“Branding is Dead” & More Marketing Bullsh*t with Mark Ritson

Buckle up—this is our most unfiltered episode yet. Mark Ritson joins us for a no-BS conversation on branding, marketing myths, and why so many marketers still miss the point.

We discuss:
︎ Marketing Myths & Industry Bullsh*t
︎ The Biggest Problem with Brand Education (and why it’s broken)
︎ Branding vs. Performance Marketing (Are marketers still missing the point?)
︎ Positioning & Brand Strategy (+ Mark’s deep love for Kit-Kat)
︎ The ROI of Branding (Can you actually measure it?)
︎ AI & Branding—Beyond the Hype (Including the rise of RitBot)
︎ Mark’s Take on Branding Thought Leaders
︎ Differentiation AND Distinctiveness (Why the debate still won’t die)
︎ Rapid-fire Q&A madness

No fluff. Just straight-up marketing truth from one of the sharpest minds in the game.
Warning: If you’re easily offended, maybe sit this one out.

Tune in now!

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10 Hard-Hitting Marketing Truths from Mark Ritson

Here are 10 pull quotes that pack a punch:

1. “If you have more than a page for your brand strategy, you’ve got it wrong.”

Ritson urges marketers to distill strategy to a single, impactful page. Complexity is a crutch—clarity wins.

2. “Branding is just two things: coming to mind and having the right associations.”

Forget the fluff—effective branding boils down to mental availability and meaningful connections.

3. “Most marketers aren’t trained in marketing. That’s a f***ing problem.”

A wake-up call for the industry. According to Ritson, the lack of foundational training is holding marketers back.

4. “Market orientation is the realization that your brand is fundamentally unimportant.”

Consumers don’t think about your brand nearly as much as you do. Get over yourself—and focus on real customer needs.

5. “You can’t mix brand and performance in the same ad. It almost always underperforms.”

Trying to blend long-term brand building with short-term sales in a single campaign? Bad idea.

6. “Brand archetypes are a dirty stain on an already pretty dirty profession.”

Ritson doesn’t mince words when it comes to branding trends he sees as misguided or outdated.

7. “You don’t need ROI projections for brand building. You need case studies and common sense.”

Chasing ROI metrics for brand activity? Ritson says it’s often nonsense. Lean on proven models and logic.

8. “The biggest revolution? Realizing brand salience is more important than brand image.”

Coming to mind in buying situations beats having a perfect personality. Salience drives sales.

9. “Training makes you better. It’s a technical pursuit.”

Why did he create the Mini MBA? Because marketers need structured, practical learning to thrive.

10. “Brand strategy isn’t complicated. It’s targeting, positioning, and objectives.”

Strip away the jargon. Great strategy = clarity on audience, message, and goals.

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The course gave me all the techniques and processes and more importantly… all the systems and tools I needed to build brand strategies for my clients.

This is the consolidated “fast-track” version to becoming a brand strategist.

I wholeheartedly endorse this course for any designer who wants to become a brand strategist and earn specialist fees.

Check out the 15-minute video about the course, which lays out exactly what you get in the Brand Master Secrets.

Transcript (Auto-Generated)

Hello, and welcome to JUST Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies.

Hello, fellow brand builder. We have some huge news to kick off today’s episode, and we couldn’t be more excited to share it with you. After years of connecting with creative entrepreneurs, designers, strategists and marketers like you, we realized the need for something bigger, a place where brand builders can truly thrive, grow and support each other. So today, we’re thrilled to share with you the launch of the Brand Builders Alliance, our brand new exclusive membership for brand builders just like you. So whether you’re looking to sharpen your branding skills, grow your business or connect with like-minded creatives, the Alliance is here to help you level up. As a member, you’ll get fortnightly master classes, expert coaching from Matt, myself and our team of resident coaches, exclusive resources and access to an incredible community of branding professionals who truly get it. The waitlist is now open. Head over to our website, joinbba.com to secure your spot and become a part of the movement. That’s joinbba.com. Now, let’s get in today’s episode. Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. Today we have the absolute pleasure of welcoming a true heavyweight in the world of marketing. Someone that needs no introduction but absolutely deserves one. Mark Ritson is one of the most respected and provocative voices in the industry, known for his sharp thinking, straight talk and deep understanding of what makes brands tick. He holds a PhD in marketing, has been a professor at some of the world’s top business schools and has worked on iconic brands like Louis Vuitton, Sephora and Dom Perignon. Beyond that, he’s built the Marketing Week Mini MBA series, which is a program that has transformed the way over 40,000 marketers, including myself, approach brand strategy. I personally take in both the Mini MBA in marketing and the Mini MBA in brand management, and to be honest, they were game changers. Mark, we’re truly honored to have you here. Your insights have shaped the thinking of so many marketers, including Matt and me, and today, we’re going to get into the real stuff. So from the messy state of brand positioning to the never-ending brand versus performance debate, and even the role of AI in strategy, we’re covering it all, or at least we’ll try. So listeners, expect some hot takes, some witty insights, and no doubt a few laughs, because let’s be honest, if we’re not having fun, we’re probably doing branding wrong. So welcome to the show, Mark.

Thanks, Jacob. It’s lovely to be here.

Welcome to the show, Mark. I’m mildly terrified having you on, because I know your wit is very famous. So we’re looking forward to getting into some of these topics with you.

We do have an icebreaker question, and I know you’re a big fan of Kit-Kat. So can you let our listeners know why you love Kit-Kat so much?

Yeah, for me, it’s the prototypical case study for brand positioning. There’s two or three things I love about the way Nestle have done it. They’ve got it all on a page, which I think is absolutely it. More than a page is pointless. They’ve got their brand codes, distinctive assets next to their brand positioning, which I think also is an essential. Their brand positioning is five words long. It’s really just one word breaks. And they haven’t changed it in nearly three decades. And you put all that together and that’s what everyone else isn’t doing right. So yeah, Kit-Kat is light years ahead of other brands, in my opinion. And yet, if you were a branding novice, you’d look at their positioning and go, it’s a bit basic, you know, I can add some Maslow, Haraiki stuff and Vagan Purpose and all that stuff, you know, and then put some rhomboids in there. But yeah, they’re an exceptional bunch. And YL, who currently runs the brand there, they work very hard not to overcomplicate it. And keeping things simple is a complicated game.

Can I ask a question? Do you buy Kit-Kat? Do you consume it?

Not really. I mean, occasionally. I’m not, you know, it’s a funny life, right, as branding people. We don’t need to be into the brands that we manage, right? In some ways, it’s very helpful not to be particularly into certain brands that you manage. I’m not a big fan of Dom Perignon.

Yeah, I was going to say you didn’t get into the Shampoos over there.

Oh, yeah, but not DP, like I’m a crew guy. I love my crew. Dom Perignon, I admire. It’s my favorite brand in terms of, you know, origin and story and all the drama with it. But it’s never turned me on from a sort of consumer point of view. But I don’t see any paradox in that. You know what I mean? It’s entirely possible for a man to work on an exclusively female product and vice versa.

