A History of Marketing

• Rachel Kennedy: The Legacy and Impact of The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

  A History of Marketing / Episode 21This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Rachel Kennedy, Associate Director (Product Development) of the renowned Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science is a leading organization in research on how to grow brands. Professor Kennedy herself ranks globally in the top 1% of advertising researchers and is highly regarded for her work in bringing evidence-based research into tangible marketing practice.In our conversation, Professor Kennedy shares fascinating insights into the work of marketing science pioneers like Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank Bass, and the founding principles of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, Australia. We explore their core concepts on how brands actually grow and discuss the global impact of the Institute's groundbreaking work.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsThis conversation is packed with important concepts when it comes to measuring marketing’s effectiveness, including:* The concept of Empirical Generalization and why the Eherenberg-Bass Institute believes it’s a revolutionary approach to understanding marketing* Key concepts like Double Jeopardy and Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD), explained in an accessible way.* What happens when brands "go dark" and stop advertising, and the real impact on sales and market share.* The importance of ad likability and how it connects (or doesn't) to advertising effectiveness.* How the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute translates research into strategies for brand growth.* And much more.Now, here's my conversation with Professor Rachel Kennedy.Note - I use an AI tool to transcribe the audio of my conversations to text. I check the output but it’s possible there are mistakes I missed. Parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity.Andrew Mitrak: Professor Rachel Kennedy, welcome to A History of Marketing.Professor Rachel Kennedy: Thank you, Andrew. Absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you for the opportunity.Viva La Revolution: The Ehrenberg-Bass Approach to Marketing ScienceAndrew Mitrak: I'm looking forward to a conversation about the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, your expertise on advertising and media effectiveness. To start, I thought I'd ask you about a research paper that you sent me in advance of this interview. It's called "Viva La Revolution! For Evidence-Based Marketing We Strive." When I saw this, I thought, “What?! This is an unusual title for an academic paper.” You're positioning yourselves as revolutionaries. Can you tell me about this, what was this revolution, and what were you reacting to?Rachel Kennedy: Well, the revolution still continues. We are just so different from most of the marketing academics around the world in many ways, particularly how we study marketing. Because we study it in a very different way, we see different things. It's as different as people seeing the world being flat versus other people who see it round. It is that different.The revolution we're encouraging people to join, and have been for decades, is to stop and look at the evidence that we see because it changes what you see, and we think it changes things for the better. We'll definitely come to some of that, but that's the big picture of the call to action. It's not the first time we've been seen as being different. We're different in many ways. That's why I reached out to you; because you were talking about the history of marketing, I thought it was really important that we share that there is this very different way of looking at it, but importantly, that is discovering new knowledge and changing the way marketing is done around the world.Empirical Generalization and the Pursuit of Evidence-Based MarketingAndrew Mitrak: When you say "we," are you referring collectively to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, or does this paper also talk a lot about this group called the Empirical Generalizationists and this research tradition? Are those one and the same? Empirical Generalizationists, I'll just call it EG from now on, by the way, it's a mouthful. How do we think of EG and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute? Are those the groups collectively?Rachel Kennedy: Empirical generalization is a thing that's far bigger than the Institute. In marketing, we are key proponents of it, but not the only ones who see its value. We're intimately linked with it, and as a team, we're large, the largest in the world studying marketing. We're incredibly cohesive in our belief that this is the way to make discoveries and to advance our discipline. We are disciples trying to spread the word, and we live and breathe it, but others do as well.The idea of coming up with empirical generalizations is broader than marketing. In fact, what we do is take the approaches that are done in the physical sciences, the ways of studying the world, and apply them to studying the things marketers are interested in: How do brands compete with each other? How do brands grow? How do marketing levers work? We study them in the same way that physical scientists do, which begins with pattern spotting: describing the world that we're interested in, ideally with as much data as possible, importantly across diverse conditions or data collected in different ways (survey, behavioral data, the more diverse the better).We pattern spot and, across known conditions, document how things are related. We're very focused on sameness, where things are the same, and documenting the conditions where they're not. This is such a different approach to most marketing study, where it's about single data sets, where people are doing complex models looking for statistical differences. We're looking across conditions, across data sets, looking for sameness, looking for what robust knowledge is likely to hold. When you've done enough pattern spotting that you see these robust patterns, the idea is to quantify it. The end point we're looking for is maths and laws that describe those big patterns.We're very associated and known for laws like double jeopardy. Small brands will always be hit twice; they have fewer buyers who buy less often. Duplication of purchase, sharing across brands is predictable based on the size of those brands. Negative binomial distribution, buying skews light, natural monopoly, it goes on, but that's what empirical generalizationists are looking for: simple laws that describe the big picture of how the world works. As researchers, we're always interested in the nitty-gritty and the deviations, but as a discipline, understanding that big picture helps us understand what matters. It helps us know what constructs we should be studying. It helps us predict the future and understand the world in ways that we don't think traditional studies achieve quite so well.Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank BassAndrew Mitrak: Can you tell me, where did this idea of empirical generalization come from? Who were the originators of this thought? Also, if you can share how you came across it for the first time?Rachel Kennedy: Personally, and as the Institute (because as you'll see in our name, we're the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science), we're inspired by both of those individuals. I'll talk about Frank (Bass) first. I never got to meet him, but I'm definitely inspired by his work. Both of them were marketing professors, born in the same year, both very quantitative in their background.Frank Bass studied maths at Harvard, but the thing that inspired us, in terms of studying the real world and implementing marketing science, was that he came up with the diffusion model. So understanding how new technologies and new products come to market and their life cycle. Studying the real world, underpinned by data, and quantifying it in models—that's core to what we believe matters.Andrew Ehrenberg, I was lucky enough to work with him in '99 and 2000 in the UK, had a very strong relationship with the Institute, and very much inspired us down this journey of empirical generalization. I can talk more about him just because I spent so much time with him. In terms of your history channel, I can probably share a few more snippets which are really important to me and important to our journey as an institute, as well as my own journey. He was originally born in Germany. His father was a staunch critic of the Nazis, so his family had to move to the UK. He studied statistics, a highly trained statistician. He understood data and numbers incredibly well and drew on that through his life. In hindsight, he was probably also inspired by a father who was a staunch critic to stand up and talk about what he believed and saw in data, which has been an important part, perhaps going back to your first question of why we see it as a revolution and that it's important to share these beliefs. Again, inspired by him.Anyway, he was a statistician. He was employed by, I think was the name of a large panel provider, to analyze their data across different categories. Marketers kept asking him to do things like the report on the loyalty of brands. He was looking at the data—he wasn't a marketer, he was a statistician—and he'd go, "Why do they keep talking about loyalty when I look at what people buy and they're not loyal?" And they're buying skews light, things that were in total contrast to the language and what the marketers were wanting him to see in the data.That led him to this journey of documenting the patterns in buyer behavior data—patterns about how people buy and how brands compete with each other—that led him to make some incredibly important discoveries in marketing, like the negative binomial distribution, that brands have these predictable patterns in terms of how people buy them, how they compete. He definitely was my inspiration.Not only did he talk about how there were these patterns in marketing that we should document—he was published in Nature, a top scientific journal, showing these patterns, along with many other places—so he shared that message. He also was heavily focused on how it is that you share information. He wrote a book about data reduction so that you can see these patterns. Many things about him inspired us in our journey.The NBD-Dirichlet ModelAndrew Mitrak: You mentioned negative binomial distribution, and that's one I've seen come up in the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and it's mentioned in the paper you sent over. I'm not a mathematician. Those words, negative binomial distribution Dirichlet—I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Could you explain this concept to somebody who's not an expert in math? What is the overall “dummy” version of how to think about this idea?Rachel Kennedy: Okay, there are two different things there, which do come together. The NBD-Dirichlet is a model that Andrew Ehrenberg with colleagues, Gerald Goodhardt and Mark Uncles and others, brought together. It is the maths that describes a lot of those laws I mentioned earlier. Embedded in that total model is the maths for double jeopardy, duplication of purchase, natural monopoly. It is maths that describes how brands compete with each other. The negative binomial distribution part is a pattern we see that all brands hold: big brands, small brands, brands in different markets across categories. When you fit that maths, it gives you the number of how many people will buy a brand once in a year, twice, 50 times if that's relevant to the category. It's relatively simple maths—beyond me to create, but relatively simple—but it describes the big patterns that we see time and time again.Andrew Mitrak: If I was to come back to your idea of you being revolutionaries and what you're reacting against, I think one concept that might be a myth or something not backed up by the data is something like an 80/20 Pareto principle or things like that that are sort of myths you hear bandied about.Rachel Kennedy: Even though that one's called a law, that is not what we see in the data. It's not what we see in the real world.Andrew Mitrak: And the NBD would be a better reflection of what you see in the data and what you see in the real world, something that would contradict more of an 80/20?Rachel Kennedy: Absolutely. Maths is a simplification of the world. E=mc², it describes it really well. It gives you the big picture. It helps you understand what matters. It's the same with the NBD-Dirichlet. Within the Institute, we've had decades of testing it. Does it fit really well for durables in the same way that it does package goods? How do services look? It gives us the big picture, and it has proven itself to be remarkably accurate—not saying perfect, but remarkably accurate. It focuses marketers on the things that matter most.So that's the maths part of it. But as an institute and as scientists, that's absolutely critical and part of the journey. But we're also interested in, “What does that tell us about theory? What does that tell us about the constructs that really matter to marketers?” So by understanding those patterns, there are very clear lessons. So, big picture: if a brand wants to grow, penetration is king. You don't get there without nudging more buyers towards your brand. So that has to become a metric that marketers matter.So Andrew was incredibly important: we named our institute out of him. We continue to talk about him all of the time and inspired by him and Gerald Goodhart, Frank Bass, others, but we've continued that journey of pattern spotting and translating what those patterns mean for practice. And that's where, in terms of you ask the question of what is this revolution, as an institute, we're very focused on taking that maths and translating it into practice. Our mission is to create discoveries about marketing and the things that matter and to disseminate that knowledge so we have a real-world impact. So we work closely with industry. And I mean, every day we're working from C-suite across the diversity of different marketing roles. In fact, we work with anyone who's interested in evidence-based growth.Two Dominant Pillars: Mental and Physical AvailabilityWe're working closely with them to translate what we see in the data and work with them to implement what makes sense and then getting feedback on what works that creates this virtuous cycle. And as part of that, we've advanced, and we truly think it is an advancement, and this is where it comes back to that initial question, we are just so different from others, the new theory about how marketing works. So we think growth is underpinned by, you know, two dominant pillars: mental and physical availability.When we see brands grow, it's because they're able to step change their mental and or physical availability, so they come to mind for more people in the range of situations where they might buy, they remove barriers so they're easier to buy, and through doing those things, they nudge penetration. They're bought by more people, more often. So that's the journey we're on.‘Double Jeopardy’ and What it Means for GrowthAndrew Mitrak: I'm going to ask you more about that journey, but I want to define one other thing that's been brought up a couple times, that's double jeopardy. So the double jeopardy law, can you explain that one to me?Rachel Kennedy: It's quite simple algebra if I had a screen, I would share it with you. But you don't even need the algebra once you understand it. The law just says, it's a law of loyalty, and how much loyalty a brand should have is predictable based on the size of that brand.The law, when you put it in words, is: “Small brands will always be hit twice.”They have fewer buyers than bigger brands, and those buyers buy them slightly less on average, or they're slightly less loyal on average. Flip side of that is bigger brands win, they have more people who buy them, and those buyers buy them more often. So any brand can apply that algebra or get its benchmark or norm to check that it has the loyalty that it should. And being laws, they nearly always do.But the real world's messy, and you do see sometimes where a brand might have more loyalty than it should, or less. And through this journey of decades of just checking and checking and looking, well, does doctor's prescribing show the same patterns that we see of households buying, or do people who buy airplanes have the same loyalty to brands that we see in services? We keep seeing that double jeopardy does hold, that these patterns are incredibly robust, but there are some known deviations.So private label predictably looks a bit different, and now that we know it, it makes sense because private label have limited physical availability. So they look like big brands where they're available, but across the total market, unless you look at them in aggregate, they look different because even people who would buy them can't, you can't buy a Tesco brand if you're in Sainsbury's or you can't buy an Aldi brand if you're in Woolworths.Andrew Mitrak: I'm going to ask you about how the institute works with real brands in the world. And I want to use this double jeopardy law as an example because it seems very useful for a big brand to be aware of this. How would you advise a big brand to think about that? And then on the flip side, a newly forming company or a newly formed spin out brand, it seems like it's a cold start problem with starting a new brand that's a new entrant because it is dinged twice as the law suggests. So how have you advised a large company dealing with the double jeopardy law versus a small or newly formed company?Rachel Kennedy: It's equally important to both. Doesn't matter if you're a big or a small brand, it's important that you understand how the real world works. And so, vitally important, probably almost more important for a small brand because a small brand's got limited resources. So they possibly have to be a little bit more strategic in where they invest those resources. So the law just gives us the benchmarks and it gives us the understanding of how the world works and also it shows us what success will look like. So if you're a small brand starting out and you're putting your mortgage on the line to make this a success, don't you want to know what success looks like? I would if it was my money. It shows them what success looks like if they want to be bigger.It shows them the thing to focus on more if you want to be bigger is getting more buyers, removing barriers that stop some people buying you. So as a launch brand, why are some people not buying you? Is it that they've just never heard of you? So maybe you need to advertise. Is it that they can't find you even if they've heard of you because they've seen you on Tik Tok or whatever, but your link to buy doesn't work. Fix that problem. So it helps you know where to focus your efforts. It gives you a benchmark that even if you are a small brand that says, yes, you'll have lower loyalty, but are you getting the loyalty that you should for a brand of your size?Andrew Mitrak: Is one implication – and this might be me oversimplifying– is that if you're newly starting, there might be an argument for going for breadth versus depth. For going for many customers versus just going for one single high paying customer. Are those kinds of the ideas that I would think about as a company that was interpreting this law or am I oversimplifying?Rachel Kennedy: No, not at all. And simplification is really important. That's vital to understand the world. I mean, when you are very, very tiny, you might be, you know, putting all of your effort in to have just that one customers. And we do see time and time again that small brands can be a bit different to bigger brands in likes of loyalty. If you've only got one brand, then that is different to a brand with millions. But, yeah, it is useful to know what the world looks like, so we know what to focus on and to have those benchmarks to go, well, for your size, are you looking like you should or not? And if you want to be bigger, knowing what that will take and what are the levers that you should be moving and what success will look like so you know if you're actually getting there or not.The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute: Structure and MissionAndrew Mitrak: That leads to my next question. We've talked about Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank Bass, and some of the core ideas. Can you tell me more about the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute itself? What is the institute? Who are the people there? What is the makeup of the institute itself?Rachel Kennedy: We're a not-for-profit research institute, based in a university—currently the University of South Australia, but we're about to become Adelaide University as we merge with the University of Adelaide. Exciting times for us on that front.But we're researchers. We have research professors, marketing academics, research assistants, people involved in teaching, but at our core, we're researchers. As I said, our mission is discovery and dissemination. We're incredibly cohesive. We are a big team, and different people have different interests. Some people do more pricing, some people look at portfolios. I spend a lot more time looking at media and advertising, but as a team, all of us are interested in buyer behavior, brand growth, competition, and those things. We don't just work differently in that we're such a big team focused on similar things; we engage with industry through our corporate sponsor program.We're 100% industry funded, and it does skew towards big brands who fund our research. That's partly good for us in that we love engagement and it's so core to what we do, but they're also willing to fund the research that we do. They pay a subscription fee that creates a research budget that no individual business alone could ever have, and no other marketing department in the world has. That research budget then enables us to undertake gold standard studies that again creates this virtuous cycle. In return for businesses subscribing to our research, we share that research.Sponsors get early engagement with the research findings, they get a lot more depth of knowledge. We share regular reports with them. We're frequently in their offices or involved in their planning days, sharing research and giving them feedback on what they're doing, they're giving us feedback on our research, telling us what their challenges are. Because we work across so many different industries all around the world and we're constantly getting that feedback, and we also have industry boards (a North American board, an Australasian board, and a European board), we have people from C-suite giving us feedback on what we do. We know what challenges brands face, what they don't understand about our research, what keeps them awake at night. That then feeds into what research studies we conduct, and it creates this virtuous cycle where industry wins.The fact that, decades on, they keep engaging suggests that they do, otherwise why would they part with their hard-earned money? We win because we get that challenge, that feedback, access to data—all those things that help us do better research. It's a virtuous cycle that we think is win-win for everyone.Measuring Advertising EffectivenessAndrew Mitrak: Today, you're among the top 1% of advertising researchers, and advertising and media effectiveness really seems to be one of your areas of expertise and focus. I'm wondering, how did you first become more interested in advertising and media effectiveness? You mentioned this scientific approach to advertising and media research—what does that look like at a tactical level?Rachel Kennedy: My journey into advertising research related to trying to replicate a study from the Journal of Advertising Research because, I probably haven't mentioned that word replication much, but we are absolutely huge fans of it. That's part of that pattern spotting of just seeing, do you find the same results that other people find? Do you find it in a different country, different categories, different measures? In hindsight, it was probably the worst area to go in if you want to be an empirical generalisationist because no two bits of advertising are the same.When you're trying to pattern spot and see how ads work, it's just a nightmare because you can't control things because things are changing all the time. That's one of those fundamental things important to the Institute: trying to tackle the big questions of what matters, trying to work out what do we know and what can we trust. A lot of my personal research has been around how do we measure advertising. There's been enormous change from when I started; it was all surveys, all intermediate measures of effectiveness: What do people like? What do they recall? What are their intentions to buy in the future?We've had biometrics, neuro, so many different things that have come along since then, online digital experiments. There's been enormous evolution. I've spent a huge amount of time trying to test different measures to go, what are they actually capturing and what measures can we trust, and for what information.Measuring Advertising: What’s Changed and What Hasn’t ChangedAndrew Mitrak: Certainly the ways you would measure or the tools available to measure advertising effectiveness over the course of your career, I'm sure they've changed a lot, and ad inventory themselves have changed. The ad formats, and even within internet advertising. The the types of ads within internet advertising when it started it was little almost mimicking the style that you'd see in a newspaper where where ads were off to the side, and then they become newsfeed ads, then they become these story ads that take over your full screen, and there's so many different types of advertisements within digital.Then meanwhile, television and broadcast, print…Rachel Kennedy: Cinema hasn't gone away.Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. It still hasn't gone away.So what has stayed the same over your career as far as analyzing advertising? And then what are the top things that have changed?Rachel Kennedy: The thing that hasn't changed much is people's brains, and the job that advertising has to do.So with Andrew Ehrenberg, we wrote a paper about the role of advertising and its key thing is being creative publicity. I would say that still holds.So without question, the way marketers can put advertising to market, so much more diversity. You know, there's so much more fragmentation. There's so much more data, but I feel a lot of marketers are probably drowning in data because they're measuring, I was going to say everything. Lots of people are drowning in dashboards with so much data, but they're not necessarily able to isolate what are the measures that matter most.In terms of what I've tried to focus on is real-world ads, whereas a lot of advertising academics historically created artificial ads. Now with AI, there are more opportunities to do that in some realistic ways. Not always, but definitely.And going back over the last decades, we've been very focused on real-world ads, trying to get large samples of ads – never as big as we would like or as much, but at a scale above what is normal for many advertising researchers. So going back to trying to describe the real world with large samples of real-world respondents as opposed to student samples which is often the norm for many academics around the world. Testing advertising from different measures, trying to find out what are the big picture things that we're learning and how you best measure those.Ad Likability: Does It Still Matter?Andrew Mitrak: Some of your early articles were on this topic of ad likability. And I'm wondering if you found any link there between ad likability and an ad's effectiveness. It seems like as far as formats changing a lot… well an ad could be likable around any type of format. So I'm wondering about that too.Rachel Kennedy: You're going back a very long time there, Andrew, but that's okay. That was one of those first studies that I talked about. And we learned then, and we still know, people can like ads for a range of reasons because it makes them laugh, it's funny, but it tells them something interesting about a shoe brand that they love or whatever it might be. So ads can work in different ways, and that still holds today. But from a marketer's perspective, likability matters, probably now more than even in the past, because if they don't, they will zone out, they'll change to other content that does capture their attention or their interest enough.We learned then, and it holds, likability alone is not enough. So in my PhD, I documented these things called dysfunctional ads where the people who knew who the brand was for didn't like them, but there were also people who liked them but got the brand wrong. So they're doubly dangerous in that they're not working for the brand, but potentially working for a competitor. So today, as much as then, people need to know the brand that the ad is for if that ad is going to have any chance of doing what it needs to do. And ads have to work through memory. So we talk a lot about their role is mainly to refresh, but occasionally to build new memories that make it more likely that that brand will come to mind for more people in the range of situations where they might make a purchase.Ideally, brands want to create ads that are so well branded that people who don't know much or don't care much about them still have that spark of a memory that they're starting to build or refresh the memories that help them win into the future. And the effects of advertising do play out over long periods of time, not just weeks, but months, years, and even longer where they're successful at building the right memories.When Brands Go Dark: The Impact of Stopping AdvertisingAndrew Mitrak: Some of your other articles were around this idea of “when brands go dark.” And by the way, I love your use of language because that is an article title that you just want to click on and read. So, can you share more about this research and what you found?Rachel Kennedy: Yeah, so for a long time, we've had kind of big questions that we're trying to tackle. And one of them is, what is the spot worth? We talked earlier about how much choice marketers have, really hard to know where do you put your budget? Which platforms, which format? So they're trying to work out, well, it's incredibly useful to marketers if they know what a spot is worth. So we've been trying to tackle this problem over years with different data sources, in different markets, different measures. The "going dark" was just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle to try and give us some more evidence because if you take away something that exists, you can see what happens when it's removed. So that's one way to determine what value was that advertising delivering.I was lucky enough to have a research student, Adam Gelzinis, who was happy to take on this particular project. One of our corporate supporters had a lovely dataset. There were about 40 brands over 20 years, and we knew exactly when the brands in their categories were on air, how much was spent, when they were taken off. It was all alcohol-related categories, so ciders and other things. But the nature of the category was that brands would be advertised for a period and then not. So there was lots of switching the advertising on and off.So we started that fundamental pattern spotting of describing what happens to sales when brands stop advertising. And there were very clear patterns that hold, and we isolated some of the conditions that matter. So when you stop, sales do go down, and we quantified that, like that process we were talking about before, and isolated conditions where you see more of an impact. So small brands are hit more than bigger brands. Brands that were already declining in sales, if they took advertising off, that sped it up. So that was our first paper.And then, as good scientists do, we knew that it was important to replicate. That one got lots of traction, so we kind of went, yes, people understand what we're trying to do here. We had a PhD student, because the engine of a research institute is research students. They can devote three years of their life to studying one thing. In this instance, Peilin took the challenge to replicate what we'd seen in a far, far bigger dataset. 365 brands across 22 different categories, US, so different markets. So lots of the boxes that we like as scientists in terms of differentiated replications, trying to see if the pattern holds in slightly more diverse circumstances. And she used a different measure, market share rather than sales, which had a number of benefits in that it helped us, enabled us to compare across the categories and things far more easily. And again, quantified. A year without advertising on average led to a 10% drop in market share, two years without advertising, 20% drop in market share, three years was 28%, racking my brain there a little bit. But again, highlighted the conditions that Adam had seen and a few others. But that work continues. So the nature of marketing science is slow. So we're now looking at different measures, looking at quantifying quarterly stops, and continuing to refine and, yeah, look at this in different conditions to continue that journey.Productizing Research: Translating Findings into ServicesAndrew Mitrak: Another part of your role, in addition to being an expert in advertising and media effectiveness, is related to product development. So the idea is taking the Institute's research and development and translating into products and services for industry supporters. Do you have any favorite examples of how you've been able to productize the Institute's research in this role?Professor Rachel Kennedy: I would say everyone, so many researchers in the Institute are involved in this as well. So taking the robust findings that we've got and looking at ways that we can encourage people to use that evidence. So for a long time in terms of the way we set up, we were just about sharing the research, you know, giving seminars to share what we found and what we thought it meant.A while back, we set up the Mars Marketing Lab, and they funded a lab within the Institute and kind of challenged us to scale up in a way that we hadn't before and work with them to disseminate that knowledge globally into their business. So through that process, we learned a lot about change management and using knowledge. So that kind of led to this idea of, well, how do we package what we know into tools or ways that marketing practitioners who are often so busy, they can't be as close to the research. They're often in an environment where they have to use that template to brief for advertising, or they're looking at a particular dashboard, so their plans for the next year have to refer to the data that they've got.But often there's a clash between the traditional tools and measures that are measured around the world and still to this day. So we have worked with our sponsors to work out, well, how do we embed the right construct, the right measures, the right ways of doing marketing that are going to deliver the best results.We've developed tools where we measure distinctive assets, category entry points, do reviews of media plans, reviews of dashboards, or whatever it might be. I think you asked what was my favorite. I love doing all of that, but one of the things that we offer and the ways that we've worked out is How Brands Grow Live. There's also a version of that, How Brands Grow for Executives. The live one is where we go into a supporter's business and we work very closely, typically with 30 to 40 senior people.As researchers, before we do that, we have done a lot of fundamental research on that particular company's brands, their categories, and we develop exercises. Some of the exercises are standard across, but we then work with those senior executives on their data and challenge them to see what we see, and together produce, well, at the end, it's the team trying to apply the knowledge that we see with feedback and evidence-based growth plan. The reason I love those most is we just see the traction that it has. And the number of times those senior leaders go, we just need to roll this out globally with all of our teams because it is, like I said at the beginning, that transformation from seeing the world as flat to round.When they get up close with the researchers, they look at their data with us, not had it that they've just not gone, yeah, the world is not as I thought it was, and they get hungry and so passionate about ensuring that their businesses can now see what they see because it's so incredibly obvious that they need to be doing different things. And then watching those journeys play out where they do different things and see the results, it's so heartwarming. So that's why that's my favorite.Andrew Mitrak: Something I've really appreciated about this conversation and about the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is that there's really a relationship between your supporters and industry and research and academia. And over the course of this podcast, I've gotten really lucky to speak with CMOs and entrepreneurs and business leaders. And in those conversations, I can't recall them bringing up academic research. On the flip side, I've spoken to a lot of really great academics, and the research is very fascinating, but admittedly, sometimes at the end of the conversation, I'll kind of be scratching my head where I'm like, “How could I as a marketer actually apply that?”Do you have any guidance or tips or any suggestions on what academia can do more broadly to, to better integrate with and collaborate with industry, and I guess vice versa for industry practitioners who are marketers full-time and don't necessarily seek out academic materials. What would you suggest? How could somebody make better use of this to become better marketers?Professor Rachel Kennedy: Yes, so we see that industry are hungry to engage. As you said, we're on the other side of the planet from many of them. Why would they come to us rather than, you know, big name universities who are in their backyard? It's because we add value. And to me, you talked about people who are doing kind of interesting research, but as a practitioner, you go, how would I use it? To me, that is just an enormous waste of resources. It's just not good for the academics' career. Well, they might get promoted, but they're not going to have real-world impact. So academics have to do research that matters, solve the problems that industry have. And it's not that all research is about solving problems, but understanding the world and the things that matter and being able to translate that knowledge so that people can see its value.We see that industry are very happy to engage. They're happy to jump on a plane and come and see us and fund us year after year, share their data, share their challenges. You know, lots of NDAs need to be signed and those things, which are completely fair. But yeah, it's not a lack of interest from many people in industry. Contentious knowledge, and we're often associated with that because what we've found clashes with what people have been told previously. So for marketers who have, you know, had a traditional training, their core DNA is around segmentation, positioning, targeting, that's the world that they see, to try and engage with the likes of the knowledge that we share does require people to commit some time to understanding what is this new marketing, what are the constructs that are now important, what language is more useful to describe the world, why might you want to measure things in different ways? So that's not an easy journey.Committing the time to learn, to look at data, so that the natural thing is often to go, that can't be right. So take up the challenge and look at data, run experiments, test competing ideas, and see, see what works. So yeah, it can take time, it can take a commitment of budget so that you can actually test things and or, you know, get your research team to look at data in different ways. So yeah, learning can take a commitment and can be hard, but what we see is that those people who do, do different things and get different results.Connecting with the Ehrenberg-Bass InstituteAndrew Mitrak: Where would you suggest listeners find you online and follow your work and follow the work of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute more broadly?Professor Rachel Kennedy: Yes, so we're not shy. Our mission is to disseminate. So, follow me on LinkedIn, Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, John Dawes, anyone from the Institute, search on Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, we're not hard to find. We do try and be active in the likes of LinkedIn. We regularly give keynotes at conferences around the world. We do try and do regular podcasts because we passionately believe that this process of bringing science to marketing is helping us discover better knowledge that does help marketers deliver on the outcomes that they're looking for.Having said that, while our mission is to disseminate, for those people who are really serious, there is real value by supporting the research, because then you get a lot more, you get early access and so much more detailed understanding of the research that we don't share in podcasts or keynotes, and in formats that enables whole teams around the world to engage with the content. So for anyone who can, absolutely encourage them to join our program and knowing that that's then going to fund a mental research that, you know, raises the whole industry up. And we're easy to find at marketingscience.info.Andrew Mitrak: Well, Professor Rachel Kennedy, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thanks so much for your time.Professor Rachel Kennedy: Absolute pleasure, Andrew. Thank you for having me. A pleasure on my side as well. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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• Richard S. Tedlow: The Story of Mass Marketing in America

  A History of Marketing / Episode 20This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by Richard S. Tedlow, the MBA Class of 1949 Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. Professor Tedlow is a renowned specialist in the history of business, an acclaimed author, and a truly engaging storyteller. Tedlow also the author behind the popular Substack, Dystopias and Demagogues.After dedicating over three decades to teaching and research at Harvard, he was recruited by Apple to become a member of Apple University, the company's prestigious executive education arm, further cementing his expertise at the intersection of historical trends and modern business practice.Professor Tedlow is the author of several excellent business history books and biographies. Much of our conversation centers around his seminal 1990 work, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsNew and Improved offers an expansive survey of how commerce and marketing evolved, tracing their journey from the mid-19th century through the transformative changes leading up to the internet age.We explore the core concepts from New and Improved, exploring the eras of fragmentation, unification, and segmentation in American marketing. We also discuss how these historical trends continued after the book’s publication with the rise of the internet, mobile technology, and social media.This conversation is packed with insights, history, and case studies, including:* The profound influence of Alfred D. Chandler Jr. on the study of business history and Professor Tedlow's own work.* The "Cola Wars" between Coke and Pepsi as an example of competitive marketing strategy and the shift from unification to segmentation* The rise and fall of retail giant A&P and the lessons it holds for businesses today.* Professor Tedlow's current work on his Substack, Dystopias and Demagogues, where he applies historical lessons to contemporary societal challenges. (I’m a subscriber and recommend you check it out!)* And much moreProfessor Tedlow is a great storyteller, and this discussion offers a rich understanding of how the past continues to inform the present and future of marketing. Now, here's my conversation with Richard S. Tedlow.Note - I use an AI tool to transcribe the audio of my conversations to text. I check the output but it’s possible there are mistakes I missed. I have lightly edited parts of this transcript for clarity.Andrew Mitrak: Richard Tedlow, welcome to A History of Marketing.Richard Tedlow: Well, thank you very much. It's nice to be here.Alfred D. Chandler Jr: The Founder of Modern Business HistoryAndrew Mitrak: I had a lot of fun researching your work, your career, and reading your book New and Improved. I'm going to ask you about all of that. But one person I want to ask you about is someone I heard you mention in an interview. His name was Alfred D. Chandler Jr. Can you tell me, who was Alfred Chandler and what did you learn from him?Richard Tedlow: Alfred Chandler is basically the man who founded modern business history. I learned a great deal from him. He's most well-known for two critical books. One is called Strategy and Structure, published in 1962. Another is called The Visible Hand, published in 1977.Strategy and Structure was a study showing the relationship between a strategy that a company wants to investigate or pursue and the structure that the company has, the organizational structure. For example, if you think about chapter two in Strategy and Structure, that's about the DuPont company. Al's middle name was DuPont, and although he was not a member of the family, he was very close to it, Alfred “DuPont” Chandler Jr. Strategy and Structure is the story of a company, DuPont, which grows very big between 1914 and 1919, decides it wants to pursue a new strategy, which is product diversification, and discovers that the old structure prevents it from doing that. So, Strategy and Structure is the story of a crisis that the company experiences in 1919, 1920, 1921, and how that crisis internally leads it to develop a structure which makes the strategy possible.The structure that makes the strategy possible is a change from what is called the U-form—the unitary form of a corporation, where you've got a manufacturing department, a marketing department, and that's pretty much it—to a multi-divisional form, called the M-form, which locates the direction of the company around product divisions. So now you have a paint division, which has manufacturing, marketing, and management. That divisionalization became the structure which permitted the strategy of product diversification to take place.Up until that book, nobody had really intellectualized what it means to try to pursue a strategy with a structure that's holding you back. Nobody made it so clear that structure must serve strategy, not the other way around. That's one thing I learned from Chandler.When he came to the Harvard Business School in 1970-71, the business history course there was called Business in its Historical Environment, BHE. Basically, it was a nice course, but it was the basic problem with history: it was a bunch of examples, and you didn't know what they exemplified. He changed that course, labeling it "The Coming of Managerial Capitalism." So now the course was about the coming of management to business, and as business grew big, what that meant for the laboring person and the development of unionization, especially during the 1930s, and what it meant for government—the development of government regulation. It was about business, government, and labor. That was the course I taught for many years. He gave it a fuselage, a raison d'être, which really hadn't existed before. You could take that and build anything off of it. The tree trunk was so hard, so strong, so vital, that all kinds of branches could grow off of it. That was what I did during the 32 years I spent at the Harvard Business School.The Role of History in Deriving Business StrategyAndrew Mitrak: It sounds like business history had just been businesses in some historical sense, but was less about how to derive strategies and frameworks from studying business history. Chandler helped make it more relevant, more useful to people by showing how a company through its history changes its strategy and what the lessons are for other companies and contemporary business leaders. Is that part of the right way to think about it?Richard Tedlow: I think so. That's very well put. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does give you a set of questions. If you attack those questions properly, you're going to come up with the true and righteous way of moving forward. After reading Strategy and Structure (which, by the way, McKinsey & Company, the well-known consulting firm, gave to its managers and partners), you know that the first question you ask when dealing with a company that's got a problem is: is our structure holding back our strategy? What's the relationship between these? The structure should facilitate it, not screw it up. He gave as vivid an example of that in real life, using manuscript resources, much more so than anybody ever had before. Then, with The Visible Hand, he came up with a master narrative of business history.The classic problem for an historian (which I've been all my life) is: history is one damn thing after another. The question is, so what? Therefore, what? Chandler gave you the "therefore what," and that was wonderful. It was liberating and very exciting to be around him.Tedlow’s Career in Business HistoryAndrew Mitrak: Was Chandler a primary influence that inspired you to become a business historian and spend so much of your career on it, or what were some of the formative influences that led you to pursue this as part of your career?Richard Tedlow: My father was a business executive. When I was getting my master's in graduate school, I thought it would be interesting to write about a company, which not many people were doing back in 1970-71. He said, "You ought to take a look at Revlon," which was a big cosmetics company in the 1970s. The entrepreneur of Revlon, Charles Revson, was still very much alive. I did. That was what my MA was about. My first refereed journal article publication was in 1976, about Revlon and the quiz show scandals, because Revlon sponsored the 64,000 Question. After that, moving to public relations and how a company presents itself to the public was a more or less natural progression. I decided pretty early on that I wanted to be a business historian. I first met Al in 1973 at a seminar I was part of and he presided over. Then, when I got to the Harvard Business School, he was already the Straus Professor of Business History, and I got to work with him very closely.Another lesson, by the way, from working with him: He was working on a gigantic book called Scale and Scope. He gave me a bunch of chapters to read, and I found a mistake in one. I'm thinking to myself, I was very young, not well-known in the profession; he was world-famous. How do I go about explaining to Professor Chandler that this didn't quite work? I told him I thought there was an error. He was very quiet. We met weekly in those days. He said, "I looked into what you found. You're right." He changed his text. Then he gave me a gigantic manuscript and said, "Go over the whole thing. Anything you find, I want to know about." That was really the beginning of our working together. Then we wrote a casebook together, published in 1985, on business history. It was a wonderful relationship for me. I learned an immense amount from that man.Andrew Mitrak: Studying business history and researching it at that time must have been so different from how it is today. First, business history in general was even more of a niche area than it is now, and also pre-internet or pre-computer-assisted research in the same way. It seems if I were Chandler, I'd be very grateful to have a smart student willing to look over, pour over, and fact-check my work. That must have been a fun time to be working in business history.Richard Tedlow: It was joyful. We wound up with a very close-knit group of people. At the Harvard Business School—that's an institution—no one goes there to learn history. They don't generate historians. But nevertheless, at one point we were teaching 1300 students business history at HBS. It was our team. There were just terrific people. It was one for all and all for one. It was a wonderful professional experience for me.Marketing History's Place in Marketing EducationAndrew Mitrak: I'm going to ask you about marketing history within business history because I went to grad school and studied marketing. Most disciplines have some emphasis on history. If I took a geology class, a psychology class, or an economics class—any number of classes—I learned some history of the discipline. But that never really happened with marketing classes. At most, they'd reference Kotler and the 4Ps in the 1960s. It's like there's no marketing history before that. Why, when it comes to marketing, do you think there's such less emphasis on marketing history? Why is it that other disciplines will probably have the first lesson be some survey of the history of it before getting into modern theories, but that doesn't happen so much with marketing? Why do you think that is?Richard Tedlow: History has to market itself to marketing. You need as an historian to explain why this is important for you to know. I think the problem lies more with historians than marketers. We have not been sufficiently accessible to the world of marketing. There is a Conference on Historical Analysis and Research in Marketing (CHARM). It does exist. You'll also find marketing articles in the Business History Review, edited at Harvard, which I edited in the 1980s. But you're right. Even if you look at strategy, for example, there's a well-known textbook called The Economics of Strategy. They start with history. I'd like to see more of that in marketing. Maybe it'll happen, who knows.New and Improved: An Approachable History of Mass MarketingAndrew Mitrak: When I started this podcast, I was initially looking for a book on marketing history and didn't find one. It was only after starting this podcast and recording a few episodes that I came across New and Improved. It's probably the closest book I found with the expansive history I was looking for. I'm almost grateful I didn't find it at first because I might not have started this podcast had I just found it and read it. What I love about it is it's written in this approachable style that's not just for academics. Some other marketing history texts or conferences are very academic-focused. This one seems like something I could just pick up and read at the beach, enjoy the story, but also take the lessons. Was that part of your goal when writing this book—to write a more popular book? What were your initial inspirations?Richard Tedlow: I like to write the way I speak. I like it to be almost as if it's spoken. One of my books is on Audible; I spoke it. Amazon asked me to do that. I want it to be acceptable. Another thing I learned from Chandler is that your research has to be solid because your interpretations may be revised or reinterpreted, but the research, if good, will last forever. If you look at this book and don't think about the propositions or generalizations, but look at the history, you won't find, I don't think, in this compact a form, the history of Coke and Pepsi or of Ford and GM. My goal is to make it, and in all my writing, I try to write as if I'm speaking. I try to be accessible. Certainly, my teaching was the same way.Andrew Mitrak: It's primarily focused on America and the 20th century, really the late 1800s up to around 1990 when it was published. Why were you focused on this time and America specifically? Was it that a global history would have been too much to fit into one book, or did you think this was a particularly special time and place to share the narrative of marketing's story?Richard Tedlow: Both are true. Some of it, frankly, is my own