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[Music] and good afternoon i guess in minneapolis saint paul right yes and thank you for doing this so early in the morning this is amazing so yes so let's we'll get started we are getting started we have uh recording so um this is thinking link uh this is a event we put on it used to be called thinking link pants optional which is uh taken up a bit of fire um in mark's post um we changed it not because of him but because we're in the new year um brand new world i'm thinking like brand new world is the new name uh it's the season it's a little more hopeful and we'll explain that more in a post coming up but it's not as good as pants optional i have to say immediately right optional was way better i know i know and why is that so that you had that there were some videos floating around it's important to point out though right that we that we most of us are you wearing pants are you are and i assume i am i am and i have worn pants for every single one of these thinking link events you're lying you're definitely gonna do these things in boxer shorts at best but anyway sorry carry on anyway anyway i want to get a word in for our sponsors uh our two sponsors capsule this firm in minneapolis uh that does uh special project work uh in the area of name brand brand strategy research design in a variety of forms and then an example of that work which is also a sponsor verse chocolate which is a wonderful new chocolate that's a healthy habit chocolate coming out of holland michigan yes there it is vs chocolate you can go buy some now it's absolutely amazing uh and those are our two wonderful sponsors if anybody else wants to sponsor this you know personally in any other way happy to take that on but for now that's who we have and um we're here to have a discus discussion about brand about marketing uh about design related topics with professor virtual professor mark rudson who's become an institution in up in and of himself um in what he's doing now which i find really intriguing on a modern level uh and just put out a post this morning i believe or at least it hit my world about brand strategy which i read and enjoyed and laughed at a number of times avoid anybody with a title strategist that's good so um that's us we ask that you be on audio mute video on if you like for everybody because we love seeing video and we're gonna have a conversation it's gonna go about 45 minutes and kelly's going to start with the first question i am but i do want to mention really quickly because i'm sure we're going to have a lot of questions from the audience as well so please put those questions in the chat we will try to get to as many of those as we can in the time we have left uh but we will also be recording and have a video of this full session some work uh we're excited to have this conversation and then put this back out into the world um and i expect a very sweary conversation please that's we all anticipate as we move through this next 45 minutes don't one of the things i promised myself was i would not swear because i remember from my days in in minnesota that it was not it didn't go down as well as it goes down elsewhere so you will not get a single curse word from me in the in the next 45 minutes i've i've been training if it slips out we're okay but thank you mark now we're very obviously very excited to have you um i think for for many of us you know over the past decade you have entertained and enlightened us with your unique take on a lot of hot topics and marketing um and uh contrarian of sorts some would say but what we want to talk about today is just get some perspectives on what we what you see as some of the hot topics of marketing um and uh just have a conversation so i will dive right in if okay mark i just ask you a quick question a recent article that i read um and then a podcast i heard of yours around marketing both ism and what your definition of both ism that model which i think for the group is is a combination of of strategy creativity and how can marketers harness that sort of one-two punch can you dive into your definition of both ism and how that applies to marketing and marketers today sure um so it happened yesterday is a good example someone was asking me um from my point of view and what was more important was it media placement or was it the creation and content of the ad that was the most important in generating success and i politely said to that person that the question was stupid because it was clearly a case of both being important right if you have shitty media choices great creativity isn't going to work and great creativity um is is the big driver behind advertising effectiveness alongside good media and so that's a good example of both ism we live in an age where especially marketing for some reason it's about whether you do short term bottom funnel performance marketing or top of funnel brand building the answer obviously is you do both you do long and short you know digital or traditional is possibly the dumbest question in the history of marketing right digital or traditional right neither term means anything given that everything is digital anyway but again the answer is both if you want to you know if you look at any piece of research ever including the research of facebook and most of the tv companies facebook works best when twinned with television you get a catalytic impact um you need them both so both ism is just my attempt to point out that you really want both of the two things that we try and separate so often these days uh online um and people like uh what's a good example gary vee who i regard as useless um are a perfect example of someone who espouses one side of the coin and it serves him very well but it's it's it's not good for brands to think that way so yeah both ism means try and do know it's not a or b it's not even a plus b it's a times b that