A History of Marketing

A History of Marketing / Episode 47
In 1967, a 30-second spot at the very first Super Bowl cost roughly $37,500. This Sunday, for Super Bowl 60, brands are paying upwards of $8 million. That is a price increase of over 20,000%.
So… Is it still worth it?
For Professor Tim Calkins, who’s spent 22 years studying this exact question, the answer is an emphatic, ‘Yes.’
Since 2005, Calkins has led the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, where MBA students evaluate every ad that airs during the big game. It’s easy to say which ads are funny. It takes more work to determine which ads will be effective.
In this conversation, we dig into how Super Bowl advertising has evolved: why brands now release their spots weeks early, why the creative has gotten safer as the stakes have climbed higher, and what the tone of these ads reveals about the American economy and political climate.
If you’re planning to watch the game this Sunday (or just the commercials), this conversation will deepen your appreciation for the work that goes into making every second worth $266,667.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
We also talk about Tim’s years managing Kraft Mayo and Miracle Whip (two surprisingly different marketing challenges), and the most common mistakes that marketers make when delivering business presentations. As you’ll hear, Tim is an excellent speaker.
Now here is my conversation with professor Tim Calkins.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Tim Calkins: Well, thank you. It is great to be here.
Andrew Mitrak: We will be publishing this right before the 2026 Super Bowl, which is Super Bowl 60. I had a lot of fun preparing and researching some of your work and also watching some old classic Super Bowl ads. The reason I wanted to have you on for this conversation is that you started publishing the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review in 2005, so over 20 years now. Can you introduce this project for listeners?
Tim Calkins: This is our 22nd year doing this event. Back in 2005, we began the Super Bowl Ad Review, the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review as we call it. I teach at Kellogg, I teach marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Before I was at Kellogg though, I was at Kraft Foods, and I worked in marketing at Kraft Foods for a number of years. When I was at Kraft Foods, now Kraft Heinz, with my team I would sometimes do an exercise where we would look at Super Bowl ads and try to think about what we could learn from what had happened on the Super Bowl.
When I came over to Kellogg, I thought there was a similar opportunity there to do something around the Super Bowl where we get the Kellogg students evaluating these Super Bowl spots. So the event has now been running for 22 years. The format is always the same. We pull together a panel of Kellogg MBA students. Nowadays it is about 70 or 75 students. As the Super Bowl unfolds, as it plays, the students evaluate all the ads that run.
What makes our panel different from a lot of other panels that are out there is that we are very focused on efficacy. We are trying to think about: will these spots, will these Super Bowl ads, build the business and build the brand? Ultimately that is what Super Bowl advertising is all about. A lot of panels, and a lot of Super Bowl rating things—there are lots of these—they will look at likeability, humor, which one did you like the best, which one was funniest. Our panel, we don’t really do that. That’s not really the question. The question really is, using sort of an analytical framework and process, how do we think about which ones of these will be most effective?
Every year we come up with our ratings. We give a handful of advertisers As, and then Bs, Cs. On occasion, we give out an F if somebody really misses the mark. It is a really fun event, but it also is a lot of work because what you realize being part of it is that there are so many ads that will run on the Super Bowl. There are probably 75 official Super Bowl spots, but then there are all these other things that show up. You have local spots, you have network promo spots for different shows. It is a lot of evaluation that the students do. It ends up being a very draining experience.
Andrew Mitrak: Can you walk me back to the beginning? You mentioned Kraft, which later became Kraft Heinz, which I will follow up on because I want to ask you about that too. When you first started paying attention to Super Bowl ads there, this might be an obvious question, but what stood out to you about Super Bowl ads? Why did you want to pay special attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Super Bowl ads are really unique things in the world of marketing. What is amazing is they become more and more unique as time has gone by. Even if you go back 25 or 30 years ago—so we are now at Super Bowl 60, so you go back to Super Bowl 25 even—the advertising that was running was really different than normal advertising. What happens on the Super Bowl is a few things. Number one, it is expensive, so the investment is high. Number two, you have a huge audience, so there is a lot of people who are watching it. But also, the expectations are different for a Super Bowl spot.
You can’t turn around and run an ad that you are running on Survivor. You can’t turn around and run that ad on the Super Bowl. For most advertisers, you are creating a special piece of creative just for that event. People expect to see amazing Super Bowl spots. That is the expectation and companies are under a lot of pressure to deliver.