intellectual limitation. I'm an historian of the United States. I was a history major at Yale, got my PhD at Columbia in history, but it was American history. There's a hell of a lot to know just in American history. Those are the archives I've worked in; that's what I know best. So if I'm going to make an academic statement, it has to be based in America. That's where the intellectual capital exists for me. Which isn't to say there isn't plenty to learn from any number of other countries; I just leave that to somebody else who's more global in their perspective.The Three Phases of American Marketing: Fragmentation, Unification, SegmentationAndrew Mitrak: So, I'm going to ask more about the book specifically. It categorizes the story of marketing in America into three phases: fragmentation, unification, and segmentation. Can you broadly share with listeners what these are and what these phases mean?Richard Tedlow: Fragmentation is early marketing. It's before the railroads, before the telegraph. It was a world of high margins, very low volume, and restricted market size because you couldn't get anything anywhere. There were no railroads; it was a canal-based world.Unification was made possible by the railroad network and the telegraph network. The full force of it really wasn't felt until the 1880s. The railroad network was still in its infancy in the 1850s. In the 1860s, there was a Civil War; you're not going to have national marketing then. In the 1870s, there was a depression. So it was in the 1880s that the great growth of branded merchandise marketed nationally takes place. Coca-Cola was founded in 1886. Procter & Gamble was founded in 1837, but Ivory soap floated in 1879. Kodak was founded in the 1880s. A wide range of other branded products that lasted for a century were founded once it was possible to reach a national market and you also had information through the telegraph.That's the era of unification. This is an era of high volume, low margin (because you're looking for volume), and incorporation of a whole national market. In the automobile industry, this comes a little later because it took longer from a technological standpoint to have automobiles. But if you look at, for example, the first decade of the 20th century, there were hundreds of automobile companies in 1905, 1910, what have you. The Model T organized the market. That unified the market and incorporated the whole country in it. After that, the market became segmented. After it was saturated with the Model T (which was basic transportation—it takes you there and it brings you back, was Henry Ford's favorite slogan), Alfred P. Sloan Jr. attacked Ford by coming up with the classic product line, which was divisionalized. DuPont owned a controlling stake in General Motors; they brought the divisionalized structure to General Motors in the 1920s. Sloan came up with "the car for every purse and purpose": Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. You'd sort of work your way up that ladder, so they'd have a lifetime value of a customer. It was very modern in many ways. That's the world of market segmentation. You see this in lots of different industries. When a new industry is developed, everybody flows into it. Then a couple of leaders sort of organize the market, and then new entrants attack by segmentation. So that's fragmentation, unification, segmentation.Corporate Combat: Case Studies in Marketing HistoryAndrew Mitrak: You've alluded to how you illustrate these phases with case studies: the Cola Wars (Coke versus Pepsi), which has come up a lot on this podcast—it's a fascinating way to look at that battle and draw marketing history lessons. Ford versus General Motors, which you just spoke about. Then there's also the story of A&P, once one of America's most popular retailers, though probably not a household name today. And the story of Sears Roebuck. I'll start with the first two: Coke versus Pepsi, and Ford versus GM. There's this corporate combat narrative approach. Why did you settle on that narrative, or what makes it so appealing for drawing lessons from history, seeing these companies duking it out?Richard Tedlow: Because there's built-in drama, first of all. Secondly, you actually can, by seeing the conflict between the companies, see how marketing progresses. For example, Coke and Pepsi. Coca-Cola was the brand beyond competition. I have quotes in the book; one American soldier in Burma during World War II said, "I think I'm in this damn mess to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes." That's brand loyalty. If you're willing to take a bullet for a brand, that's brand loyalty. Coca-Cola was the brand beyond competition. How do you compete with that?Pepsi came up with a way. It had been bankrupt in the mid-1920s, but in the 1930s, they came up with "twice as much for a nickel, too, Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you." The idea of twice as much for a nickel during the Depression, when Coca-Cola was selling a 6.5-ounce bottle for a nickel, you could sell a 12-ounce cola for a nickel—that had enormous price appeal. That's how they entered the market; Coca-Cola provided a price umbrella.Seeing this conflict, to me, made more sense than reading articles in the Harvard Business Review or the Journal of Marketing. I wanted it to be not a history of what academics had said about marketing, but a history of what business people did to market. That conflict provided drama, and also a sense of progress.The Strategy of Finding an Enemy: Duopolies and CompetitionAndrew Mitrak: For marketers and business leaders, is proactively finding an enemy or archnemesis a good part of strategy? It seems like some categories become almost duopolies with iconic two companies. Then there are markets like Coke and Pepsi (though more fragmented now) or Ford vs. GM (also more fragmented now) that were once dominated by two major brands. Is drawing lessons from history about these duopoly dynamics something marketers should proactively think about and strategize around?Richard Tedlow: When it's a duopoly, in one sense it's good because you're measuring yourself against a competitor you understand. In another sense, it's bad because you need to think out of the box. You need radar spotting the next competitor. Companies that don't do that... Intel was a great company in the 1990s. What the hell happened? By 1999, Intel had basically a monopoly on the microprocessor, a device vital for life in the 21st century, and they lost it. Nvidia, now the headline company, was founded in 1993. How did they miss that, especially with Andy Grove, who always said, "Only the paranoid survive" (a bestseller)? It's important to have competitors, but it's important to focus on the smartest competitors you can find. That's what companies sometimes don't do.The Cautionary Tale of A&PAndrew Mitrak: I also want to ask about A&P, a company many listeners might not know, but it was once as well-known as McDonald's. Why focus on them? What's the cautionary tale of A&P?Richard Tedlow: The first part of the book is from the manufacturer's view. The second, Sears and A&P, is from the retailer's view. Sears marketed everything except food. A&P marketed food—and you need food, clothing, and shelter to make it through the day. A&P stocked America's pantries; it was the power retailer of its time. It also managed a remarkable transition during the 1930s from thousands of small stores to fewer, larger stores because the automobile revolution made it possible to drive to a market rather than go to one on a streetcar and stock up. They managed that transition very well.The question was, having managed this enormous change so well, what went wrong that made it difficult for them to manage change in the future? That's what that chapter is about. A&P was always looking for the next depression, which led them to sign one-year leases, meaning they couldn't get the best store locations. They were also deeply devoted to private label because they were vertically integrated. When I was a kid, they'd sell Ann Page sugar frosted flakes. Kellogg's was selling Tony the Tiger, which you're probably much too young to remember...Andrew Mitrak: I remember, “They're great!”Richard Tedlow: "They're Gr-r-reat!" That's right, exactly.Imagine you're shopping with a young kid shouting for Tony the Tiger. Are you going to say, "You know what? You can get Ann Page, they're just as good and five cents cheaper"? The kid has a psychotic episode. You don't need to be screamed at much to say, "I'm going to another supermarket and get Tony the Tiger because that's what's coming to me over my TV," which was widely distributed by the 1950s. That was a revolution A&P did not manage well.A&P in Mad Men: A Metaphor for Decline?Andrew Mitrak: One way I'd heard of A&P before this book is from the show Mad Men. Have you seen the show Mad Men?Richard Tedlow: YesSpoiler Alert - Please skip this paragraph if you have not watched the show Mad Men and plan to watch it in the future.Andrew Mitrak: I'm a big fan of the show. It probably like also got me somewhat interested in this historical part of marketing. A&P appears a few times, and it always seems to coincide with a character dying or something bad happening. A grandpa character dies in line at A&P—his generation would have shopped there. A copywriter, down on his luck, starts working at A&P, almost symbolizing his character's death. That’s the last time they refer to him on the show. Then Betty, the main character's wife, is seen shopping at A&P in the last season, and her end is… not good. It's like A&P is used as a metaphor for dying.Richard Tedlow: It didn't end well.The story doesn’t end well for A&P. The company was incapable of reinventing itself. Its owners, John and George Hartford, were elderly men. They turned the company over to a man who might have revived it, but he died of a heart attack early. Then it was in the hands of Ralph Burger—you'd think perfect for a food store, but it didn't work out. The book quotes an A&P executive: "Cleanliness and courtesy standards, freshness and quality control standards, shelf stocking and checkout standards, and store morale all deteriorated at the same grinding, steady pace." It happened step-by-step. It's the frog in the boiling water story. Before you knew it, you had a boiled frog, and they couldn't compete, while competitors like Safeway and Kroger are still in business.Andrew Mitrak: It's interesting to see the counter-cycle. A&P with its private labels, then supermarkets with big brands. A&P dies, and then places like Trader Joe's or Whole Foods emerge, almost as a counter-reaction, filling that gap.Richard Tedlow: Here's a question for you: What did Jeff Bezos do first when he bought Whole Foods?Andrew Mitrak: I remember seeing Amazon Echos next to the bananas.Richard Tedlow: The very first thing: he cut prices on a lot of items. If you want to enter a market, price is key. There are two ways to compete: on price or on something else. He came in with price. Whole Foods has its private label, but overwhelmingly, if you go to Stop & Shop or Safeway, they're private label. You can do it that way.The Fourth Phase: Hyper-Segmentation in the Internet AgeAndrew Mitrak: You published this book at the dawn of the internet age. In later writings, you talked about a fourth phase of hyper-segmentation. Can you share about this or other phases that might have happened after the book's publication?Richard Tedlow: The internet and social media mean companies now know so much about their customers they can have "markets of one." The dream in the 1990s was to turn marketing into a conversation, not just "buy this, buy this." The amount of data big companies have about buyers and potential buyers is unprecedented. Any book on marketing history now would have to fully grasp what this fourth phase means. That's not easy, but it can be done. There's room for somebody.Andrew Mitrak: Do you think those four phases have held up since you introduced them?Richard Tedlow: Historically, they've held up pretty well as a description of what happened in the 1910s, 20s, 30s. It's a good pattern. It's an idea, not just one story after another. The important thing about introducing a pattern is that people can attack it, like Coke and Pepsi did to one another. In the clash of ideas, you grow. Intellectually, life isn't a seesaw. If you come up with an idea and someone else comes up with another, we're both better off. If it stimulates thought... there have been books written incorporating this, not just in marketing. The Economics of Strategy by David Besanko (not my field) uses Coke and Pepsi as an example of attacking an entrenched incumbent. That's not easily answered. But incumbents also have dilemmas: how do you change when you're winning? These are questions the study of history surfaces. This gets back to something I said earlier: history may not give you answers and doesn't repeat itself, but it will give you questions. Then you, with the corner office and big salary, come up with the answers.The Historian's Challenge: Models vs. Messy RealityAndrew Mitrak: I'm trying to figure this out through the podcast. I'm collecting interviews, hearing diverse perspectives on marketing history. I was surprised how contentious little parts of history are, how it's not settled, and there's more debate than I expected. Your frameworks (company strategy, transportation, communications, consumer behavior) make perfect sense and fit these phases. But then you see "whataboutism"—what about this edge case that doesn't fit? How do you, as an historian, respond? You can have an elegant model, but it's a model, not the whole world, which is messy.Richard Tedlow: That's one of the great things about case method teaching at Harvard Business School. You can have a "what about" corner case as a case and ask students, "Is this the future or not?" Let them say. It's the difference between successful people and not. You have to keep a very open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. Within your company, you need principles that guide. For example, "Focus and simplify"—a wonderful instruction guiding Apple. The importance of making decisions that guide the customer.Steve Jobs believed the customer, especially with a path-breaking product, didn't know what they wanted. It was up to you, not necessarily to ask, but to tell. He always said if Henry Ford had done market research, they'd have said, "Get a faster horse," not "I want a Model T Ford." The market wouldn't have come up with that. Ken Kocienda's book, Creative Selection, about his time as a software engineer at Apple with Steve Jobs, is, though not a marketing book, perhaps the best marketing book I've read. It shows how Jobs made decisions, like the keyboard on the MacBook. It's an education. A classic example of "focus and simplify." Why is that so important? Variety is expensive, complexity is hard to manage. If you focus and simplify, you're ahead. There are principles like that at Apple, but they don't necessarily tell you the next step, but they tell you how to take it. That's wonderful.Systems vs. Individuals: The Entrepreneurial SparkAndrew Mitrak: I'm adding Creative Selection to my reading list. This idea of Jobs, Apple, and Ford brings up a tension in your work: systems and frameworks versus individual entrepreneurs who break the mold. How do you reconcile these when telling these stories?Richard Tedlow: I'm very intrigued. We started with Al Chandler. Strategy and Structure lists companies from the high tide of American business in 1962. Most are dead. What happened? Bureaucratization makes it very, very hard to think about step-function change. Why didn't Sears become Amazon? Sears was the most trusted company, had a national warehouse network, stores everywhere. Why not Sears Web Services? Because Jeff Bezos never would have worked for that bureaucratized company. He had an entrepreneur's soul. Amazon lost money for a long time before becoming a powerhouse. He joked he should have called it amazon.org. But he had an idea, understood how technology would revolutionize retail, and he's smart. That's Amazon. Sears and Kmart don't exist anymore. It's intriguing how difficult it is for an established company to reinvent itself with a step-function change in the environment in which you are doing business. For Bezos, that environment was technology. Sears couldn't reconceptualize its business for the new tools. You needed someone young, hungry, and smart. It's very, very hard for these companies to reinvent themselves.From Surveys to Biographies: Tedlow's Shifting FocusAndrew Mitrak: Pulling on this thread of individual case studies: New and Improved is a survey of business history. You wrote another survey of PR, Keeping the Corporate Image. Then your work shifted more towards biographies of specific companies like IBM and Andy Grove at Intel. You also wrote about broader ideas like denial and charismatic business leadership. It seems there's this historical survey of trends, then you get more specific with individuals, and then you take another specific angle on phenomena like denial. Why the shift from surveys to biographies, and what's the role of each for a business historian and educator?Richard Tedlow: They have to coexist. A lasting biography takes both “the life” and “the times.” You've got to put those together. That's an exciting adventure. The wonderful thing about biography is that, in a certain sense, the biography organizes itself. One thing comes after another as whoever the subject is grows. Somehow it's more, literally, more human. You get a sense of who the individual is making decisions, how this individual pursued his or her career, what decisions they had to make.Andy Grove, for example, talks about the strategic inflection point. That's the point at which your company either takes off or declines. It is intriguing that you get to these nodes, these places where, if you go right instead of left, there are turning points. You've got to make the right decision at those moments.Lessons from Apple’s HistoryIt's very interesting, if you look at Apple's history, to see why these people opened stores in the early 2000s. Gateway Computer, which you've heard of...Andrew Mitrak: I have. I remember visiting a Gateway store out in the boonies, maybe near a Best Buy, but its own place.Richard Tedlow: Why do you suppose that is?Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure you have a better answer, but I'd guess it's not enough of a destination for foot traffic. Apple opened stores in malls or iconic places, beautiful buildings that welcome you in high-traffic, often affluent areas. Maybe it's a choice of place. Driving out to a Gateway seems antiquated.Richard Tedlow: What Apple did was reconceptualize the retail experience. First of all, I think to this day, I don't know how many stores they have, call it 500, maybe more. But when they opened those first stores, it was a place you went to get educated about the product. You're right, you didn't go to the boondocks to shop at Apple. You went to a mall, and it would be right across from Victoria's Secret or a Nike store. Very high traffic. That broke the mold. These are consumer durables, expensive products. Apple has been a premium-priced company selling premium-priced products. Steve Jobs thought it needed explanation and love.He reconceptualized the retail experience for computers. He did this after Gateway, my recollection is, closed its stores. They tried being their own retailer, closed their stores. He opened his when the company was very small. What a wild thing to do.Steve Jobs and the iPhone LaunchBy the way, the introduction of the iPhone, maybe the most important consumer product of the 21st century, was in 2007. If you look at Steve Jobs's keynote that day, which I think is still online...Andrew Mitrak: It's on YouTube. I've watched it more times than I can count.Richard Tedlow: It was about 82 minutes long. There are fascinating things about it. First, he understands it's an internet connectivity device, a phone, an iPod. The iPod arguably is the product that made Apple. There's a beautiful book, The Perfect Thing. The iPod was the perfect thing. Jobs understood if you could incorporate this into a phone, someone else would. Either we do it or someone else does. So he decided to do it: an iPod, a phone, and an internet connectivity device, three in one. But if you look at that keynote, he mentions the camera in like one minute: "By the way, it has a 2-megapixel rear-facing camera." I don't know if this is true, but my guess is that camera is one of the top five apps on the phone. How many photographs are uploaded to the cloud every day? Steve Jobs himself, and also the App Store, he didn't fully appreciate what he had there. But somehow it was open enough so it could grow into this unbelievable product.Andrew Mitrak: My guess is also the level of focus. Storytelling is an editing process; it's what you leave out. As a great pitchman, he knew if you included all ideas—four things in one, or it's also a calculator—it's too much for the brain. Three is an elegant, magic number. Even if he included the camera (probably my favorite app on the phone, I use it a lot), I wouldn't remember it the same way if it was four in one versus three.Richard Tedlow: I think there's truth to that. That keynote was a remarkable display of what he had and the team he had. People yelling and screaming in the audience, all Apple engineers. It was a joyous moment, and it gave you a sense of how exciting it is to play on a winning team in business. He was able to construct that. That's part of the company's strength that Tim Cook, one of the great business executives in American history, took that ball and ran with it. Boy, did he. It's fantastic.Teaching at Harvard vs. Apple UniversityAndrew Mitrak: We're talking about Apple. You were a teacher at Apple University and spent a big chunk of your career as a professor of business history at Harvard. How do those two experiences compare? Did people immediately understand the benefits of learning business history, or did you have to paint the picture of why it matters today?Richard Tedlow: There was no need to sell it at Apple. One of the biggest differences is that at Apple, you didn't have to grade papers. I'd have 200 students a year; that was three weeks of grading for the final, and early in my career, midterms too. That was hard. Also, at Harvard Business School, there was a forced curve. Very smart students, but 10-15% you had to give the lowest grade to. That was hard. You didn't have to deal with that at Apple.You didn't have to sell history because at Apple, you weren't so much teaching history as teaching decision points. Since you knew how things turned out, you could dissect something and say, "Okay, I can tell you this decision resulted badly. I want you to tell me why." So here's the story. You tell me what went wrong and where. You learn that at Harvard Business School. One of the first cases I taught in marketing was a salesman's diary. It was, you know, on September 12th this happened, on October 5th this happened. I'll never forget this case. The guy lost a sale. All you had to do was say to the students, "All right, here are dates. The guy kept a diary. Where did he lose the sale?" That happened. It's the past. But this is a dilemma any salesperson faces. What went wrong and where? Cases like that you could teach anywhere; it's a pleasure.Dystopias and Demagogues: History as a WarningAndrew Mitrak: I also want to ask about Substack and Dystopias and Demagogues. It's a Substack I read, and the stakes feel higher compared to your other work. I read it, I recommend it. I wouldn't say I enjoy it, but "enjoy" might not be the right word because it gives me anxiety. I think that's partly the point: using historical examples to ring alarm bells. Can you tell me about Dystopias and Demagogues and your process?Richard Tedlow: I'd be delighted to. I started writing this in August to explain to myself what was going on in the United States. I publish on Tuesdays at noon Eastern Time. I don't try to write daily like some, but that's not me. I want to use what's going on today as a hook, but I'm an historian, so I want to go back and say, "What can we learn from the past?" For example, this country, and I never would have said this 15 years ago, seems to be turning its back on democracy. That's very dangerous.History can tell you what has happened to countries that made that choice, what the symptoms are, and perhaps suggest solutions. I'm 77 now, so the clock is ticking for me. When I look at the country, I'm more concerned about its future than ever. Being an historian, I think the country is in more trouble now than ever, including the Great Secession Winter of 1860-61. We're getting warnings that many people are discontent. As a result, we have the president we have now. It's unclear to me if he's a cause or a symptom. That's something I try to work out.I also believe Dystopias and Demagogues has encouraged me to realize even more vividly the importance of history. George Orwell said, "He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." I believe that's true. History has never been as important as now. It's distressing that so many universities are losing focus on history due to expense and the need for practical knowledge, which I understand. Nevertheless, studying history helps tease out fact from fiction. A classic example: what happened in Germany from 1919 to 1933, the Weimar Republic. Life was difficult for statesmen there because of the "stab in the back" belief: that Germany hadn't lost WWI but was betrayed by leftists, Social Democrats, communists, and Jews. The result of that myth was, in part, Adolf Hitler becoming Chancellor in 1933, leading to 12 years of hell.A lot of that was because of a mistaken belief in history. Germany lost WWI on the battlefield. There were revolts, a revolution, the Kaiser was kicked out. Germany's allies had given up. The war was going to end. But because of misunderstanding what happened, horrible things took place. An acute, honest understanding of the past is very important in moving forward. That's what Dystopias and Demagogues is about.I agree, it's not like New and Improved, which has laughs. The Cola Wars are fun. The current situation isn't as enjoyable. But it's important to face facts. That's what I try to do. It's also a way to keep in touch with thousands of former students. I love hearing from them, taking their advice, learning from lead users—very important. Anyway, that's the story.Andrew Mitrak: The current situation can evoke many feelings, and sometimes people don't know what to do. I'm glad you've found this productive outlet, writing these thoughtful historical essays. It's an example of doing something productive instead of just venting. I publish this podcast on Substack weekly too, and having a weekly practice is something I've personally enjoyed.Richard Tedlow: It organizes your life positively.Andrew Mitrak: Aside from subscribing to Dystopias and Demagogues, where else can listeners find your work?Richard Tedlow: I don't think so. I have books through Amazon. Giants of Enterprise I enjoyed writing very much. It was a number of years ago. But it's fun to re-engage with business executives like Sam Walton or women like Oprah Winfrey or Mary Kay Ash. These are remarkable, often "think different" stories. It was fun to research and write about them. That's online if anyone's interested—Apple Books or Kindle.Andrew Mitrak: Great. Richard Tedlow, thanks so much for your time. I've really enjoyed this conversation and appreciate your work. I look forward to reading more of your books.Richard Tedlow: Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to chat with you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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• Laura Ries: Pioneers of Positioning and the Immutable Laws of Branding