the two together produce the best results and they inevitably do that's that's good so it's like equilibrium if you will a balanced depression right thank you yeah that's great so i um i need this so when we this goes way back we get historic i can't help but do that but after taking your class this is pre the internet this is 97. not pre-installed right right just just to be clear you didn't have gray hair i didn't have gray hair uh and we got together and we a number of times we don't need to make that clear um no we uh we uh and i was so enamored what was happening to the internet and what was what that was i kind of think like it's going to be everything and you said no no really it's just going to consume everything it's going to consume all the other mediums out there do you ever go back to that article or back because that you had just written something about that and go back and look at your stuff to see if it's come true because part of what i mean it's a pundit you have to look into the future like that yeah no i i do remember that first of all i remember you being very passionate about it which sounds obvious now but at the time wasn't you know it was 25 plus years ago whatever it was and i do remember my own argument which was that yeah it became the medium by which everything else went through i think obviously it's it's kind of a bit of both now isn't it you know what i mean it's um i i think it became really with with with digital media that's when we saw the full fruition of it when we were talking back in the 90s it was the in you know it was the internet the existence of the web that was the thing we were discussing i think it was only when we got from that stage through the social media stage organic social media which was in my opinion ridiculous right i mean that was when i really started to lose my mind a little bit and that was probably what about 10 years ago now if you remember zuckerberg had been talking about how we weren't going to do advertising anymore um what was going to happen was people going to be friends with brands organic social media conversations there's a lot of people still believe that's the case right and it was never the case the reach was never there social media was a social media it wasn't for brands to have a conversation with consumers the oreo dunk in the dark remember that from the super bowl was possibly the dumbest moment in the 25 years since we last met right because so many people believe that that tweet during the super bowl was some kind of revelation and it reached literally less than 0.1 percent of the ads that were running on the tv show yeah and and yet when you read advertising age even you know the wall street journal the next morning they were claiming that dunk in the dark was you know had won the internet so i think that was i think when we got to what i would call digital media so not organic social media but but essentially using facebook as a youtube as a traditional media source running ads that's when you got to the place where i think a proper revolution occurred and as we now know 50 of the money goes on it so yeah i remember it well but we were at the time we were debating whether the internet was going to change things you know i mean it's come on so much it's hard to even know what is the internet now right i mean what exactly it's everything and everywhere and the fact that we're having this call with australia you know this is absolutely amazing to me that this is to look back on that um i don't want to steal the whole show kelly so no no no no i've got so many questions i know we won't get to end there a lot showing up in the chat but but quickly mark to stay in the theme of digital and marketing in this digital age and again something i'd read that you had had discussed with regard to you know current sooner senior expert marketers um either looking for jobs um or are transitioning to new roles and knowing that digital is a critical part of the marketing playbook but it's not and you've said this not the playbook itself um can you share a little bit about the current role of of marketing and a marketer in this digital age and better yet um you know who who are they serving as a practice as they practice their discipline we think about digital and how that is yeah yeah it's a key question kelly and you asked it very well in the sense that marketers in a digital age i think is the right way to think about it i think the minute we get digital marketing we enter a much more difficult territory and the problem with digital marketing is it's inherently tactical and and i'm often quoted a lot and so you know richmond's against digital he doesn't think digital none of which is true i think digital has a massive clearly a massive place in all of this and if you wanted to say what it would be it's approximately half the tactical impact of communications right um for example so digital by its nature is the tactics we use which are quote quite digital come back upstream with me though what marketers have to do before they do tactics is strategy yeah strategy and tactics are not the same thing they're connected but strategy is about answering the key questions that will direct the tactics it's the generals at the top of the hill planning where the soldiers will go before the soldiers go right and i i don't see any role when someone talks about digital strategy i know we're in a place of stupidity because no such thing exists the car is in front of the horse right we're going to digital tactics but strategy is strategy and putting digital in front of it tells you that you don't know what you're doing now you can have a digital marketer but that market is relatively junior and is relatively wrapped up in tactical stuff right and again nothing wrong with that but what we're seeing right now in many places is those digital marketers who are now in their 30s are trying to swim