A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 56
Yoram “Jerry” Wind has spent six decades at the frontier of marketing. He has won virtually every major award a marketing scholar can receive, and his CV is more than 100 pages long.
In B2B marketing ,the shift from single leads to buying groups is framed as a new revelation (see my interviews with Kerry Cunningham & Jon Miller). But Jerry Wind mapped organizational buying centers in 1966 and developed the BuyGrid model in 1967.
I was almost angry when I discovered this. “We’ve all known about buying centers since 1966, and marketers are still chasing individual MQLs?!” I had to ask Jerry about this directly. It’s where we kick off our conversation.
We then shift gears to one of my all-time favorite case studies: Courtyard by Marriott.
Like Moneyball, it’s a case study of taking on the old guard (hotel industry veterans trusting their gut) and using data (conjoint analysis on traveler preferences) to build a modern system. Jerry and his collaborator Paul Green used marketing research to reshape the physical world, creating hotel layouts and room designs we still see today.
Jerry’s foresight is just as impressive. More than 10 years ago, he was writing and presenting on AI and its coming impact on marketing and education. Last year, at age 87, he published Creativity in the Age of AI.
We also cover:
* The RAVES framework and balancing cognitive data with emotional appeals
* Why the CMO role must evolve to orchestrating all customer touchpoints
* How to spend a career challenging mental models
* Why most marketing lectures fail and how to fix them
For me, this conversation felt like a return to form for the podcast. It’s in a class alongside my interviews with legendary professors like Philip Kotler, David Aaker, Jag Sheth, and George Day.
I learned a lot from Jerry, and I find his prolific career inspiring. I hope you like it too.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
In case you missed it, play the “Date the Ad” marketing history game. Learn more.
The Wharton School in 1967: Bridging Theory and Real-World Practice
Andrew Mitrak: I want to start right at the beginning of your career as you were entering the field of marketing. Can you describe the scene of what marketing looked like as a field back in 1967 around the time you first joined Wharton?
Jerry Wind: Marketing was a little different, but it was the beginning of kind of what we see today. And I think one of the great things about Wharton is Wharton had the orientation that we still have, which is marketing theory and methodology has to have practical value. It started with Wroe Alderson, who was basically the founder of this practical approach to marketing. And with Paul Green, who really was the main figure in the Wharton marketing since the early ‘60s, but he joined the department. I joined in January ‘67, primarily because of Paul Green and Ron Frank. I liked their orientation and approach, and at the time Wharton Marketing also had the Marketing Science Institute that was actually launched because of the work of Wroe Alderson, that convinced Scott McCabe from Scott Paper to start an institute that will bring industry to academia and academia to industry. When I joined Wharton, I almost immediately joined some of the projects at the Marketing Science Institute. So the environment at Wharton was really a little different than the rest of the field. We were very much, especially because of the influence of Paul Green, focused on new methodology. Reavis Cox was still at Wharton at the time and he was kind of one of the leaders in the marketing theory area. I think it was an ideal place to be in. It probably was the most advanced of most of the other marketing departments at the time.
Andrew Mitrak: One of the names you mentioned a couple of times, I was wondering if you’d bring him up, is Wroe Alderson, because I did a whole episode on Wroe Alderson. I interviewed his son, I interviewed Stan Shapiro, and I interviewed a scholar named Ben Willis Croft who had studied the life of Wroe Alderson. I think Wroe would have probably just passed away in 1966, right before you joined.