  A History of Marketing / Episode 19This week I’m excited to be joined by Laura Ries, a leading marketing strategist, speaker, and bestselling author. Laura is also the daughter of Al Ries (1926-2022), the legendary marketer who's best known for popularizing the concept of positioning, along with his partner and co-author, Jack Trout (1935-2017). Laura and Al Ries co-founded RIES, the global positioning strategy & consulting firm and co-authored several books together including The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, and The Origin of Brands.We talk about all of this in our conversation, and we cover Laura Ries’s upcoming work “The Strategic Enemy,” which will hit bookshelves this fall.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsLaura is a world-class speaker and strategist, and this conversation is full of useful marketing advice and case studies including: * Coors Beer and their missed opportunity to own the “Light Beer” category* The .Com Bubble (Pets.com & Webvan) and how massive advertising budgets couldn’t overcome weak credibility and a lack of positioning fundamentals* How The Gap successfully launched Old Navy to expand their market share without extending their brand* And much moreNow, here's my conversation with Laura Ries.Note - I use an AI tool to transcribe the audio of my conversations to text. I check the output but it’s possible there are mistakes I missed. I have lightly edited parts of this transcript for clarity.Laura Ries: Born into MarketingAndrew Mitrak: Laura Ries, welcome to A History of Marketing.Laura Ries: Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.Andrew Mitrak: I'm excited to have a conversation about positioning, branding, your amazing career as an author and marketing consultant. But to start, I want to ask about your background. How did you first become a marketer?Laura Ries: Well, I was born into it, shall we say. I was the only child of my father's (Al Ries) second and forever marriage to my mom, Mary Lou. And at an early age, just sitting at the dinner table, what did we talk about? Marketing. My dad was a great teacher. He loved to tell stories, and I always loved the story. We'd always have this little TV with the bunny ears. We'd always watch MASH at dinner. My dad had served in Korea with the army, and so he loved the show, I loved the show, but the commercials were where he shined. He would talk about the ads and what the companies were doing right and wrong. And he talked to me and my mom as if we were adults, as if we were the CEOs of these companies, and we could actually change something.But it was a great introduction and really got me excited about the whole industry and the business. And of course, when I was little, he took me to the office in Manhattan where he had an advertising agency for many, many years. And I just, I just soaked it all up, and it just seemed so interesting and cool.And then later on, it wasn't until my teens, the “Positioning” book came out in 1981. And a few years later, I don't know why, but I picked it up, and I was like, "Let me just see this thing my dad apparently wrote." And that changed everything. The book, as many people know, is amazing, but it really tuned me in. It was written in such a clear and funny and interesting way. And from that day on, I just knew that's what I wanted to do with my life.Andrew Mitrak: That's amazing. You grew up with it, and in middle school, you read "Positioning." I bet that's younger than the usual reader for "Positioning." So, this is your father, Al Ries. And you shared a portion of your upcoming book with me, "Strategic Enemy," and you have this beautiful afterword that's dedicated to your dad, Al Ries. And you describe watching MASH and seeing these commercials. Do you remember any specific commercials or critiques that he had that come to mind from that era?How Coors Could have Owned the Light Beer CategoryLaura Ries: Well, really, one of his most famous stories and the critique was about Coors. And during that time, my dad actually had some meetings with Coors where he flew out to Colorado. And he got to Colorado, and he went to a bar, and he was like, "Give me a local beer." And the bartender was like, "You mean a Colorado Kool-Aid?" My dad was like, "A what?"Denver is the Mile High City. Coors was naturally a lighter beer. And that wasn't something most people knew. And so he would go on and on about this story. And he told them on multiple occasions, "Don't line extend." Miller Lite was making headway, Bud Light hadn't launched yet. "Be the original light beer without the 'light,' you know, in the name." And he was so passionate. He was like, "It would have been such a great success." And they didn't do it, and it crushed him. And he would tell the story over and over.And I always like to say, when I was a teenager, I mean, you'd just like, "Oh, roll your eyes," like, "He's going to tell it again." And it's funny because he didn't repeat it because he forgot he told us. He did it to make a point that the more you repeat something, the more powerful, the more memorable, and even the more believable it is. So, he was a great storyteller in that regard. And so, I do remember many of those stories that he would tell over and over again.Andrew Mitrak: It's so funny. When I picture Coors, I picture Coors Light in a way. That is what comes to mind. Why is that? They are a diluted brand because you're split across multiple things. They're most associated with light. They also try to capture this idea of cold, which is a funny idea too.Laura Ries: Well, originally it was such a cult following. It was only in the, it was Rocky Mountain water, it was in the Rocky Mountains. I mean, there was a tremendous PR effort around it. Even Smokey and the Bandit, the whole movie was about bootlegging Coors across the country because you couldn't get it on the East Coast.But they missed out on an important opportunity to not, while they were successful with Coors Light, what if it had just been Coors? What if Coors alone could dominate that new category of light beer? And again, it goes back to my new book, "Strategic Enemy," but the enemy would have been regular beer, right? Coors could have owned it. When you have your one name on two things, who's the enemy? Right? You can't say that your regular beer sucks or that your light beer is watered down. It puts you in a very precarious situation. So, when you do have a brand that stands for one thing, has a very specific enemy, your message can be so much more powerful.Laura Ries’s Early Marketing CareerAndrew Mitrak: So, I'm going to go behind the scenes a little bit. In advance of recording this podcast, I sent my questions in advance. And I wanted to ask you if there were any other influences you had when it came to marketing. And it was beautiful that you said, "Nope, it was pretty much just my dad, Al Ries." And I'm wondering, did you ever take marketing courses, or were there ever other marketers who tried to teach you? Because I imagine if you grew up in a household with one of the best marketing teachers in the world, it would be, you'd be a tough student. So, did you have any encounters like that when it came to learning marketing from others?Laura Ries: Well, there are so many stories. My first job out of college, I had an internship at TBWA Advertising, right there on Madison Avenue. And I was on the account team for Evian and later Woolite. And then later got a job there. I worked for a whole year there before going to work with my father. But it was very interesting during that time, and I had a lot of opinions and insights. And I did work with great people. Louise was my superior, and she was just, how she worked with clients, and many people at the agency. I met Bill Tragos and many of the bigwigs. The agency launched the Absolut campaign and so had a great history.And it really was fun to be in the agency and to know what it was like to just be a low-level executive in that experience. But I had such aspirations. And what my dad was able to tell clients, I really liked that. I mean, when you're an agency, you have to be very careful, and you can't tell them exactly what you think. I mean, you're trying, you're trying to sell advertising, right? You're not necessarily selling the strategy. So, that's what I really learned. I didn't want to be in the position of selling advertising; I wanted to help companies figure out what to do.Now, listen, at 22, I had no idea what I was doing. But I was spunky, and my dad was just so generous with his time. And so, I look back at my career with my father. We were, he passed at almost 96 years old, so tremendous longevity of his life. And he was working until the absolute very end. But in those decades, that first decade, I was just learning from him, right? Soaking it up. I was a young kid. I would go with him on every session, every speech, and it was just amazing.And then, into that second decade, well, I have my own experience, and particularly I had a lot of insight into female-type of categories and new technologies that he was very willing to listen to me on. And then, in the last decade, really leading the company, and also really honoring him and his induction to the Marketing Hall of Fame, and allowing him to really work as much as he could. And he really enjoyed it. And so, it was so special. I mean, maybe he couldn't travel to every speech, but we would work on the slides together.And one of the last memories. He had fallen and broken his hip, and things were going down. And he wanted me to give a presentation. And so I went over, he had worked on some of my Visual Hammer slides. And so, the family and I gathered around while my dad was in the hospital bed with a big TV, and I would do the slides, and he hammered me. He's like, "Slow down. You've got to wait, pause. Don't stumble through this." And it was, it was really magical because my whole life, he was always teaching me, guiding me. And I hold that, you carry that with you. I carry those, those feelings and those memories, but also now able to really, after so many years, have my own ideas. And that's really exciting too.Andrew Mitrak: That's beautiful. That long collaboration between a father and daughter is really a special thing. And you mentioned that your father passed away a few years ago at almost 96 years old, so remarkable longevity.How Ries & Trout Popularized PositioningAndrew Mitrak: On your website, on ries.com, you pay tribute to the history of positioning and the history of Ries and your collaborations. And you tell the story of many of the major milestones that your father contributed to. So it's, it's great as somebody who's interested in marketing history, it's great that you're preserving and carrying on that history. And can you tell the story for listeners of how Al Ries and his collaborator Jack Trout first became interested in this idea of positioning? Because it wasn't, it wasn't really a household word within marketing at the time that they got started with it.Laura Ries: No, not off the bat. And it is a great story. I mean, my dad was kind of one of the madmen of Madison Avenue, as was Jack Trout, in the 60s. And he worked in PR and at advertising agencies, and very early on, he struck out to start his own agency, Ries Cappiello Colwell, in 1963. And very exciting, but he was a young advertising company. They had mostly business-to-business clients. Jack later joined the agency. He was on Uniroyal, one of their clients, and then came over to the agency.But the problem that they faced was, how do they build their agency, right? Unless you have big clients. And so they were trying to make a mark. And that's where the, the, the first idea of positioning came about, was how do we differentiate our agency? And it was at that time, the big word around Madison Avenue was David Ogilvy and creativity. And it was said creativity could do the job of 10 ads if you had one creative one. And the entire focus on the industry was over creativity. And while early on, they might be effective, and if you had a lot of money, but it wasn't for every company.And so, what they thought about was, initially, the rational approach. And then my dad had the idea to call it "the rock." So, every ad had to have a rock. And what that rock was, was an indisputable idea, something that the mind wouldn't challenge. So, he was starting to get into the notion that it wasn't just what you're communicating, but the most important thing was getting in the mind. And so, to make it as easy as possible, again, most advertising today is puffery and claims, "We're the best this and the best that." Is that believable? No. When you say it, it's not believable at all.But for one client, Uniroyal had the most patents ever, right? I mean, that was not disputable. People actually believed that. Or when you say, you don't do something, that's also very believable. So, this idea of the rock they kind of threw around, and it was actually Jack who said, "Why don't we call it positioning or a position?" And Al thought that was a great idea. So, they renamed it positioning and started writing articles and doing speeches.And really, the big break was when my father was giving a speech where Rance Crain, the owner and editor of Advertising Age, the bible of the industry, especially back then, loved the speech. And he said, "Al, like, how about you write an article?" And my father was like, "Great." I mean, and in fact, it was a series of three articles. And that really blew everything up. And what did it do? It created a lot of controversy. All the creative people said, "What are these crazy positioning guys talking about?"But that's what drives interest, that drives attention, and that drives the positioning idea into the mind. And it was this battle between positioning-focused approaches to marketing versus creative-only approaches. And I think positioning did a very good job along in that battle. And most companies today, that word "positioning" is used around the world. The book was successful not just here, but globally. And that's why my father and I have been to over 60 countries, because of the acceptance of the idea of positioning. And today, over 50 years later, the interest and importance of the idea that successful brands need to take into account positioning. It's not just innovation, but Peter Drucker said innovation and marketing, but I think it's positioning that is most important.Positioning vs. Creativity: The Madison Avenue DebateAndrew Mitrak: And there is a funny sort of meta story to that of them kind of drinking their own Kool-Aid and using positioning to position themselves against other advertising agencies to stand apart. So, just a lesson right there, to marketing yourself as a marketer. And so, you mentioned how when they published these articles, which by the way, are republished on your website ries.com, and it was great to read through them in the original format. But you mentioned how there was this industry response that was controversial. And do you recall any of the examples of the controversy around it?Laura Ries: Yeah, I mean, it was tremendously controversial. To think back and luckily, my dad was very good at preserving things. So, we have many of the old articles that talked about the craziness. The creative community was really trying to defend that, but also, companies saw the opportunity of using positioning type approaches. And then many successful examples, right? Avis is number two because they try harder. And many companies started to get in on this notion of, again, thinking about in the mind of the consumer, what's the open hole? What position can we occupy? And of course, the most important position to own is leadership of the category itself. And that led to many successful later books expanding on the notions of positioning.How “Positioning” Shaped Marketing in the 1980s onwardAndrew Mitrak: So, they published these articles in the early 70s, and then in 1981, they published "Positioning," which is the book you mentioned earlier, is the book that you read in middle school. And it's called "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind." And it became one of the...Laura Ries: Right here!Andrew Mitrak: You have it, you have it handy. Do you just have all the books handy right in front of you? That's amazing.Laura Ries: Of course, I got all the books, I'm a marketing person! It still sells well. And I mean, obviously, many of the examples are old, but they still hold true of the principle of positioning. And very interesting to read.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, absolutely. The examples totally hold true, and there's, I certainly believe there's a lot of lessons in them. And if you were to describe the impact that it had on marketing as a practice, are there any examples that you'd cite of how marketing in the 80s and 90s, following the publication of this book, how it became really a different practice than it was prior to positioning being a key idea?Laura Ries: It's funny. I did study marketing in some ways in college. I took a couple of classes. I was a communications major. And I did take an advertising class. And of course, I was very excited to get the book, the textbook, which my dad actually knew the guy that wrote the textbook. But there was a whole chapter on my father and Jack and positioning and everything. And I was so excited. I will say the professor was not too excited with me. But, he couldn't show favoritism or anything like that. But it was kind of very fun for me to see my father's name in that textbook.And it changed everything, right? It made the textbook. I mean, how could you get more important than that? But really, it changed how people thought about marketing. I mean, it was really that, it was the communication going out was the focus of what do we want to say? Who are we? What do we want to tell people? And it flipped the script. And instead of thinking about it from just the, from us to them, is first to think of the mind. And what's in the mind today? And what will the mind accept? And is there a new category opportunity? And then thinking about things like line extension and how that impacts how the brand is thought of and stored and even talked about within the mind itself. I think there's been a lot more emphasis on the mind because of positioning when it comes to branding and companies. And so that's been so exciting.But the other thing is that some people still violate them. We've written books on the immutable laws, right? And there, there are still many violations out there. So, it does keep the work exciting and important and shows that it's a challenge. Many of the things about marketing are not logical. We say that marketing isn't like math. In math, 1 + 1 always equals 2. In marketing, it's sometimes the opposite. 1 + 1 might equal a half, meaning the more things you expand, the weaker your brand becomes. And why 3 - 1 might equal 4. Because once you narrow the focus, you might have some, a much stronger message that you can promote, get attention for, create controversy. All of these things generate.The 22 Immutable Laws of MarketingAndrew Mitrak: You mentioned those immutable laws, and one of the books that your father, Al Ries, published was "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing." Can you share any background on the creation of this book?Laura Ries: Well, yeah, I mean, again, I have the props here. Excellent book. Yeah, that was in the, what, was like 91, I think. But it was, it was simple. And part of their message in terms of what positioning was, is the more you can oversimplify an idea to make it short, simple, memorable, the better it will be received. And so, really, the goal of that book was to put these principles into little snippets, little short, 22 chapters of ideas that people could really remember, understand. It was a quick read. It definitely is again, one of their, their best books and best-selling books because it really does really pack a punch of, of really making those ideas super simple and super clear.Andrew Mitrak: Do you happen to know, this is probably the only place where I've ever come across the word "immutable." I don't see it very often. It's just, but, do you remember how they came up with immutable and how they settled on 22?Laura Ries: Well, I, I don't. I mean, they started working with HarperCollins. So, the original books were with McGraw Hill, and then Harper was a great partner. Al, and our, the books that I wrote with him were with Harper. We had a long relationship with them. And Adrian Zackheim was the editor, and he was just amazing. And they had a great collaboration. So, I imagine it was a back and forth. They wanted a shocking word. Again, the title and the cover are super important in books. And so, having some sort of word that wasn't usual, was really a big part of it.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that's right. It's funny to see how you market marketing ideas as well and how they come up with a striking word like that that is just so ownable. And as you mentioned, there are other books you published that continue on this idea of 22 or 11 or, so those numbers...Laura Ries: Yeah, well, and being different, right? I mean, when you use a word that is known but isn't used that frequently, it gets your attention. And so, books and ideas also have to be positioned. And names and visuals are incredibly important. So, we try to, and all, believe me, we've had many fights with publishers over the covers. And not all of them are our favorites, but we certainly have a few.Building Ries & Ries: Father-Daughter DynastyAndrew Mitrak: Around the time that this book comes out in the early 90s is, is the same time that you founded Ries & Ries together with your, with your dad. And what was it like going into marketing consulting as a young professional and going into business with your dad?Laura Ries: Well, I mean, it was, it was magical, honestly. It's funny, my dad always said, the most, after we started working together, the question he was asked most often after a meeting or presentation was, "How did you get your daughter to work with you?" You know, many successful entrepreneurs and business leaders are like, they wish their kids, especially their daughters, would come work for them. And the answer was, I never, I never pushed it. My dad never asked. It was, it was almost, it was unspoken. It was just a feeling between us. And I think the fact of when you tell a kid to do something, the last thing they do will be what you tell them to do. So, he definitely took that advice and didn't try to push it. But what he did was just so remarkable. And also his just willingness to teach me and not try to pretend like he was a big superstar, and just sit down with me.I mean, I have so many memories of working together, especially on projects. So, as young as the fifth grade, I was bringing my own slide projector to the class presentation, which I always joke, I mean, the other kids did think I was weird, but I always like to say I was practicing for my future. And he took an enormous amount of time to help me. And with those projects, I really learned how to break down ideas, how to visualize them, how to simplify them. So, whatever the topic was, it wasn't really about the topic, it was about learning how to present. And I mean, honestly, I just, I mean, I had a, I like to present, as you can maybe see. I don't mind being on camera. I love talking about ideas. And so it turned out to be a great fit.Andrew Mitrak: I think the first book that you published together was "The 11 Immutable Laws of Branding on the Net."Laura Ries: No, 22. Yeah, we did the 22 first.Andrew Mitrak: You did 22. Okay, so was this "Branding on the Net" or was this...? (*Note to readers: My research was wrong here, and this is why you can’t trust everything you read on the internet!)The 22 Immutable Laws of BrandingLaura Ries: This was, yeah, this was the book, "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding." And so, I started working with my dad in '93. Actually, the marketing one was in the late 80s, and then they had "Horse Sense." And then, I started working with him in '93. So, I helped him with the research on the book "Focus," which is another one of his really big, important books. It really breaks down the importance and as well as the impact on a company's financials of when you, when you focus a corporation. So, I was there and saw the whole process with him, and it was super exciting. And then we pitched the idea for the, the "22 Immutable Laws of Branding," which also the publisher was interested in exploring into, branding was becoming a big, a big and bigger buzzword.So, yes, so we worked together on that. And again, he was so generous to make me a co-author and allow me to participate in that. But it was super fun, just you have to work out all the chapters and the order and the examples and the research, which was much harder to do back then. I mean, we subscribed to probably 30, 40 magazines and newspapers, constantly, we had to rip them out and save them in folders. It's so much easier today with being able to use the internet to find this stuff. But he was very diligent about saving and reading. And that's really an incredibly important part of our process, is studying the case histories. So of course, we've worked on a couple hundred brands, but we've studied thousands and thousands more by reading their case histories of what made them successful. I think that's the most important thing for marketing, of how they get that brand in the mind? That's the big challenge. And it's very difficult, but once it's done, it's very powerful.Early Internet Marketing: Branding on the NetAndrew Mitrak: I didn't think about that. Researching these books and coming up with these case studies prior to the internet would have been so difficult. And you were coming up in your marketing career, building, building the consultancy, Ries & Ries, at this time as the internet was developing. And it sounds like you kind of extended that idea of the Immutable Laws of Branding to the idea of 11 Immutable Laws of Branding on the Net. And were you on...Laura Ries: The net came up and the publisher was like, "You've got to write something." So, I mean, we wrote that book really early on. I mean, it was right at the we probably were writing it in '99. You know, honestly, we did a pretty good job. I mean, not everything is accurate. I think we underestimated the power of search because we thought people would go right to websites. But the opportunity to find information once everything was on the internet became a truly big deal. But I think it's really important and our biggest message with that internet book, and it's the same with any brand, but there was the, the .com bubble was all about people wanting to use generic brand names. So, it was books.com or pets.com or business.com, which were going for millions and millions of dollars. And what we said was, "No, it's going to be brands. It's going to be Amazon, and it's going to be brands that are built for the internet."And also, then subsequently, in combination with that, was the importance of PR and not starting with advertising. Because while Webvan wasn't a generic name, they started with massive amounts of advertising and quickly went belly up. And of course, as you know, the cover of the "Fall of Advertising" book is the demolishing of the pets.com sock puppet, which really was the poster child of that era of using $50,000 in $50 million of advertising to launch a brand that had essentially no sales. Not good math. And instead, you have to have a obviously the right name, the right brand, and business strategy, but then using PR to gain credibility and allow it to go along with the rise of the company itself.