upstream earn more money become more strategic become more senior but they're hanging on to the d word and i have to be honest with you they know very little about marketing and a lot more about digital and and that's not a bad thing because you know god knows i'm making money out of training them and i welcome them coming up by the way because it you know if you don't have digital tactical skills it's pretty hard to be any good these days but you do have to drop the d prefix to come and do marketing properly and that means strategy and just to finish up you know trilogy tactics is is the tip of the spear then there's the strategy and before strategy there's the diagnosis the understanding the market on which the strategy is based the battle plan the strategy then the troops and for me the answer to your question is those three things are what a good marketer does understand the market develop a strategy execute tactics off the strategy what we see i would say six times out of ten is no real focus on diagnosis absolutely no strategy no strategy at all and even when we get to tactics uh almost total focus on communications and ignoring the other tactical levers we see very little discussion of price anymore within marketing product development distribution and an almost total obsession with comms and digital comms which if you think about these three phases and the fact that comms is a quarter of the four ps as mccarthy would once have said then we're talking about eight percent of the total marketing mix that eight percent of marketing comms and the four percent you know the half of it which is digital comms occupies about 70 percent of our conversation and we miss all the other parts which for me is a tragedy yeah yeah and on top of that the fact that it's it's a it's a shallow medium all the things related to it is generally delivered through a screen of some sort you know it's not as it's not as human connection kind of form right look but it is effective don't get me wrong i mean as a four percent in the overall marketing journey it certainly has its place but you know what's happened to pricing in our conversations you know as marketers what's happened to strategy what's happened to segmentation these are rich conversations and we just we just don't go your next marketing conference virtual or not count how many special sessions are on about comms and how many are on about other things yeah and it's ridiculous yeah that's a great point you know if i can if i may here and mark just continue really quickly because this is part of again hot off the press uh um an article you've written around brand strategy and what you call the three axioms and then the three questions you would ask associated with that talked about diagnosis first and then strategy about in terms of choosing what you will not do could you go a little bit deeper into that or just give some additional perspective please it's a big one right it's a real big one kelly so axioms is a fancy way of saying there are three things i think you need to be aware of when you're doing strategy right before you actually do strategy we've kind of talked about two of them put the tactics down super important you can't have a facebook strategy so put it put facebook and all that down step back to the strategic questions build it on diagnosis which you've already talked about that's another axiom and then you know for me i think this this i don't know how to describe it but this um inherent focus on strategic thinking um really demands that we ask these four questions um three main questions really um before we do anything else you know and the first question is who are targeting the next question is what do we stand for what's our position and our final question is what's our objectives and that's it that's all we're talking about we get a lot of people turning up you know with all you know brand strategy marketing strategy and even worse i'm a strategist right my experience of strategists is that they know nothing of strategy right there are certain flags you'll see on linkedin anyone who refers themselves as a strategist is the opposite of strategy it's almost as bad as being an author um putting that on your linkedin title um or using a verb that's the ultimate one using a verb in your linkedin title thinking doing challenging it means you're useless okay so um my point is that you know brand or marketing strategy has these axioms that drive how we do things and then if you boil it down what is a brand strategy it really isn't that complex it's who we're targeting what's our position and what are our objectives you know those are the those are the key drivers of the process and the axiom that surrounds it the most and the one i learned from the strategy people and it took me a long time to learn is is strategy is what we do not do so when you answer these questions who are we targeting what do we stand for what's our objectives the classic mistake is to try and do everything or try and do too much and one of the americans have added relatively little words to the english language of any value okay i would say uh hot dog i would say but i'm not swearing so i'm not gonna use that word on the on the podcast and the other one is choiceful okay choiceful it's an abysmal word but my goodness it's a great word too because choicefulness suggests that you've made choices you've decided what we're not going to do and when it comes to marketing or brand strategy targeting who are we not going after where will we focus our money positioning i i've positioned more billion dollar brands than anyone on this call right doesn't mean i'm smarter but i've certainly done it a lot right i know that if you have more than two or three fundamental things in your brand positioning it's not going to work right you've got to get it down and i see all these brands with triangles and keyholes and 25 words and a brand