The Framework Behind Super Bowl Advertising
Tim Calkins: The reason it is really interesting to study is that you know that for each one of these advertisers, they are putting forward their best thinking, their best creative talents. This is the pinnacle of their work. So much scrutiny is on these things. Given that, it is fascinating to see what they decide to do. Sometimes they do brilliant things and other times they really miss. But to understand what is happening there and really think about it as a marketer is a really unique opportunity and you can learn a ton.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how Super Bowl ads are kind of this unique thing. They are a little different than other ads. When you think about this project of analyzing Super Bowl ads, how does it connect to your broader work in brand and marketing strategy? Do you see these as really closely related where a Super Bowl ad is just the epitome of a brand and a marketing strategy wrapped into 30 or 60 seconds? Or do you feel like this is just a little bit of a different, kind of like a fun side quest that’s related to a brand, but it is a slightly separate, unique, different thing than the rest of the brand itself? How do you frame this work?
Tim Calkins: I think a Super Bowl spot is very much at the heart of everything that I teach. I teach marketing strategy, I teach biomedical marketing, I teach influencer marketing, branding. Across all of those classes where I really spend a lot of time is trying to think about the strategy. What are the choices that companies and brands are making? Are they going after new consumers, for example, or are they going after their current consumers? Are they trying to skew younger? Are they trying to go older? Is it about repositioning a brand, getting people to think differently about it? What are all the choices that companies are making?
So when we look at Super Bowl spots, and I look at a Super Bowl spot, I am really interested in pulling apart the choices that the companies have made. Your first choice: the decision to run an ad on the Super Bowl. Well, that’s a big decision. How is it that the company reached that decision and decided that was a good use of 8, 10, 20, 30 million dollars? That begins there. Then the question is, okay, well what products are they talking about and who do they seem to be going after and what’s the message they are putting forward? All of those are sort of strategic choices that the company is making.
Ultimately it does get down to some creative execution things, and those are fun too. But I think a lot of the heart of a good Super Bowl ad comes from the strategic choices that are made in the development process.
Andrew Mitrak: What is the first Super Bowl ad you yourself remember watching? Were you always interested in Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I’ve long followed the Super Bowl. Like everybody, I watched the Super Bowl. As I was growing up and came through college and all of that, I would watch the Super Bowl and you’d watch the advertising, of course, a big part of the event. It was really only when I got to Kraft that I began to look at it with a marketing lens. That is a very different way to evaluate a Super Bowl spot. Beforehand you might be looking at, you know, what’s one of the early ones I remember... the Coke Mean Joe Greene ad that ran, which was one of the great spots.
Or, of course, Apple’s spot that ran back in 1984, these old spots that ran.
But it was very different for me when you begin to think about these as marketing investments and marketing tools. That is where all of a sudden it begins to change how you watch a Super Bowl ad. It is one of the things I try to do as I talk about the Super Bowl, is to get people to look at them a little bit differently. It is so easy for people to pass a quick judgment on a Super Bowl spot. “Oh, that was funny. That was great. That was stupid.” People are very quick to pass judgment on it and nothing to stop them from doing that.
But when you really pull back and try to think about what is happening there, it totally changes how you evaluate it and how you think about it. You just have a lot more respect for the risk of these pieces of advertising and you have a lot of respect for how difficult it is to do. I think to do a great Super Bowl ad is really tough. It is a really difficult thing. So when somebody does it well, you have to have a lot of admiration for that team and really salute them.
When they miss, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s not for a lack of intent or trying and effort. It is something went wrong. Sometimes your heart goes out to them because you are like, “Shoot, I don’t know exactly the people who were working on this, but it did not go well for them.” So I guess it makes you much more empathetic about this advertising when you really understand what is happening.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it is good to be empathetic. It is also kind of fun to dunk on the people who miss and all that, but you got to look at everybody trying their best, marketers taking a high-risk bet and kind of good on them for trying whether it’s a win or a bit of a dud.
Evolution of the Super Bowl Commercial Landscape
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a few famous ads that I want to ask you about because you mentioned Mean Joe Greene, the Coca-Cola advertisement, which is a lot of fun. And then of course the classic 1984 ad, which is probably the single ad that’s come up on this podcast more than any other advertisement. I kind of see that as sort of a watershed moment for the Super Bowl ad where it was a 60-second spot, big budget, directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1984 and obviously has the tie-in to 1984.
Do you see any other milestones beyond that one in Super Bowl advertising? If you look at moments as the stakes in the Super Bowl have gone up, the prices of an ad have gone up beyond 1984, do you see any other major milestones or inflection points for Super Bowl advertising?