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it's funny how these things come in cycles because then over the last few years, we saw a big rush to the .ai domain name and a lot of generic brands using just “something.ai” as their thing. And you just got to, got to learn the lessons of the previous era before you make the same mistakes all over again.Laura Ries: I know, and it's funny. I mean, history repeats itself. If you don't study history, you may be condemned to repeat it. I mean, it went back to Miller Lite. The original brand name was L-I-T-E. They tried to make it a new brand for a new category. But L-I-T-E is, it looks cute on a piece of paper, but how do things process in the brain? It's sound. And the sound is the same whether it's L-I-T-E or L-I-G-H-T. And that was a critical difference. And many companies today continue to even make that difference. I mean, Freshpet dog food, if you ask people, "Do you buy Freshpet?" I say, "Yep, I do. I ordered Farmer's Dog." Because that's a real brand name. You need both. You need a category name, and then you also will benefit from having a real brand name, one that has a capital letter.The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PRAndrew Mitrak: Over this course, there was, there was "Positioning," there was "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing." You co-authored "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding," so you kind of extended your marketing consultancy beyond just positioning to also doing branding. And then you write "The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR," which you were just alluding to, and it has this hilarious pets.com sock puppet deflated on the road.Laura Ries: I mean, if you haven't seen it, people have to see it. It's the best. Yes.Andrew Mitrak: It's great. What was it like kind of expanding the scope of your purview when it came to marketing consulting to, to be in branding, in PR as well? What did that look like for you as a professional?Laura Ries: First of all, we made a lot of friends in PR. I will say that.It is an interesting trajectory in terms of, my father ran an advertising agency, which is Ries Cappiello Colwell, then that was later in the late 70s named to Trout & Ries. But for 30 years, they were an advertising agency. And with the rise of positioning, however, they got attention from many big companies, as a matter of fact, even like Burger King hired them for strategy. And Burger King didn't want this little agency to do advertising for them. But positioning brought in clients for consulting. And so, by the 80s, the business was really half and half. So, they had half traditional advertising agency. They had 200 people in the Manhattan office. And then half of it was these kind of consulting projects. And they were, people are busy, they just do what they do, right? They were running around.But my dad was giving a speech in the 80s on positioning and on focus and all these important things, and the danger of line extension. And some fella in the audience raised his hand, his question was, "Why don't you follow your own advice? You're advertising and consulting." And my dad was like, "Hmm, you're right. You're absolutely right." But it was scary to lose what, half their revenue? I mean, that's incredibly scary, but they did it. So, the decision was, we're going to get out of advertising. We're only going to do what really made us world famous, which was positioning strategy. So, they took two years to shut down, wind down the agency, and he and Jack came in, I think '88, just strategy consultants. They had an office in Greenwich, Connecticut, out outside of the city to kind of make that distinction, and were just consultants. And that was one of the best things he ever did.The second best was, of course, working with me. Which was really fun. But it really was very, very important. So, it was then a decade of being in consulting and not in the ad agency business that we did write the book on PR. And all of the books essentially come from the experience working with clients where noticing what does work, what is happening, the downfall of companies that used massive advertising, most associated with a line extension, right? Companies choosing that route instead of new brands and seeing how things even as Botox was one of our great examples because it was not allowed to be advertised because it was an off-label usage of the drug. They had to use PR. And guess what? It became a multi, hundreds of million dollar product because of the massive amounts of PR and why nobody in America can frown anymore, or anywhere around the world because of Botox. So, it was examples like those. And of course, many others. I mean, Starbucks didn't advertise for 20 years, yet has built one of the best, most known global brands around the world.The funny story about "The Fall of Advertising," the initial name, because remember, a book title should be shocking. Listen, the immutable laws, I mean, sometimes companies can break them and be successful, but the name is shocking. You have to be shocking. So, the original name was "The Death of Advertising" or "The End of Advertising" or "The Death." I think it was “the death.” Yeah, we had a, our Rest in Peace. And we sent it, of course, Rance Crain became a very good friend of my father's. And he sent Rance a cover and a summary. And Rance said, "Al, you can't call it 'The Death of Advertising.' We can't write about it. Our magazine's called 'Advertising Age.' Can you tone it down a little?" And that's where we changed it to be "The Fall of Advertising." And it was literally one of the best moves we made because it, listen, the book didn't say that advertising was going to be over. It says that advertising is best used when a brand is established in the mind. It's necessary to reinforce a position. What should Starbucks do today? Massive advertising is what they should do. And they are making steps in that direction and have turned up the, you got to defend your leadership. Advertising is a defensive mechanism to keep, keep Dunkin' Donuts from getting too much attention, right? You got to hammer in what it is that Starbucks stands for. And that's coffee, and that's baristas, and that's the back to Starbucks strategy is trying to do that, go right back to what they focus on: coffee.Are Marketing “Laws” Breakable?Andrew Mitrak: Something you mentioned there is that you have these 22 immutable laws, but people can break them and still be successful. When you author a book that has these laws, do you get sick of people asking "but what about" type questions?Because of course, they're general principles, general guidance, right in most scenarios. But do you, do you kind of find that coming up a lot whenever you make a statement like this is a law?Laura Ries: Yes! But first of all, marketing is not like physics. Right? In physics, if there's one situation, and the whole law of gravity is gone, right? It doesn't work. In marketing, that's not true. I mean, yes, you can always find some company that violates the rules and still has some success.But what we have found, and where positioning had that very much in the 80s where people would say, "What about the Japanese, Al? What about GE, Al? GE puts their name on everything. Sony puts their name on everything." And at the time, his answer was, "Let's wait and see. I don't think it's long-term, the right strategy." Short-term, line extension can be successful. It's the long-term that it catches up with you.And look at GE, and IBM, and Sears, and Sony that have been undermined by their line extension strategy and the one name on everything strategy, as opposed to, say, Apple. Apple is the company, but they have a different brand name for each category, right? It was the Macintosh, it was the iPad, it was the iPhone. And so, that strategy long-term has been very successful.But also, the key in presentations, where you've got a Q&A at the end, we always try to loop in those ones we know we're going to get asked about. And so, we will talk about the GE strategy and why it may have worked initially, but long-term, and not successful. Again, when a company is 100 years old, it's a little different than you as a startup. You know, you can't be GE. You can't be Amazon. You have to be who you are.The other example we used to get asked about was Virgin and Richard Branson. And we got a great answer for that one. I mean, Richard Branson is a master of PR. He will dress in drag, he will show up in his underwear. He will do anything. Now, if your CEO will do this, well, then go ahead. But also, the numbers don't prove the success. They have not been successful in Virgin Cola, Virgin Vodka, Virgin wedding dresses, many of the crazy line extensions that they've gotten into. That short-term PR bump, long-term has not led to any sales.Andrew Mitrak: Bless them for trying. It's a really entertaining company and enjoyable to watch. But he's...Laura Ries: There's only a few of those kinds of people in the world. And listen, that's the, that's the key of positioning. Do you want to use the strategy that works 95% of the time? Or pin your hopes on being the exception? Pin your hopes on all of your competitors line extending, or your CEO is Richard Branson and able to get in the news every day. I mean, those are few and far between. Much better to have the right positioning, the right name, the right visual, will help you out much better.The Origin of BrandsAndrew Mitrak: You mentioned marketing is not physics, but you did write a book that ties branding to evolution a bit. It's "The Origin of Brands," kind of tying to "The Origin of Species." And can you share about that idea of how brands evolve and what your approach to telling the story and evolution of brands was?Laura Ries: That is a great book. We wanted more of the tree effect on the cover to represent the idea of what Darwin talked about. And that was really the divergence of species, of what he noticed was one species over time became multiple, and those were very different from one another. I mean, and so what we see is, it's not really the divergence of, of brands, but it's the divergence of the categories themselves, leaving opportunity for new brands to establish themselves. So, for example, in computers, what was a computer? Well, initially, that one tree was a mainframe computer, and IBM was the brand that got in the mind and owned the mainframe computer. And IBM said, "Terrific, that's our tree." But the thing happens is that that one category, computers, diverged over time and became mini computers, and then you had the software for computers, and you had personal computers, right? And palm computers. And what did IBM do?Well, they said, "That's our tree. We're going to put our IBM name on everything." Instead, they faced focused competitors that looked at every new branch on that tree and said, "I'm going to be Microsoft and focus on software," right? "I'm going to be Sun and focus on workstations. I'm going to be Dell and focus on personal computers." And those were the big winners. And that's exciting because it means there's always opportunity to beat even a company as big and as powerful as IBM, but not by copying them, but by looking for a new category opportunity.The big thing is that, and you know, funny to say it from someone who's lived their life in branding, people don't care about brands. They don't care. They care about categories.Now, the tricky thing is, they speak in brands. They think Red Bull is a great brand because it represents the energy drink category in the mind. And the energy drink is where the power is, and they were the pioneer of that new category and being the leader, being the pioneer is the most powerful position you can own. Now, there's also the opportunity, again, in that category, to be a number two brand. And sometimes the number two can even overtake the leader. But Monster did just that by being different, right? The 16-ounce can with the, with the name that communicated that, with the visual and the green and the monster truck things and everything else that goes along with it. In many markets, Monster sells more than Red Bull, which is a tremendous feat.Why “Positioning” EnduresAndrew Mitrak: I'm thinking about positioning that your father helped popularize more than 50 years ago. And if I think of all the buzzwords that have kind of come and gone, I could do a whole podcast about a lot of just those because there's so many, so many things that have come and gone. But positioning has this, this staying power. And I'm wondering, what's, what's your take on why that is? It seems like positioning's only gotten more important over the years. Why is that?Laura Ries: Well, I mean, it works. I mean, I think that's part of it. But it's also strategy versus tactics. So, many types of these buzzwords are tactical oriented, and tactics change all the time. I mean, we've seen the introduction in our lifetimes about the internet and social media, and now we have AI. And those are tactically where this is strategic. And it goes down to really just the fundamentals of the mind. And the mind doesn't change. I mean, we are all human. We continue to be human. And while our experiences may have changed, building your brand in the mind is the end goal. And positioning explains how that happens. It explains how to deal with competition, how to position whether you're first in a new category or you're competing against a competitor where you're trying, or you need to start a new category. And it deals with the importance of the brand name and the category name. It takes into effect so many different things. And again, it was first, right? So, it went up at a time where people weren't thinking in that direction. They were thinking about communication as the main emphasis of marketing and primarily using advertising.Positioning took the tactical side out of it and said, "Let's take it back to the fundamentals." And when you're the pioneer, that's a very strong position to have. And so, I think that that's also helped. But it's a great joy and it certainly brought my dad great joy to see that it was impactful. And his greatest hope was to help people. It really wasn't driven by money or fame; it was to work with companies, work with people. He loved to mentor people. People are brands. And that was tremendously important. I mean, listen, it was a very, my mother-in-law hates to hear it, but I did not take my husband's name, which back in my day was very unusual. But Ries was my brand, and I wasn't going to change my name to Brown. Most people don't think of themselves as a brand in that way, and they, they actually try to, "I'm going to just try harder. You know, I'm, I'm Laura Brown, and I should be just as successful." But you know what? I wouldn't have been. What my brand name was incredibly important, and it hasn't impacted psychologically in the mind to introduce someone, to get you through doors. And you should never overlook that. And don't throw away an opportunity to work with my father was, was one of those great opportunities. And so glad I took advantage of it.Advice for Building a Father-Daugher Marketing BusinessAndrew Mitrak: On that topic, on the Ries brand name and your collaboration with your father, I just think it's such a beautiful thing that you went into business with your dad. And we spend so much of our life at work, but really, obviously, the time that matters most is the time we spend with our family. And you just got to spend more of it with your dad, and he got to spend more with you. I have, I have two daughters. I'm expecting my third. Do you have any advice on how to successfully work with a family member or with a, I'd love for them to, I guess the Mitrak marketing family down the line someday, maybe. But, how can I make this happen? Or what's your, what's your advice on that?Laura Ries: Well, obviously, I mean, if you are a parent like, telling your kids to eat their vegetables every day is unlikely to be successful. So, but being a role model, eating your vegetables and showing them the way, making it fun, making it entertaining. And spending time with them. As a busy as a young parent, it's so hard. But that time is so well spent. They will remember it. And I think that's what led me to, to want to work with him, to seeing the time he spent with me helping me on papers or projects, and and finding what it really is. I mean, listen, not every kid is going to be interested in what their parent does. But they, they, so you may find what they're interested in and learn more about it and participate in that way, or it could be that they have a genuine interest in what you do. And bringing them along. I don't know how much they're, my kids didn't really have like, "Take Your Kid to Work Day." I don't, that's, that was most one of my favorite things to do. And I think my parent, my dad would like pull me out of school, or there would be a holiday. And getting to watch your kid or getting to watch your parent. And most kids are they have to be entertained. Well, maybe not.I learned a lot just sitting there bored sometimes at his office and wandering around the halls. And but all of those experiences are, I think, really make a difference. And so, trying to, trying to make that time and just enjoy your kids. I think it, they're such a gift. They are such a gift. And they're each individual and they're each different. But having the time to, to be with them. And for me, what was so interesting, obviously, I spent my whole life with my father, but those first 20 years, I only saw him at night, right? So, he was the dad, and he was traveling, and I saw him in dad mode. But getting to see him every day at work mode was really cool. And that is, was whatever you do, like if you can invite your kids to watch what you do, I think that's really so interesting. It gives them an insight into the world of what it's really like. It's not what the Netflix show tells you it's like. And that's, that's really the opportunity to see and travel is, is incredible.The Strategic Enemy: Coming This FallAndrew Mitrak: "The Strategic Enemy" is your new book. It's slated for release this fall. I've seen a little preview of it. I'm so excited to read the full thing. What are you able to share about it with listeners?Laura Ries: Oh, well, I am super excited. And the story of why I really wanted to write it is that's how "Positioning" was born, right? We talked about it already. I mean, they, they, it's not that they hated creativity, but they said, "We've got to pick an enemy to go up against." And to get your idea in the mind, you have to kind of reposition another idea. So, "Strategic Enemy," I think every brand should think about what that is. It might be a company, it might be a category, it might be another idea. But finding that enemy and positioning against it. And some tips like, "Just say no."Many companies are built on this idea of just saying no. I mean, Salesforce and "no software." Chick-fil-A, right? "Eat mor chikin."I mean, think about the power of saying no and how few companies really do. And don't be your own worst enemy. I mean, Coca-Cola launching Coca-Cola Life? I mean, what does that say about Coke? That it's death? I mean, that's the instant idea most people think of. I mean, don't do that. The line extension truly is the enemy of positioning today. That is what undermines the ability to own a position first and foremost. And listen, it doesn't limit you either, because you can launch your own enemy.I mean, what's the best thing the Gap did? It was launching Old Navy. And ultimately, it competed against them. But Old Navy became bigger and powerful and the major force of the company itself.So, launching new brands, like, for example, Mike's Hard Lemonade. What did they do? They launched White Claw. I mean, just one of the biggest beverage brands billions and billions of dollars. I mean, there are great opportunities, but if you take a moment to say, "Not how, what more can we get into, but is there a new brand that can even potentially become our own enemy?"So, there's lots of great case studies, great ideas and inspiration to think about how you can utilize this, even when it comes to something like a nonprofit, the idea of narrowing the focus is extremely important. And you see the success of, for example, Tunnel to Towers. They're not just trying to help veterans. What do they do? Mortgage-free homes for heroes. You know, why don't, being burdened with the mortgage, not having the home be adaptable and smart. I mean, that's a powerful idea that evokes a visual, it evokes emotion, and it evokes the enemy of, "We can't let our heroes being straddled with mortgages, not being in smart homes." I mean, that lends yourself to having a great conversation.Andrew Mitrak: That's right. So, "The Strategic Enemy," look for it on bookshelves this fall. I'm so excited to read it. Laura, I really enjoyed this conversation so much. As one last question, where can listeners find you online to follow your work?Laura Ries: Well, that is simple. It is ries.com because I bought the URL in 1996 at the dawn of the internet. Working on, I've been updating the website, so looking at all the iterations over the years, it's crazy. And yes, the book, you can pre-order now on Amazon. Super, super excited to just share my passion about positioning and helping companies build better brands for the future.Andrew Mitrak: Great. Laura, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed the conversation.Laura Ries: Absolutely, my pleasure. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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  54:46
• Nino Carvalho: More Marketing, Less Guru

  A History of Marketing / Episode 18This week, I'm thrilled to welcome Nino Carvalho, a professor, author, and marketing consultant based in Portugal.I actually discovered Carvalho and his work thanks to a podcast listener who brought him to my attention via a YouTube comment. After connecting with Nino and reading translations of his publications (he primarily writes in Portuguese), he has become an inspiration for me and my exploration into marketing history.Nino stands out as one of the few marketing educators I've encountered who passionately emphasizes the importance of marketing history in his teaching.Our conversation is packed with so much material, it’s like three episodes rolled into one. I'm especially grateful for this conversation; since Nino primarily creates content in his native Portuguese, there aren't many long-form English-language discussions like this one available.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsWe kick things off with Nino's book, Mais Marketing, Menos Guru, which translates to “More Marketing, Less Guru.” We chat about the history of so-called "marketing gurus" and how we should critically consider their role in shaping how people think about and practice marketing.From there, journey through marketing history in the Lusosphere, the Portuguese-speaking world. We start by examining how Portugal's early commercial and trade history laid the groundwork for early forms of business schools. Then, we fast-forward to the 20th century to uncover how marketing education emerged in Brazil during the Cold War and in Portugal following the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship.Throughout our conversation, Nino shares his valuable perspective on how learning marketing history can enhance a marketer's skills and strategic abilities. He even offers me a few tips on how to make marketing history more engaging for marketing students. (Fingers crossed that I can put these to work!)This episode is a bit longer than usual, but I'm sure you'll find it interesting throughout. I certainly did.So, without further ado, here's my conversation with Nino Carvalho.Note - I use an AI tool to transcribe the audio of my conversations to text. I check the output but it’s possible there are mistakes I missed. I have lightly edited parts of this transcript for clarity.The Spark: What Inspired Nino to Teach Marketing Through a Historical LensAndrew Mitrak: Nino Carvalho, welcome to A History of Marketing.Nino Carvalho: Thank you very much, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.Andrew Mitrak: I'm so excited for this conversation. We have a lot to cover. I want to start with your book, which is in Portuguese, Mais Marketing, Menos Guru, or More Marketing, Less Guru. I love the title of this book. This is one of the few popular marketing books I've come across that talks about the importance of marketing history. What first ignited your passion for marketing history?Nino Carvalho: Well, I think it was like a spark that suddenly started. It sounds like a very emotional thing. I believe I was always curious about the history of things in general. When I started working with marketing and studying marketing, especially in the digital field where many new professionals and their digital gurus took things from the past and kind of reinvented the wheel themselves to have a new package and try to sell that to newbies and people who are just starting to study digital. So that, I think, took me on a journey to go deeper into what those concepts, those theories, or the practices they were talking about were all about, because it didn't sound quite reliable. So this was like a very instrumental motivation.However, during the search for those things and looking for the truth or the beginning, the origins of some concepts, I think we start discovering a lot of new things about marketing. Because marketing is so connected to society, you also start learning about society in general, other countries' histories, other cultures' histories. So, I think it's something that will either strike you straight away or not because it's very strong. And I think this motivates us to keep learning more about the past of our discipline. Of course, I also noticed that the more I learned about the past, the better my classes and my professional work as a consultant were as well. So, it was like finding my own personal Holy Grail, in a way.Defining the Guru: Marketer vs. Self-PromoterAndrew Mitrak: So we're going to talk a lot more about marketing history and everything you found, including your Holy Grail. But first, going back to the title of the book. The title is More Marketing, Less Guru. I think we've all seen marketing gurus on the internet and whatnot, but I'm wondering how you would distinguish a marketer from a guru.