purpose and brand essence and brand position and brand this and brand that it's over because you didn't make the choices of what you didn't want to stand for and the same with objectives done a ton of research on this a handful of objectives going into a year three or four is the optimum number all things being equal to have success if you have 7 8 9 10 imperatives those aren't imperatives those aren't objectives those are dreams that will never come true so i really think it's one of the most important points you know as i said in the article morons keep adding more and more good marketers keep chopping away and if you ever see a great choice for strategy it's it's the line of sight is very clear and it delivers as a result yes and very timely i think now for marketers trying to be more focused on what they need to need to do in their business and um i have to go historic again oh i i'm just gonna say aaron it's very important though just to point that out you you've got to be very critical on brands on on the work that you do when you look at most brands and most marketers and you look at their brand or marketing strategy as obvious as the things i'm saying they haven't done it there isn't clarity on targeting there isn't clarity on positioning and there aren't the two or three objectives that really are gonna drive this you know what i mean so although this all sounds obvious i'm telling you nine times out of ten those questions have not been sufficiently answered sorry we're gonna go historical yeah yeah it's uh historic but also to go current as well because there's the follow-on question to my first question will be have brands and marketers lost their way which is a question from our audience from john gleason but before that which kind of feeds into that is a video an event that you attended that was um brand valuation brilliant or um which is something that we've promoted pretty heavily because um uh the emotional response that i had to it is i guess as i watched you go up there and tear apart uh three different brand valuation firms i think they flew you in they probably sponsored and paid and put you over a nice hotel and everything else and then you just crushed them and i had a fight or flight instinct i think the flight was more like i would have just if i was on that panel um and i was one of those three i've just walked out of the room i was just like i can't i can't do that um then i watch them try to counter you the last guy came pretty close i don't remember what his name was and i think he was the one that started to want to land he was pretty good he had a good argument but um fairly good argument for it but he had crushed them before they could even get started and the one guy was like well i'll address mark's comments in the question and answer sorry dude you lost anyway you still what is your view on brand valuation um still worthy is it i mean it isn't even something that branch should be doing to look yeah look let's separate it out so brand valuation as exemplified by the league tables by brand z by brand finance um certainly by interbrand is a massive bag of yeah a total bag of and and to explain aaron's point what if you actually whenever you produce a league table every lazy marketing journalist goes you know that's number one and that one's gone up three places and that one's gone down two places and the league itself the table the numbers is horseshit and you know it's all because essentially as i pointed out in this talk to aaron said all i did was i dug out the data so you know these companies tell you what a brand is worth right on the balance sheet they estimate it well all all i in a swiss firm called marketables did is we said right over the last 20 years you guys have been saying these brands are worth the following we've looked at every instance where a brand was sold in the year that you put a value on it and none of you have got within 300 of it in some cases right on average you know and it's like a real estate agency i'm going to value your house and i'm either 100 off you know it's worth 500 000 bucks i said it was going to be worth a million bucks or i said it was going to work 250 000 bucks that's how that's how off they all were so the league tables are all horseshit right they're just a pr pile of horseshit and and it's pretty easy to demolish having said that i do believe in brand valuation and i've been involved many times inbound valuation because although the lead tables are horseshit where they're guessing if you get a valuation firm to come in do the research spend proper time on it and then put the intangible asset value on the balance sheet either to protect or sell or drive the thing there is value in that i believe having said that the rhetoric that you know every half-trained market a well-intentioned will say oh putting brands on the balance sheet oh you know we're finally getting the respect we deserve go and look at the league tables between brand z and interbrand the two big ones we cannot agree within a billion a hundred billion dollars what google is worth you know what i mean so it's a bit of a big pile of rubbish in my opinion yeah the theory is great the theory is great the practice is that's funny so you bring up google which is a great one because we're on the book tour the physics of brand book tour and um we go to google and they and they sit down with the brand leadership team and the first thing they say to us is we don't have a brand google said that google said that we don't have a brand and i i'm like well that's that's an interesting statement in itself right i'm like and you the argument was i think that they you know that they are the the plumbing right they are the they are a good portion of the internet right and so therefore they don't have a brand you know for about a hundred different reasons i mean you can make an argument i don't believe in it the brands