Mark, I’ve got a quick question. You mentioned the simplicity, and I think that’s beautifully put. There was a book I read recently called, it’s a tiny little book. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. It’s called Obvious Adams, and it’s from some chap back in the 50s, I think, or 60s. And it’s this kind of narrative about an agency and there’s this guy in it called Obvious Adams. It’s a fictional story. And he just looks for the obvious and he boils everything down and keeps things so simple. And the story is how he’s successful in the ad industry. And I think it kind of, when you said about that simplicity thing, I just wondered what your thoughts are. Why do we, as businesses, as brands, why do we love to overcomplicate something like Kit-Kat, which is so simple?

I think it’s just a failure of market orientation, Matt. Most brand managers and strategists work on a brand for 3 or 4 months or longer and 5 or 6 hours a day. And they miss the point that consumers really don’t give a f**k about the brand, think about it for 2 seconds, have 900 other brands within their focal memory. And they just miss all of that, you know what I mean? I’m not exaggerating when I say if you have more than a page for your brand strategy, you’ve got it wrong, because you have. It takes many pages to get it down to one, but any fulcrum brand positioning that has 7 or 8 pages in it, getting it down to a single page is a much bigger challenge. I mean, I did it with LVMH, I mean, these are big brands. We’ve mentioned Don Perignon, Louis Vuitton and Sephora, and the list goes on and on. We had a great 10, 12 year run where all of our brands had the DNA on one side of the page and the brand codes on the other. And we operated these billion dollar magnetic things out of that very tight definition. And it was very difficult to get to that place. But once we got to that place, it was much easier to execute.

You always have hot texts and maybe that’s not the right word, but I’d love to know your insight on like, what’s a marketing trend that everyone’s hyped about right now, but you think is a bit bullsh**?

I mean, the personalization one has probably been the biggest pile of bullsh** in the last five years. It seems to be dying back a little bit, but not really, right? So, you know, personalization is great, except for the fact that we don’t need to do it, and it’s not possible. And other than that, it’s brilliant. The one I’m particularly opposed to at the moment, which is everywhere, is allowing the social media platforms to convince naive marketers that their algorithms will do the targeting for them, and all that they’ve got to do is give us your ride and we’ll do the rest. You know what I mean? Which is wrong on so many levels. And by now, you’d have expected marketers to go, hang on, why are you the guys talking to me about hyper-targeting five years ago? And now you’re telling me you don’t need to do any targeting at all. Wait a minute now, what’s changed here? So probably that’s the new one. You know, AI automatic targeting is just a nonsense for me.

Okay, what about this? What’s one belief you used to hold in marketing that you’ve completely changed your mind on?

I guess at the start of the Ehrenberg-Bass revolution, this idea of mass marketing ran so far against everything we’ve been trained on in the 80s and 90s, that I was convinced it was wrong. And it was only over a lot of data points and client stuff that you started to realize. It’s not completely right, but that it’s mostly right. And it’s not wrong to do mass marketing. It’s probably about 60 to 70% right. I think that took me a long time to get to, but I’m firmly there now.

So, Mark, you’re famous for your brand education, your MBA courses that you’ve put on that Jacob’s already referenced. I just want to ask a quick question around the education of brand and marketing today, the theory versus the kind of the practice side of things. What do you believe the biggest problem is that you see, and why did you kind of start the MBA courses that you did? What gap were you filling?

Yeah, I mean, the gap’s pretty straightforward, Matt. I mean, you know, we know that about 25, maybe 24% of marketers have any formal training in marketing. We don’t have the number for brand managers or brand consultants, but it’s probably single digit. And that’s fucking horse shit. That’s the problem. And I have a very simple philosophy on this, which is that training makes you better. It’s a technical pursuit brand management. I’m not saying we can do everything, but a training in brand management makes 99.9% of brand managers, not just better, but phenomenally better at what is quite a specialized trait. So the launch of Mini MBA was really to rectify that gap. I mean, we started these days with two stats, which is the first stat is 24% of British marketers have a training in marketing. And the second stat is no one’s going into a classroom ever again, right? No one’s sitting in a windowless room with a guy in a suit for, you know, eight hours a day. It’s just not going to happen with the YouTube generation. So how do we solve the problem? And the answer is Mini MBA. And what’s interesting is I really thought when we launched it nine years ago, I knew it would be pretty lucrative and I knew it would be, I thought, relatively popular. I didn’t think it would be this successful. I thought it was going to do quite well. The thing that surprised me is it’s proven to be inherently superior to the classroom where I spent the first 25 years of my life. And that, if you’d have told me that 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have believed. There’s a little crossover. I was still teaching MBA students for the first couple of years as a Mini MBA. It’s the same syllabus. I mean, it’s the same lecturer, right? It’s me. But the difference in impact and just generally the effect it had on the class was so much stronger with Mini MBA versus a classroom that it really, that was a stunner for me. So it’s not just that we are kind of giving you the classroom experience, it’s far more successful than anything that would be taught at Harvard or Wharton or LBS or any of the schools where I still have great respect for, but we can do it better on Mini MBA. And those that have done both will tell you the same thing.

What do you think the background of that success is? Is it that experience side? Is it the knowledge that both is it everything combined?

I mean, you know, I’m one of the best marketing teachers in the world. I’ve won teaching prizes at MIT and everywhere. That helps. But I don’t think it is that. I think it’s to do with the students. The whole philosophy of classroom teaching is based on a 16th century approach, right? Put everyone in a room and someone will stand at the front of the room and basically shout at them for three to six hours, right? That’s a shitty way for anyone to learn anything. And executive training, we normally do that for three or four days. So we fly them to a fancy location. We talk to them from nine to five. Then we get them shit faced and give them lots of calories. And then we do it again for another two or three days. It’s pretty much the worst way you could learn anything, right? And so with Mini MBA, we’ve developed a pedagogy, which is it rolls week after week, as Jacob will tell you, but there’s no time. You don’t have to tune in at two o’clock in the afternoon. So it enables our marketers to put the course into their life rather than having to organize their life around a classroom. So we’ll have a class of 400 brand managers in a couple of weeks doing brand management. They’ll all do it differently. Some of them will do it in the gym. Some of them will do it walking the dog. Some of them will sit in a room with their colleagues and do it, but they’re all finding the right way for them to learn. And I think that more than anything has driven its success. And the other part is, you know, it’s the, hate to say it on JUST Branding, but the category is more important than the brand. So the category is coming our way, right? People aren’t sitting in classrooms anymore, irrespective of how strong Mini MBA is as a brand, the era of live teaching in a classroom, in a 16th century model, you know, driving to class and driving home from class, it ain’t gonna last, clearly. You know, when I used to teach a business school, I used to teach weekends, you know, for people who were working full time. And you know, they’d come in at 8.30, usually they left their kids at home with the other partner. We did three and a half hours of teaching, then they went and moved their car somewhere else so they didn’t get a ticket. Then we did another three or four hours of teaching. It’s hard, I mean, like, that’s no way to do it. You know what I mean? It’s ridiculous. So yeah, I think, you know, that lesson, I worked a lot with private equity. I worked on evaluation of a large retailer, Watches of Switzerland, I think it was, and for a private equity firm. And at some point, I remember asking them, why do you want to buy watches of Switzerland? And they said, we don’t. We want to buy a hard luxury retailer because that sector is growing 22% CAGR, right? And so what you learn from the private equity, boys and girls, is you don’t start with a brand like we would do and go, right, let’s look at this brand. You start with the category and go, right, if this category is in good shape, most brands are going to be okay. And that’s the story of online education. We are a strong brand, but we’re in a category that’s growing so fast with relatively little competition that we can’t really go wrong.