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, this is interesting because by studying our discipline, I found out that there will be different interpretations. For instance, what we in Portugal or in Brazil would understand about a guru is different from how North Americans normally would. So you say that Kotler is a very important marketing guru, and this is a positive thing. It's a positive adjective. When you use that in our markets, probably even in Europe, I think, but surely in Brazil and in Portugal, this has a more negative connotation.So, there will be important, positively speaking, marketing gurus such as Kotler, Peter Drucker, and so on. But I would say that the negative side of the word refers to those professionals who have a lot of fireworks, and everything seems so easy and magical. They try to give very simple solutions to very complex things. This is very captivating because, of course, people love to have simple solutions to complex issues in their lives. So, when I mention gurus, it's that negative aspect of people who have their own dogmas. They are mostly very superficial, and they are quite ignorant, to be honest, about things related to marketing and management, and so on. So that's the kind of professional I want to put on one side, and other gurus such as Kotler or very studious and hardworking professionals on the other side.Andrew Mitrak: That's right. Yeah, I understood, even though I'm an English speaker, what was meant by the translation. I think this idea of somebody who is almost self-aggrandizing or promoting themselves more than they are promoting the substance of marketing. And then it's almost more about this very high-level view where they appear to be smart, and their posts on LinkedIn and Twitter and all these things make them appear to be very concise and actionable. But then you look into the details, and you're like, that doesn't really make sense. That doesn't really pass muster.The Dangers of Oversimplifying Marketing AdviceNino Carvalho: One of the main things is that those gurus try to sell one-size-fits-all solutions. That's pretty much against marketing because we talk about how important it is for us to prioritize, segment, and make very data-driven decisions, and to differentiate ourselves and our companies from competitors. So differentiation is key. On the other side, those people think that a one-size-fits-all solution will fit everyone.There are other issues as well. For instance, perhaps a problem that you, Andrew, solved in your own professional environment in the US with the companies you're used to working with, might serve well for similar contingencies. However, once you export it to Europe or to small companies even in the US, I'm not so sure. So, we need to take that into consideration, especially now when you see a very turbulent, very unstable, and unpredictable environment out there.Early Marketing Gurus: From Claude Hopkins to TodayAndrew Mitrak: I want to ask about the history of marketing gurus. When did they first emerge? Have they always existed as long as marketing, advertising, and sales have existed? Has this type of person always been around, or did they emerge later? Do you have any favorite examples of early marketing gurus?Nino Carvalho: So, looking at those negative examples, I honestly believe that they were always there, throughout history. I was never able to actually find out the primary source. But you have, in advertisement and sales, very old gurus in our history. For instance, especially in the beginnings of the last century, because of the connection with advertisement, sales, and those manuals that people were writing at almost industrial speed, just producing things, and everyone had their own manual, and so on. So, you do have quite a lot of examples back then.For instance, one of the guys that, up until today, is used as a reference by newer gurus is Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins, one of the things that we should be thanking him very honestly for, is because of so many bad things he did with marketing and with a company he had with an associate, a partner. They sold medicine. So, they sold miraculous medicines that cured everything. Because of that, there was a journalist in the US who started to dig into that story of a miraculous medicine and, of course, found out that it was a hoax; people were dying. This investigative, journalistic work was the starting point for a number of discussions in the US government that turned out to be the first regulatory aspects of communicating and selling to the health and medicine industry. So, this is a very strong example.Note: View my conversation with Mark Tungate for more context on this.Andrew Mitrak: I want to share more for listeners about who Claude Hopkins is because he's a great first example. He wrote this book called Scientific Advertising, and it's still somewhat widely regarded. The medicines, the 'miraculous'—I love that word you're using—often we might call them snake oil salesmen, or these patent medicines that are really of no value to anybody. These magical elixirs. We can almost laugh about them today, but that was really dark. It's selling people hope and cures, and it's doing nothing for them, for their illnesses. Medicine, in general, has come a long way, but this certainly wasn't helping. So, it's interesting to me that Claude Hopkins is somebody you cite, and he dresses himself up as a scientist. He calls it Scientific Advertising, which is almost kind of a red flag when you look at who might be a guru.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, and honestly, Andrew, they are still using this "science" sort of cover up until today. A couple of days ago, this weekend, I was browsing and talking to my students, and there was a new guru selling a "social media scientist" role, which was for someone to be prepared to post and edit copy, like those very basic operational things, calling them a scientist.Hopkins and Ogilvy: Gurus with Important ContributionsNino Carvalho: However, most of those gurus, such as Claude Hopkins, and I would also mention David Ogilvy—this could be a surprise to most people—but those guys had some important contributions. Claude Hopkins wrote about advertisement techniques that we still use today, such as A/B testing, using coupons to spread the word, writing different regular mail (today we use email or WhatsApp messages, whatever). So, they had nice initiatives. However, there are a lot of things that we should be questioning as well. David Ogilvy, for instance, again, had a number of positive examples. However, he, and I think advertisement agencies in general, tend to have this movement of taking an important yet complex concept and trying to package it in a way that is very easy for their own customers to consume, which sometimes are big companies. So things spread very fast. David Ogilvy, for instance, took a very important academic paper from the 50s, 1955, where two guys were proposing their view of what would be, years after that, the branding area. So they started to discuss branding. David Ogilvy read that in the Harvard Business Review paper, kind of gave it his own packaging, and then sold this to companies, professional markets. Up until today, we have this kind of war between branding and marketing.So, I think that we should learn more about those, let's say, "dark side of the force" gurus, because, yes, they may have some good contributions for us to think about and to study. But we cannot forget some of the damage that they will kind of leave, those scars, in our area. So it's important for us to know and to know how to balance.Andrew Mitrak: That's a really good point. I personally have been inspired by David Ogilvy. His were like some of the first books I read that were kind of historical, in that they were written more than 40 years ago; they covered a time well before digital marketing. And there was a lot of good advice, or there's a lot of—he's very witty, very memorable. But there are these sort of oversimplifications. Like he says, "Always print on a white background with dark text and never invert the two." And, well, is that really true all the time? I've had a client in the past when I was consulting who had read a David Ogilvy book, and he always insisted on his logo being really large on everything on his website and every little thing. It's like, "Oh, David Ogilvy says my logo has to be large." I don't even know if Ogilvy actually said that, but he's listened to this guru and he accepts it as a truism with no context and no nuance, which is kind of a dangerous thing to do. You want to take the good, but also make sure that, hey, it doesn't necessarily apply to every single scenario.Napoleon Hill & the "Think and Grow Rich" ParadoxNino Carvalho: No, and I think that's the big issue because those gurus, some of them, like Claude Hopkins and Ogilvy, still have millions of followers and readers and believers. So, they are very influential. People will continue, such as Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill is one of the biggest hoaxes in the whole history of management or whatever you can think about. Even Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker has very important, several important contributions to marketing. I think Peter Drucker is one of the guys responsible for popularizing marketing, making it more popular amongst smaller companies. So, this is very important to marketing. However, he also took those important and perhaps sometimes complex theories in marketing and management, and even his own consultants worked with other companies. The solutions they proposed to huge companies, he said, "Okay, so now you just follow those three steps that I did with GM or IBM, and you can do the same in your laundry like in the corner here in your neighborhood." So, we need to take this very carefully.Andrew Mitrak: That's right. I think what's interesting also is you mentioned Napoleon Hill, and he wrote this book called Think and Grow Rich. And of course, that's also another red flag. Think and Grow Rich sounds like you're promising me a lot for very little effort. But I was listening to this interview with—are you familiar with Banana Republic? You'll see it in malls and stuff. I was listening to an interview with Max Ziegler, who founded Banana Republic, and I was shocked to hear he founded it because he was directly inspired by Napoleon Hill. That was his Bible that he followed. And I'm like, "Oh, Napoleon Hill, he always kind of seems like a guru," and I didn't ever really think to take him that seriously. But here's this person who founded this really large company who was inspired by him. So, it's this weird tension that gurus could be a little dangerous, they could be simplistic, they can lack nuance, they can have all these flaws, but they can also still have good to them. They can inspire people to do things. I guess you kind of have to take a balanced view of them and take them in context, that they're not either all good or all bad. They can have good things, and they can also have things that are overly simplistic as well.Nino Carvalho: I think there are two things. I fully agree with you. One thing is, sometimes it could be more difficult for, let's say, newbies in marketing to kind of separate what is what. So, this is something we should be paying attention to. The other thing is, more recently, those gurus, because of digital marketing, have access to educate, so they give their courses and hypnotic content to millions and millions of people. This is also an issue because when you have this power, such as the internet, to talk to and to influence so many people, you should be thinking very carefully about your own responsibility as an educator. So, if I just say, "Listen, I have this launch formula, and you just follow these steps, it doesn't matter even if you have a product or even an idea, just jump in, and I'll teach you and I'll guide you, and you will have good results." This is dangerous. So, I think we should be very careful, especially with this educational aspect of it. This is, at least in Brazil, I can say that because of the deficit, the difference in educational level, you cannot expect that the majority of the population, by hearing those gurus, will have the means to make this contrast between what makes sense and what is completely nonsense.Connecting Past to Present: Making Marketing History TangibleAndrew Mitrak: This is a good transition because you're talking about the responsibility of marketing educators, and you are a marketing educator. You are a professor, an author, a speaker. And also, as you're teaching people, you're also teaching about marketing history. When you teach marketing history and introduce—you're teaching a marketing class and you're including historical examples—how far back in history do you go? What are the earliest dates? What are the earliest milestones and historical artifacts that you reference when you teach?Nino Carvalho: This will depend. It will depend because I like, even if it's briefly, to go back to the first exchanges, like seven or eight thousand years ago. Just to talk about how, if you put marketing under a microscope, probably the smallest particle of our discipline will be "exchange." Then, with this, I try to bring in how marketing is connected to commerce. Therefore, the more cities and cultures develop and evolve, commerce also evolved with them, and then marketing was there as well.But I try to put that in a very brief space, bringing in some curiosities, such as talking about how you can see the same theories behind customer behavior that you see in major sports events today. You can also see those references in gladiators' games in ancient Greece, like organized groups cheering for different opponents in that fight or in that battle. You could have merchandising just like today, and you also had it in the gladiators' games several thousand years ago. So, I also make those bridges to kind of engage them via those curiosities. However, I think it becomes more tangible to them when you bring examples from the past and show them how those things are so important nowadays.“Marketing” in Ancient MarketplacesFor instance, in very old markets, such as in Greece or in old Rome, in ancient Rome, there was a group of merchants who got together in an organized way to complain to the local government. They said, "Listen, we have a huge market here, people from all over the known world come here to exchange, to sell, to buy. But we are selling our stuff, and we have people here dealing with meat. So they are killing pigs, they are chopping the heads off chickens, everything very close to where I sell my clothes or my jewelry." So, they made a movement for these people to go away to a different part of the city, to have their markets, the meat markets, separated because of the aspect of the smell, of the whole atmosphere. So, we work today with sensory marketing, for instance, concerning sounds, smell. Those bridges also make a difference. And I also think it's interesting to students when, of course, they connect their own history to our marketing history. So in our case, Brazil and Portugal's history, and also always making this kind of link with North American marketing history because it's the hegemonic view. It's important for us to have that in context so we can understand better how marketing works.Andrew Mitrak: I love this example of the merchants who organized in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, a very long time ago, to change where they sell. I think of how you could tie that to a current example; it sounds a lot like if there's a social media platform that has hate speech or violent images or things, you don't want to advertise your product right next to that. That could be—you don't want your product associated with that. It kind of strikes me as somewhat similar, where you don't want to be selling jewelry or textiles where it smells like meat or people are seeing animal blood, and it's upsetting. So it seems like there's just a connection between those two.The Etymology and Evolution of the Word "Marketing" ItselfAndrew Mitrak: In our email exchange prior to this, you shared a marketing manual that dates from 1767, and it uses "marketing" in the context of a shopper visiting a market to purchase things. Your book also highlights that the first use of, quote, "marketing" dates all the way back to 1561. So, when you teach, do you teach about the evolution of the word "marketing" itself, and how do you tend to describe the evolution of the word "marketing"?Nino Carvalho: This is something that I think is very important because, even today, I believe one of the main things that prevents us from developing, from evolving in our own discipline—either in the academic way or in the practical environment, the market—is that there's no consensus about what marketing is. So, you will see, you hear people in the streets say that marketing is advertisement, sales—those are very common. But sometimes even marketing is kind of a lie. So, "Nino, do you believe in Andrew, or are the things he's saying actually true, or is it just marketing?" "I know he's just very good at marketing." So, he's a guy who knows how to influence. This is an issue. So, I think it's important for us to understand that there's a history behind it.However, if you go to people who write about marketing online, several of them do say that marketing is a verb because you have the "ing" part, the suffix "ing," behind it. So it's a verb, it's continuous, so it represents movement, and so on. Interestingly enough, those people are repeating something that I see where they are coming from, but it's not a verb. It was a verb in the past. So, yes, "marketing" in 1561—this is a reference from the Oxford Dictionary, so that's the one I use—they say that a lawyer in the UK, when translating a piece (and I never found whatever piece this was) from French, he chose to write "marketing" translating something, and I never found out what this "something" was.However, marketing for centuries was indeed—it has the meaning of buying and selling in a market. That was why it was a verb. And you can see, I sent you a couple, you can see some very old books from the 1800s, perhaps even a bit older, using the word "marketing" just trying to make it sound like "buying the marketing," "selling on the marketing," or "preparing your product to be purchased" or "to sell your product," and so on. This continued until the beginning of the last century, so the 1900s, when this guy, one of our grandfathers in marketing—so Kotler is our father, or one of the fathers, we had, we have grandfathers.So, Ralph Starr Butler, probably in 1911—and this is probably because I don't think anyone, and there are people looking for this Holy Grail again, so like the very first use of the word "marketing" as a noun. So, Ralph Starr Butler, he mentioned in a letter to another historian, a marketing historian, that he needed to conceive a course for the University of Wisconsin, a course that mixed promotion, sales, distribution, and he was trying to figure out a title for this course. Then "marketing" came to his mind, and then he started using "marketing" since then. In 1914, he eventually published a book, it was like a textbook used in correspondence courses in the US, and probably he is the father who baptized our word as a substantive.However, the concept continued to change. We had some very important changes in the word "marketing," such as after we have "marketing" as a noun in the beginning of the last century, in the 60s, especially in 1960, we were presented with the Four Ps, the marketing mix. So, you had since then a different understanding of marketing. A few years later, 1969, with "broadening the concept of marketing," again, you broadened the concept of marketing. Then, services marketing, relationship marketing, branding, so, digital marketing nowadays. We keep changing the concept, it keeps evolving, which is great. But it's important for us to be very—I would say that as a professor, not with my clients in terms of as a consultant, but as a professor, I am very orthodox about those concepts because we, at least we who are marketing professionals or marketing students or professors, we need to be very demanding about what those words really mean. Because this, if in our own midst, in our own métier, we do not have our own agreement about those concepts, this prevents us from developing. So I think this is an issue.Andrew Mitrak: I think this is so important because as marketing professionals, we need to be very specific about our language. Any campaign we're doing, any strategy we're writing, you need to be very precise with your language. And if you're not even precise about the word "marketing" itself, it just seems like we kind of need to follow our own instructions there. So, thanks for that history.Marketing in the Lusosphere: Portugal's Commercial FoundationsAndrew Mitrak: I want to shift to something you mentioned earlier, which is the history of Brazilian and Portuguese marketing. You are Brazilian, and you primarily educate in the Portuguese language. This is a topic that I just haven't discussed on this podcast very much yet, and I'm grateful that you're here so we can discuss how marketing evolved in the Lusosphere. When you were educating marketers, either in Brazil or in Portugal, where do you typically begin as far as connections to their own marketing history?Nino Carvalho: This is very interesting, Andrew, because marketing, as you know, how it was kind of "born" in different countries or markets will differ. So, we use North American marketing because of the importance it has throughout not only the marketing world but the business world in general, in the whole world, of course. But it's interesting for us to see those particularities in different countries. So, if I want to really go to the origins of marketing in the Lusosphere, of course, I would start with Portugal, as Brazil was a colony, a former colony of Portugal.This actually, Andrew, was the reason I decided to dedicate and kind of invest myself in studying the history of marketing. It was the following premise: I thought, okay, so I'm learning by reading about the history of marketing in the US, in the UK, for instance, that marketing is kind of one developed stage in the commercial history of that country. So commerce will start to evolve, evolve, evolve. At some point, marketing will be able to appear as a science, and so on. So, if that was right, there should be some history in Portugal because of the commercial history that Portugal had several centuries ago—Portugal, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and so on. So, that was my motivation. And I was right. I was right, but I never would have been able to guess the whole history.The thing is, it's very interesting because in the mid-1700s, so in the 18th century, Portugal was kind of feeling they were losing their global power. You had, in the UK, several discussions about the future of the economy, and Adam Smith in 1776 would publish the milestone of our current liberal economy. Portugal was kind of feeling aside, left behind. And they were, a few years before that, a huge global potency in terms of commerce and discoveries, and so on. Because of that, the king, King José, what he did back then was to start exchanging some ideas with a, let's say, a sort of ambassador, a Portuguese ambassador in the UK. This guy was looking at, probably in the pubs, people drinking their whiskeys and talking about Adam Smith, the future of the economy, and so on. You had the commercial class with more money, so buying political power, getting closer to the noble people, to the church as well.So, this guy, his name was Sebastião. Sebastião wrote to the king here in Portugal saying, "Listen, King," like a WhatsApp message, "Listen, King, that concerned me. Something like that is scary. Things here, they are not looking great. We need to think about having our own managers and commercial cast as well because this will change. Mercantilism is going down the drain. We need to move on to the future of times," and so on. So, King José invited Sebastião to come back to Portugal and titled him. He gave him the title of Marquês, Marquis probably in English, isn't it? So, he was a very important figure in Portuguese history. Marquês de Pombal is his name. He was a dictator, to be honest, Marquês de Pombal, but he invested a lot in kind of revolutionizing the educational system in Portugal. With that, they created, Marquês de Pombal and King José, they created the first commercial school, the first public commercial school in the world. So, this was very important in marketing. They, like, students learned what was important for marketers back then, such as the difference of laws in different countries, weights, different measures, the ways of measuring and weighting things, exchange, how to write commercial letters, and so on. So, that's the very origin of marketing in the Lusosphere.Andrew Mitrak: Was this called the Aula do Comércio?Nino Carvalho: Aula do Comércio, yeah. It's like, in the sense, if I were to translate it, it's like "Commerce School." That was the main thing. It was a technical school. It's not a university, but it taught some profession, some trade. People learned some trade.Andrew Mitrak: Your book also, I think, cited that they taught things like bookkeeping, accounting, and double entry, which are foundational to having businesses today. And here it was, being taught to the commercial class back in the 1750s.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, especially Andrew, because up until then, this commercial knowledge was pretty much masters and apprentices, like the medieval guilds several years before. So, they kind of made this in a more formal, more structured way. So you start to have more commercial managers. And the students, they would become managers of the Portuguese companies. That was the main goal: to prepare them to manage Portuguese and, of course, private commerces and companies back then.Andrew Mitrak: Aula do Comércio, seemingly a lot of things like a business school. Business schools teach things like accounting as well. And all the things to make you a business manager were established in Lisbon as the first state-sponsored school. So it just really seems like a very important milestone that came out of Portugal.Nino Carvalho: You are very right. And actually, if you look at the genealogy of Aula do Comércio, they kept alive, they changed their names, then they merged with other schools. But they are still alive today. The name of the school nowadays is ISEG, which is an acronym for Institute, like Superior Institute of Economy and Management, something like that. And they teach marketing and management. Aula do Comércio also exported this educational system to the colony in Brazil. So, Aula do Comércio was present in three different states and cities in Brazil, and of course, was also very important to fast-track the whole background for commercial managers and business people in Brazil as well. So, this was, of course, 300 years ago, almost.So, jumping a bit more into the future, more recently, so I think like in the 30s, Portugal had a dictatorship here, a military dictatorship. One of the things they did was to isolate Portugal from other countries, especially the US. There were some countries that they liked less, so the US, UK. So they were very isolated. It was forbidden in the country for several years, from the 30s to the 70s, it was forbidden, for instance, even to use foreign words. So, you couldn't even write or say "marketing" anywhere. This was, of course, very damaging to the development of marketing and the whole market scenario, the ecosystem here in Portugal. So, only once the dictatorship came to an end in 1974, so a few dozen years ago, what they did was they started to gradually, very slowly, be more open to business in general, the country. So in '86, Portugal joined the European community, and this helped a lot. So, more international companies, and with more international companies, you need to have better professionals in the market, and so on. So, only in 1984, so pretty much 40 years ago, there was the first actual marketing course here in Portugal. The name of the school is IPAM, which is the Marketing Management Portuguese Institute. I give classes there. I'm a professor there, and of course, I'm very happy to teach and to tell students that history. I think they would be proud. So, they were the first course here in Portugal. And this was 30 years after marketing started in Brazil. And of course, if you like, I also can talk a bit about the Brazilian side of the history.Fernando Pessoa: Poet, Writer, and …Marketer?Andrew Mitrak: Yes, we will. Let's jump to Brazil in just a moment. But one other individual I wanted to highlight is that your book has a chapter on Fernando Pessoa. I read a translation of this book, and it translated to Poet, Writer, and …Marketer?. Could you share who Fernando Pessoa was for listeners who aren't familiar with him and what his relationship was to marketing in Portugal?Nino Carvalho: Fernando Pessoa, probably—of course, I'm not an expert in this—but probably is the most important and well-known Portuguese, specifically from Portugal in this case, but probably in the Portuguese language, writer and poet. So, he's actually extremely important, and he wrote using a number of different names. So, you see Fernando Pessoa in several different personalities writing poems and texts, and so on. Fernando Pessoa was educated in a technical school as well, a technical commerce school in South Africa, in the late 19th century and the beginning of the last century. So, when he was a young person, his high school was pretty much a commerce school in South Africa. South Africa was a colony of the UK. So, he knew, of course, English probably as well as his Portuguese, I would say so. And probably he had contact with English commercial literature, which probably also came from the US.So, I believe in this link, and this is something that I'm trying to kind of dig into much further with a colleague who is a history of arts professor, because I believe that Fernando Pessoa had contact with the sales and advertisement literature in the US in the beginning of the last century, such as Claude Hopkins. Because when he got back to Portugal, he had to work in an accounting office to earn his bread every month. Just to kind of add up to his salary, he did some kind of