are becoming less important right i mean my mate the great scott galloway is continually saying that uh brands are becoming less important in the information age i think that's horseshit too but anyone from google who says we don't have a brand is uh well they want to they maybe want to find out why they were spent or they've upped their advertising brand building spend by about you know uh 300 million dollars this year well if you know either it's not working or the person who said that has no idea what they're talking about right right that's great so yeah kelly i'll let you down i would just love to get there was a question i think it's ozzy or azzy and i'm not butchering your name but it's a great question i think we have a lot of entrepreneurs on the call today mark who are thinking okay this big brands big budgets i'm a startup or i'm a marketer for a startup um who don't have the access to those resources per se certainly early in the in the lifetime are the life of the brand um and they rely on building communities organically right rather than through paid media so how would you recommend or do you have some thoughts you could share on startups marketers working for startups how do they manage and is there a different approach to brand strategy in this marketing brand based on that lack of resources that you could share yeah so there's two things that good news and bad news let's do the bad news which no one ever says in america um on this particular point but it's super important right i get this question a lot um especially if you go and give a talk about brand building and you talk about you know you have to have excess share of voice you have to spend across many channels um you have to maintain your presence in the market and people with small brands say but i haven't got the funds to do that i can't afford to do that stuff what do i do and i always say the same thing which is you stay small you stay small right let's be very clear about this nonsense which comes out of america about david v goliath you know oh the small brands right the small brands are more agile and d to c and they're beating up the big brands what utter right there is still that belief that um what's the razer brand that everyone pops on about the unilever board do you remember aaron what was the razor not harry uh not the one that ran the commercial around the had the video at the beginning that was like i was safely popular right there's still a belief that um dollar shave club somehow beat gillette no they didn't they still haven't made a profit right this d2c nonsense that goes on um small brands stay small that's just the way that it goes okay you never actually you know very rarely do you see a brand break that myth the most important driver of effectiveness when it comes to brand building what's the number one driver that makes your branding effort successful is you're already a big brand not what you're spending but you've already built tremendous physical mental availability and you're leveraging that in your communications never go past that part right that we keep telling this story in advertising age about the small d2c brands they're all useless they don't make any money stop it it's just from people trying to sell their companies d2c is a joke they're in target within about eight months of launching it's rubbish right so the first point is and i don't mean to be sound um negative i'm being realistic small brands because they cannot do a lot of this stuff will stay small and then disappear that's the rule of the jungle right that's how capitalism works it was never fair right and there's this parlayed mythological stuff oh the small brands win one and two do when we write lots of stories about them but mostly they get smashed right and never make it having said that if you accept that that's the case there's a couple of lessons for smaller brands the first brand uh lesson i would say is play the founder play your smallness as a strength the second one is pick an enemy right the most successful small brand strategy is to position and reflect against a bigger brand in order to use their strength almost in the judo way against them and to fuel you and then the other thing is i don't think brand management starts until about year five so i i work for sephora in san francisco i have done for a very long time and we have a thing called um what how much i can say about it we pick um two or three of the hottest beauty brands each year and i go and work with them to build them into the next stage of growth one of the things we call it incubator and we've worked with a lot of famous brands that have become very successful over the years one of my rules i put in place when we started that program is they have to be five years old and the reason they have to be five years old is before then it's not it's still prototypical so i don't think you need a brand strategy from year one to year five what you need is a marketing strategy and you need to see where you land right once you get to year five you may be profitable you've got a bit of growth you've got some heritage you've got loyal customers things have started to settle down you can start to do the research and strategy until year five you know just survive and that's important because you know it's like having kids right we all have kids thinking they're gonna be doctors and nurses and mine have all turned out to be criminals and minor criminals and so forth and it's a bit like brands you know you have this vision for what a brand will be when you launch it but if it is successful it finds its own way and it's only once it's found that way that you should do the branding thing don't do it too early you know what i mean it's it's it's a mistake okay so it's more strong small tactics so mass targeting test and learn build awareness and then make a shift as you as you move through yeah yeah be flexible be