A History of Marketing

Andrew Mitrak
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A podcast about the stories and strategies behind the campaigns that shaped our world. Featuring conversations with top CMOs, marketing professors, authors, historians, and business leaders. marketinghistory.org

  1. Sep 10

    Jerry Wind: Market Segmentation, B2B Buying Centers, and Overcoming Mental Models

    A History of Marketing / Episode 56 Yoram “Jerry” Wind has spent six decades at the frontier of marketing. He has won virtually every major award a marketing scholar can receive, and his CV is more than 100 pages long. In B2B marketing ,the shift from single leads to buying groups is framed as a new revelation (see my interviews with Kerry Cunningham & Jon Miller). But Jerry Wind mapped organizational buying centers in 1966 and developed the BuyGrid model in 1967. I was almost angry when I discovered this. “We’ve all known about buying centers since 1966, and marketers are still chasing individual MQLs?!” I had to ask Jerry about this directly. It’s where we kick off our conversation. We then shift gears to one of my all-time favorite case studies: Courtyard by Marriott. Like Moneyball, it’s a case study of taking on the old guard (hotel industry veterans trusting their gut) and using data (conjoint analysis on traveler preferences) to build a modern system. Jerry and his collaborator Paul Green used marketing research to reshape the physical world, creating hotel layouts and room designs we still see today. Jerry’s foresight is just as impressive. More than 10 years ago, he was writing and presenting on AI and its coming impact on marketing and education. Last year, at age 87, he published Creativity in the Age of AI. We also cover: * The RAVES framework and balancing cognitive data with emotional appeals * Why the CMO role must evolve to orchestrating all customer touchpoints * How to spend a career challenging mental models * Why most marketing lectures fail and how to fix them For me, this conversation felt like a return to form for the podcast. It’s in a class alongside my interviews with legendary professors like Philip Kotler, David Aaker, Jag Sheth, and George Day. I learned a lot from Jerry, and I find his prolific career inspiring. I hope you like it too. Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. In case you missed it, play the “Date the Ad” marketing history game. Learn more. The Wharton School in 1967: Bridging Theory and Real-World Practice Andrew Mitrak: I want to start right at the beginning of your career as you were entering the field of marketing. Can you describe the scene of what marketing looked like as a field back in 1967 around the time you first joined Wharton? Jerry Wind: Marketing was a little different, but it was the beginning of kind of what we see today. And I think one of the great things about Wharton is Wharton had the orientation that we still have, which is marketing theory and methodology has to have practical value. It started with Wroe Alderson, who was basically the founder of this practical approach to marketing. And with Paul Green, who really was the main figure in the Wharton marketing since the early ‘60s, but he joined the department. I joined in January ‘67, primarily because of Paul Green and Ron Frank. I liked their orientation and approach, and at the time Wharton Marketing also had the Marketing Science Institute that was actually launched because of the work of Wroe Alderson, that convinced Scott McCabe from Scott Paper to start an institute that will bring industry to academia and academia to industry. When I joined Wharton, I almost immediately joined some of the projects at the Marketing Science Institute. So the environment at Wharton was really a little different than the rest of the field. We were very much, especially because of the influence of Paul Green, focused on new methodology. Reavis Cox was still at Wharton at the time and he was kind of one of the leaders in the marketing theory area. I think it was an ideal place to be in. It probably was the most advanced of most of the other marketing departments at the time. Andrew Mitrak: One of the names you mentioned a couple of times, I was wondering if you’d bring him up, is Wroe Alderson, because I did a whole episode on Wroe Alderson. I interviewed his son, I interviewed Stan Shapiro, and I interviewed a scholar named Ben Willis Croft who had studied the life of Wroe Alderson. I think Wroe would have probably just passed away in 1966, right before you joined. Jerry Wind: Correct. I never met him. All I know about him is really through Paul Green. The Influence of Wroe Alderson Andrew Mitrak: Could you speak to him as a figure? Because it seems like he’s one of those figures who had a lot of influence in marketing, but kind of—I don’t want to say he was forgotten, we’re talking about him here, but his impact, maybe because he passed away right in the 1960s as marketing was taking off and growing as a field. I’m wondering if you have any comments or would want to speak more on his influence. Jerry Wind: Well, Wroe actually had a consulting firm, was very active, and it’s still very insightful to read—I think it was called Cost and Profit, the short publications that he issued. He really influenced a lot of us, definitely Paul Green, who then influenced the rest of Wharton marketing and the field. It also legitimized to a large extent consulting. For many years, consulting was viewed as: you could say you have one day a week you could do some consulting. Most of the consulting people did was really lecturing to industry. Lecturing is not really consulting. The real consulting that Wroe epitomized, and that Paul Green and I did a lot over the years together, were actually solving business problems. A lot of the developments in marketing over the years, especially on the methodology side, came because we had to solve problems of real companies who faced them. Conjoint analysis, multidimensional scaling—all of these are great examples of developments that came because of needs of industry and the need to address specific problems. Organizational Buying Behavior: The Buygrid Model and the Buying Center Andrew Mitrak: That actually is a nice segue to organizational buying behavior. This is one of the topics you researched. For context, I am a marketer and I’ve almost always worked in B2B marketing. The way that organizations buy is really interesting, and I think that the way things are sometimes set up and measured today are flawed and don’t really take into account the dynamics of organizational buying behavior. I want to start just by asking you about that and why did you start researching it? What was the scene of the status quo of the way people thought about the way organizations buy, and how did your research help change that? Jerry Wind: I started because, first of all, I was curious. It was curiosity as to: how do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? The literature at the time was not very helpful. Luckily, one of the faculty at Stanford at the time was Bob Davis, who chaired my dissertation committee, who also worked as vice president at Varian Associates, which was an industrial firm. In discussions with him and with Ron Frank and Bill Massy, who were basically the lead faculty at Stanford, Bob Davis suggested, “Why don’t you start speaking with some of the people at Varian and get a feel for what’s happening?” That led to actually studying them and studying another company, Motorola, that had major operations in Las Vegas at the time. So the motivation was fundamentally: how do they buy? How do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? Since very little was known at the time, I thought it was a bright field to start, and it was a great start. Also, it reinforced the belief that was developed later on when I moved to Wharton of the importance of working with industry. Andrew Mitrak: Did you visit Las Vegas and Motorola in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s? Jerry Wind: Spent a lot of time. This was in the ‘60s. I worked on the dissertation from primarily late ‘64, ‘65, and ‘66. I got it from Stanford. My doctorate at Stanford was two years; it was ‘65–’66. Andrew Mitrak: What was Las Vegas like in the ‘60s? Was there the Rat Pack era? Jerry Wind: A little different than today, but still glamorous and very hot. Andrew Mitrak: As a young scholar visiting a company and learning about the way they buy, what was that like? Were the people at Motorola like, “Who is this person? Is this strange?” What were the dynamics like? What kind of questions did you ask them or what were observations you had there? Jerry Wind: I was lucky. I got an introduction through Bob Davis to introduce me to Varian, and Varian introduced me to Motorola; they had some relation between the two of them. They were very open. They were actually curious and tried to find out what I could find out about the way they behave. When I developed the buygrid model, which was recognizing that there is a buying center that makes the decision, so not the individual; that there is a buying process; and that the buying process is conditional on the buying situation, whether you’re buying something for the first time, repeat buying, or modified rebuy. The whole conceptualization, I presented it to them and they loved it. They said, “Yeah, makes sense.” It represented what they were doing. The interesting thing: it was a real breakthrough in the field because nothing like this existed before. Also, we did one other thing in my dissertation, which was quantitative analysis of brand loyalty. Brand loyalty at the time was viewed in the consumer behavior area, but never applied in the organizational buying behavior area. Andrew Mitrak: That’s really interesting. Of course, I think there’s a lot of brand loyalty dynamics within an organization. The concept of the buying center and how the buying center changes depending on the dynamic of what’s being purchased—like you said, a first-time purchase in the category, a new vendor in the category, a repeat of the same vendor—that dynamic is so interesti

