The Push

Jack Ferguson

The Push is a podcast for senior marketers eager to hear honest perspectives from peers who tell it like it is. We speak directly to your day-to-day reality and don't bother with superfluous tactics you don't need. We understand that senior marketing is uniquely frustrating.   You have to sell the 'why' more than any other department.You're held accountable for results beyond your control. You're forever dealing with non-marketers who 'know better than you'.Stakeholder politics, opinions, and “gut feelings” constantly get in the way.You're so busy dealing with stakeholders, there's little time left to conceptualise new strategies and hone your craft.  We bring together senior marketers to candidly share stories, analogies, strategies, and mental models they've used.  You can use these conversations to: Explain complex concepts to non-marketers.Get more client buy-in.Explore new strategy ideas.Better articulate your existing knowledge.Explain the 'why' behind your strategy.Keep your own team engaged.Better navigate marketing politics (which are inevitable). Remember that you're not alone in your experiences. No empty buzzwords. No listicles. No generic advice.  Whether you’re in-house, agency-side, or a consultant, you’ll leave feeling empowered to speak up and lead with confidence. The Push is hosted by Jack Ferguson, a Brand Strategist with 15 years of marketing and brand experience across 20+ industries. 

  1. 4일 전

    S3 E70: When Great Marketing Execution Still Fails: Understanding Buyers, Markets, and Risk

    Most companies blame execution when growth plateaus. So they start doing more outbound, making better ad creative, creating new landing pages, building sharper sales scripts, and tightening the alignment between sales and marketing. But often, the problem isn’t execution, it's market understanding. In this episode, Jack Ferguson hosts Buyer Researcher Ryan Gibson to help you understand when poor growth is an execution problem and when it is a market understanding problem.  Using examples from SaaS, enterprise software, startups, and B2B sales environments, they explore how buyers make decisions, why status quo bias is stronger than many realise, and why customer feedback alone is seldom enough to glean broad market insights. They cover: - How Amazon use qualitative data to break the tie of a GTM decision - The % of revenue Salesforce reinvests back into their GTM - How to get feedback from buying committees you don’t ordinarily get access to - How to know if you have a market understanding problem or execution problem? (incl. real examples of each) - The lead and lag indicators that indicate a company lacks the market understanding to effectively grow - The issues with using surveys for quantitative research - How you can use AI to complement your market research efforts - Low cost approaches to doing B2B market research - Ways to get your company to start investing in market understanding - How to get market and buyer truths - What strong resistance to pricing tells you - How qualitative conversations uncover what dashboards and CRM data can’t  - The benefits and drawbacks of relying on sales teams for market understanding - What conditions need to be in place for large B2B companies to change providers  - The limitations of relying on customers for market insight Helpful Links: Where to find Jack: - LinkedIn - Website  Where to find Ryan: - LinkedIn - Content Lift Website Where to find The Push: - LinkedIn - YouTube Music - Instagram - TikTok - Website

    52분
  2. 4월 7일

    S3 E68: The Ontology of Brand (Pt 2): Strategy Outputs, Decision Infrastructure, and Scenario Modeling

    A Brand Strategy is often dismissed as ‘fluff’ because it’s poorly defined, inconsistently applied, and confused with tactics, communications, advertising, or visual identity. In Part 2 of this series, we move beyond the theory of brand as a function of memory and why buyers buy to define specific strategic outputs, explain how they’re informed, and model scenarios in which they’re used. This episode presents a unifying idea of brand strategy that holds up for marketers and remains accessible to non-marketers. This episode covers: How brand strategy operates as a set of outputs that shape decisions across an organisation Scenario modelling across two distinct operating environments: a B2B accounting firm and a high-urgency B2C retailer How an effective brand strategy aligns incentives, operating models, and capability, not just communications and advertising outputs Why most competitive advantage comes from structure, not messaging or creativity A practical test to determine whether something is strategic or tacticalThe core outputs of brand strategy, how they’re informed, and how they’re used The role of memory, association, and expectation in reinforcing or violating brand strategy Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson hosts this episode. Helpful Links: Where to find Jack: - Find Jack on LinkedIn - Find Jack at his Website Where to find The Push: - Follow The Push on LinkedIn - Subscribe to The Push on YouTube Music - Follow The Push on TikTok - Follow The Push on Instagram - Visit The Push Website Resources Mentioned: - RSPCA Commercial - Budweiser + Jay Z Commercial - 2013 Budweiser Super Bowl Ad

    30분
  3. 3월 24일

    S3 E67: The Ontology of Brand (Pt 1): How It’s Measured, First Principles, and Why Buyers Buy