Tim Calkins: People often ask, what turned the Super Bowl into this marketing extravaganza? I think what happened is that it has been a step-by-step process over the years that have really led to this. There have been iconic spots that have run over the years. Mean Joe Greene back in 1980. Apple, that was 1984. Then of course 1993, that was one of the great spots for McDonald’s with Larry Bird and Michael Jordan shooting baskets for a McDonald’s meal. That was one of these great iconic spots, celebrity, the whole thing. That was a really big spot people remember.
The Budweiser Frogs in ‘95. That was another spot that people remember that sticks in the mind.
What really happens here in the Super Bowl is that it is a step-by-step growth and increase in the importance of Super Bowl advertising. Part of what is happening with the Super Bowl growing, what is happening at the same time is that all the other media properties out there are sort of fragmenting. So if you go back 20 years ago, the Super Bowl was a big deal, but a lot of other things were a big deal too. The Academy Awards were huge and people would watch those. The Baseball World Series was huge and people would watch that. The Olympics was huge.
What has happened over the decades is that so many of the other big events, viewership has declined as audiences have fragmented and we have so many choices of things to watch. The one thing that has held up and even grown as the years have gone by is the Super Bowl. Which makes it then more and more important when it comes to companies and brands and when it comes to the advertising because now if you want to reach everybody in the US or a good chunk of people in the US, really the only way you can do that is on the Super Bowl.
The Surging Costs of Super Bowl Spots
Andrew Mitrak: I looked up the price of a Super Bowl ad when they started. A 30-second spot at Super Bowl I (1967) was $37,500 back in 1967 dollars. By the way, that’s from Wikipedia, so I don’t know if it’s 100% accurate, but let’s say that’s the ballpark cost of an ad at that time. Inflation-adjusted about 10x that is $360,000, so more expensive. But that said, today in 2026 the reported cost is about $8 million. So that delta between $360,000 to $8 million, that’s the increase in cost.
That would mainly be attributed to there being no other option. If you want to reach all of America, there are not many other places where you could do that. Would you say that scarcity and the breadth of that reach is what justifies the higher costs that advertisers are paying now versus then?
Tim Calkins: There are a lot of things that go into the price, but certainly the price escalation has been extraordinary for Super Bowl spots. But you know, if I could today buy a Super Bowl spot for the 2035 Super Bowl, if I could do that, if there were a market that would allow that, I would do that because I don’t think the Super Bowl is declining anytime soon.
Why do companies pay so much money? Partly it is the sheer reach of it. It is, if you want to get to a big chunk of the population, the only place you can go. But it is not just that. The other thing that has happened is that a lot of people when they are watching the Super Bowl, they are there, they are watching the advertising. Viewership of the Super Bowl, you might have 110 million people watching the Super Bowl, but the vast majority of those people, they don’t care about the teams and they, in many cases, don’t really care about football either. You just have to watch the Super Bowl though because that’s what everybody’s doing that night.
Nobody counter-programs against the Super Bowl. You are not going to have a piano recital on the night of the Super Bowl. People would say, “What are you doing? You can’t have like a Scrabble party on the night of the Super Bowl. You are not going to do that.” No, everybody’s got to watch it. So people show up there, they are looking forward to seeing the advertising. That’s what they are paying attention to.
The other thing though that is happening is that Super Bowl ads are very symbolic. That is an important aspect of this. If you are a company and you are going to go buy a Super Bowl ad, what happens now is you are going to put of course a big PR push around that and you are going to do all these other activities. You want everybody to know that you are buying a Super Bowl ad. Because what does that say? Well, that says that you believe in your business, you are investing in the business, you are an important company, you’ve got resources. All of that is really valuable for branding and it’s got this symbolic nature to it that is hard to quantify but is very real. So there is lots of stuff that brings people to this moment.
You know one other thing that helps Super Bowl advertising is that the Super Bowl is early in the year. It’s in February. Which you would think, well who cares? But in a way that is really important because most companies, if you are on a calendar year fiscal year—January and February, what do you have? Budgets. You’ve got money. At the beginning of the year. In November, your money was either spent or cut or something happened to it, the money might not be available. But at the beginning of the year, all these companies have big budgets. In many cases they say, “Let’s get the year off to a good start. Let’s get on the Super Bowl. Let’s run this advertising, really give the business a jump start.” And that is going to propel us through the year. That is another factor that kicks in here to make it so valuable for firms.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s a really good point, that timing within the year itself. Because also it sets up a campaign or an idea that you can build on throughout the year as well. If I think of the 1984 ad, at the start of the year, that’s great, 1984. If it was at the end of the year, maybe 1984 is kind of a lame pun. Like, “Oh, we’ve heard 1984,” it just happened over and over. So I think the ads themselves are fresh, it’s a new year, it’s a new idea. This is a campaign that you launch big and can iterate on or call back to throughout the year. So it’s kind of a nice big upfront investment in your brand spend.