freelancer jobs, such as producing advertisements and slogans for companies here in Portugal. So, he did the first ever slogan for Coca-Cola in Portugal. I wouldn't be able to translate it, but it was pretty much, "At first, it's strange, but then you get in love with that." Something, just to say that the taste was a bit different—soft drink in the late 20s, 1920s—but then you get kind of crazy about it. So, this was the first slogan for Coca-Cola. He wrote a lot about commerce, management, and the practice of marketing in the 20s and the 30s as well. This was very common both in Portugal and in Brazil. Several well-renowned writers and poets today, they had to do those freelancer jobs as advertising or salespersons just to pay their bills. So, you see a number of cases of very famous writers who also produced several slogans and advertising pieces back then.Andrew Mitrak: That's an amazing story. I'm always interested to see where marketing and advertisements can also support the arts. You see a lot of film directors and such who got their start doing commercials. Here you have a renowned, beloved poet and author who also was supported by commercial activities like marketing and Coca-Cola advertisements.The Birth of Marketing Education in Brazil and PortugalSo, moving to Brazil, marketing came to Portugal in 1984. I was looking at your YouTube channel, and you had a commemoration of 70 years of marketing in Brazil, starting in 1954. Your video was published last year, so 70 years, now 71 years of marketing education in Brazil. My understanding is this involved a cultural exchange between professors in Brazil who visited Michigan State in the US, and then American professors from Michigan going and visiting São Paulo. Can you tell the story of this exchange, why this happened, and how it brought marketing to Brazil?Nino Carvalho: This is very interesting because marketing started formally in Brazil because of, let's say, one of the consequences of World War II. After the World War, as you know, we had the Cold War. Both of those two main groups of influence, the US and the Soviet Union, were trying to influence more countries to spread their ideological views after the war. This was known as the Cold War, as you know.Brazil kind of benefited after President Truman in the US wrote a document where they would transfer technology, investments, knowledge, know-how, and so on, to countries in Latin America, just to spread this influence. One of the countries was Brazil. In the 50s, Brazil started to join forces with the US on a number of different fronts. One of them was in the Brazilian University, the name is Fundação Getúlio Vargas. This was, they just created that foundation, that also they were looking at developing management, bringing companies to Brazil, kind of trying to stimulate industrialization, and so on, with the help of US investments.So, as a part of a number of initiatives during this period, some professors in this Fundação Getúlio Vargas went to the US, to Michigan State University, to learn more about management, about marketing, sales, and of course, then to bring this knowledge here to Brazil and to spread it throughout Brazilian students and professionals, and so on. So, they did that. They went to Michigan State University. They also brought back a number of American professors who would give classes and courses in Brazil. Actually, the library at this foundation in Brazil, the library up until today has the name of one of the professors who came from Michigan State University and then was kind of, carries the name of the library now. So, they made that exchange. So, in 1954, there was the first formal marketing course in Brazil. And so the story goes.What I'm trying to, it's interesting because more recently, I saw there is a very kind of timid dispute between another school here in Brazil with a potential history that they were the first, several years before. So I'm trying to dig into that. However, what we do know so far, in terms of clear documents, and this is the hegemonic view here in Brazil, is 1954 with Getúlio Vargas and Michigan State University. Since then, Andrew, since the 50s, I would say that our way in Brazil, especially, of doing marketing, doing digital marketing as well, is very much influenced by North American professionals, professors, culture, and so on. This is, of course, we have all the pros and cons of that, but the influence clearly is there.Andrew Mitrak: It's interesting. You mentioned how there's another school that says, "Hey, we were first." This is something that's so funny about history: you have to be cautious saying anything's the first because then there's always something that comes before it. Also, with something like marketing that can, as we were talking about, the definition of marketing and what's included and what's not, it's cool like, okay, you can see arguments for it being even earlier. So that's interesting.One person, one name that comes up in your book is Raimar Richers. Could you share a bit about who Raimar Richers was and what his contributions were to marketing in Brazil?Nino Carvalho: Raimar Richers is actually someone, he's a guy from Switzerland. He's a Swiss citizen, Swiss/Brazilian. He's important because he was the Brazilian professor kind of in charge of this pioneer group from the Fundação, the foundation that I was mentioning to you, Getúlio Vargas, that went to the US and brought back marketing and management techniques. So, he was the leader of that movement. He also was the first professor who mentored, let's say, the first masters and doctors in marketing in Brazil. He was one of the supervisors, let's say. So, he was also important in sharing and just rolling out his knowledge in this sense.He made a book trying to propose, and this was quite interesting, it never went anywhere, but it was very interesting. He tried to propose a kind of Brazilian version of the Four Ps. He called it the Four As. That was interesting because this local flavor is important in marketing. Of course, however, it's very difficult to compete with and replace "marketing mix." So, and it's interesting, Andrew, because this won't make sense to your audience because it's a very local Brazilian thing. But there's another curious thing about Raimar Richers: probably his brother is much more famous in Brazil. Because his brother is the owner, or was the owner (they both are deceased), was the owner of the main translators company for American movies in Brazil. So, of course, we have here thousands and tons of American movies and TV shows, and so on. And they translated. So, when you said like "Brazilian translation," then they say the name of Herbert Richers, which was his brother. So, everyone in Brazil knows Herbert Richers, but doesn't know Raimar Richers.Bridging Marketing Practices in the Lusosphere and AnglosphereAndrew Mitrak: So, thanks for this tour of the history of Portugal and Brazil. We only spent 20 minutes or so on it, but I'm sure we could spend hours just looking more, looking just into this topic. If you were to look at the Lusosphere, marketing in the Lusosphere, and its relation to the rest of the world, how do you see the work of Portuguese and Brazilian marketers influencing marketing beyond the Lusosphere? Or do you feel like it's more the other way, of marketers in North America or in the English-speaking world sort of influencing Portuguese-speaking marketers? How do you see the relationship between the two and the impact on marketing more broadly?Nino Carvalho: This is a great question for a number of reasons. On one hand, I believe that it's very recent, in a number of areas, this movement of trying to look at local histories via a different lens than the hegemonic view. So, we are starting really, very, very recently in Brazil and Portugal to try to see what is the Brazilian management marketing history, the actual Brazilian or the actual Portuguese, the Portuguese people, the Brazilian people. We do practice marketing here. It's not only via the US, or we do have influence from the US, but also from Europe because of our past, our colony past. So, this is a movement that's very recent. I think in several countries.So, this is one aspect. The other aspect is, I think that Brazilian and Portuguese markets, they are, they were, and they still are very different. In Portugal, Andrew, just for you to know, there are 10 million, perhaps 11 million inhabitants. In Brazil, we have 222 million. So, that difference is huge, not only in the numbers, but when you have 200 million people in your country, then you have more companies because they have a huge market to sell. You have more money circulating in the economy. Brazil is a hub for the entire Latin America and also a hub for other countries as well. And because you have so much money circulating in the economy, you have great universities, multinational companies, great advertisement agencies. So, it's like a very positive cycle that you have over there.In Portugal, you have only 10 million people. You have a very recent democracy, even more recent than in Brazil. You have a huge influence from Europe because they are one of the smallest countries in the European Union. So, you have different influences, and I think that those have pros and cons, as in anything else. However, when you look at the Lusosphere in Africa, such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, you'll be able to see that they have much more educational influence, even in marketing, with Portugal than from the US or Brazil. So, when they started their universities, even because they were colonies as well, Portugal went there with universities and courses. So, the first marketing course, for instance, in Cape Verde, and I have students from there, they graduated only in 1997. So it's very recent. And it was a local university in partnership with a Portuguese university.So, I think that this influence is starting to change a bit. But the reality is, in our universities, both in Brazil and in Portugal, students will learn marketing, 90% or more, is still North American marketing. This is difficult to kind of challenge. And I don't think that we should kind of just deny it. This is completely nonsense. But we should kind of incorporate a UK view because they also have a lot to contribute, even in the beginnings of marketing. The Nordic view, services marketing, relationship marketing, and so on. The local flavor. So, a broader view would be richer for all of us. But currently, I think that if we do have a Brazilian or Portuguese professor that influences the market outside the Lusosphere, in my mind, I can only remember the Portuguese Luís Moutinho. He wrote the forewords in my newest book. He was the first doctor in marketing in Portugal. Of course, he's retired at this point, but he has a lot of books with Philip Kotler, a lot of books, very new things such as neuromarketing. However, he was a professor in the Suffolk University in Scotland for 40 years. So it's a Portuguese outside our environment.But things are changing. And I think also, to be honest, that American intellectuals, such as Philip Kotler, they are, I believe, or some of them, they are incentivizing or stimulating more people from other countries and other backgrounds to contribute with marketing kind of discussion in general. So, they are also helping this movement of looking outside the US to have a more diverse view and enrich our discipline. Kotler is doing that brilliantly the last few years. And he's not the only one. So I think that new things are coming, and this is very important to everyone, I believe.Making Marketing History Engaging for Today's MarketersAndrew Mitrak: I want to come back to the idea of the value of marketing history. You and I both clearly see the value of it. And kind of coming back to this idea of students who may not see the value, or may want to just learn about marketing today, or be a little more myopic, or "what's in it for me?" If you were to say, what is the selfish reason for marketers to learn marketing history? How can learning marketing history make someone a better marketer or more effective at their jobs? What would you say to that? Does anything come to mind?Nino Carvalho: I would say, I believe, that in a short answer, to learn the history of marketing protects you as a professional and gives you a competitive advantage. Of course, there will be explanations for that. But I think the bottom line is, the more you learn about the history of our discipline in this broader way, as we are discussing here—just look at the local context, a bit of history in general—this will protect you from so much nonsense, lies, fakes that are happening nowadays. We need to be more critical. This historical view helps us to be, to question things and to be a bit more annoying in a way that, "No, listen, Andrew, I'm not buying that. I'll look for it." So, I think this is very positive.And also, as a competitive differential, Andrew, because I believe that as soon as artificial intelligence surpasses our human intelligence—and I think this is right around the corner, it has already replaced very operational functions such as producing content, editing videos, and so on—the more we move that way, the more important it will be for professionals to develop a more critical, analytical, and holistic view. This will only be possible with a multidisciplinary background. I think that history is important to kind of give some pillars to help us build stronger, more reliable knowledge and expertise from there. So I think that's pretty much it: protect us and give us a competitive differential, an advantage.Making Marketing History Engaging for Today's MarketersAndrew Mitrak: Those are both great examples. If you were to share some tips with me on how to make marketing history more appealing to marketers—I guess this is a very selfish question. I'm trying to share this podcast and help others be more interested in marketing history. What tips would you have?Nino Carvalho: I think that one of the things that will capture, in my view, first of all, people's attention—and this is, of course, important if you look at the AIDA model, isn't it? Attention, interest, desire—is to capture them via the curiosity aspects. Such as the history of Spam, that food from the UK, which is quite interesting. In my own reality here, looking at the commercial aspect of Portugal being a huge potency worldwide, and so on. These things about old advertisement gurus such as Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy. So I think those curiosities usually capture the users', the students' attention.The other thing is for us to show them, and this is also very effective, that, okay, so you are talking about how important it is for us today to have a funnel here in our marketing team. Right. So, let's have a look at how and where those funnels started appearing in our discipline. So taking those things and bringing them back to the past. I think this is very important as well.I believe that because, Andrew, we can see that out there, in the whole world, those discussions about truth, lie, what actually happened in history, because this has become more blurred, more and more, isn't it, with different narratives, and so on. And also discussions about DEI—I think it's the same, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion in the US is the same. So, DEI, these discussions, diversity, for us to be a more plural society. Those discussions, some people are very averse to those ideas. However, I think that to learn in a broader way about history will help us to make those connections. Marketing, I also think this is important to show students, marketing is a very active and important agent in society in making those changes—bad changes, good changes. Marketing helps tell what is, how your look is accepted or not, what is a beautiful woman, what is the role of a man, what's. So those things, marketing influences that a lot.So, I believe that because of that, we as marketers have kind of a superpower. And as Uncle Ben told Spider-Man, with superpowers also come great responsibilities. So, I think that when students discover that, well, this is actually true because if I work in a huge company, I will affect perhaps thousands, millions of people. So, this perception, I think, changes how people think and how they will operate in their day-to-day lives. Those are things that, in my own experience, I can see when I start having this conversation: a group with a shine in their eyes, and a group just waiting for the bell to ring so they can leave the class. We need to be very resilient, very patient, to focus on changing those fewer people's lives, I believe.Finding Nino Carvalho OnlineAndrew Mitrak: Wonderful advice. Thanks for all of those ideas. And thanks for all of your time today. Where can listeners find you online?Nino Carvalho: I will have some content in English often on my LinkedIn, so just type Nino Carvalho over there. There will be a few lectures, presentations, and classes in English on the YouTube channel, again, Nino Carvalho. But in addition to those two, for my Portuguese students and listeners, I'm also on Instagram, of course, where my username—and I lost this battle—is Nino Carvalho Consultoria, which is "consultant" or "consultancy." And of course, my website, ninocarvalho.com. And my courses at marketingelevation.org. They are in Portuguese at this point only. And my books, again, only in Portuguese. Perhaps at some point, Andrew and I will be motivated to get together to write some History of Marketing for Beginners in English and in Portuguese as well. Andrew Mitrak: Well, I'll post links to all of those on the blog and in the show notes to make sure listeners can find them. But Nino, thanks so much. This has been such a pleasure to meet with you. Also, prior to this episode, you shared so many great resources with me and have just been such a huge help and source of inspiration. So, thanks for all of that, and thanks for your time today. I've really enjoyed talking to you.Nino Carvalho: Andrew, thank you very much. And not only for inviting me, of course, it was extremely pleasant, especially because I have a very good reason now to just send to my father. I never told you this, but he was an academic scholar here in marketing in the past. He's retired, of course, and he's quite old. But I will forward to him, "Listen, you know those guys, Aaker and Sheth and Kumar and Kotler? And there's your son over there!" So this, I have to thank you for it.But much more than that, because this would be a bit selfish, but so much more than that, I think, Andrew, that the work you are doing—and this is very honestly, I'm saying this very honestly—is extremely important to marketing professionals, to marketing students, and to the future of our discipline. Because we are being bombarded by those fakes, those gurus, and it's difficult to fight against it because it's not a fair fight. So, you took the initiative, and you put this huge constellation of legends in one place. When I mentioned to you that I want to translate those to Portuguese, I'm being very honest because this, I think, will help to spread your work. And this will kind of elevate, I believe, the level of our market. So, I have to thank you as a professor and as a professional as well. Because if you never did that, other people didn't either. So, you took your time, you took the initiative, and you are investing yourself in that. So, I do have to thank you. And I'll make my best to spread your channel and your podcast to as many people as I can. Thank you very much.Andrew Mitrak: Oh, thank you so much, Nino. That's so nice of you to say, and I really appreciate that.Nino Carvalho: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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• Reflections and Lessons from the first months of ‘A History of Marketing’

  A History of Marketing / Episode 17This week we're mixing up the usual format. I've been publishing this podcast for a few months now, so I thought this would be a good time to reflect on the conversations I've had so far, talk about what I've learned, and share a behind-the-scenes look at how the podcast is going. Spoiler alert: I think it's going great.I recruited my friend Scott Morris, Creative Director at Waka Seattle to interview me about the podcast.Scott is an incredibly talented documentary filmmaker who always asks thoughtful questions. He provided me with incredibly helpful advice and feedback as I put “A History of Marketing” together.I gave Scott some of the top questions I've heard from listeners, but otherwise let him drive the conversation. Now, here’s Scott Morris interviewing me.The Origins of “A History of Marketing”Scott Morris: I see this as serving as a proxy for your audience. So I'm going to ask you some questions about the podcast: how it started, how it's going, and then where it's going to go from here. So diving right in, let's go back to the beginning. A History of Marketing. Where did you get this idea? What's the origin story?Andrew Mitrak: The podcast idea came all at once, but a lot of things were percolating in the background. I released a trailer, about a three-minute intro to the podcast, and it's a pretty honest trailer. It really tells my journey from the start, and of course, it's three minutes, so it's an abbreviated journey, but it tells most of the important parts of the story.At some point, it hit me that I'm a marketer, and I've spent a dozen or more years doing this professionally, and I know very little about how it started. Meanwhile, I'm very interested in history. I read—most of the books I read are non-fiction or history books—and I feel like I have a grasp of a lot of other disciplines, the history of those disciplines. I know a little bit about psychology and economics and computer history and art history and music history, but I didn't know anything about marketing history. And that suddenly hit me as odd. And I'm like, I better go look for books on marketing history.And I really didn't find any. There are some books, and I don't mean to diminish the work that's out there, but they tend to be very academic-oriented journal articles. There's a book called The History of Marketing Thought. Or they're siloed. They're histories of advertising, of certain elements of public relations, and biographies of individual marketers or advertisers or entrepreneurs. But there wasn't anything that was like a history of marketing. And similarly, there was no podcast dedicated to it either, or even a blog really dedicated to it. There were blog posts or podcast episodes that touched on marketing history, but nothing that really dived into this particular topic.And being somebody who's interested in storytelling, interested in marketing, I thought this was a gap. And it was one of those moments where I thought, “This doesn't exist in the world, why don't I try to fill it?” And that's the start of the show.Scott Morris: In the process of building up the interviews and starting the editing process and really building what you felt like was going to be this podcast, what's been the toughest part?Andrew Mitrak: It's been surprisingly easy, all things considered. You are aware of this, most listeners probably are not, is that I have a video background. I had produced podcasts at a prior company that I was at. And so I know all the tools. I was a student in college, I was a journalist, I was a documentary filmmaker, and a lot of those skills translate pretty well to podcasting. I also am pretty good at cold emailing, and sending emails to guests was a fun little challenge. So a lot of that came easily. I'm not the best at any one of these things, but I think that I have a lot of the skills, when combined together, that make me pretty good at this so far.I'd say the thing that I disliked the most about it—that to me it's hard because it's hard to do things when you're not having as much fun—is sometimes it's things that I've signed myself up for, like doing a YouTube short. I have a lot of joy in editing the full episode. I'm in the zone when I'm in Premiere and editing everything together, and I feel good about releasing the long-form stuff. But there are things that I'm like, well, every episode, every platform seems to want these short little snippets and these bite-sized things, and let me go ahead and do those as well. And I don't find as much joy in them. I see them as a little more of a chore.So there are things like that that I'm like, it's my own doing. I could choose not to do it, but the things that don't get me excited about it, they feel the hardest to me. And also, I always edit the short last, so I've gotten the whole episode done, I've gotten it all transcribed, I've got everything published, and then I do this little short, and it seems like one extra thing to do. So maybe I'll stop doing that because it's really by my own choosing that I do it.Surprising responses to the podcastScott Morris: Nice. Well, I have some ideas for that for you. So, let's talk about that afterward. You got to do those shorts, man. Once the episode started airing and you were starting to get feedback and listeners and subscribers, what was the thing that was most surprising to you? Was there anything that generally in terms of the folks who had been listening or specifically anyone that had reached out, left a comment or a post about one of the episodes?Andrew Mitrak: The most surprising and delightful thing is the response from international marketers. And it helps you realize how big the world is, how interconnected we are, how the internet can help you reach anybody.We're both here in Seattle, Washington, and I have a bias towards thinking about our local community or thinking about the United States or the English-speaking world. But when I look at the Substack subscribers, only like 29% are from the US. And the next biggest is Brazil and India and a lot of countries where English is not the dominant language there. But folks from all over the world will share a really nice note about how they are enjoying the show or share some LinkedIn post about this interesting conversation they found. And I search the show name and I come across and I'm like, "Oh wow, this person in Sweden liked it. That's so cool."You see the numbers of how many hours cumulatively that have been listened to, and even though it's still a relatively small niche podcast, it does break your brain to think about, "Wow, a lot of people have actually heard this and reacted to it and reached out about it." So that's been super fun.Scott Morris: How do you view engagement with that audience and how do you think about connecting with them? Is that something that's been on your mind?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, a theme for me personally, producing the show, is questioning whether I'm doing it for me or whether I'm doing it for listeners.Selfishly, a lot of me reaching out to people is because of my own curiosity. It's because of my own interest in talking to some of the guests, doing things because I want to have a conversation or learn about a certain topic. And that's what makes the show fun to do is that it's not me trying to optimize for engagement or optimize for listenership or optimize for what some other audience wants. It's just me doing what I want to do, having the conversations I want to have, meeting the people that I want to meet.But then people respond and they have feedback and they've dedicated their time to it. Everything has been super positive so far and everything's been very encouraging. So because I haven't really seen any negative feedback per se from listeners or things that would lead me to do anything differently than what I'm currently doing, I'm following my own interests for the most part. And whenever I receive a note or an email or anything, of course, I respond and am really grateful for it. It keeps me super motivated.Starting with Philip KotlerScott Morris: When thinking about your own curiosity, right? And cold emailing. I know that reaching out to Philip Kotler was a pivotal moment in your decision in terms of whether to do this podcast or what it would look like. When you got that email back from him agreeing to the interview, what was that like?