  2. Aug 6

    Kathleen Schaub: Marketing Is Not a Vending Machine

    A History of Marketing / Episode 55 Kathleen Schaub spent thirty years as a marketing executive and CMO, and nine years running IDC’s CMO Advisory practice, where she counseled CMOs of the world’s most influential tech companies. Her book, Marketing in the (Great, Big, Messy) Real World, takes aim at a dream the industry has chased for over a century: marketing as a vending machine. Put a dollar in, get predictable revenue (or pipeline) out. Kathleen argues it was never like that. She traces the pursuit of certainty back to Frederick Taylor, one of the first management consultants, who ran around steel mills with a stopwatch looking for “the one best way.” Scientific management built the 20th century factory. But the stopwatch approach was never well suited to marketing, a function that sits where the company meets the messy real world. That doesn’t mean marketers are off the hook for goals and measurement. Here’s my favorite excerpt from the conversation: “Marketing influences, but it cannot control or predict.” What you can hold marketing accountable for, she argues, is building the systems that give the company its best shot at turning intention into revenue. We cover: * How marketing inherited Frederick Taylor’s stopwatch, and why the funnel still runs on it * Whether the marketers who promised certainty were fooling their bosses or fooling themselves * The CMO interview problem: why the candidate who promises certainty gets hired… and is often gone before measurement catches up * Judged numbers, attribution, and why the forecast that lands closest is the one you can’t back into the data Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Jon Miller, whom you may remember from episode 35 of this podcast, for introducing me to Kathleen. The Book Schaub Wanted to Read but Couldn’t Find Andrew Mitrak: I’m excited to speak about Marketing in the (Great, Big, Messy) Real World. So, I wanted to start by asking you what led you to write the book. Kathleen Schaub: This is a topic that I’ve been thinking about for decades. I mean, I’ve been a lifelong marketer. I was a CMO and ran product marketing for a couple software companies. And then I was IDC’s CMO Advisory, and so I have a lot of background in this. But at the same time, I’ve always been interested in science and other things that are going on in the world. And very early in my career, I started learning about systems thinking, and I was easily applying it to marketing, but I noticed that very few people did. And so when I decided to leave IDC and I wanted to write a book, this was the topic that really jumped out at me because it explains so much—the whole complexity science and how to act in an uncertain world. It explains so much about the way that marketing works, and yet it is something that not a lot of people know about. And so I wrote that book because it was a book that I wanted to read and I couldn’t find it. So, that was what led me to believe that I could talk about this. Andrew Mitrak: Running a CMO advisory sounds like a really fun, interesting job where you might learn things. And so, did some of that inspire the book? Or were conversations you were having with CMOs where they were planning things a certain way but it didn’t quite match up to reality—did some of that inspire what you wrote in this book and just sharing examples of that? Kathleen Schaub: Oh, all the time. And the book is full of stories, both from my own personal experience as well as experiences that I got from clients. You know, I did a lot of consulting as a part of that book as well—or, excuse me, as part of the CMO advisory service, where we were transitioning from something that wasn’t working to something that worked better. And a lot of these themes always served as a sort of background for us. So, people’s stories are just a fantastic wealth of demonstration that, yes, the world is indeed messy. Andrew Mitrak: And so IDC, for listeners who might not be familiar, is an analytics firm, an analyst firm, and sort of a market research firm that provides data. Kathleen Schaub: Yes, yes. International Data Corporation. So, yes. And it was serving the tech industry, so we had huge, huge companies all the way down to startups as our clients. So the fact that I had all of this data that was available to me, and I had the opportunity to go out and get more data to answer specific questions, that was just like a treasure trove. But I always fed it in, and I think most analysts—most good analysts—do, is you feed it into this kind of humble view that you really don’t know everything, and tomorrow something’s going to pop up that’s going to change everything, and you just don’t know what it’s going to be. Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. Yeah. And this gets to the heart of what a lot of the book is about, that the book is about this transition from—we use the term deterministic, seeing marketing as deterministic: you put dollars in, and you get revenue out or pipeline out. And the real world is something more complex than that. So before we talk about the complexities, and the book does a great job of breaking down how to think about these complexities, let’s talk about that deterministic era of why it became viewed as deterministic. So why do you think initially, as marketing was constructed, it was set up in this deterministic way? What was sort of the seeds that led to marketing as a function growing that way? How Marketing Inherited Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management Kathleen Schaub: Okay, well, I’m going to go back a little ways, then, if you don’t mind. So back to the early 20th century with Frederick Winslow Taylor, who is considered to be the first management consultant. And he was brilliant. And if you think about what was happening around the late 1800s, early 1900s, that was the peak of the Industrial Revolution, and so many machines and everything were coming online, but work was not keeping up with the machines. So work was still being done in sort of a cottage industry way. And Taylor had this brilliant insight: what if we could treat work like it was a machine? And so for the first time—we’re talking about data—for the first time, things were being measured. And he used to run around to steel mills and things with a ruler and a stopwatch, and he developed what he eventually called the “one best way.” Or that was what he was looking for. And the efficiency absolutely exploded, and people all over the place—not just all over industry, it was just hugely, widely adopted, but also in our schools, the way our schools are with standardized testing and grade levels and all that kind of stuff, that was all scientific management. So Taylor and his—over the next few decades, there were people that became his followers. The reason why we could ramp up for World War II was because of Taylor. Hugely, hugely influential and had a lot to do with why the United States, but also other parts of the world, became successful during the 20th century. So marketing was part of that. And as companies, who were industrial powerhouses, wanted to become bigger and bigger brands, they needed to industrialize, if you will, or apply scientific management to their outreach efforts, to their go-to-market efforts as well. And so the—actually, what is now the American Marketing Association was founded for the purposes of bringing scientific management to the marketing world. So the idea of measurement and all that kind of thing in marketing became prevalent in the first part of the 20th century. And that lasted for a long time, even though in the middle of the 20th century, science and math—so kind of maybe more tucked away into the more academic world—was starting to see that there were places where this didn’t really work. The closer that you got, or the farther that you went away from the very routine kinds of, like, assembly line types of factories, the more difficult it was to find this “one best way.” And finally in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there started to be—really with the advent of computers—we started to see the math and the science behind why things continued to fail. And yet, business in this case was really lagging. The idea of complexity has started, maybe starting in around the ‘90s, started to be understood in things like Agile software development, where we get Agile, and all that kind of stuff, and even in manufacturing, where we had Lean manufacturing and things like that. But marketing just really didn’t keep up. I’m not throwing the marketers under the bus; this is a business kind of a focus that is just still working, for the most part, in that 20th-century way. We don’t want to throw away everything that—I mean, there was so much good about scientific management, but it just does not apply in all situations. Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I’m not super familiar with Taylor. I looked him up a little bit prior to this episode. You don’t see a lot of his work on marketing specifically. But marketing at the time he was working wasn’t really called a job function. People did the work that we now consider marketing, like a lot of those activities were there, but marketing at this time in the 1910s, early ‘20s, there wasn’t usually like a marketing department per se at most companies. But then the AMA—sorry, American Marketing Association, I think—is that the ‘30s or something that that kind of gets started? Kathleen Schaub: Around the ‘30s. And sales, too. Sales really started to really professionalize. And IBM, I think, was one of the very first ones to professionalize their sales force. So yeah, around the ‘30s. Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. And I think a lot of Taylor’s work, you kind of mentioned it, within mark

  3. Jul 15

    Byron Sharp: “There’s only one science.”