Tim Calkins: Well, and you’ll see that a lot of advertisers will use the Super Bowl to launch new campaigns. So that is when they bring out the new advertising. And then they follow it up. Either they take that Super Bowl spot and run it again, either as is or in a shorter format, or they extend the campaign idea and bring other executions around the same creative look and feel. You sort of put it in the mind originally on the one Super Bowl, the one big event, and then come back to reinforce that and to get some repetition. They do that in the subsequent months.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that companies measure the impact of their Super Bowl ads differently than they do other ads? Do they measure ROI in terms of different types of uplift versus some other type of ad? Any thoughts on, you know, they spent $8 million on these ads, how are they measuring the ROI on that?
Tim Calkins: Measurement of Super Bowl ads is really tough. It is really difficult to do. What happens is that every company is measuring the impact. You are not going to go invest 8, 10, 20 million dollars and not try to figure out the impact. The problem is that it is not easy to measure the financial impact of a Super Bowl spot. Some things are easy to measure. You can measure website traffic and you can figure out if anybody came to your website. You can look at search terms, did anybody do that. If you are selling an app, you can look at how many downloads did you get and what happened there. If you’re relying on influencers, you can see what kind of activity. So you can look at a lot of these diagnostic metrics.
You can also ask people, do they remember your Super Bowl ad, did they like it? All of those, that’s all easy to measure. But financially, it is very hard to put numbers around it. The big problem is that valuing a brand financially is... people try to do it, but it is a very imprecise science. So in theory, if you get out there and run an ad on the Super Bowl, and if it’s a great piece of advertising, at the end of the day people will think better of your brand than they did before. They will have more positive associations with your brand and they might either know of it for the first time or have some... but it helped the brand.
The problem is you can’t quantify the financial value of that. I can quantify how many people came to my website and things like that, but that’s a very small part of it. You are never going to justify a Super Bowl ad based on those kind of metrics. You are going to do it for the brand value and for the long-term impact that it is going to have.
I have come to believe there is one way to know though if a company is happy with their Super Bowl ad. The one way you know for sure is whether they come back to do it again. Because you know that if a company runs an ad on the Super Bowl and then the next year they don’t, well then you know that clearly they didn’t think or they had questions about the efficacy of that. But if they come back and they do it again, then you know something.
Sometimes you’ll see advertisers, they will run on the Super Bowl for a number of years and then they don’t. And then the question is, what happens next? Somebody like WeatherTech. They ran for many years, but then they took a year off. And then they came back. What that tells you is that they clearly thought that they were benefiting from the Super Bowl spot. And when they stopped doing it, they saw the problem.
Andrew Mitrak: Sorry, which company was that? WeatherTech?
Tim Calkins: WeatherTech. Yeah, so WeatherTech, they do floor mats. Very strange company. It’s a private company. And they have been running on the Super Bowl though for many years. They are back in 2026. They ran in 2025. I believe they did not run in 2024. But they ran ‘23, ‘22, ‘21, ‘20. But then you know.
Some brands have been back and they have run for just many, many years. TurboTax has run, this will be their 13th year running on the Super Bowl. And you are like, wow. Squarespace, 12th year coming up. Michelob Ultra, 9th year. What you know is that these companies have clearly thought about this and have clearly decided that the Super Bowl is a good investment for their brand.
Why Major Brands Left the Super Bowl
Andrew Mitrak: I’ll keep a closer eye out for WeatherTech; I hadn’t heard of that brand, but I’ll be watching for their ad as well. Are there any certain brands that you’ve noticed that left and stayed out? Do you think there are brands that said, “Hey, the way we win is by not playing,” and just chose to opt out of the Super Bowl? Are there any examples that come to mind of not because they went out of business or aren’t a successful company anymore, but they just choose to opt out of the Super Bowl?
Tim Calkins: Oh sure, a lot of companies have. They come and go as Super Bowl advertisers. One of the great Super Bowl advertisers for many, many years was FedEx. FedEx eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl, and we haven’t seen them in recent years. They made the decision not to do that.