flexible is the key point you know um one of the brands i i just i discovered that um i i encountered when i was in minneapolis was belvedere and ed phillips was launching belvedere and came to my class in 96 to talk about it about a luxury vodka and i and my whole um mba class thought he was a lunatic right you couldn't have luxury vodka and then weirdly about 18 19 years later i was working for mower tennessee when we acquired belvedere and i had a drink with ed 20 years later so he'd been in my classroom launching this liquor brand and then here we were in paris having a drink and he didn't remember me but i certainly remembered him and one of the big lessons was he had this vision but it went somewhere else in order to become successful so give it you know just like children give it a bit of flex and let it find its way um don't be too structured at the start you're not png let it flip and flop a little bit at the beginning that's that's a key lesson guys like me and i me and aaron and you and i mean this in the nicest sense we're artificial right you use someone like me to work out what's in the brands and then lock it down and grow it and scale it and all of that and you know i've done that throughout my career we're great but we're not the source of it let the source grow and firm first before you bring in people like us to do the work that's great that's really interesting plus his one of i think it's one of his kids became a senator if i've got that right as a story not maybe his brother but maybe his anyway uh so there you go right that worked out for him um so the back to the uh i get the sense that there's a little bit of ebenezer scrooge in you um in as it relates to marketing and brand and um [Music] do you feel like because someone asked at the beginning before you showed up did you swear a lot in the classroom and i didn't remember you swearing a lot um and you didn't seem like an ebenezer scrooge but this and is it you think it's getting more amplified as you age and gain more experience and more gray hair that you become more frustrated with the state of marketing and marketers and brands i think and look back then you didn't know enough to know what was wrong or right and that's the other thing i mean i have to be honest with you aaron i think being a professor i mean i wasn't even 30 then was i so you know it was a brutally hard job because i didn't know anything do you know what i mean it was re i did a job i remember for your cults in europe and they wanted the marketing professor and i turned up and i was so disappointed that i was so young and i remember being so i felt so bad for them being a professor only gets to be fun in your 50s because you're actually you look like you're meant to know what you're talking about even if you don't and you should if you've done enough work be experienced enough you know if you stay practical now most professors don't right my criticism of american business school professors is they don't do any work they don't really do consulting they ask about and and they're generally they're the reason american business schools are a bit stuffed now right i i adore american business schools i i went there deliberately in the night because i loved them and i adored them but they're in deep deep because the professors aren't practical enough you know um and and i think yeah as i got more experienced and i i definitely became more scrooge-like would probably be fair but only because i just think it's such a waste of time to not do it well that you know and everyone's full of like you go to these conferences and everyone's so full of right such gets said at conferences you know and um i think you have to stand up and say look what a lot of bollocks you know that's not true and when you say it the response from marketers who know what they're talking about is yeah that's right it is a load of you did you know what i mean like it's a total load of we know it's and yet no one is saying it you know what i mean and i think that's you know that's fundamentally where i found my my niche i mean i don't just rail about things you know we do we do then do it properly but yeah there's so much out there you kind of can't get get over it you know yeah yeah it is everywhere that is so true yeah yeah it's a degree of stuff i'm keeping tabs on the swearing by the way the just saying that we should all do like a shot of caffeine um every time um i would love to great mark i would love to dig into this because this is fascinating to me and i took by the way your um mini mba marketing class uh in 2019 learned a lot did you i didn't know that kelly and i will be taking your brand management course in the spring right so uh so yes a big big fan but i wanted to touch on your um your full proof seven point system for what you say identifying terrible brand consulting because this was fascinating to me and i'm not going to i'm not going to uh steal your thunder so could you could you share if not all seven points or the entire system what's your thoughts on how we identify okay okay now i've got to remember them all so don't don't be don't be disappointed if i forget some of them so i wrote an article this is 10 years ago by the way so i'm allowed to forget some of it which was here's how you spot your brand consultant who's full of right and a couple of them and there are many many more right my favorites and these are true by the way right is any use of swot or maslow's hierarchy of needs tells you the person is full of okay swat is the biggest pile of arse i've ever met in my life right the idea and we spend i mean our lives filling out these four inane boxes right and it's not as if at some point in the history of marketing anyone ever went oh look over in the threats box our competitors launching a new brand next year that's a threat if we hadn't built this this swat chat we never would have seen that thank we did that