    A History of Marketing / Episode 54 Few people have challenged how I think about marketing more than Professor Byron Sharp. His book, How Brands Grow, might be the most influential marketing book of the contemporary era. It told a generation of marketers that much of what they’d been taught was wrong, and it had the data to back it up. Sharp is the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the world’s largest center for marketing science research. You may remember my conversation with Professor Rachel Kennedy that covered the institute’s history and the two researchers it’s named for: Andrew Ehrenberg, who discovered law-like patterns in buying behavior, and Frank Bass, who believed marketing could be studied like any other part of the real world. This episode picks up that story, straight from the man who carried their work to a global audience. It’s a conversation that spares no sacred cows: Kotler’s STP, brand purpose, behavioral science, and personalized advertising all take hits. We cover: * How a young academic in Australia took on giants like Philip Kotler, and why marketing had the data to become a science long before it acted like one * The difference between looking scientific and being scientific * A round of overrated / underrated: Sharp’s hot takes on positioning, brand purpose, behavioral science, and personalized advertising * Whether AI opens new questions for marketing’s most famous empiricist Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Nick Asbury, who you may remember from episode 53 of this podcast, for introducing me to Byron. Andrew Mitrak: Byron Sharp, you’ve been at the top of my list of people to interview since before I started this podcast. So I’m looking forward to a conversation with you about marketing history and “the arrival of science.” Byron Sharp: (Laughs) That’s not true because you interviewed Philip Kotler first. Andrew Mitrak: Yes, well, I’ve interviewed a lot of people. I feel like I’ve had a chance to do my homework prior to interviewing you. Of course, I read and re-read How Brands Grow and then, for the first time, I went through How Brands Grow: Part 2. So that was excellent. So I feel like I’ve done my homework prior to speaking with you, between that and the other interviews I’ve done. Byron Sharp: Excellent, excellent. At the end of your Philip Kotler podcast, he said, you know, “an inquiring mind” and “read a great deal of things,” and he was excited for the next revolution in marketing. He’d like to be part of it. I don’t know, when was that recorded? When did you record that with him? Andrew Mitrak: I recorded that in October of 2024. Byron Sharp: Okay, well, gosh, there has been a revolution. He’s obviously missed out on it. “Have you looked?”: The Shift to Marketing Science Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about that. So let’s talk back to sort of the Kotlerian era of marketing, and when you first encountered marketing, when did you realize that the prevailing marketing wisdom wasn’t sufficiently evidence-based? Byron Sharp: You know, when I did my master’s by research, I read a lot of the American literature and things, and it was researchy. You know, it’s researchy. But it’s not terribly—it’s not the sort of science that we learn when we’re at high school. There was sort of, I don’t know, it’s weird. It’s a weird thing in the—I mean, Andrew Ehrenberg wrote this amazing article, published it in Nature, right? The world’s most famous scientific journal, called “Even the Social Sciences Have Laws.” And in there, he said that there was this sort of belief that you could not have scientific laws that concern human beings or crazy things like advertising and stuff. And it’s a great line from Andrew. I don’t know if it was ever published, but when people said there can be no laws in marketing, he would say, “Have you looked?” You know, if you don’t look, you’re not going to find. Because that’s always been—I mean, science is actually quite a new thing, and it’s only a few hundred years old. And it was just people looking systematically, taking systematic measurements of things. It’s not actually rocket science. In the podcast with Philip Kotler, he talked about how—what was it?—in his time, finance was seen as science and marketing wasn’t. But even he is not talking about science; he’s talking about engineering. He’s talking about using numbers and spreadsheets and things like this, which is just not science. Science is repeating studies over and over and looking for repeatable patterns and then building—then when you find those, you can make predictions, and you can start to understand how the world’s working. And you can start to—you realize that some explanations work, fit with those laws, and some don’t. And you find weird things because the world is weird. There is only one science, right? People often say, “Can marketing be a science?” I’m like, “No, there’s only one science, it’s called science.” Science studies the real world. It can study marketing. It can study turtles. It can study whatever is in the real world. But it follows a method that is designed to establish laws that are so reliable that we don’t, you know, I always joke, no engineer asks, “So what’s Brazilian gravity like?” We know. And that repeatability—so a lot of academia was always about new things, new words, or just coming up with new titles. “Social marketing” we’ll call it, as if people in charities didn’t realize that beforehand. I don’t, yeah, or buzzwords and things. Applying Scientific Method to Marketing Andrew Mitrak: So was there ever a moment where you were in some marketing lecture or reading a marketing book and just realizing, “There is no science here”? Like, what was the spark or the initial moment where you felt like, “Oh, this is not sufficiently science-based and therefore I could actually be part of the movement to make it more science-based”? Byron Sharp: I don’t know. I think because I read philosophy of science, and I read writing by people like Frank Bass and Andrew Ehrenberg, and Andrew was actually doing it. And so I was very keen on replication, and I started a journal. I was advised, “Do a journal, it’ll be really widely cited.” It wasn’t. But I invited Andrew Ehrenberg onto the advisory board and then started working with him, and then sort of the rest is history, I suppose. But I came from the Phil Kotler school. I always liked how Phil Kotler was quite down to earth. He wasn’t like the Cannes crowd that I’ve just been with, you know. He was quite skeptical of the idea that advertising could manipulate people. There is a famous line about, you know, “People don’t have garages full of cars they don’t drive and fridges full of food they don’t eat” and things. They are quite experienced. And I liked that down-to-earth thing. So I sort of rebelled a little bit about the mystical part of marketing, the sort of magic advertising that subtly changed people’s psychology and things like that. I was quite skeptical about that. And at the same time, I thought, “Why aren’t people talking about memories? Why aren’t they talking about what we now call mental availability?” It seems that this is really underplayed. And that sort of got me doing research and discovering stuff. The Pareto Law That Wasn’t 80/20 Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any hypotheses as to why it was that marketing was not more scientific, or stayed unscientific for so long? Or do you have any instincts, or have you looked at why—why wasn’t Phil Kotler more science-based, or why weren’t the folks of his era more science-based? Was there some bottleneck preventing them from being more scientific? Did they not have access to the research or the tools and processes to be more scientific, or do you feel like there was just something that went wrong very early on and they kind of went down the wrong path? Byron Sharp: Academia is very competitive, quite vicious, particularly in the North American schools. Incredible pressure to be “new, new, new,” even if the new isn’t that new. It’s just what we call old wine in new bottles. Like today, people don’t talk engage. If you’re in an advertising festival like I was, they don’t talk about engagement much anymore, but they talk about attention instead, and it’s the same thing. So, yeah, there’s incredible pressure for that. So the leading North American journals are quite anti- if someone blatantly says, “This article is—so-and-so did a really interesting study, but we don’t have any idea, really, about how does that generalize, where does it generalize to? We need to do more studies. And so I’m going to do, first of all, a very close replication of it just to check that they haven’t made mistakes.” If you send that to a leading journal, they’ll go, “Well, no, we don’t publish close replications. No.” And particularly, “How dare you question that an article that we published in our journal might not actually be correct, that they might have made a mistake,” which is deeply unscientific. So, yeah, the lust for new—”new, new, new”—is, I think that is, yeah, it is deeply unscientific. Prestigious journals are deeply unscientific, too. I mean, we shouldn’t—you should be judged not by which journal you get into. If we judged Einstein by which journal he got into, he’s a total loser. We judge people on discoveries. Some guys won the Nobel Prize a while back for discovering graphene, which had always been—it’s graphene, it is only one molecule thick. It’s amazing. It’s spawning a multi-billion dollar industry. And they discovered it by putting graphite—you know, the

    Byron Sharp: “There’s only one science.”