Jerry Wind: Correct. I never met him. All I know about him is really through Paul Green.
The Influence of Wroe Alderson
Andrew Mitrak: Could you speak to him as a figure? Because it seems like he’s one of those figures who had a lot of influence in marketing, but kind of—I don’t want to say he was forgotten, we’re talking about him here, but his impact, maybe because he passed away right in the 1960s as marketing was taking off and growing as a field. I’m wondering if you have any comments or would want to speak more on his influence.
Jerry Wind: Well, Wroe actually had a consulting firm, was very active, and it’s still very insightful to read—I think it was called Cost and Profit, the short publications that he issued. He really influenced a lot of us, definitely Paul Green, who then influenced the rest of Wharton marketing and the field. It also legitimized to a large extent consulting. For many years, consulting was viewed as: you could say you have one day a week you could do some consulting. Most of the consulting people did was really lecturing to industry. Lecturing is not really consulting. The real consulting that Wroe epitomized, and that Paul Green and I did a lot over the years together, were actually solving business problems. A lot of the developments in marketing over the years, especially on the methodology side, came because we had to solve problems of real companies who faced them. Conjoint analysis, multidimensional scaling—all of these are great examples of developments that came because of needs of industry and the need to address specific problems.
Organizational Buying Behavior: The Buygrid Model and the Buying Center
Andrew Mitrak: That actually is a nice segue to organizational buying behavior. This is one of the topics you researched. For context, I am a marketer and I’ve almost always worked in B2B marketing. The way that organizations buy is really interesting, and I think that the way things are sometimes set up and measured today are flawed and don’t really take into account the dynamics of organizational buying behavior. I want to start just by asking you about that and why did you start researching it? What was the scene of the status quo of the way people thought about the way organizations buy, and how did your research help change that?
Jerry Wind: I started because, first of all, I was curious. It was curiosity as to: how do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? The literature at the time was not very helpful. Luckily, one of the faculty at Stanford at the time was Bob Davis, who chaired my dissertation committee, who also worked as vice president at Varian Associates, which was an industrial firm. In discussions with him and with Ron Frank and Bill Massy, who were basically the lead faculty at Stanford, Bob Davis suggested, “Why don’t you start speaking with some of the people at Varian and get a feel for what’s happening?” That led to actually studying them and studying another company, Motorola, that had major operations in Las Vegas at the time. So the motivation was fundamentally: how do they buy? How do organizations buy? How do they make the buying decision? Since very little was known at the time, I thought it was a bright field to start, and it was a great start. Also, it reinforced the belief that was developed later on when I moved to Wharton of the importance of working with industry.
Andrew Mitrak: Did you visit Las Vegas and Motorola in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s?
Jerry Wind: Spent a lot of time. This was in the ‘60s. I worked on the dissertation from primarily late ‘64, ‘65, and ‘66. I got it from Stanford. My doctorate at Stanford was two years; it was ‘65–’66.
Andrew Mitrak: What was Las Vegas like in the ‘60s? Was there …