Then there are other brands that really found magic on the Super Bowl and then stopped. Somebody like CareerBuilder. You might remember them; they ran some Super Bowl ads that were really distinctive with chimps. They had these chimpanzees, and it was these very funny spots about the workplace environment and, “Do you work with a bunch of monkeys?” I think was the thing. Maybe you should get a new job, and CareerBuilder was going to be a place to go find your new job. They eventually stopped running on the Super Bowl. There were a lot of reasons why.
It is interesting, though, for a brand like that, you stop running on the Super Bowl, and then you do begin to see an erosion in brand awareness. Clearly, I haven’t seen their numbers, but clearly, that brand was top of mind when they were a big Super Bowl advertiser, and that is not the case at this point.
Andrew Mitrak: I wonder which one preceded which. For CareerBuilder, it’s interesting because others have taken up the space, like Monster.com or obviously LinkedIn and other tools are massive within it. I wonder if CareerBuilder, if they don’t advertise in the Super Bowl because their budgets went down because of their impact, or if they stopped advertising in the Super Bowl and then therefore they kind of lost some market share and it was sort of a downward spiral from there. I wonder which one preceded which.
Tim Calkins: My understanding of the story on that was actually sort of interesting. They were using the chimps, which were super memorable and distinctive Super Bowl ads, but then they got a lot of pushback from the animal rights activists who said it’s totally inappropriate to be using the chimps. They were very targeted. Some of the activists were very targeted and went after some of the senior executives at the company. The company eventually said, “We can’t really use the chimps. We’ve got to do something else creatively.”
When they did that, though, what they found was that it was very tough to come up with a great Super Bowl spot. So they ran a couple of years, but they did not get anywhere near the distinctiveness or the lift that they had before. Then I think they said, “It’s a lot of money, the creative doesn’t seem to be working here, doesn’t make sense to keep doing this.” And then they backed away.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I guess if you’re going to use the animals, use something like frogs that work better as puppets or CGI or whatever Budweiser uses versus the real chimps.
Tim Calkins: Yeah. I mean, the good news now, I guess, is Generative AI can create whatever we want right now.
From Single Super Bowl Spots to Integrated Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: Exactly. Aside from the advertisements getting more expensive, over the course of the last 20 years since you’ve been—22 years now since you’ve been running this—have you noticed the ads themselves change themselves or the nature of Super Bowl advertising? How has the nature of Super Bowl advertising evolved since you’ve really started paying attention to Super Bowl ads?
Tim Calkins: So it’s changed a lot. One of the big things that has changed is that more and more Super Bowl advertising isn’t just about the Super Bowl ad; it is about the whole integrated campaign. I think there are two factors behind this. One is the investments have become enormous, and so companies want to maximize the return on investment to make the most of the opportunity. The other thing, though, that’s available is now there are so many other digital tools that are available.
You go back 20 years ago, and we didn’t have Instagram and Facebook and TikTok to play with. All of that has emerged over the years. Now what you see is companies put forward incredibly elaborate, integrated marketing campaigns around the Super Bowl. For most of these companies, it becomes a three-week—really a two-to-three-week—marketing push where they try to hit every lever during those two or three weeks. They pull out the PR campaigns and the influencer efforts and all of this different activity to try to make the most of it. So that’s, I think, really different. That’s one thing that’s changed.
Why Brands Release Ads Before the Game
Tim Calkins: Related to that, another change that we’ve seen is that more and more of these companies now release the spots ahead of time. It used to be that the vast majority of Super Bowl ads would run on the Super Bowl, and that was the first time you would see them. Now, the majority of advertisers—the vast majority—will release the ads ahead of time. They’ll release them either the week before the Super Bowl or maybe two weeks in advance, but they get those spots out there ahead of time. There are lots of reasons to do that, by the way. That is the best practice. That’s a big change that we have seen. There’s a lot behind that we could go into.
Andrew Mitrak: What are the reasons you would release your Super Bowl ad before the big ball game? You’d think like, “Hey, I want to make a big splash all at once. Let’s kind of hold the dry powder and go big all at once.” But is there some strategy to releasing beforehand?
Tim Calkins: Oh, there are a lot of reasons to release a Super Bowl ad ahead of time. One of the big ones is that there’s just more time. So if you put your spot out there a week in advance, you’ve got a lot of time to generate viewership and to get views of it before the Super Bowl even happens. The Super Bowl goes by really quickly.