  4. Jun 11

    Nick Asbury: The Case Against “Purpose” - How Good Intentions Made Every Brand the Same

    A History of Marketing / Episode 53 Nick Asbury is a creative writer, one half of the design partnership Asbury & Asbury, and the marketing industry’s most persistent critic of brand purpose. He’s the author of The Road to Hell: How Purposeful Business Leads to Bad Marketing and a Worse World (And How Human Creativity Is the Way Out). It’s a title that tells you exactly where Nick stands. For 15 years, “Purpose” was an idea marketers weren’t supposed to question. It dominated creative briefs, advertising awards, and TED Talk stages. Brands from chocolate bars to social networks climbed what Nick calls “the ladder of abstraction” until they settled on something like: “we’re here to make the world a better place.” The Road to Hell is a rarity: most marketing books tell you how to do something right. Nick wrote one about why a whole movement got it wrong. He also argues there’s a way out: human creativity, lateral thinking, and humor. In this conversation, we cover: * How the 2008 financial crisis kicked off the capital-P Purpose era, and why the 2024 election may have ended it * Why even Dove’s Real Beauty, the most celebrated purpose campaign ever, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny * Why the most prominent purpose advocates are late-career marketing legends * Why AI can’t make the lateral leap behind slogans like “Just Do It,” and why that’s good news for human creativity Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. Why Write a Whole Book Against Purpose? Andrew Mitrak: Nick Asbury, we’re here to talk about your excellent book, The Road to Hell. I love this book, I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting, and I hope marketers everywhere read it. And it’s all about how purposeful business leads to bad marketing and a worse world, and how human creativity is the way out. And I wanted to ask you about this because most books about marketing focus on how to do marketing the right way versus why a certain approach is wrong. And so I’m wondering, why focus on why the purpose movement was a mistake? Why write a whole book about this? Nick Asbury: Yeah, that’s a really good question and first of all, yeah, thanks, thanks for reading it, thanks for having me on to talk about it. Yeah, I think, I think first of all, there is a, I hope, a kind of noble tradition of books that argue against something rather than for something. Like, I know Bob Hoffman has done some brilliant stuff against ad tech and advertising. You can even look at books like No Logo by Naomi Klein—books that are kind of polemics against prevailing wisdom. And I, I guess I would put this book in that category. I mean, it is arguing ultimately for something, in that the last of the five sections is arguing for creativity and humor and humanity. But yes, most of the book is an argument against purpose. And I guess it’s just been a kind of, you could almost say a kind of unfortunate fact of my career, I think, that I happen to be working at a time where I do think this huge idea of purpose has dominated the industry for, well, you know, 15, maybe even 20 years. I think you could say that period is, is waning now. But, yeah, I just found it was a very omnipresent idea that was affecting almost every kind of brief coming across my desk and was dominating industry awards, industry conversations. So, it felt like a—and I guess, one thing I’d add is it also felt like something you weren’t meant to question that much. There was a slightly taboo feeling about, you know, how could anyone be against this? And I guess when I sense that taboo, I do almost feel drawn to challenging it. Not for its own sake, but just because— The Risks of Challenging the “Purpose” Orthodoxy Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it still somehow, to me, it feels a little bit riskier than something like No Logo, which was sort of like punching up. It’s sort of like taking aim at the brand bullies, or something that is anti-tech. Like there’s so much anti-tech, or is sort of more consensus to, like I feel like there’s more people to nod along. This one somehow feels almost a little bit riskier because how could you, how could you have an argument against purpose? Purpose sounds so nice. And did you worry at all that this might alienate potential clients or colleagues who had embraced the purpose-driven marketing? Nick Asbury: I guess, maybe on one level, I think I am, I’m maybe fortunate in that it’s fairly low risk for me because I’m basically a lone traveler in the industry. I’m a self-employed writer. So, it’s not like I work for a big employer who might be unhappy with it. I, ultimately, as a writer, only need enough work to keep one person busy. So, if a few clients don’t call me because of the purpose position that I have, then, you know, there will equally be clients who do call me because they like the arguments being made. But I didn’t really write it as a, as a kind of strategic business career move for myself, really. I just felt the urge to write it because I felt there were important things to say. I guess on that kind of punching up, punching down thing, which, you know, I, I would definitely think of it in my own mind as a kind of punching up exercise in that—and this kind of brings us on to the whole subject—but I see purpose actually as quite a big corporate, top-down kind of movement. I kind of consider myself, I guess, arguing for the smaller businesses and the consumer who kind of often gets slightly patronized by some of this stuff, I think. So, yeah, I would see it as kind of challenging an orthodoxy imposed by powerful people. The Origins of Capital-P Purpose Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, fair enough. And let’s, I think that is how it comes across, it’s just that at a high level, it seems like such a sacred thing. But as you’re saying, let’s get right into it because I think that, taking this sort of historical lens, you start with a moment as you’re seeing purpose and typing it out. And I’m wondering, when in your mind does this, does purpose become a movement? When does it become sort of the big behemoth omnipresent thing that you’ve experienced? Nick Asbury: Yeah, well, I think the simple answer is I see the kind of purpose with a capital P movement, I think, started after the financial crisis of around 2008. So, I think—and that’s not to say that none of these questions ever existed before that, I think you can see purpose as the latest manifestation of very old arguments about kind of stakeholder versus shareholder capitalism arguments that Milton Friedman was having back in the 1960s. You can basically take it as far back as business itself, really. People have always argued about the ethics of business and, you know, how they relate to the—can capitalism be ethical? You know, there’s all these big philosophical questions that have been debated for a long time. But I think the purpose movement in advertising, and in the kind of corporate boardroom, really did take off post-2008 when, I think, the story I would tell was there was kind of a reputational crisis for big business. A lot of people were turning against business, kind of blamed them for the excesses that led to the crash. And, you know, you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, kind of quite a large, widespread, anti-corporate kind of feeling in the world. And I think, I definitely sensed this at the time, even in some of the clients I was working for, was there was this sense that, oh, we need to tell a better story about business. Rather than people thinking of us as the enemy, we need to kind of tell a story about how we can actually be a powerful ally to important social causes. And I think that became a really persuasive, powerful thing that people wanted to believe in. There was this whole mantra of “do well by doing good,” which was kind of the slogan of the purpose movement, I guess. But this idea that you could, yeah, do good things in society, and that would, through a kind of virtuous circle, it would lead more consumers to buy from you because consumers, so the argument went, consumers are more concerned about ethical issues these days than they have been before. And therefore, the more good you do in the world, the more profit you will make. And that really was the argument coming from TED Talk stages and the industry press and, you know, no doubt many podcasts as well. So, yeah, that’s where I think it came from. Before Purpose: When Ads Were Absurd Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so the great financial crisis, it happened right when I was sort of a graduating senior in high school and then just entering into university. And I kind of, I do remember this moment, and I do remember sort of the vibe shift, you know, with TED Talks taking off. And I feel like things got much more serious. And if I recall, I’m wondering, did this feel like a counterreaction to anything that came before it? Because if I also think of the ads that came before it, there was sort of this era of the Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“ that was all very silly, you know. There had been a Betty White Snickers Super Bowl commercial where, you know, an old woman in her 90s was tackled by a football player. And there was this era that in hindsight feels pretty brief, but there was this moment where ads felt very silly and irrelevant and random and absurd. Skittles had surrealist ads. And I’m wondering, did you feel like this seriousness, of course there’s the great financial crisis, but does it feel at all like a counterreaction to you to what came before it, or do you want to speak to what immediately preceded the sort of this capital P purpose movement? Nick Asbury: Yeah, I think, yeah, it’s an interesting point. And I guess I don’t explore that much in the book, but I think you’re rig