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


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


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


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A History of Marketing / Episode 52
Gian Fulgoni has spent 50 years as a pioneer in market research and audience measurement. From his work on scanner data at IRI in the 1970s to co-founding Comscore in 1999, Gian helped invent how marketing gets measured, first in supermarkets and then on the internet.
His career sits at the center of two transformations that reshaped the field. At IRI, he helped pioneer the use of supermarket scanner data and built one of the earliest controlled experiments in television advertising, a system that could send different ads to different households in real time, in 1979. Two decades later, he co-founded Comscore to bring that same measurement rigor to the chaos of the early internet, building the panels and tools that defined how digital audiences and e-commerce got counted.
Gian has lived through every major shift in modern marketing measurement, and he’s candid about what went wrong along the way. He has watched the industry get seduced by metrics that are easy to capture but don’t actually measure whether advertising works.
In this conversation, we cover:
* Why digital marketing metrics like click-through rates and ROAS are misleading, and why the industry keeps using them anyway
* How scanner data accidentally flipped CPG spending from advertising to promotion and handed power to retailers
* Why data shows that creative is the biggest driver of advertising effectiveness, and why the industry keeps ignoring that lesson
* What the dot-com era might tell us about today’s AI revolution
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Tod Johnson, whom you may remember from episode 51 of this podcast, for introducing me to Gian.
Andrew Mitrak: Gian Fulgoni, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Gian Fulgoni: Well thank you. Thanks for the invitation to be here today.
Andrew Mitrak: I want to start right at the beginning. You studied marketing in London and then moved to Pittsburgh to work in marketing. How was the marketing scene different between the UK and the US?
Gian Fulgoni: Well, you know, marketing was kind of viewed as having originated in the US, but that’s really not the issue that I was focused on. So my undergraduate degree is in physics. Right? And while I might have been good at it in high school, it was like going from the minor leagues to major league baseball when I got to university. I had no competitive advantage in physics. I was trying to figure out what to do next, and it was the beginning of marketing, actually, in the US and certainly in the UK. I did some research and realized that marketing might be a good place for me to be.
I did, I think, anticipate correctly that data and computers and the like, analytics, would become more important in marketing as time went by, which kind of reinforced my decision to major in marketing. I got a master’s degree in it. Then I got offered out of the blue. I got a job while I was still at school that took me to Pittsburgh, and it was a company named Management Science Associates that was started by a professor out of Carnegie Mellon who wanted to do research on things he was interested in. He started a company that was focused on analyzing data, basically. Processing and analyzing data. And that’s where I ended up.
Is Marketing a Uniquely American Discipline?
Andrew Mitrak: I want to follow up on, you said that it seemed like marketing had originated as more of an American field. It’s something that on this podcast I’ve actually encountered. Like I’ve talked to Phil Kotler, who is often called the father of modern marketing, and he kind of says that marketing is uniquely American or comes from an American tradition. And I’ve talked to folks though from abroad who reject that or they push back on that, and it’s just sort of like a North American bias. So it’s interesting as somebody who was in the UK, you kind of perceived it that way. Can you speak to that?
Gian Fulgoni: Yeah, I mean there’s no question in my mind. There’s no question in my mind. For example, where I got my master’s was the only university in the UK that had a master’s degree in marketing. That was in 1969. I mean, you could get a master’s degree in marketing in a bunch of universities at that point in time in the US. There were only two MBA programs in the UK at Manchester and London. You know, you had dozens of them. So, if you look at all of the people who pioneered marketing, they’re really from the United States. So I don’t think there’s any question that the US was ahead at that point in time and maybe to this day is still ahead.
Andrew Mitrak: So did you go into marketing knowing you wanted to go to the US eventually?
Gian Fulgoni: No. No, it was, I had done some research, talked to some other people who were going on to MBA programs when I was in my undergraduate final year. And that’s what I decided that marketing looked really interesting. As I said, I think I anticipated the data and analytics, computers, would become more important there. But I had no idea, no intention of coming to the US. It was when the job offer came along that I suddenly thought, man, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. I gotta do this.
The Early Adoption of Computers and Data in Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: You were really early to computers and data in marketing. Marketing as a field in the UK was early, and then attaching computers and data onto it. How did you make that connection initially?
Gian Fulgoni: I think in large part it was because the company I worked for, Management Science Associates, their business was helping companies use whatever marketing data they had. And that would involve taking raw data, if you will, and processing it, analyzing it, whatever data it was. It could have been panels of consumers, back in those days it was diary panels. Or it could have been shipment data that companies had, or it could have been Nielsen audit data, or another database was SAMI warehouse withdrawal data, or whatever data they had. And so I was able to learn the basics of what was available as data, how to process it, analyze it, how to improve it, and I think started to get a feel for what was not available that maybe could be a home run if it became available.
Riding the Technology Wave in Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: It strikes me, this is a little bit of an odd question, but have you seen the show Mad Men?
Gian Fulgoni: Yes. Yes.
Andrew Mitrak: It strikes me the analogy I was thinking of like people like you who adopted computers early. In that show, there is a character, Harry Crane, who adopted TV, and he became the head of television and sort of rode the wave of TV. And people like you were very early on to computers and data and sort of rode that wave. I feel like marketers who can identify the right technology ride a wave, it can propel you in your career. Do you think of it that way at all, like part of it is timing and finding the right technology and positioning yourself as the expert in it?
Gian Fulgoni: Absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I have often said I didn’t create any particular technology. I just took advantage of breakthroughs in technology that allowed for the creation of new applications and new products. But I think I did see early on that it just had to evolve, right? Computers, it was pretty clear, were getting faster, at that point bigger by the way, we hadn’t reached the trend when things were getting smaller. But you could see that the data that was becoming available, that was changing. The way that data was being analyzed, things that could be done with data that wasn’t available at the time. I mean, the emergence of scanner data was a great example, because that changed everything in how consumer packaged goods marketers operated. One truth at least that’s evident to me is that data, the availability of data, can change markets fundamentally. And I think there a…


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