    Most definitions of ‘brand’ focus on what a company produces, like logos, names, and design systems, but fail to explain what brand is, how it drives commercial outcomes, and how it is measured.  In Part 1 of this series, we define brand comprehensively while keeping it accessible to marketers and non-marketers alike. From that foundation, we break down how brand shows up in real buying situations, how it influences decision-making through different memory systems, and how it can be measured through awareness, salience, distinctiveness, and risk.  In Part 1, we discuss: What is happening in the mind during a purchase decisionThe role of working memory in evaluation vs long-term memory in reducing riskWhy most brand interactions never make it past sensory filteringThe relationship between brand building (long-term memory) and activation (working memory)Sensory, working, and long-term memory, and how each shapes brand outcomesThe commercial implications of brand: awareness, perception, and risk reductionBrand Distinctiveness vs Brand DifferentiationHow category entry points trigger brand recall in real-world situationsThe practical discussion of how brand heritage affects commercial outcomesWhy diagnostics are the foundation of any credible brand strategyThe difference between internal (team/founder) and market diagnostics, and why both matterWhy most definitions of brand are incomplete, and what is commonly missedA unifying definition of brand grounded in perception, memory, and behaviourThe ontology of brand: its tangible existenceHosted by Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson. Where to find Jack: - LinkedIn  - Website Where to find The Push: - The Push on LinkedIn - The Push on YouTube - The Push on TikTok - The Push on Instagram - The Push Website

    34분
  4. 2월 24일

    S3 E65: Why Costco Engineers Against Impulse Purchases, How Honey Collapsed in One Video, and the Quantum Shift Marketing Needs

    Buyers don’t experience brands as funnels. They encounter them mid-scroll, mid-conversation, mid-doubt, mid-purchase, to name a few examples. So why does marketing still plan as if people move predictably from awareness to purchase? This episode's guest Jelena Veselinovic joins host Jack Ferguson to rally against this phenomenon while drawing on 25+ years of marketing experience, including 18 years at Coca-Cola and 3.5 years as Head of Brand Marketing at Miro.  Now operating as a fractional Head of Brand, she blends classical marketing science with a philosophical background to challenge the deterministic assumptions still embedded in boardrooms. If the world behaves probabilistically, effective marketing must evolve accordingly. We cover: How Honey’s overnight collapse is the best case study on brand promise riskWhy Costco removes marketing traps and caps marginsHow Coca-Cola institutionalised product as their brand coreHow Newtonian cause-and-effect thinking misreads buyer behaviourWhy marketing is better understood as shaping conditions rather than controlling behaviourHow brands lost narrative authority to reviews, creators, and AIWhy deterministic marketing is both disrespectful and ineffective How to build brands that thrive upon contact with realityHelpful Links: - Determinism - Quantum Mechanics - The Quantum State of Branding Article - Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam Video Where to find Jack: - LinkedIn - Website Where to find Jelena: - Rewire Your Mind Substack - LinkedIn Where to find The Push: - LinkedIn - YouTube - Instagram - TikTok - Website

    48분
  5. 1월 27일

    S3 E63: How 150 Brands Achieved Disproportionate Growth, Making Bluetooth a Household Name, and The Category Fallacy

    In this episode, Brand Strategist Jack Ferguson hosts Strategic Growth Architect Mats Georgson, former Global Brand Director at Sony Ericsson, to discuss how brands achieve large, sustained growth and how most category-based thinking caps it. Mats was the first marketer to work on Bluetooth, giving him deep, practical insight into rapid global adoption, and years later completed a research project analysing how 150 brands achieved disproportionate growth. Together, Jack and Mats explore why some brands defy gravity, while others struggle to break free of their category constraints. Jack and Mats discuss: - How brands grow via Demand Point Constellations - How the iPhone leveraged demand points to grow - Launching Bluetooth and the story behind its overwhelming success - How Mats saw a client quickly jump 20% in revenue without advertising - Uber’s Demand Point Constellation - How to escape the gravitational pull of a category - Why innovation is hard for marketers and what can be done about it - Why few brands grow primarily through gaining market share - The problem with comms and advertising being asked to do things they can’t do - Why marketers need to think like detectives Helpful Links: Mats’ Demand Point Constellation Thesis Links to Jack: Jack's LinkedIn Profile Jack's Website Links to Mats: Mats’ LinkedIn Profile Mats’ Website Links to The Push: The Push LinkedIn Page The Push on TikTok The Push on Instagram The Push on YouTube Music The Push Website Referenced in Episode: Blue Ocean Strategy Ehrenberg Bass Institute Apple losing its App Store trademark case Category Entry Point Jobs to be Done Framework

    1시간 5분

소개

The Push is a podcast for senior marketers eager to hear honest perspectives from peers who tell it like it is. We speak directly to your day-to-day reality and don't bother with superfluous tactics you don't need. We understand that senior marketing is uniquely frustrating.   You have to sell the 'why' more than any other department.You're held accountable for results beyond your control. You're forever dealing with non-marketers who 'know better than you'.Stakeholder politics, opinions, and “gut feelings” constantly get in the way.You're so busy dealing with stakeholders, there's little time left to conceptualise new strategies and hone your craft.  We bring together senior marketers to candidly share stories, analogies, strategies, and mental models they've used.  You can use these conversations to: Explain complex concepts to non-marketers.Get more client buy-in.Explore new strategy ideas.Better articulate your existing knowledge.Explain the 'why' behind your strategy.Keep your own team engaged.Better navigate marketing politics (which are inevitable). Remember that you're not alone in your experiences. No empty buzzwords. No listicles. No generic advice.  Whether you’re in-house, agency-side, or a consultant, you’ll leave feeling empowered to speak up and lead with confidence. The Push is hosted by Jack Ferguson, a Brand Strategist with 15 years of marketing and brand experience across 20+ industries.