Just to follow on that, the gap between theory and practice, right, is also how do you take that knowledge in and apply it? What’s your thoughts on that and how have you kind of made that happen?

Well, there’s problems on both sides there, Jacob. So on the academic side, it’s full of people that don’t work in the business and that’s just not good enough. So I spent my life at really good business schools with really good professors, none of whom have done a day’s work in marketing, not good enough. So on the left-hand side, you’ve got to say that it’s pathetic and they all know it, they just hide it from the students. On the other side though, you’ve got a bunch of Neanderthals led by Gary V, who are steadfastly opposed to the idea that you can learn. The only way to get it is by doing it on the job. You get all these posts that are like, this is what they don’t teach you in business school and all that, and that’s also, it’s just horse s**t. And in the middle, there’s what a great business school has always been, from the NBA days of Harvard a hundred years ago, which is practitioners with PhDs and lots of experience, teaching junior people what to do. And that model, which is very thin in the middle, but does exist, is still a phenomenal model, do you know what I mean? But you have to have a training, and ideally a PhD, but you also have to have extensive experience as well. And when you put those two things together, it’s marvelous. I mean, it’s the Indiana Jones model. If you remember at the start of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he spends the first 10 minutes with Alfred Molina still in that gold statue. And then on Monday morning, he’s with Denim Elliott teaching students about archaeology. And that’s kind of how I try to build my career. I mean, in a non-hot Harrison Ford way, right? But I would go and work for LVMH in Paris for a week. And then I would come back and I would teach my MBA students partly based on what had been going on the week before. I remember doing a whole class at MIT just on this story of doing a negotiation for a very large wine brand with a very large American retailer. And without divulging too much information to the class, the whole 90-minute class was, what would you have done in this situation? And the students, that’s what they came to business school for. They came to learn business. So yeah, when it works well, when someone, I mean, let’s be clear, there’s a lot of people teaching online courses that have never taught before and I don’t have a PhD. And I think that’s s**t. I mean, what’s our biggest problem in marketing? In the top 10, it’s people that aren’t trained in marketing trying to teach others marketing. That’s f**king madness, right? The reason we’ve got ourselves into such a problem with the P’s is all these idiots that don’t understand the P’s inventing new P’s because they’re idiots, right? You know, you understand the work and understand the history of this hundred year old discipline before you start trying to teach other people about it. You know what I mean? It sounds obvious, but f**k, you know, it’s a real problem. It’s a real problem. So yeah, there’s a middle path there where theory and practice and training are all the same thing. You know what I mean? And that’s where I think we’ve been going wrong. But I don’t want to blame JUST Marketers for that. I think business schools have a lot to say as well, because they let down managers by giving them professors that had never done the job.

So we’ve got a listener question I want to throw into the mix. And it’s slightly change gear, if that’s all right. And it’s from Denny Kurian. And he says, how do you define branding? And how do you go about? Well, that’s a bit of a second question, Kenny. He said, how do you go about it? How do you go about positioning? So I guess the first question is probably, how do you define branding?

Well, so branding is anything to do with managing a brand, obviously, right? So and so start with brand. Brand isn’t a complicated topic. It’s certainly been over complicated by strategists who don’t really understand the concept. It’s just two things. It’s the ability to come to mind in the target consumer’s head and then when it comes to mind to be associated with the things that will get that consumer to buy the product. That’s it. And so anything that drives those two things, the cognitive presence of the brand and the correct attractive associations is by definition branding. And therein lies the start of our discipline, right? It’s there the two jobs. I think the big revolution of the last decade is Ehrenberg-Bass demonstrating very clearly that the first part of that concept is more important than the second. When I was trained in the late 80s and 90s, the first part, the awareness, the cognitive salience part was deemed to be a gateway variable. And it was all about the brand image and the brand personality. And one of the great revolutions, I think, that we should thank Ehrenberg-Bass for is reversing that imbalance and, you know, pointing out that, yeah, I mean, I still believe there’s a role there for the associations and the brand image. But ultimately, coming to mind has to be the 60, 70% of the job. Partly because if you don’t come to mind, it’s over. And partly because the research is clear now. If you do come to mind, your brain, which is very lazy, is already starting to tip the favoritism and perceptions towards that brand that came to mind first, so it doesn’t have to think of another. So I think that’s been the big revolution. But what is branding? It’s driving the cognitive presence and perceptions of the brand to your favor.

So that said, positioning is a big part of that, but it’s such a mess in this industry as well. So what do you think? What’s your take on that?

It’s the worst thing we do in branding. I mean, we talked about Kit-Kat at the start. That really is almost it. Most brands just go completely f**king mental with it, and it’s a total s**t show, right? So what they do is, the core to this, most brand managers think that positioning is an end in itself. You know, I’ve got to do a positioning, so that instantly conjures up brand books and presentations and onions and keyholes and all that s**t, right? And they’ve missed the point from 1979, which is positioning is not an end in itself, it’s a means to an end. And the end, back to my earlier point, is that the brand comes to mind and we, the consumer thinks the couple of things we want them to think. The end, right? Now, add on to that, the idea that most positioning is so full of s**t, consumers would never ever deign to think it, right? I mean, I’m still stunned by Starbucks, right? Which, fine company, good operating model, obviously huge, and despite what people say, not bad coffee, right? Their positioning is the biggest f***** hilarious carnival of horse s**t I’ve ever seen. And it keeps getting worse, right? It keeps asking employees to come up with what it is. And it keeps becoming more and more Walt Disney on cocaine nonsense, right? About all the things that, you know, that Starbucks isn’t, right? They overstate it completely. So for me, the other sin of positioning, other than having too much, is overthinking it, right? Again, 60, 70% of it is having the distinctive brand codes that will bring the brand to mind. And the other bit is having the two or three things that, relatively speaking, the consumer wants, and you can promise it more than the competitor. And, you know, Kit-Kat talks about breaks. It doesn’t talk about being the f***ing consumer champion, or changing the dimensions of chocolate consumption, or any of that other whole s***, right? Or being the colorful fighter for diversity, and all that s***, right? Have a break and have a Kit-Kat. And when you own that for 30 years, like they’ve done, you’re in a very good place.