this changes everything right it's the most inane rubbish maslow's hierarchy of needs basically and i'm not paraphrasing says if you really need to take a piss you stop being hungry that's what it says that's literally what it says right if you need to piss you don't feel so hungry you don't worry how you look right that's what it says that's of no use almost anyone but the reason brand consultants use maslow hierarchy of needs is it sounds really smart right i think i created something like stable humper's trumpet because i said all you need is to create some theory that sounds smart and everyone will quote it maslow he sounds clever a hierarchy of needs you know so they're always for me the big watch outs i can't remember do you remember anymore kelly what else was in there you know you talked about um a brand consulting um advisor the number of concepts they try to sell you so there's no way that's all the term brand values et cetera et cetera which i thought was interesting the number of the number of uh the number of circles in their onion when they're doing brand positioning tells you how good or bad they are right if they have more than i look i'll be honest i have two so if you have more than two in my opinion then it's that you know and there are many many brand consulting firms that will sell you a dozen you know we need your brand essence over here they knew your purpose over there then you need your brand attributes here and then of course this brand character and brand ideal and nah right you know they're selling consulting by the yard the reality is you know in my world of consulting at this stage what have i learned from watching it play out i i like to work on brands that you know um have two or three or four things in their what i would call positioning we can call it anything you like what do we stand for we want to be this this and this right that's what i would call positioning but you can call it what you like and then the thing that doesn't get talked about in america which is such a shame is the distinctiveness stuff the codes um uh distinctive brand ascents if you what really and i love america so don't take this wrong way it's my favorite country i loved living there for so long it's the place i learned marketing america is so far off the pace on brand theory now because of the european movement and you know the the ehrenberg bass stuff the most important thing i tell everyone on this podcast now and i've been converted to this by very smart people and it's a new thing is that when we talk about branding if i had to put a number on it 60 70 80 of the job is just coming to mind just distinctiveness just being present in the mind of the consumer when the consumer thinks about the product or category yeah now when i taught uh brand management and marketing to aaron 20 odd more than 25 years ago what i was teaching back then was the standard keller theory which was you have brand awareness do i know the brand exists that's a gateway now what are the what's the brand image that the consumer has in their head that's where you focus your efforts right tick the box of brand awareness now what do you think when you think about the brand it's the wrong way around everything we've learned about system one and system two about distinctiveness now tells us very clearly that you can call it brand awareness you can call it salience but simply cognitively coming to mind b to b b to c high involvement low involvement every single category is the biggest challenge now it doesn't mean brand image is unnecessary but what it tells you is coming to mind and being present is more important significantly more which means that when you're positioning brands sure the brand positioning and what you want to stand for still has a role but the most important thing you should be doing is working on the codes the distinctive assets which really comes down to whatever are the motifs the images the shapes the colors the fluid assets and again only four or five be choiceful that bring the brand to mine and make the brand look like itself there's nothing i've learned more important than that i was on a call with duracell um last night night before last and they are absolutely on it and the most of the call was about what are the codes of the brand and a little bit was on the positioning but most of it was on codes and how we drive codes and that's the right way to do it based on everything i've seen that is an important acknowledgement shift so thank you for sharing that more because i had read that and i was curious erin actually how what you heard back then 20 years ago and what mark you're saying today in the courses that i'm taking and there's a shift there's an evolution and thank you for sharing it's very helpful yeah a nice getting condiment in there that was nice system on a system too is always good it's a big theory aaron it's a big theory if you read system on system two it's a metaphor but it tells you a lot about the way we decide you know for everyone that's listening system one is the reptile brain we make you know this morning on the if you're walking to your office someone said to you when you stopped off for your coffee do you want a uh a cappuccino or do you want a latte and you said cappuccino you have no idea why you wanted cappuccino but you said it and thought it with certainty that's system one now if i get you in a focus group or if i get you to fill out a survey why do you prefer cappuccino over cafe latte you'll give me a whole host of horseshit system two explanations that are not the reason yeah that's the problem in mind that's the problem right now you think they're the reasons they aren't the reasons it just came to mind yeah i mean just using the word reason messes with it right there's it isn't that reason right it's just it's there it hits right yeah it is it's a it's a whole field of understanding that is definitely