  5. May 14

    Gian Fulgoni: 50 Years of Metrics Reshaping Marketing... for Better and for Worse

    A History of Marketing / Episode 52 Gian Fulgoni has spent 50 years as a pioneer in market research and audience measurement. From his work on scanner data at IRI in the 1970s to co-founding Comscore in 1999, Gian helped invent how marketing gets measured, first in supermarkets and then on the internet. His career sits at the center of two transformations that reshaped the field. At IRI, he helped pioneer the use of supermarket scanner data and built one of the earliest controlled experiments in television advertising, a system that could send different ads to different households in real time, in 1979. Two decades later, he co-founded Comscore to bring that same measurement rigor to the chaos of the early internet, building the panels and tools that defined how digital audiences and e-commerce got counted. Gian has lived through every major shift in modern marketing measurement, and he’s candid about what went wrong along the way. He has watched the industry get seduced by metrics that are easy to capture but don’t actually measure whether advertising works. In this conversation, we cover: * Why digital marketing metrics like click-through rates and ROAS are misleading, and why the industry keeps using them anyway * How scanner data accidentally flipped CPG spending from advertising to promotion and handed power to retailers * Why data shows that creative is the biggest driver of advertising effectiveness, and why the industry keeps ignoring that lesson * What the dot-com era might tell us about today’s AI revolution Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Tod Johnson, whom you may remember from episode 51 of this podcast, for introducing me to Gian. Andrew Mitrak: Gian Fulgoni, welcome to A History of Marketing. Gian Fulgoni: Well thank you. Thanks for the invitation to be here today. Andrew Mitrak: I want to start right at the beginning. You studied marketing in London and then moved to Pittsburgh to work in marketing. How was the marketing scene different between the UK and the US? Gian Fulgoni: Well, you know, marketing was kind of viewed as having originated in the US, but that’s really not the issue that I was focused on. So my undergraduate degree is in physics. Right? And while I might have been good at it in high school, it was like going from the minor leagues to major league baseball when I got to university. I had no competitive advantage in physics. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and it was the beginning of marketing, actually, in the US and certainly in the UK. I did some research and realized that marketing might be a good place for me to be. I did, I think, anticipate correctly that data and computers and the like, analytics, would become more important in marketing as time went by, which kind of reinforced my decision to major in marketing. I got a master’s degree in it. Then I got offered out of the blue. I got a job while I was still at school that took me to Pittsburgh, and it was a company named Management Science Associates that was started by a professor out of Carnegie Mellon who wanted to do research on things he was interested in. He started a company that was focused on analyzing data, basically. Processing and analyzing data. And that’s where I ended up. Is Marketing a Uniquely American Discipline? Andrew Mitrak: I want to follow up on, you said that it seemed like marketing had originated as more of an American field. It’s something that on this podcast I’ve actually encountered. Like I’ve talked to Phil Kotler, who is often called the father of modern marketing, and he kind of says that marketing is uniquely American or comes from an American tradition. And I’ve talked to folks though from abroad who reject that or they push back on that, and it’s just sort of like a North American bias. So it’s interesting as somebody who was in the UK, you kind of perceived it that way. Can you speak to that? Gian Fulgoni: Yeah, I mean there’s no question in my mind. There’s no question in my mind. For example, where I got my master’s was the only university in the UK that had a master’s degree in marketing. That was in 1969. I mean, you could get a master’s degree in marketing in a bunch of universities at that point in time in the US. There were only two MBA programs in the UK at Manchester and London. You know, you had dozens of them. So, if you look at all of the people who pioneered marketing, they’re really from the United States. So I don’t think there’s any question that the US was ahead at that point in time and maybe to this day is still ahead. Andrew Mitrak: So did you go into marketing knowing you wanted to go to the US eventually? Gian Fulgoni: No. No, it was, I had done some research, talked to some other people who were going on to MBA programs when I was in my undergraduate final year. And that’s what I decided that marketing looked really interesting. As I said, I think I anticipated the data and analytics, computers, would become more important there. But I had no idea, no intention of coming to the US. It was when the job offer came along that I suddenly thought, man, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. I gotta do this. The Early Adoption of Computers and Data in Marketing Andrew Mitrak: You were really early to computers and data in marketing. Marketing as a field in the UK was early, and then attaching computers and data onto it. How did you make that connection initially? Gian Fulgoni: I think in large part it was because the company I worked for, Management Science Associates, their business was helping companies use whatever marketing data they had. And that would involve taking raw data, if you will, and processing it, analyzing it, whatever data it was. It could have been panels of consumers, back in those days it was diary panels. Or it could have been shipment data that companies had, or it could have been Nielsen audit data, or another database was SAMI warehouse withdrawal data, or whatever data they had. And so I was able to learn the basics of what was available as data, how to process it, analyze it, how to improve it, and I think started to get a feel for what was not available that maybe could be a home run if it became available. Riding the Technology Wave in Market Research Andrew Mitrak: It strikes me, this is a little bit of an odd question, but have you seen the show Mad Men? Gian Fulgoni: Yes. Yes. Andrew Mitrak: It strikes me the analogy I was thinking of like people like you who adopted computers early. In that show, there is a character, Harry Crane, who adopted TV, and he became the head of television and sort of rode the wave of TV. And people like you were very early on to computers and data and sort of rode that wave. I feel like marketers who can identify the right technology ride a wave, it can propel you in your career. Do you think of it that way at all, like part of it is timing and finding the right technology and positioning yourself as the expert in it? Gian Fulgoni: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have often said I didn’t create any particular technology. I just took advantage of breakthroughs in technology that allowed for the creation of new applications and new products. But I think I did see early on that it just had to evolve, right? Computers, it was pretty clear, were getting faster, at that point bigger by the way, we hadn’t reached the trend when things were getting smaller. But you could see that the data that was becoming available, that was changing. The way that data was being analyzed, things that could be done with data that wasn’t available at the time. I mean, the emergence of scanner data was a great example, because that changed everything in how consumer packaged goods marketers operated. One truth at least that’s evident to me is that data, the availability of data, can change markets fundamentally. And I think there are numerous examples of that in history, if you will, certainly over the past 40 years or so. The Founding of IRI and the Emergence of Scanner Data Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me the story of what led to you founding IRI? Gian Fulgoni: Yes. Well, I wasn’t the founder. Let me say I was hired shortly after they had started the business. And as it happened, the person that started it, John Malec, had worked at Management Science Associates where I was at, so I knew him. And what they did was pretty amazing, even looking at it today. So basically, scanning was beginning to be installed in supermarkets, but it was nowhere near pervasive. And so what IRI did is they bought the scanners for the retailers in two small cities, Pittsfield, Massachusetts and Marion, Indiana. And they gave the scanners to the retailers with the understanding that the retailers would stock new products as they came along that IRI would bring to them, that they would only supply the data to IRI, and that they would accept an ID card from households who became members of the IRI panel. Alright? So that was the scanning part of it, and that was a breakthrough because then we were able to cover the entire city. And there was no other city in the US that you could measure. Inventing the “Black Box” for Targeted TV Advertising Gian Fulgoni: And then they did a second thing that maybe was even more dramatic. They invented a black box that sat on the television set of these households. In these towns, you couldn’t watch over-the-air television, the broadcast signals weren’t strong enough, so you had to have cable. They gave the panelists, with permission, a box that allowed IRI to change the television advertising in real-time without you knowing when that was occurring. Okay, so it was targeted advertising in 1979. Crazy to think about it today, right? And so what we could do is we could send one advertisi