When you see brands… Take Starbucks to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cup and one neighbor at a time. Sounds like a Donald Trump manifesto, doesn’t it? But let’s just take that. Do you think that what these brands sometimes are trying to do is they’re conflating internal alignment, where they’re trying to rally the troops, get everybody excited about something, with consumer outward facing actual marketing, where you’re thinking like you’ve sort of walked through about the consumer and what’s in the consumer’s mind. I see a lot of conflation and depending on what, for example, when I’m consulting, depending on what my client needs, if they need internal alignment, some of that fluffy stuff can be very helpful, but is it ever going to be a consumer facing message? Absolutely not. So what are your thoughts about that kind of internal, external kind of tension in branding?

I think it’s a fair comment. I mean, it’s true, Starbucks has done all of its brand research to go into its positioning with its own staff, which is an elementary error, right? None of them buy Starbucks for stars, right? And salience is pretty much baked in because they stare at an eight foot tall mermaid every f***ing day, right? For nine hours, right? So it’s kind of f***ing pointless, right? So yeah, I get it. I mean, yeah, doing some, you know, I mean, I’m a huge hater of swats, right? And I have done my fair share of swats with, you know, a team with a clipboard because the bosses wanted me to do it. If it gets the team to feel good about themselves and that’s the objective, then fine. I think that’s cool, right? The point is, do we have a position, though, that is actually going to drive the brand? Because if we don’t, we’re in pretty bad shape. You know what I mean? So I agree. I mean, whatever it takes for the team. Jesus, I’ve done paintballing events to make the team feel better about themselves. Right? You know, great. Famously, we used to run karaoke at one client just for a team modeling session. Great. Awesome. Right? But that’s not the purpose of positioning. The purpose of positioning is what the f**k do we stand for to the consumers? And ironically, the staff are the least qualified people in the world to know the answer to that.

Right?

All right. And on the topic of contrarian takes brand personalities and brand archetypes, I know you don’t buy into them. So I’m curious to your thoughts on that.

Yeah, it’s just total horse s**t. So the brand archetype wheel or whatever the f**k is called is probably the most stupid thing we’ve ever created, right? And why is it stupid? On a theoretical level, creating a generic model for brand positioning demonstrates you know nothing about brands, right? The definition of a brand is it’s not like anything else, right? So why are we using a paint by numbers approach built on dodgy, youngy and f**king philosophy to create something? On the practical level, you need to look at the company after they’ve done this horse s**t work, right? So the deluded marketing team decided they’re the magician slash cowboy, right? And then bring the CFO in or bring the head of ops in or bring the sales team in and tell them you’re half f**king magician, half cowboy and see how far you get that afternoon with engagement and work. Do you know what I mean? And rightfully so, because it’s nonsensical childish rubbish, right? And incredibly defended by people who should know better. You cannot get away with that f**k in the 21st century. Do the work, find the real brand position from the real unique essence and relationships you have with the consumer. Worry more about salience and distinctiveness than just image. Something again that doesn’t happen. And find something that will work within the culture of the company and won’t turn everyone against you, do you know what I mean? It’s so poor to see that still floating around. And I’ve worked, I’ve walked into clients where they’ve done that work, you know, there was a beauty client that I obviously want named, but they’ve done that work with a very expensive brand strategist who’d left them with the idea that they were the joker slash cowboy, right? And their question for me was, what do we do with that and how do we execute that? And I’m like, what are you talking about? This is nonsense, right? And then the CMO talked to me about the, you know, that there’d been some spiked comments about the fact that she’d aired this among the leadership team. And I’m like, well, of course, because you look like a fool. Yeah. You look like an absolute fool. How are you going to brand track any of this? Right? I mean, it was a brand aimed at women with beauty products and it was partly a cowboy, right? What the f***, you know? So yeah, it’s a dirty stain on an already pretty dirty profession.

Matt, do you have any words on that? You can be brave enough.

You know, I’m talking to Mark Ritson and I think, Mark, you make your points really, really well. I think where I found it useful, and you can come back at me and I’m absolutely happy for you to do so. But what I found it useful is when you’re trying to align a team and engage the team. Now, do you, in terms of helping, when you’re uniting all parts of a business around something, and whilst I 100% agree with you in relation to audience, you know, segmentation, the actual, what the customers actually think, when you kind of are trying to translate that into something simple and that they can grasp, put their hands around and understand and then take whatever it is we align around and say, brief a creative team or a marketing team to actually begin to create assets and campaigns. I found it kind of helpful conceptually. Do I ever want to die on that mountain? No, like, no, I don’t want to die on that hill. Like, if my client are like, you know, this is not helpful, then I wouldn’t use it. But for alignment, I have found it quite helpful first kind of step to simplify things. So what would you say from an alignment perspective? Do you find it useful at all? Or do you just think it’s such a bad stain because of the bad press that it’s got, you know, that we should discount it completely?

It’s a fair point, but I just disagree. It’s just, it fills the room with nonsense and we don’t have that much room. Do you know what I mean? Like we have to align the team around what the brand position really is. And therefore giving them, you know, cowboys and mystics and all of that, it might make the team feel momentarily clearer. But what it does is obscure them from the fact that we’re a, you know, we’re a mobile toilet business and we’re positioned, you know, our distinctiveness is the issue when we’re positioned on value for money and, you know, quick transportation of s*** after the event, right? And you’ve just lost, you’ve gained two points of clarity and 500 points of organizational respect, you know, because you’re the cowboy now, you know what I mean? It’s, for me, it’s something that we should eradicate quickly from our literature. We got to help our teams understand brand. I get that point, but not with hoo-ha from the early 19th century.

All right, thank you on that. I think we’ll change it up now into market orientation, which is another very big point, and I think it leads into this whole discussion. So many marketers still forget they’re not the customer. So do you just want to share a little bit about market orientation with our listeners and just describe what that definition is, because some may not have heard that before.

So it’s a concept that really sprung up in the marketing literature in the late eight years, early nineties with a host of papers that identified it as the origin for good marketing. And the reason why it’s origin for good marketing is the realization that you’re not the consumer. In fact, because you work for the company, either as an employee or as a consultant or as an agency, you literally don’t look at the brand or product the way that the consumer does. And so you look at it eight hours a day, you only think about one brand, you stare at the pigmentation of the model in your ad for nine months and everything that you’re doing is not what the consumer does. And so market orientation at the marketer level is the realization you are not the consumer, put it the f**k down, remove your perceptions because they’re not just incorrect, but they’re totally alien to what’s really going on. There’s also an organizational equivalent, the market orientation, which is at the company level, how much is the company built around the consumer? And there are scales that measure this quite adequately. And why is it such a fundamental concept? I would say it’s the most important concept in branding and marketing. It’s important because if you understand market orientation, and that’s why we start the Mini MBA Marketing with the module on market orientation, it sends you in the right direction. It sends you to research, it sends you to segmentation, to target, to position, to execution, etc. And also it’s important because everything changes the minute you get market orientation. Brand salience coming to mind isn’t a problem if you’re not market oriented, because you’re like, everyone knows about our brand, right? Because you look at your logo every day. You know, you think your brand is important, that people really give a **** about your toothpaste brand’s brand purpose and its position on diversity, right? You really get to the point where you really believe that ****, right? It’s important though, you know, consumers want buyers because of this, right? No one gives a **** about a toothpaste brand’s position on anything other than on the shelf in your bathroom, right? So market orientation kills all that **** and it makes you realize every brand is fundamentally and totally unimportant. Even to the people who buy it regularly, nobody gives a ****, yeah? I’ve worked with brand managers where their brand has been deleted from Tesco and I’ve watched them tell me, a very smart man tell me that there will be protests when the consumer realizes next week that the brand is no longer there. And of course, the consumer didn’t even **** notice, right? Didn’t even notice it was gone, right? So market orientation really, you know, I call it the 180. When you do it with clients, they go, oh, hang on, our brand isn’t important. Oh, hang on, the competitors that we’ve listed aren’t really the competitors when you look at it from the consumer’s point of view. And the word competitors makes no sense because consumers don’t have competitors. They just have different alternatives. Oh, and categories? Categories don’t exist to the consumer. They’re picking from across all kinds of different places. And the touch points we thought were important, like advertising, don’t matter a **** compared to things like service and windows and product performance and packaging. So, it changes absolutely everything. And again, because most marketers aren’t trained in marketing, they don’t know about it, even though we’ve had it for 40-odd years.