in the last 20 to 25 years since you were my professor um we've advanced a lot of knowledge around that which is really fascinating to see the um the other one i want you to pick on a little bit even though we don't have a lot of time and i do have to announce our next show is coming up um but it's humane which uh came out of i think mandalay or somewhere else out there yeah there were so many yeah it's the cmo of mondelez it's possibly the biggest load of i've um i've encountered in the last few years i wrote an article about what a lot of it was mondelez want to change marketing to humaning right and um i wrote an article and i said it is a big load of but it's not the biggest load of in marketing there are many more things that are much bigger but it did make my all-time top ten at number nine which is pretty hard to do so yeah it's it's it's a it's a word it's worthy just to study something so stupid and can we can we talk about that for one second aaron the reason that one of the many reasons it's so stupid and a very important point for marketers again is it's because mondelez have made the ultimate mistake of thinking that their brand is important right it's important to them their little chocolate bars and their little finicky little things right they work on it eight hours a day so oh you know cadbury's very important brand when you swing things around and see it from the point of view of the consumer which is what marketers are meant to do what you discover the first thing you discover your brand is absolutely a tiny tiny tiny thing right and no one gives a about the brand now that's not a negative thing to say that's the realistic thing to say all this horseshit about bran per the pathetic brands bid 19. no one gives a what your brand thinks about covet 19. nobody in the real world cares yeah it's it's it's absolutely essential to realize brands are little things [Music] chocolate yeah they don't have it's about what your chocolate brand thinks about so size things but don't stay in your lane a brand is a little thing come to mind don't waste your time with all this horseshit because it will hurt you in the end yeah that is really good great uh some people have put some links to some of your past articles around that uh unmistakable signs of a brand consultant which i think is uh yes um and if anybody on here does not subscribe and watch and read your stuff they should be it's exceptional um marketing week let's put a plug in because it's yeah yeah it's free as well i gave up getting paid so they put it in front of the paywall so yeah we do marketing week every wednesday so yeah by all means it's free content who is the athlete behind your right shoulder or right your left mommy oh no you've asked i've got the world's messiest office oh that's a photograph from the first ever super bowl when the quarterback who forgive me i don't know his name uh at halftime had a couple of cigarettes and a beer it's one of my favorite pictures i'll show you and dawson when dawson are the kids the chiefs player i'm not very afraid with football but i really enjoyed him taking this moment during the super bowl to have a and down here there's a couple of beers you know that's half time not the end of the game it was at halftime which does not happen anymore right that's too fast maybe not i think american athletes would be better if they stopped for a cigarette every now and again do you know what i mean it would actually do them good just calm the down man you know what i mean anyway that's not my area of expertise would solve a lot of problems for a lot of athletes in my opinion imagine what would happen if a swimmer finished the like the olympic trials and then just casually whipped out a cigarette and a beer at the side of the pool before the next heat man that would i would i'd vote for him that's exceptional that is so good oh uh well this is unfortunate that we have to end the end of our hour and uh you're just getting rolling and this is absolutely amazing and horribly horribly funny thank you for doing this thank you for spending the time with us i want to make sure that everyone knows that we put this on at once every other week we have an amazing number coming up we have some really interesting people from lumber liquidators and from a trade school coming up and uh and and i've got a delivery package coming so i've got to go um as well mark i can put you on the spot really quickly um we have a lot of questions that came in the chat that we'd like follow up keep going yeah let's do a few what do you want to do a couple now or we we're out of time but if you'd be willing i'd love to and i'll follow up with you send these to you and if we could get a few answers that we can with this video recording of today's session um push that out so that everyone has a chance to have their questions answered we won't get maybe get to all of them but a few of them i think would be quite interesting yeah i love to do that yeah it's it's fun to do things like that for sure yeah happy to do that we appreciate your time mark this was a wonderful insightful and entertaining conversation to say the least so and are you kelly you are you doing brown mini mba and brand management in april is that what you're doing i am right hey you're gonna love it we um i'm looking for out it'll be great to see how you do because you know there's a simulation now so you just yeah i might skip that part no no no no no i'm gonna watch you i'm gonna give you a brand to manage and then you you share prices your grade at the end of the course um at the end of the 12 weeks so i'm i'm going to keep a special eye on you now kelly see how you do thank you we're looking forward to it for sure fantastic well thank you again thanks everyone for joining us today and we hope to see you on our next thinking link brand thank you everyone take care everybody this was great thanks [Music] bye you