  6. Apr 24

    Tod Johnson: The Evolution of Market Research - From Handwritten Diaries to Internet Ratings

    A History of Marketing / Episode 51 My guest Tod Johnson, a market research pioneer who was among the first people to measure the Internet. He’s an inductee to the Market Research Council Hall of Fame and former chairman of the Advertising Research Foundation. Tod is President and CEO of the Board of the Metropolitan Opera and is a member of the board of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Tod led The NPD Group for over 50 years, building it into one of the largest consumer research firms in the world. NPD became the company retailers like Mattel and Hasbro relied on to understand what was selling. In 1995, he founded Media Metrix, essentially the Nielsen ratings of the early internet. In this conversation, we dive into: * The era of pencil-and-paper diary panels, when consumer research meant tracking grocery purchases by hand and mailing the booklets back every month * Why Tod’s analysis showed that brand loyalty is mostly a myth, long before anyone in advertising wanted to admit it * How he accidentally discovered the internet was about to change everything Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Tod. Why spend a career in market research? Andrew Mitrak: I watched a speech you gave while accepting a lifetime achievement award. And at the start of the speech, you quipped that you’re tempted to aim for a second lifetime achievement award and do it all over again. I take that as a sign that you spent your career really doing something you love, and your career was in market research. So, what do you love about market research? Tod Johnson: Well, I’ve always been a very quantitative-oriented person. I’ve loved numbers, I’ve loved facts supported by numbers, and I’ve always had an interest in psychology as well. In fact, I taught what today would be called cognitive psychology when I got out of graduate school for a while. Market research just puts those two pieces together very, very naturally. So it fit into what I really found exciting and wanted to do. I have to say, I never started out thinking market research was my career objective. I kind of fell into it by accident, but once I got into it, it was where I wanted to be. Innovation and Innovation Models in Early Market Research Andrew Mitrak: You were an academic doing quantitative analysis, and these were real-world business practitioners. Was this seen as new pioneering research that they could apply to their business? What was that dynamic like with them? Tod Johnson: Well, the dynamic was interesting and different in those days. These companies had their own staffs oriented to innovation and development, and they were always open to new ideas. Today, that’s not so easy to get into a company with a new idea because there’s just too many of them out there. But back then, it was kind of open arms, wanting to explore new ideas. We were solving real problems like new product introductions with trial and repeat models, which hadn’t really been focused on much before, market structure work, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies had a curiosity to want to learn that. The Era of National Purchase Diaries Andrew Mitrak: Can you set a scene of what market research looked like at the time? Was it ever influencing a certain product launch, or a certain product strategy, or messaging or positioning type? Tod Johnson: In those days, virtually every new product launch would go into a test market. We would set up a diary panel of consumers to record purchases in the appropriate category. We would do the trial and repeat analyses that would predict the long run success or failure of the particular product. That would be the most common application. On a national basis it would be more about consumer trends in those categories uh and how they were structured and what was changing. The other thing that was very good, I’m now jumping ahead to when I became involved in developing NPD, was in the mid70s, General Mills started to diversify from CPG into a lot of other categories like food service, toys, apparel, jewelry, and I was fortunate enough to be the person they looked to to set up how to track those industries similar to how CPG had been tracked. Andrew Mitrak: Amazing. They embraced the general in their name and kind of not so much the mills part of their name. Tod Johnson: Well, the general went away about 10, 15 years later. Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned National Purchase Diaries. What was the actual purchase diary? You mentioned like purchase diary panels and what does it look like? Walk me through the nuts and bolts of what a purchase diary panel would look like. Tod Johnson: Well, it would be a booklet which was about 20 pages and each page had a couple of categories on it like toilet paper, facial tissue, and paper towels might all be on a page, and they’d be structured in a way that if you bought one of those items, you answered some questions. The panelists would get a new booklet every month and mail the old booklet back in to us, which we would code up. Back then, it was pretty easy to get good representative samples because women typically weren’t working. They were interested in doing projects and interested in helping, and we made it clear how they were helping manufacturers make better products for them by providing this kind of information. That relationship with the consumer in market research just doesn’t exist anymore, but it was what a lot of the industry was based on in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Measuring Product Success and Consumer Loyalty Andrew Mitrak: The consumers were part of the panel who had these diaries. They would kind of punch in their purchases for the week? Tod Johnson: No, they’d fill them in by hand with pencil. Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any favorite examples of how this data was used? Especially in the early years of these manual diary entries. Tod Johnson: New product introductions, which were elaborate test markets for the most part back then, was perhaps the most common use. The other use was it was a way to track demographics. It was a way to track loyalty. I can remember in the ‘80s, I did a lot of publishing about how consumers weren’t very loyal because we’d see their purchase patterns. That was at a time when advertisers and advertising agencies believed in loyalty. You were always talking about their loyal buyers. It didn’t really exist, but that was the basic premise. I know I was swimming upstream for a while with those publications, but today, everybody accepts that as the truth and the fact, and that there’s enormous brand shifting and much less loyalty than once was thought to exist. The Growth and Diversification of NPD Andrew Mitrak: You joined when it was a $300,000 revenue company. Tod Johnson: $400,000. Give me the full credit. Andrew Mitrak: sorry, I also want to give you credit because it grew to a lot more than that. How did the small kind of regional firm that was doing 400,000 revenue a year over the course of your next 30 years? It became a global market research firm that the world’s largest retailers rely on. What were the major inflection points as far as it growing? How did you grow it? Tod Johnson: Well, I mentioned one, and that was General Mills taking us into a bunch of general merchandise and food service categories. Our toy clients encouraged us to get into Europe. We worked with everyone in the toy industry, whether it was Mattel, Hasbro, or Lego—all the big players, all the smaller players. Mattel had a huge variety of products; it owned Fisher-Price, so that was a whole different set of products. They were a great client, are a great client, and had a wonderful mix of products. The toy industry has evolved a lot—electronics came along, how kids use time, and the definition of toys has evolved quite a bit from there. Managing Industry Rivalries in Market Research Andrew Mitrak: It’s interesting because advertising companies or advertising agencies have this concept of conflict. So, if I work with Mattel, I can’t work with Hasbro—that’s a competitor. But a market research firm actually could be more neutral and work with everybody in that, right? Do you ever run into things like conflicts where, if we’re doing this survey for Mattel, that might lead to some conflict of interest to do it for Hasbro? How does that work? Tod Johnson: That’s a very interesting question because in the CPG world, that conflict orientation tends to exist even today. If you work for Coca-Cola, you don’t work for Pepsi. If you work for General Mills, you didn’t work for Kellogg’s typically. Now, the company might work for both of them, but the individual people don’t. When you got into general merchandise, the client was much more interested in being sure that they were working with someone who really understood their industry. To understand an industry, you don’t learn an industry just by working with one company in that industry. Each of those general merchandise industries—whether it’s toys or consumer electronics or office supplies, which all have very different distribution structures—also had very different product structures. It took a lot of learning to understand it, so they viewed it as a benefit to work with someone who really knew their industry. The Birth of Media Metrix and the Internet Lightbulb Moment Andrew Mitrak: Can you tell me about Media Metrix and the introduction of software meters? Tod Johnson: What happened was one of the categories NPD was tracking was software. This is in the early ‘90s, and software back then was shrink-wrap that you bought in a store. Our software clients were saying the purchase data is really interesting, but we’re wondering if