So, Mark, I’ve got a question. Imagine you’re managing a small B2B brand, for example. What would some of the tips be you give to, say, the leaders of such a brand who want to get their arms around market orientation? Like, what would you suggest that they start to do if they’re a smaller brand?

Yeah. I mean, the first trick with a smaller brand, especially in B2B, is ethnography is the great research methodology for this. So I would challenge all the senior team to go out and spend an afternoon with either a target customer or an existing client, sit back and just watch the contextual way in which their product or brand fits into the much bigger picture. Yeah. And I think what immediately happens is small things become big, big things become small and this experience, which sounds very sort of anecdotal and non-scientific, can often break through into a manager’s mindset. Oh, hang on a minute, they don’t even know this, any of this. They don’t care about any of this. So yeah, I would say ethnography is a starting point, especially for B2B.

Yeah, great. I’ve seen that happen loads, actually, when you actually get people to get out from the desk or get out from the boardroom and actually go and sit or go and experience things from a customer’s perspective. It’s so strange, isn’t it, that that happens, the scales fall and then they’re like, oh my goodness, we’ve got a lot of work to do. So yeah, 100% agree.

When I worked for Bernard Arnaud, on some days of the week, the world’s richest man. When you listen to Mr. Arnaud in interviews, it sounds like he spends his weekends at the Kabuki and at the opera and everything else. He does no such thing. He spends every single hour of his weekend in his different boutiques talking to his sales team and watching consumers. He knows the name. I’m sure he doesn’t know the name of the GM of one of his brands in Japan, but he certainly knows the name of all the main sales associates for all the major boutiques that he owns right across Tokyo because he goes in there all the time when he’s there. Right. So yeah, it’s absolutely, you know, in retail we used to call it walking the floor, but it’s absolutely 100% critical. One of my favorite stories is Jeff Bezos bringing in the chair into the meeting when everyone was talking about Amazon and just bringing in an empty chair and going, let’s just remember guys that the consumer’s not here and none of us have a clue what we’re talking about. Now carry on. You know what I mean? And the chair just sat there, man. It’s like, if you know it, you know it. You know what I mean?

I won’t forget that. That’s brilliant. All right. The brand first performance today, I mentioned that in the intro. It’s been talked about a lot. Why are marketers still missing the point?

Well, there’s a couple of reasons, right? Most of them have no training in marketing to return to the main theme, right? So most of them are dumb enough to think that ROI is the main driver of performance. And therefore they follow their noses into the wrong short-term direction. For me, there’s a number of levels to this, right? So the first level is just knowing about field and bonnets long and the short of it. Then the second level is realizing it’s not 60-40. It depends on the dynamics of the industry. In financial services, it runs about 80-20, right? For various dynamic reasons in the industry and B2B goes 50-50. So there’s a flexibility there. The next level is realizing you can’t do brand and performance in the same ad. You can, but it almost always underperforms splitting it up into different campaigns and there’s good data on that. And the next level up from that is realizing the word long, when we talked about the long and the short of it, is an unfortunate word, right? Because it’s led everyone to think for the last 10 years, long-term brand building takes longer to work. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. The data is clear. You run a great brand building ad, you will drive immense short-term sales. It then will last longer in driving sales than short-term performance. Orlando talks a lot at System 1 about it should have been called lasting rather than long. I think that’s a sh** word too, but it’s better than long. Do you know what I mean? For me, those levels of knowledge about brand and performance and how they work together. For me, when I train the marketers now, as you’ll remember, we talk about two-speed targeting. You have to target the mass with the long. You have to go after all of them and predispose them so that when they come into the market, they’ll buy, and then you have to target the 5% who are in market right now with the short and with performance. But you can’t mix those two things up, man. And the balance has to be right. And unfortunately, I think most marketers don’t understand marketing or advertising or the dynamics of communication. They don’t understand the 95-5 rule. They don’t understand the nature of two-speed targeting. So because they haven’t done fundamental study, they are operating under the illusion that ROI and performance marketing are going to be the saviors. And we’re not exaggerating this, right? The Nike saga isn’t that complex to understand, right? The CEO was a doofus. He came out of a digital business with a direct performance mindset, and he f***ed up Nike for a good four or five years. Because whatever the new CEO righteously now does, it’s a five-year recovery from that. So we want to talk about the long-term lack of sales. It comes from overspending on performance. You know what I mean? Not from brand building campaigns.

Yeah, there’s like a pressure, isn’t there? I think maybe, is it like, does it come from the board, the private equity, the shareholders, where they want to see a correspondence between the ad and the lead gen, right? And if that is missing, it’s almost like we’ve failed. And what I see with some of the work that you do is you’re giving the confidence to the marketeers to push back, to say, hold on, you know, here’s some facts, here’s some data, here’s the strategy that we’re actually going on. Because frankly, you know, CFO, you know, investors, you know, you’re going to damage your own brand, your own cash cow if you go down this very short term.

The only thing is we do conjure up these bogeymen, right? We conjure up the CFO and the board. The reality is its market is not making a case, right? So if it was a CFO, it would be unusual. CFOs know that most of the value of the company is in their future revenues, right? That’s the second day of CFO school. It’s mostly about future value. Net present value is mostly about future value, right? It’s marketers who are unable to articulate and explain that I think are at fault here, right? I think we have to own it that we’ve just not made the case in the past with a few notable exceptions for the need to build brands as a fundamental prerequisite for success, right? I mean, then I think that’s where we have to own the failure, I think. You know, not the corporate bogeyman. We have this image of like private equity in CFO school. We want short term. We want short term. The reality is the marketers are mostly not even aware of what they should be doing.