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, doing the podcast, I had this idea for A History of Marketing, but the question is, how does it become real? How do you actually do it? Because I've had a lot of ideas. I've probably shared a bunch of ideas with you of fun projects to do and documentaries to do or domains that I purchased and then never actually set up as a website.And then this became real because when I was looking up which guest to talk to, Philip Kotler, who is sometimes called the father of modern marketing, he wrote my marketing management textbook that I used in grad school to learn about marketing. He is a legend. And I'm like, "Wow, he has to be one of the first guests."So I purchased his autobiography. I think it's called My Adventures in Marketing, and read it. And the autobiography had his email address in there. And so I sent him an email. And since listeners have asked about this before—how did you get Philip Kotler?—I'm just going to read the exact email that I sent. And it's called "Podcast Interview: A History of Marketing" is the subject line.I sent that to him at the start of November, and he responded within a day. You could tell there are things I said; I kind of made this podcast feel official as if I'd actually recorded one before. But it's a very transparent, truthful email. And I think partly the reason he probably agreed to do it, if I had to surmise, is that I clearly had done my research on him, read his book. If I was in his shoes and I'm looking at a podcast called A History of Marketing, why wouldn't I want to be a part of that, right? It's almost elevating marketing to a historical status.So not only did he agree to do the interview, which was a huge win—that would have been gracious enough—he right afterwards emailed the people who would be my next several guests on the show: David Aaker, Jag Sheth, V. Kumar. And they then emailed folks who I should talk to as the next guest after that. And that really spurred a lot of the guest booking, especially for the first 12 episodes or so. Phil Kotler and his network really helped launch the show.Scott Morris: Well, sticking to that email that's going to go down in history now, it's going to go in the PR museum. You chose a very specific amount of time for what you were asking for. I wonder if you could talk about why did you choose 45 minutes?Andrew Mitrak: I always ask for 45 minutes because it tells somebody that is longer than a half hour, and usually if they agree to 45 minutes, they'll also agree to an hour. And also, it's not too big of a commitment. Also, I'm not Joe Rogan or whatever doing three or four-hour podcasts or something like that. I have a life, and so do the guests.Marketing history is still being writtenScott Morris: We talked about some of the surprises that you found from audience members. What's something that's surprised you in terms of the content that you all have covered in these episodes?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so I went in not knowing a whole lot about marketing history. There's this really silly throwaway joke from The Simpsons where Marge is thinking about how to make money and get a job or something like that. And she's like, "Oh, I'll be a piano teacher." And Lisa's like, "But Mom, you don't play piano." And Marge says, "I just have to stay one lesson ahead of the kid." And I kind of feel like Marge.I know more than the average listener or even the average marketer. I've done some research, and especially now, I have really spent, I don't know, six months or so generally researching it. But I'm also not an expert. I'm not so deep in it that I'm doing really, really, really niche things. So all of that to say, I've learned a lot from the guests on the episode themselves.The most surprising thing is that the history is not written in stone. There's relatively little of the historical record as it is, but even what exists is kind of debated over. I published that interview with Philip Kotler, and he talks about the early 1900s as the start of marketing.And then I got some inbound from really smart professors who were like, "Phil Kotler, obviously smart, accomplished person, but I'm going to disagree with him there. Actually, I think it started earlier than that."Or I think that the idea that marketing emerged as a field of economics, I'm going to dispute that and say it actually emerged much earlier, and there are things. I published this interview with Giana Eckhardt about how there were branding elements in Imperial-era China a thousand years before the 1900s. And Giana was one of those people who reached out to me where she had seen the Phil Kotler one. She's like, "Thanks for doing this. This is great. I want to add a unique perspective that hasn't been shared where I'm going to introduce some of my own research to this that'll kind of contradict some of what was shared before." And I think that's great. That's wonderful.It also, this is part of why—we didn't talk about the naming of the show—but the name of the show is A History of Marketing, not The History of Marketing. I don't pretend to get everything right. I don't pretend to not have my own biases. I don't pretend to try to cover everything out there. And even the people who I interview, they might contradict each other or introduce new information. And I think that's a really exciting thing. So if you had asked me at the start, would I be talking about branding practices in Imperial-era China, I would have laughed at the idea that that was happening. So, all sorts of surprises across the board.Selecting Marketing Legends and “Primary Sources” as GuestsScott Morris: Speaking specifically about the guests that you've had so far, a lot of the folks that you've talked to have been more towards the end of their career or maybe even retired. And so it's created this opportunity for this great career retrospective that your interview ends up being for them. But I'm curious if you are thinking about interviewing folks more mid-career and what kind of more modern types of campaigns or other things are interesting for you as you look forward?Andrew Mitrak: I think starting off, I thought, "Well, Phil Kotler, the father of modern marketing" Really sharp as you can hear the interview, but he is 93 years old. And he is somebody who may not have the capacity to do that forever. We're all mortal. And some of the guests are primary sources. Phil Kotler literally wrote the book, experienced a lot of this and a lot of change firsthand, was an active member in some of the changes in marketing, many of the changes in marketing. Same goes for Dave Aaker, Jag Sheth, V. Kumar, George Day—folks who had a big impact of lived lives. And I figured, prioritize them and start by going to the primary sources as much as I am able to, and then work my way forward.Covering recent marketing historyAndrew Mitrak: And what's good about the podcast is that marketing history sounds like a niche, but where do you cut off the line of history? There's a lot to cover. I barely have really focused on the internet era, the first banner ads. There was this banner ad that I used to see all over—maybe it was on Netscape Navigator or something like that—of Punch the Monkey.And it was this banner ad where there's this annoying little monkey that danced around, and you moved your cursor, and your cursor controlled a glove, and then you'd punch the monkey. And of course, the thing is, it wanted you to click on the banner. It didn't matter whether you actually hit the monkey or not.And I'd like to meet the people behind these little ads that are really gimmicks, because there basically is this life cycle of an ad or a tactic where something gets launched, and then it works, and then people catch on, and maybe a bunch of other marketers and advertisers do it. And then so people see it everywhere, and then it stops working, and then you have to find something else. There are so many little stories of the Punch the Monkey type ad or early viral ads, how much web has changed, e-commerce, the marketing funnel. There are all sorts of history that's really more recent history that I think will be fascinating to dive into. But to start, I wanted to go to some of the earlier generations and hear from the primary sources as much as I could.Working Towards a “Marketing Mix” of Guest VoicesScott Morris: Looking back at this first block of episodes, how do you feel about them now? What do you feel like is the story that you're kind of telling with this first block, and then where you kind of want to go?Andrew Mitrak: You can hear in the Kotler email, I say I interview professors, authors, CMOs. And I think this first block especially was a little more biased towards professors. That's mostly who we've talked about so far. And while there were great authors—I was really, I really enjoyed the interview with Larry Tye about Edward Bernays. Really enjoyed Shelley Spector, the curator of this museum that also touched on PR. Mark Tungate, I thought that was a really fun one on covering advertising history through the ages. Obviously Guy Kawasaki and Sergio Zyman who had great stories about Apple and their own careers and Coca-Cola.So I'd like to get more of a mix. I feel like it's probably been 70-ish percent professors, and then the remainder being divided between authors and more practitioners. I'd like to develop a mix where I'm hearing from everybody because I'm really interested in seeing the intersection of where academic ideas meet the real world, how marketers can learn from academia and research that's being done, and on the flip side, how marketing theory can be enhanced by case studies that are from the real world or real-world marketing campaigns. That mix is something I'd like to keep developing.Frankly, interviewing professors is a little easier because you know exactly what their research is, it's all published. Usually, professors have their email on their website, and so it's easier to get in touch with professors. But I want to be mindful and I don't want to over-anchor on academics, and I want to bring in more biographers and authors and historians and other marketing practitioners themselves.Going back to me being selfish about it, I see them as me getting mentorship from these folks. I have so much to learn. And getting the excuse to sit down with somebody like Sergio Zyman, the first CMO of Coca-Cola, or Guy Kawasaki, somebody whose marketing books I've read and have influenced me, and hearing from them firsthand, it's so inspiring. I'm so grateful for it. It's one of the beneficial growth hacks of having a podcast is all these people get to talk to me. And I want to learn from more of them as well—professors as well, but also some of the marketing practitioners and authors out there.Scott Morris: That's one thing that's really stuck out to me that you, a claim that you made in your trailer that turned out to be true, which is that a lot of these folks are really good storytellers. Guy Kawasaki and Larry Tye and Sergio Zyman, these are some really not great stories in a history of marketing, but great American or even broader stories that are being told. You guys have covered the 1984 Apple ad or New Coke or bacon as a breakfast food.Future marketing campaigns to cover on the podcastScott Morris: For you personally, what are the kind of ad campaigns or marketing campaigns that you kind of have most been affected by or influenced by?Andrew Mitrak: I don't know if I've been affected or influenced by it yet, but one campaign that I've become a really big fan of over this show and I want to keep exploring more is the Pepsi Challenge. I haven't booked this person yet. I'm trying to get him on, so if anybody listening happens to know him, his name is John Sculley. He's best known as being the CEO of Apple. He was played by Jeff Daniels in the Steve Jobs movie that Aaron Sorkin wrote. He has this incredible career, but before Apple, he spent a decade or more at Pepsi. And Pepsi was like 10% market share to Coke—a total underdog. It was like Coke was everything, and then it was Pepsi and the other guys. And then all of a sudden, Pepsi became pretty close to a 50-50 competitor, or maybe 40-60 or 45-55 to Coke. But in the 70s and then in the 80s, they were this juggernaut.As a storyteller, I love the story of an underdog. As somebody who spent a lot of my career in a startup, you're always an underdog when you're a startup. And hearing how they took on the big guys who totally outspent them—they did the Pepsi Challenge.And what is the Pepsi Challenge? It's kind of the truth. It's using a taste test, biasing the taste test to favor Pepsi, because if you take a sip of Pepsi versus a sip of Coke, you're more likely to prefer the sweeter of the two. It might be different if you drink a whole can or a whole pack, but they designed a test where it favors their product.They filmed participants, almost like an early version of reality TV, reacting to it. They reported on the accurate results: most Americans or most consumers prefer Pepsi in a blind taste test to Coke. And they do that, they do the Pepsi generation, they do a bunch of underdog campaigns. They're not even mean-spirited at Coke; they're just like, "Hey, most people prefer Pepsi, time to give it a try."And it has everything. It has, in classical rhetoric, ethos, pathos, and logos, right? Ethos is sort of, "Oh, I trust that because other people are doing it, or it's like some authority." And you see other people, most Americans, liking Pepsi. You see the pathos, the emotion of it. There's an ad where a grandma is like, "I've been drinking Coke my whole life. I guess I do like Pepsi more." And there's this emotional element to people realizing that they like it. And then there's the logic to it that most people prefer it. It's this ad that is new, it's an underdog, it works clearly for them. As somebody who's interested in how underdogs can use marketing to gain market share and to have that David versus Goliath type story, that's one campaign that I'm really interested in.Scott Morris: I mean, as you're talking about it, I have very fuzzy memories of the Pepsi Challenge, but not nearly that solid memory that you have. So, yeah, it was fascinating.Andrew Mitrak: One of the other things that sparked me in doing this podcast is I was referencing the Pepsi Challenge to a co-worker, and she had never heard of it. She had never heard of the Pepsi Challenge. And it did primarily run in the late 70s or the 70s and 80s, and I saw little elements of it in the 90s and maybe early 2000s. But I thought, "Wow, if marketers don't know about the Pepsi Challenge, we got to preserve this. We got to make marketers more aware of this. Marketing needs to be taught as a history just so you can learn about good ideas." So that was one of the other things among the things percolating that gave me the idea to pursue the podcast.Applying Lessons of History to Marketing TodayScott Morris: You are a marketer. You work as a Marketing Director for a large company. You've done this work for a long time.Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] I'm not a Director, you gave me a promotion. I was a director at startups…Scott Morris: Soon to be marketing director. Has working on this and the interviews that you've done changed your view of marketing?Andrew Mitrak: This is probably the most selfishly rewarding part is that speaking to these—many of them legends in marketing and people with great careers—is so inspiring, and it's absolutely changed how I work. There are a few ways how.First, a big theme throughout the podcast is that marketing strategy, when implemented well, is not limited to the marketing department. Really, marketing as a function should be the interface between the company and the market that it serves. And it's a two-way job. You should be communicating the company to the market that you serve. You should also be analyzing the market and taking in market feedback, and then feeding that to the company to influence what the company does, how it builds its products, how it prices.The first person that I spoke to was Philip Kotler, and Philip Kotler is famous for the 4Ps. He didn't invent the 4Ps, but he popularized them. And they're product, price, place, promotion. And it's something you learn about in a marketing textbook. And then what happens is you enter the marketing world, and you're basically just focused on one of those Ps, which is promotion. Right?Maybe there are certain elements of place as far as if you call internet advertising or channel advertising or promoting on a certain channel. But marketing so often is lumped in with promotion, and the product and the pricing of it even today is often owned by a different team within a company. And I think marketing just can perform this strategic function where you have to think beyond promotion. You really have to think more holistically about what you can do. And I find myself stepping out of my lane as a marketer to try to advocate for other things the company should be doing or communicating upward on where the market I serve is at, things we can be doing, other trends are there. And I just see that as my job as a marketer to communicate upward and outward throughout the company.The other one, at a more tactical level, is the interview with Robert Cialdini. I had read his book Influence way back when, and I read it again in advance of interviewing him a few months ago. And the way that he frames things, he has a language for stuff like the principle of reciprocity. Right? Now when I am running a campaign that means providing somebody an ebook about some services or something, I'm talking to my stakeholders about, "Hey, the reason we're doing this is the principle of reciprocity that when you give somebody something of value and you're not taking stuff from them, they like you more. They want to give something back. This is a sense of goodwill, and this is why you do these things. It's because of these psychological elements." I don't know if it works. I bet a lot of my colleagues just roll their eyes at me. But anyway, I'm using more and more of the language that these professionals use. I hope it makes me sound a little smarter...Both in terms of the scope of marketing and some of the really tactical language I use around campaigns, it's totally influenced. And also, just publishing the podcast itself, a lot of what goes behind the scenes, I get to learn a lot of tools, AI tools even that I don't use in my everyday job. And so as a tactical person, I'm doing something that I don't do in my day job every day, and I'm getting to learn new tools and work new muscles. And I use my company's products a lot when I produce the product. So I get to empathize with users as well. So all those things, I think, accrue to influencing how I am as a marketer.Scott Morris: That's so cool. And yeah, the episode with Robert Cialdini. I felt like if anyone hasn't listened to that, especially if you're a small business marketer or just marketing in general, it's like, yeah, I feel like I gave me a to-do list essentially is what I felt like, which was really exciting.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, if you are 30 minutes into this conversation with me and Scott right now, you should pause it. Go listen to the Robert Cialdini one.Marketing and Measuring ROIScott Morris: You also talk a lot with a number of folks. I think particularly Guy Kawasaki with the 1984 ad and how that was, essentially, there was a lot of pushback about that ad, trepidation essentially about whether they should do it. And then also how effective was it in terms of ROI on the millions of dollars that they spent in producing it. Now that you've gone through these interviews, how are you seeing that relationship between that kind of the art and commerce aspects of marketing and advertising?Andrew Mitrak: I think that's an interesting one because that 1984 one, it's come up a lot, often cited as one of, if not the greatest ad of all time. And among the, not negative comments, but some LinkedIn reply guy is like, "Actually, this ad didn't work because the Mac was a failed product line." And it's funny how these things can still be debated to this day. And I think that's great. I think it's really cool that history is a living thing, it's being reassessed, re-evaluated. It's why a podcast like this, I think, has a lot of interesting material to cover.Yeah, the relationship between art and commerce or another one for me is data and intuition. There's certainly a lot of the best marketers and campaigns seem to rely a lot on intuition. Somebody like Steve Jobs, I think he could be persuaded with data, but also clearly had a lot of intuition. Sergio Zyman and the Coca-Cola folks clearly used a lot of data, but they also did things with their intuition as well. I think that's an interesting idea too. The measurement and the ROI of marketing—marketing as an expense versus as an investment—on what time frame do you consider that investment? How important is measurability?I think they're all really, really interesting questions, and I think it's good that there's not one single definitive answer to saying, "Oh yeah, the answer is 1.25” And that's it and it's settled and now we're going to… It's not that. It's something where, hey, it is a little squishier, and that's what makes it fun. That's what makes it exciting. That's what gives it a lot of rich history and stories behind it.Favorite Moments from the Series (So Far…)Scott Morris: I don't want to ask you what is your favorite episode, but I am curious if you have a favorite moment or a favorite insight that you've gleaned from these marketing legends that you've interviewed thus far. Do you have a favorite thing that you've done?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I definitely wouldn't pick a favorite episode. A favorite moment was actually with the Sergio Zyman one where a lot of my episodes are very cheerful, happy, conversational. And I am not asking really super hard gotcha questions, and it's a very easygoing conversation that hopefully is insightful and well-researched but has positive vibes. He's a little confrontational. He's a little jabby. That's his style. He likes to poke. He kind of was interrogating me about describing the taste of Coca-Cola.Sergio Zyman Clip:Sergio Zyman: Do you drink Coke? You drink Coke sometimes?Scott Morris (from Zyman episode clip): Yeah, of course. I've had a Coke. I don't drink it every day.Sergio Zyman: What does it taste like?Andrew Mitrak: Well, first you feel the bubbliness of it, the sweetness to it, and then there's a bite.Sergio Zyman: No, no, no. I didn't ask you how it feels. I ask you what does it taste like.Andrew Mitrak: It's hard to say other than it tastes like Coke. It's hard to describe other than a Coke tastes like a Coke.Sergio Zyman: Basically, a Coke has no taste memory.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.Sergio Zyman: If you go and you say what does Pepsi taste like, people will say sweeter than Coke.Andrew Mitrak: Coca-Cola is your baseline for comparing everything else.Andrew Mitrak: He kind of put me on the spot and I'm like, "Gosh, I have to describe this to the guy who was the CMO of Coke." And he's kind of, he's like interrupting me. And I actually like that a lot. I think a lot of good podcasts have some tension to them, have some sense of drama, that there is a dynamic between the host and the guest and always respectful and everything, but also that there's a little bit of tension there. And I think that came up. So that strikes me as something that I'd like to explore more of. I want to have a really positive relationship with the guests, but I'm thinking about how do you inject more drama, more tension into the guests without, while it's still being an overall positive and informative experience?Scott Morris: I did want to ask you actually, if you wanted to have another take of answering the question, what does Coke taste like? Now that you've had some time to think about it.Andrew Mitrak: Last weekend I was thinking about this question, and I actually had a Coca-Cola for the first time in, honestly, probably like 10 years for me. I don't drink much soda in general. I've had some Diet Cokes here or there, but I hadn't had a Coca-Cola Classic in a long time. I'd kind of like to answer it exactly the same. It is mostly about the initial bubbliness. If you leave it in your mouth long enough, it gets very caramelized and sweet to it.Scott Morris: [Interrupts] The taste, Andrew.Andrew Mitrak: Here's the thing, if I was to push back on him, the thing about taste is taste is a sensation that really does encompass every other sensation. The sense of touch—people will describe themselves as a texture eater, right? And if something smells a certain way, that has a really big impact on how you actually taste it. If it looks a certain way, it'll actually really impact the taste. And I think he was being provocative there, but I would just push back on his idea that taste is only just what is the flavor in your mouth. It is—taste is actually a number of other things. And me describing the texture is a perfectly valid response to taste. So, if I was to defend myself, that's what I would say about it.Wrapping Up and Listener FeedbackScott Morris: Well, it made for a great moment. It really did. Well, thanks so much, Andrew. I mean, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's been really fun and insightful to learn more about the behind-the-scenes of A History of Marketing and what's been motivating you and what have been some of your favorite moments. Is there anything else you want to hit on before we close out?Andrew Mitrak: No, that was great. I'm laughing because you sound like me; you're clearly doing the same wrap-up thing that I always do. Any things you want to plug?Scott Morris: The thing I was to ask you is, where can we find your work online? Is there anything that you'd like to plug?Andrew Mitrak: No, this has been fun. Hopefully, it's been fun for listeners too. I think of a good podcast as having some education to it, some entertainment to it. Then there's also this idea of companionship to it, that there is, you form some relationship with the host. And I can tell it's happened with folks who have reached out to me and sent me nice notes. I'm hoping this does some of that, shows a little bit of what goes on, how I'm thinking about it. But also, I think the guests are the most interesting people. I just want to hear from them.So listeners, if you've made it this far, hopefully you liked it okay. But also just let me know, shoot me a note: [email protected]. I read all the emails. I respond to them. You can find me on LinkedIn and shoot me a note there. I really like hearing from listeners. And if you like more things like this, let me know. With the caveat that, like I said at the beginning, I'm doing this selfishly to learn from the best—the CMOs, the authors, the professors, and the guests themselves—and I want them to be front and center of the shows.Scott Morris: Do I get to promote anything or what?Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Yeah, do you have any things you'd like to plug?Scott Morris: People could to my website wakaseattle.com. I make videos for businesses like Pike Place Market, Bloodworks Northwest, and a lot of folks in the Pacific Northwest, but that's what I love doing. So if you want to go check it out there, you can also find me on LinkedIn.Andrew Mitrak: I'll post a link to wakaseattle.com and your LinkedIn in the blog. And Scott, you're selling yourself short. Scott is an incredibly talented filmmaker, documentary maker, video producer, all-around great person to work with who does really great videos for great brands. So if you are in the Seattle area or beyond and are interested in working with a really talented video producer or somebody to guest host your podcast, he's good at that as well.So with that, thanks so much, Scott. This has been a lot of fun.Scott Morris: Thanks, Andrew. Take care. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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