  7. Apr 2

    April Dunford: Positioning Is Not Branding, And It's Not Just Marketing's Job

    A History of Marketing / Episode 50 Fifty episodes felt like a milestone worth marking. So I wanted a guest who was, well, obviously awesome. April Dunford is the authority on positioning for B2B tech companies and the author of the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. I’m a huge fan of April’s work and frequently reference her book, her blogs, and her frameworks in my daily work as a marketer. April’s premise is provocative: positioning cannot live in the marketing department alone. She argues that if the CEO, sales, and product leads aren’t in the room providing input, marketing is left guessing about what makes the product special and who it is actually for. Without their buy in, marketing will inevitably lose the “battle of opinions.” In this conversation, we discuss: * Building on Ries & Trout: The positioning pioneers defined the concept in their 1981 book, but they didn’t give a how-to manual. April does. * The death of the “positioning statement”: Why filling out a template is not a methodology. * Blind men and the elephant: How sales, product, and marketing departments each hold a different piece of the puzzle. * Skip the parts people don’t read: April discovered that CEOs don’t finish books, so she cut her manuscript in half. April is one of the most persuasive and grounded thinkers in the field. Here’s my conversation with April Dunford. Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. The Origin of April Dunford’s Positioning Framework Andrew Mitrak: I have a confession to make. Every time I join a new company, among the first things I do is I visit aprildunford.com and I enter my new email address and I download one of your positioning templates. You probably have several of my old corporate email addresses cluttering your mailing list. Sorry about that. April Dunford: I appreciate you jacking up my newsletter subscription numbers. Andrew Mitrak: And a big fan of your work and I want to say congrats on the updated and expanded edition of Obviously Awesome. April Dunford: Thanks. I’m super excited to get it out there. Andrew Mitrak: For this conversation, I wanted to start back before you became the go-to expert on positioning, and when you were coming up in your career, when did you first encounter the concept of positioning? April Dunford: That’s a good question. Pretty early, actually. My first real job in tech was at a little startup and I was brand new and junior, they assigned me to a product and the thinking was that product wasn’t doing very well and the plan was to shut it down. This is why I got assigned to it as the product marketer. We didn’t end up shutting it down. What we ended up doing was looking at gathering some feedback from people that were using the product, and then we got an idea to reposition it. We didn’t know it was called positioning, we thought we were doing, we’re just doing a Hail Mary thing to see if we can make this unsuccessful product successful doing something slightly different. We repositioned it, relaunched it, and it was super successful. Revenue started going up to the right, everybody’s happy, we’re making a lot of money on that product. And then we got acquired by a big company in California and the big parent company assigned us a couple of products that weren’t doing very well and then said, hey, do that thing you did with the other one. I didn’t have really any idea what we did with the other one. I was worried about getting fired, I thought, okay, I better figure this out. I did a deep dive into positioning. I figured out, A, this is what it’s called. B, I had a lot of conversations with smart marketers asking them about, how do you do positioning? If you were in this situation, what would you do? Do you have a strategy for that or a methodology for that? I also read a bunch of books. There’s the classic positioning book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by these guys Ries and Trout, written in the early 80s, but even back then was considered the book on positioning. And then I took a couple of courses and some post-grad stuff at a couple of universities just learning about positioning. I dumped into this whole positioning thing pretty early in my career, and I was really interested in this idea, could we get a way to do positioning in a really repeatable manner so that we wouldn’t have this problem of, we launched the thing and it didn’t work and then now we’ve got to try and change it. Could I get to a point where there is a process for us to follow to, first of all, maybe do a better job guessing at what the positioning should be in the first place, and then secondly, if we do need to change it, is there a nice repeatable step-by-step thing we could follow to do that. Is Product Positioning Intuitive or Learned? Andrew Mitrak: You initially positioned or repositioned a product without even knowing what positioning was or knowing that it was called positioning that you were doing. And then you went to look at the literature. What’s your takeaway from that? Does that reveal to you that the fundamentals of positioning are somewhat intuitive or can be learned, or do you feel it was just dumb luck really? Or do you feel there were parts of it where this is just obviously the right thing to do for the product? How do you overall think about, can positioning sort of just be an intuitive thing, or is it best to look at the literature that’s out there? April Dunford: Sometimes it is really intuitive. I would say that’s true. I would say a lot of the time when I talk to founders, they’ll talk about how they built the product in the first place, and they’ll be, we saw this need, we had this idea, we could do this in a different way than the existing products that are out there. And we looked at it, we understood what the competition was, we built a thing that was demonstrably different, we understood what the value of that thing was because it was solving our own pain, we understood what kind of customers would want to buy that, and therefore what market we position in. It’s just, it is what it is, it’s super easy. And I think that happens a lot in the early stages of a company. Not for everybody, but I do think it happens a lot. However, what also happens a lot is if you fast forward two or three years, the market’s changed. Maybe your competitors caught up with you and the thing that made you really different isn’t different anymore. Or maybe the way people buy or what they want to do has totally changed. Or maybe your competitors did an acquisition and that changes the whole way everybody thinks about this market. Or maybe you and your product have changed, and you now do a whole bunch of other stuff that you didn’t originally do, and that enables you to get at a different kind of customer to deliver a different kind of value. Now how do you position it? That’s where people get messed up. Sometimes it can be quite intuitive at the beginning, but then a whole bunch of things change and it’s, okay, now the positioning needs to shift. How do we do that? Because we didn’t do anything the first time, it was just obvious. I think that happens a lot. The other thing that happens a lot is you have this thesis when you launch the product and you said, okay, we saw this problem and this is what it’s gonna be and these kind of people are gonna love us for these reasons and here’s the competitor. Then we launch it, and it turns out our thesis was incorrect. We get out there and we’re, man, we launched this thing and we thought banks were gonna love it, but it turns out we’re selling to insurance companies, we didn’t really build it for that, but they’re buying it like crazy. Now we’re in the insurance business, hello. And they love it, but there are some things they don’t love so much, and they’re comparing us to competitors we never really thought about. How do we position this thing because we thought it was gonna be something else. And this is not unusual, to be honest. We call that a pivot in lean startup language. It’s not unusual for a company to build something for one market and then get in the market and find out, whoops, the market’s a little bit different than we thought. People are looking at our product a little bit different than we thought. We’re getting pulled into another market, so how do we position for that? And again, that’s when having a methodology for this would be helpful. The B2B vs. B2C Divide in Positioning Andrew Mitrak: You did your positioning exercise initially and then went to the books, went to Ries and Trout and the others. Do you find yourself as you’re reading the literature on positioning, was it confirming what you did, oh, that’s what we did was called, or was it saying, oh, were there things that you’re, oh, I wish I had known that to start, or what was the discovery process for reading? April Dunford: No. And I was so mad about this. Here’s how this went. I went and I’m having all these conversations with people, I’m talking to all these smart heads of marketing, right? And I’m saying, how do you do this positioning thing? What do you do? And everybody’s doing it the way we did it, which was a little bit of trial and error, a little bit of getting some feedback from customers, a little bit of, let’s try this and if it doesn’t work we’re gonna adjust. A bit of messing around until you get something that works. And that feels terrible when you’re the head of marketing because your head’s on the block, man. And if you don’t figure it out fast enough, everyone’s gonna get mad and you’re gonna get fired. And that was unsatisfying. And then I took some courses and read the Ries and Trout book, which does an amazing job of defining here

    April Dunford: Positioning Is Not Branding, And It's Not Just Marketing's Job

  8. Mar 26

    Peter Van Wijnaerde: Branding, Beauty, & Beheadings - Lessons in “Stopping Power” from Art History