Yeah, you say that, but I think the investment round sort of situation does… Say you’re going up for investment, right? You know, you’re going to have to present in front of potential investors. They do sort of drive, you know, well, what is the lead? You know, we’re generating what’s the close rate, all of that kind of short term thinking. No one says, oh, where will you be in 10 years time? Because they’re, you know, they’re looking for an exit in three years. Do you see what I mean? So I think that does sort of drive some of that short term thinking.

I’m with you, but then the points you made earlier are relevant here. Brand building is going to make you short term money, right? The way to get around any investor that comes with that point, just use the 95-5 rule, right? In any market, 95% of the market of the consumers are not in market right now. We need to hit them because when they do come into market, when they do want a haircut, we’ll be ready to scoop them up because they’re not, you know, the time to get them to know your brand and think good things about your brand is not when they’re looking for a barber. Do you know what I mean? So it’s just making the point using good proven data. For me, you know, the tragedy of Field and Burnett’s work is it’s completely empirical. It’s pulled from literally thousands of case studies. You know, econometrics, whatever, right? Sure, do econometrics if you want, whatever. It’ll, you know, employ three different econometricians. They’ll give you three completely different exact answers, right? That’s all you need to know about econometrics. You don’t need to do it. We’ve already got a data bank of thousands of case studies that say if you’re a bank, you want to put between 78% of your marketing budget into long-term brand building because that’s the sweet spot. Here’s all the case studies. Do you know what I mean? And for me, I mean, the tragedy of budgeting and marketing budgets is, Grace Keit’s done some great work that shows that, you know, very broadly speaking, you want to spend somewhere between five and 10% of your total revenues back on advertising, right? And that’s the sweet spot for most companies, the vast majority, right? Let’s call it seven and a half percent. Then you’ve just got to go to Field & Burnett and pull out the appropriate balance of long and short for your particular industry, which can be done very quickly with various calculators and estimates. And then you’ve got yourself two points of money that you can spend on performance and you can spend on long-term brand building. You’re going to be in an immensely strong position if you do that, right? But most marketers don’t know how to do that.

Yeah, I found that part in the MBAs quite… That was a new thing, right? To see all those calculations and see the mechanics of how it actually plans out and what brand planners do or managers do. It was quite eye-opening. You mentioned ROI on branding. One of our listeners had a question around, like, how you actually measure the ROI on branding. What would you say to that?

You can’t and you don’t. I mean, you can get lots of bullsh** about it and you can have all these econometricians tell you that for every dollar you spend, you’ll get seven or perhaps six or perhaps $19 back. The reality is you have to accept that you will never be able to directly demonstrate the actual ROI from a brand building investment. That doesn’t mean it’s not generating a massive return. It means you can’t f**king show it. What happens with most marketers is they make up some total horse s**t analysis. They bring in econometrics that they don’t understand. They present it to people who do understand more advanced statistical modeling and everyone smells blood in the water almost straight away. You don’t need to do it. You don’t need to project forward an ROI for brand building. What you’ve got to do is again, go back to thousands of case studies of time machines that have looked at other brands in your industry and what they’ve all respectively spent on brand building versus performance and show that the sweet spot for your industry with your kind of online distribution, with your kind of maturity sits around, let’s say 50 to 55 percent. You’d want your head examined not to put that money in. Now, can you demonstrate from that standing start that 55 percent will give you the best ROI and how much ROI I’ll give you and everything else? No, you can’t do that. Well, you can, but it’s all horse sh**, in my opinion. But what you have to do is explain to decent, quantitatively minded business people, hey, there’s a data set of thousands of case studies where they’ve already looked at this, and this is the answer, and it sits about here, and if we do that, this is the position we’ll be in, and here’s why. I think that’s a much more reasonable case than trying to demonstrate this projected ROI, which is f**king impossible to demonstrate.

We’re going to ask you out, Mr. RitBot, your AI alter ego.

Yeah, yeah.

I had a check that out, and there was some quite hilarious responses, and there was different…

What did you think, Jacob? I mean, I’m too close to it, obviously, to assess it. What did you… We should fill everyone in, right? So the WFA, they did ask my permission, created a RitBot, which was an AI version of me, that they then took out on tour and went around… I mean, I got complaints from people. Like, I did a particularly salacious session somewhere in Southeast India and I got several people email me and were quite upset. And I was like, look, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t f***ing me. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t f***ing know what I said, you know?

Yeah, I saw the videos. It’s very obvious it’s AI, but the responses are hilarious and you can see your personality and wittiness and jokes come through. And I found that quite hilarious. But that aside, I’d love to hear your take on AI and beyond, like, you know, AI is just a tool. Like, what do you see as some things being like practical uses of AI? How could it benefit branded brand strategy?

It’s not going to be making big brand advertising as it is at the moment, right? We don’t need AI to do that. We can employ humans to do it relatively cheaply. I do think AI will play a role, ironically, in the other side of it on performance marketing, where we do lots of small targeted test and learn messages. There’s a role for it there. In terms of strategy, yeah, it’s coming close now. Synthetic data is astonishing. It’s got past that 95 percentile level now, where we don’t need consumers to do amazing consumer research. That’s a big surprise that it’s moved so quickly.

Mark, what’s synthetic data? Can you just explain that?

Synthetic data is market research, qual and quant, done without humans. What happens is you create, literally, you create, if you want to do a search, so I’m working with a client that works in the rare disease area in a medical company. It’s very hard to find people or people who treat people with these rare diseases. We could be talking less than a thousand people on the planet, and the hoops you have to go through in order to get approval to do any form of research will literally take years. The advent of synthetic research means we can run that research in a day to the 95th or higher percentile of accuracy versus doing it with real consumers and move on to the next thing. There’s a very fine CMO at Ernst & Young who questioned this data last year, and the company that was being questioned said, send us your CEO survey and we’ll replicate it in 48 hours. And they promptly did. They promptly sent back the results. And it was within 95 percentage points of what they spent $3.5 million and four months collecting. So for me, that’s already happened. And it doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of market research, but that’s certainly a new modality. The real interest from a strategy point of view is we’re now, we’re therefore with synthetic data in a position where we should be able to automate brand planning within the next five years and remove the weak link in brand planning, which is human strategists. So we should be able to build segmentation, targeting, positioning, category entry points, distinctive brand analysis for assets, pricing, product innovation, media buying, brand tracking. And we can literally just keep running research forever and tightening and tweaking it as we go. Now, is that going to be perfect? No. Is it going to be better than 99.9% of the human generated brand strategies out there? Definitely. So, on Mini MBA, we’re a year away now from having my A-Vatar. We’ll be able to, at the end of the course, offer the marketer that’s done the course and learned all the models the chance just to see that their brand plan built for their brand before their eyes using synthetic data and I walk them through it. I mean, it’s not me. How cool is that? But the A-Vatar will do it. So, we’re in a place now where it’s, you know, are we there for 2026? It looks questionable. I mean, I filmed an A-Vatar against a green screen yesterday. It was a very strange Blade Runner experience, you know. I had to say all these weird things. And in a week’s time, there’ll be a, you know, we’ve already got them, but this is the new model. There’ll be a walking, talking version of me that speaks Japanese and German and delivers the class. So, it’s moving very, very fast. And the opportunity to do stuff with marketing and brand is like everything else is going to be interesting, right? But again, look, it’s the 30s where it’ll kick in. It won’t be the 20s. It’ll be the 30s for me.

That’s fascinating stuff. It’s moving so quick. It really is. We’re going to move on to the next section, which is talking about controversial takes and… Oh, yeah.

So, let’s go. Let’s go. This is going to be, this is going to be an interesting… This is going to be my favorite section of the whole thing. So, get ready, folks.

I’ll leave it to you, Matt, then.

Do you want me to start?

Yeah, let’s do it.

What we thought we’d do, Mark, since we got you on and without being personal, rather, let’s attack the ball rather than the player, perhaps might be a good way to frame this. We’ve got a few kind of folks, so that few ideas that we want to throw on the table, we’ll just get your hot takes or your honest perspective on perhaps the teachings. So, the first one we want to put on the table is my good friend, Marty Neumeyer, so we’ll plunk him on the table. In terms of the strengths and weaknesses you see in his approach, will probably be a great way to start.

Look, it’s a bit too design-y for me. I mean, coming in, it’s like Landoor, coming into brand strategy out of design is always a weakness for me. And I think Marty’s work is good, but it is guilty of those things. Yeah, okay. I mean, for example, it’s not work that is informed by the latest marketing science work from various directions, I would suggest. So good, I know a good three out of ten from me. Yeah. All right, Jacob.

And if Marty was here, what do you think he would say about your approach?

I really don’t know. I mean, I’d like him to stop telling his students to write stupid posts about what’s the difference in brand and marketing. He’s been doing that for years, and it just makes the students look stupid because it’s a dumb question. It’s like, what’s more important, your lungs or your f***ing vena cava? What’s the point? You know what I mean? Is it a trick question? I hope it’s a trick question.

Okay. Well, are there other figures in branding or marketing that you respect or passionately disagree with? Yeah.

Look, they all have a point of view. Everyone’s trying to do their thing and everyone likes their s***. You know, who do I really like? I think Les Burnett is a genius. I think Peter Field is a genius. I think if people actually read the long and the short of it, they would realize it’s not just about the long and the short. It’s a phenomenal work that over the last 12 years has predicted so much and it’s still got so much. It’s about everything, man. It’s so on the ball. I think Byron Sharp and Jenny Romanyuk are incredible scholars and have put up with a lot of s**t and have come through it brilliantly and are now the dominant paradigm for modern brand management. I think they’ve replaced the Arca-Keller paradigm and it’s happening now. So, you know, I think those two deserve a s**t ton of credit as well. Who else is out there? Who else do you want to suggest?

Well, I’ve noticed you had a thing for Andrew Tindall or Yunglick.

Oh, yeah, Tindall’s only 14, you’ve got to remember, right? So, he’s got a long way to go, right? I mean, by the time he gets to legal drinking age, I think there will be real potential there. I mean, at first, I thought Tindall was going to just burn out because he was so productive and he’d come on so strong. But now I think he’s the real deal. The quality of that work on compound creativity and the power of consistency, it’s phenomenal stuff. I mean, I don’t want to do down what WALK did with that new report on, you know, that new report they did last week on the multiplier effect, right? It’s a really nice bit of work, 60 pages long, absolutely nothing new in it anywhere. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. You look at Tindall’s work, pretty much done on his own. No one’s ever had those thoughts before. And I think that’s a spectacular achievement for a guy who’s, you know, all right, he’s in his, I’m making a bad joke, he’s in his mid-twenties, but I think he has such potential for the industry. It’s really exciting. So yeah, I put Tindall up there for now. Grace Kite’s got some nice s*** in there. I like what Grace has to say. And I think there’s always room for a more statistical bent. Who else’s work do I really enjoy? I’ve always liked Lombardo and Weinberg’s work, formerly at LinkedIn, and now doing their own thing. Those two are very interesting collators of stuff. So yeah, there’s some very effective people in the industry for sure. And the only question we have is where all the Americans have gone. From an industry that was dominated by Americans. And I went to America to learn my trade in the 90s because they were literally 20 years ahead. To an industry now where they’re so far behind, it’s quite gobsmacking. I love America. That’s my favorite country. But I did Brand Week in Arizona last year. And I talked about why Americans were so far behind and what they were behind on. And my talk went down incredibly, incredibly badly. Because most of the audience didn’t understand what the f**k I was talking about, right?

Oh dear. Okay. Well, let’s go down the route of Byron Shark. We’ve had him on the show, The Dark Lord himself.

Was he in a good mood or not? Did you get him on a good day or a bad day?

He was all right.

He was all right. I don’t know.

People give him too much. He’s quite a… He’s such a f**king dry m*****, right? That many people think he’s just properly evil all the time. And he can be. Don’t get me wrong. But he’s got a… It’s a very enjoyable sense of humor. I like very much… Last week, he said to some poor American marketer, I don’t think you understand your question. I thought that was the best thing I’ve ever seen on social media.

Ouch. Okay. Well, what do you think marketers misinterpret about their work over there?

Oh, look, I think they probably now are mostly accepting it. I don’t see many people that know what they’re talking about, giving them too much s**t. My only problem with the Ehrenberg-Bass approach, if I’m allowed to have one, they just sprinkle a little bit of… In America, we used to say that he puts a little bit of English on the ball, meaning a little bit of spin. You know what I mean? There’s just a little bit of extra hoo-hah for what’s supposed to be a scientific approach. Selling indistinctiveness is a brilliant thing to do. It’s a phenomenal revolution in our field. No one was thinking about distinctiveness or salience before Ehrenberg-Bass, but I really started to push it. But the way they sold it as being, don’t worry about differentiation. Differentiation doesn’t really exist. What you need is distinctiveness. That’s just rubbish. If you don’t need to do that, you really should have both is the point. Then what happened, I just had a big conversation with someone about it last week. I was suddenly held up as the guy that was like, I’m Mr. Differenciation and Byron is Mr. Distinctiveness. I’m like, no, that’s not it. I’m both. I think he’s great, but I also think we need this. But it doesn’t matter now because everyone’s like, I think Ritson is right about differentiation. No, Byron is right about distinctiveness. I’m like, no, I’m not arguing with him, but I’m also not giving him a different… The nuance is last man, totally last.

It’s a whole idea of the versus. I think it throws people off. It’s like Byron’s here and Mark is over there.

They need it, right? They need that. And I get it. And look, if it puts me in the same fucking arena as Byron, that’s great. You know what I mean? It doesn’t do any harm from a strategic point of view. It’s just not correct. But as you begin to learn, it’s like I’ve had this huge debate about liquid death. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I think liquid death is a failure, right? No, I don’t. I think it’s a really interesting brand that started to make money. What I think is every marketing idiot went on about it last year because they don’t properly understand marketing. My criticism was always about marketers and nothing to do with liquid death. Do you know what I mean? So you can’t really win. Do you know what I mean? You can’t win because suggesting it wasn’t all that and then I find myself defending liquid death now because everyone’s like, but yeah, you said it was going to fail, but it’s not failing in America. I’m like, I didn’t say any of this. Do you know what I mean? But what’s the point? At least back to our earlier conversation, they’re talking about me. It doesn’t really matter. Do you know what I mean? If they’re like, yeah, Ritzen hates liquid death. He hates distinctiveness. Do you know what I mean? At least I’m in the sentence.