    A History of Marketing / Episode 49 Have you ever stood in front of a 500-year-old painting of a father devouring his son and asked yourself, “Who paid for this?” Me neither. Until I met Peter Van Wijnaerde. Peter is a CMO based in Ghent, Belgium, and the writer behind a Substack that connects art history to modern marketing. Rory Sutherland recommended I speak with Peter (which is as high a compliment as you can get in this field) after seeing his presentation on medieval branding. Peter’s premise is provocative: art was the original marketing department. Patrons funded paintings, statues, and tapestries not for beauty’s sake, but because they needed to project power, build legitimacy, and sway public opinion. The separation of fine art and commerce is a relatively recent development. Peter brings a perspective that’s part art aficionado, hobbyist historian, and marketing strategist. He shows us that “stopping power” has been central to persuading the masses for a thousand years. Here is my conversation with Peter Van Wijnaerde. Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts Quick Update: Thank you to the thousands of marketers from around the world who have played The CMO Game! It’s been amazing to see the response and I’ve had a few marketing professors reach out to request using it in their classes. Special Thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And thank you to Rory Sutherland for introducing me to Peter. The Intersection of Art History and Marketing Andrew Mitrak: You’ve written about so many topics connecting history, marketing, mythology, and art, and branding, and merging the past with the present in our work as marketers today. So how would you describe the content of your Substack and your perspective that you bring? Peter Van Wijnaerde: I like to stretch out the history of marketing a little bit to before the 1950s. And I love art and I love looking at art and I love using those art pieces that were made to compel people to have stopping power. I use those to explain how marketing is really one of the oldest professions there is and what we can learn today of marketing. So not that there’s no surprises anymore in the current time, but my blog is about widening the scope of the time frame of marketing. Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned one of the oldest professions. It is funny when Pompeii was uncovered – the ancient city that was covered by Mount Vesuvius. They discovered brothels but also they discovered artwork that would point people to the brothels. Right. So if prostitution is the oldest profession, there seems to be types of advertising to get people there. So they were very interconnected. So advertising does seem like an old profession. Peter Van Wijnaerde: Exactly. Andrew Mitrak: So what was your initial spark? How did you start connecting the past to the present? Peter Van Wijnaerde: I was always a very visual person, liked to engage with things that are visual. But I think the spark happened my first time in Vienna in the Belvedere. I started to appreciate medieval art. And normally medieval art is something we laugh about. You have the memes with the medieval cats and there is full Instagram feeds full of that. But actually we should not laugh with medieval art, because it’s very communicative. Because it’s very symbolic. It says there are two guys and a child and the child is just a little human and this is happening, right? And so it’s basically like a cartoon. I started to appreciate it, started to look at it and then started wondering, that must have been expensive and difficult to make. Why were people making this? Uncovering Medieval Marketing in the Bayeux Tapestry Peter Van Wijnaerde: The moment that it clicked was when I was doing medieval travels through Europe. And I was in France and I was in Bayeux. Have you ever heard about the Bayeux Tapestry? Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know about the Bayeux Tapestry. I’m not too familiar with tapestries in general. Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, it’s a 70-meter long tapestry that was embroidered in the year 1080, let’s say. They don’t know precise but it was embroidered there. And it’s a tapestry about the Battle of Hastings, about William the Conqueror kicking out the Anglo-Saxons out of England and putting in Nordic rule in England. And this guy, his brother, yes, this one. Andrew Mitrak: For listeners, most people listen to the audio, but I am going to, because this is a visual conversation, I’ll pull them up on the screen, because I find it useful to hear and see what you’re talking about. So I’m sharing my screen and showing the Bayeux Tapestry. Peter Van Wijnaerde: So what’s so interesting about the Bayeux Tapestry is that it’s a scroll of 70 meters, it’s about 40 centimeters high or something. And it tells the story about why William the Conqueror thought he had the right to conquer England and what the deal was and how they prepared for it and who they talked to and the whole story from beginning to end is on that tapestry. And it was made... Andrew Mitrak: So it’s a really wide tapestry. Cause it’s like frame by frame. Cause it’s... wow, okay. Yeah. Peter Van Wijnaerde: And you can roll it up too. And it was made by his brother, the Bishop Odo of Bayeux. And what’s so interesting about it, it was not a painting, it was not a statue, it was a tapestry. And there is actually really no other tapestry of that kind. But if you think about it, it was mobile, you could roll it up easily, you can transport it easily and put it out somewhere else also as easily. So it was actually a bit of a prop of a PR tour for William the Conqueror by his brother the Bishop of Bayeux. And then it clicked. And I thought, oh my god, they should give this Odo guy an Effie Award or something because he invented a completely new way of storytelling to convince the people that this king is their legitimate ruler. And you don’t do that by building a cathedral because a cathedral is only in one place. So I thought this is a 1,000-year-old marketing campaign in front of me. So this is when it started clicking even more. Andrew Mitrak: It’s, and you mentioned medieval art almost looks like a cartoon sometimes because it’s a little more two-dimensional, they didn’t quite have the same sense of perspective and lighting and depth that you convey that you’d later see in the Renaissance. But and then also medieval art sometimes you see it in memes today. Like you see it in internet memes and you see it kind of translates kind of because it’s cartoon-like. And in a way memes are such a huge part of internet culture and the way people communicate now. And this artwork, this tapestry kind of reminds you of a comic book almost, or a frame by frame and it sort of takes that type of visual storytelling and it seems like it communicates that to the masses who mostly would be illiterate but would still appreciate a story. Peter Van Wijnaerde: If you walk in front of it and you just go, it takes half an hour to see the whole thing. And there’s action scenes in there and little jokes in there. There’s a warrior showing his bare ass to another warrior, things like this. So it’s also made to entertain. And I think that’s beautiful actually. It’s not just, this is history, this is also, also very interesting fact: the guy who made it gave himself a very prominent role in the history as well. But he was the guy who commissioned it right? So he could embroider himself into history. Andrew Mitrak: Okay, yeah, so sort of the marketer, the marketers being a little self-promotional in a sense, or at least the patrons being self-promotional. That’s great. Inspiration Everywhere: Learning from the Past Andrew Mitrak: So I originally heard about your work from my conversation with Rory Sutherland, and he mentioned that he loved your presentation on medieval branding. Which is a very high compliment. I mean, take that win because if Rory Sutherland complimented my work, that would be wonderful. So very cool. So that was my initial spark for reaching out to you. And you’ve already talked a little bit about medieval history or medieval artwork and how it relates to branding. So was this part of that presentation? The Bayeux Tapestry, was this part of the presentation or could you just share what the presentation was that Rory was speaking about that seemed resonated with him? Peter Van Wijnaerde: Well, the insight that, so this was not about the Bayeux Tapestry. This was about some tactics that some brands do today that you can also see that kings and queens did in history. So it was actually, I think the title was ‘Medieval Marketing Lessons for Modern Marketers‘. That was the thing. And it all starts from this, the reason that if you are in power, you need to stay in power. And there are several ways that you can stay in power. And one of them is fighting. But that’s not a good thing for your resources, because you will lose a lot of men and you will lose the belief of your people if you lose too many men. So for efficiency reasons, the kings and queens looked for different ways to keep their power or make sure no one started fighting them. If people believed that it was not worth fighting you because you were stronger, because you had better allies, or you would end up in hell because this guy has the blessing of God. That’s also an important one. So they started making up all these stories. And what I did in this talk was picking apart some of those stories and translate how they are actually being used today. Just to show, not to tell people this is the way you should do marketing, but more to tell people, like, if you’re in marketing, if you’re in branding, open your eyes. Ideas are everywhere. That was more, and I look for them in history. Other people can look for them in kindergartens or whatever,

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About

A podcast about the stories and strategies behind the campaigns that shaped our world. Featuring conversations with top CMOs, marketing professors, authors, historians, and business leaders. marketinghistory.org

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Mitrak
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    61
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Andrew Mitrak
  • Show Website
    A History of Marketing

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