There you go. At least you’re not on the back foot.

That’s true.

Yeah. All right. So we’re coming up on time. So we’re going to have on some quickfire questions. Are you up for that?

Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

All right. So we have a listener question from Charlotte Leroy, who says, what are the three words you’d use to describe excellent brand management?

Diagnosis, strategy and execution in that order. Right. So, yeah, lining things up that way.

What’s one marketing metric that should die immediately?

Oh, that should die. I mean, I can’t say ROI because it does perfectly capture performance. But it’s an absolutely appropriate measure for performance marketing. Well, none in this case. Whenever anything is declared dead, it’s invariably a hack thing to do, right? So I don’t think any right metric at the right time. So I don’t want to kill any metric at all.

We’re going to name this episode, Branding is Dead, just for you.

Do it, do it, man. All right. Ritson says, Branding is Dead. Make that the title.

Let’s do it.

I got one.

What’s one marketing concept that doesn’t get enough credit in your book?

Net Promoter Score. So I love Net Promoter Score. The interesting thing about Net Promoter Score is, the people that hate it and the people that are trying to sell it, both talk the same, which is it predicts future business growth. It definitely doesn’t, right? Put that to one side. It’s a two-question metric that gives you a really interesting comparable quant benchmark, and with the follow-up qual question, some really insightful probing in terms of what people thought about whatever the product or service is. When we do mini MBA, we ask a raft of exit questions and Net Promoter Score very quickly gives me two things. It gives me a really quick comparable with, was this co-or as good or as bad in satisfaction terms as previous ones? Second, I sit with the verbatims for about two-thirds of a day with a big cup of coffee or two, and I just go through them and it gives me so much insight into what we need to fix, or what we’re doing well, and what we’re doing poorly. I don’t think it’s the only metric you need. I don’t think it predicts future business growth, but it’s a really decent metric. Just for understanding quickly and lazily what’s going on. I wish people would just stop, their promoter score is shit, or their promoter score is brilliant. Again, it’s pretty good.

Yeah. What I found fascinating in the MBA was the fact that different scores in different industries were the norm. In finance, it would be like five out of 10, or in another one, it could be much higher.

This is a true story. I once worked for a cemetery business, and they did net promoter scores from like the, not from the corpses obviously, but from the family members. And yeah, it was the lowest MPS benchmarks you’d ever see, obviously. How likely would you be to recommend our undertaking firm? You know what I mean? But yeah, it varies by industry, and it varies by country. The Belgians, I think I’m right in saying, are the most miserable on the planet when it comes to MPS. So if you have like Toyota in Belgium, if they score like a 50, a plus 55, it’s the equivalent of getting a plus 80 in the USA, you know, because Belgians are just miserable mother f*****, which is the other alternative title for the show.

All right, we got a few there. All right, next question. What makes a great brand leader?

Oh, that’s an interesting one. I think they have to have curiosity. I think they have to have a bit of passion. I always go on about comfort within precision. I’ve worked with some pretty big presidents and CEOs in my career, and all of them have this skill whereby they go, right, okay, that’s good enough. I get it. We don’t need to keep going after this. You know what I mean? I get the story. Move on. And then I work with a lot of mid-level marketers that have to make everything add up to 100, and they’ll never get promoted. So comfort within precision. And then, yeah, an ability, I think, to be different, depending on the brand that they’re working on. So if you look at half the leaders that move from one big brand to another, they fail because they still try to do the same stuff. It’s kind of the Nike story, right? What worked at eBay or whatever? What do you know? It didn’t work at Nike. So it’s that ability also to switch hit and move to a different brand. I worked a lot with Jean-Christophe Babin, who was the CEO at Tag Heuer, and then he moved to Bulgari, the Greco-Italian luxury retail jeweler. Babin is one of those guys that can be very Swiss, very precise, and then jump across and be very Italian and extremely creative and fun. It really needs a bit of a chameleon to pull that off if you’re going to have two or three brands in your career.

All right. If you could only consume media from one brand for the rest of your life, which would it be?

Look, I’m probably, even though I’m not, I’m very opposed to either left or right wing views. I really do like reading the New York Times. So New York Times is the brand that I am most into. Even though I disagree strongly with their stance at the moment on Trump and on a lot of the stuff, it’s gone too far, in my opinion. But I love the quality of it. And so, yeah, New York Times would do me in a daily way. All right.

We’re going to wrap this up. What’s the one thing you wish more marketers understood?

Look, I would probably say it’s a toss up between market orientation, which we’ve talked about, and strategy in the general sense, that strategy isn’t complicated, right? Brand strategy is just three things. It’s targeting, positioning and objectives. That’s it. So I just tire of strategy. There’s so many strategists now. There never used to be any, and they just complicate the f**k out of the industry, and that means they’re not really strategists, right? Because it’s supposed to be simple. Brand strategy isn’t, it’s not easy, but it’s also not complex. It’s just working out who you’re targeting, and what your position is to those targets, and what the objectives are. There’s nothing else. You can make an argument for brand architecture on the edge, but that’s it. And we get all this **** on LinkedIn about strategy is this, and strategy is that, and strategy is feeling this, and creative strategists, and all that ****. It’s just answering those three questions, which are big enough questions to occupy anyone.

For sure, Mark, it’s been amazing having you on. I was just going to ask, if folks are interested in connecting with you, connecting with the courses, where do they need to go? Where could we all go to follow up on this?

Oh, look, we’d welcome anyone on the April program of the Mini MBA in Brand Management. It’s currently filling up. You can study it from anywhere. And just go on to the internet and type Mini MBA, and miraculously, we will spring into usually the top of your search results, if not, we’re in second place, but someone’s buying us sometimes. But yeah, just look up Mini MBA. You know, we have trained, as you said, 40,000 marketers, of which about 12,000 were brand managers. And, you know, what can I tell you? 96% of them said it immediately made them a much more effective brand manager. So we, you know, we do the business.

Any discounts, Mark?

We don’t know. You know the answer, Jacob, right?

I know the answer to that one.

We don’t do any discounts, and in Module 9, you can find out why.

Do you need to do the marketing one before you do the branding one?

No, it’s a good question. What we say to everyone is, if you’re going to do two courses, yeah, do marketing first. But if you’re working in brand, if you’re a brand consultant, if your title says brand manager, just come and do the brand course. You know what I mean? It’s the one that’s in your wheelhouse. You know what I mean? So yeah, absolutely. They’re standalone courses for sure.

Amazing. Thank you so much, Mark. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

My pleasure, boys. Congratulations. That was fun.

Thanks so much. Have a great day.

Thank you, Matt.

Thanks, guys.

Bye.