The other thing that happens is as an advertiser, the Super Bowl is very unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe it’ll be a blowout and you’re running in the third quarter and nobody’s watching anymore. Maybe what happens is a different advertiser runs a spot right in front of you that is uproariously funny, and that overshadows your spot. Maybe the creative idea that you’ve embraced is copied by another company, and they’ve got the same sort of idea.
These are all unknowable, unpredictable things. How do you hedge that? You get out ahead of time and try to get some viewership before the game even begins.
Another big one, and maybe I think the most important one, is you know ahead of time if you have a problem. So on the Super Bowl, there is so much attention and viewership that it’s terrifying for companies because if you make a mistake and you run a spot that people find—even a small group of people—if they find it inappropriate or offensive or something like that, it can turn into a massive problem for the company. How do you avoid, how do you minimize that risk? If you release the spot early, there is time for people to come back and say, “Wait, that doesn’t look right,” and then you can fix it before the Super Bowl goes and before you offend millions and millions of people.
So there are lots of reasons at the end of the day to get that spot out there. Holding it back for the surprise, you’ll see some advertisers do that, but that is not a common approach anymore. The stakes are too high. It’s too risky. There’s too much money involved. It makes a lot of sense to release it ahead of time.
The Rise of QR Codes and Digital Calls to Action
Andrew Mitrak: The other change that I’ve seen probably in the last 5 to 10 years or so is the ads themselves having more distinct calls to action or digital experience within it. The QR code... I can’t remember which company it was that just had a kind of bouncing QR code on their ad for 30 seconds.
Or ones where there’s also one from a year or two ago where it was just a big long URL or some secret code to enter in an app, and you had to find all the letters and type it all in.
So it seems like there are more and more—in addition to being aware of the digital surround or pre-releasing on social media or on YouTube in advance—there’s also on the ad itself having more direct calls to action and making the ad more interactive itself. Is that kind of a trend you’ve been paying attention to?
Tim Calkins: Well, there’s no question that companies are trying to leverage technology and take advantage of that. Whether it’s the QR codes that you see on some of these spots or on other platforms, you see that I think more and more.
Super Bowl Ads as a Mirror of the US Economy and Politics
Tim Calkins: There are two other really interesting things to watch for, though, on the Super Bowl. One thing is who shows up and who advertises. And that’s a really interesting question. It tells you something about the economy. Because to go on the Super Bowl and run an ad, that means that you’ve got resources and money and you have a certain amount of optimism about the future. If you’re worried about saving money, if you think your company is going to be having some hard times, you wouldn’t run a Super Bowl ad. Those are the companies that are feeling good. So it’s very interesting to watch that and to see who shows up.
The other thing is to watch the tonality of the Super Bowl spot. I think you can really learn something about the US economy and how people are feeling if you really look at Super Bowl ads. Because all of these companies, they study the environment, they study how people are feeling, they come up with creative design to resonate with people. So what these companies see is a really interesting look at what’s happening within the country. And you can really see that happen in many ways.
You know, actually if you look even when it comes to politics, you can see trends develop there. So if you go back, what was it now, a year and a half ago to the... Was it a year and a half ago? Before the election. Yes. But if you go back and if you... The question was who was going to win? Would Joe Biden pull it off and his group and the Democrats, or would Donald Trump come back?
But you go back and you look at the advertising that was running on the Super Bowl that year, and there was a real tone to some of the spots around people feeling that it was tough in the economy, it’s tough to move forward, it’s tough to get ahead. What you could see there, there was a real sentiment that people were not feeling good about how things were going. They weren’t feeling good about their futures.
And when you look at that in hindsight, you’re like, “Shoot, there it is.” If people are really feeling that way, that is a very difficult time for an incumbent or an incumbent administration, an incumbent party, to get the win. And you just look at it and you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s interesting.” So it’s always fun to watch what’s the tonality.
Last year on the Super Bowl was interesting. We saw a lot of traditional values on the Super Bowl. What did we see? People in traditional families. People at the cul-de-sac. What did we not see? You don’t see people at the club. You don’t see people in an urban environment. You don’t see super diverse groups of people. Last year we saw this real sort of pivot to these traditional kind of values, which again, I think just reflected a little bit of where the country is at the moment. So the Super Bowl, it’s really fascinating to watch what people run and what’s the tonality.
Are We Past the Era of “Peak Super Bowl” Creative?
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that we’re past peak Super Bowl at all? I mean, you mentioned how you’d still... if you could buy an ad for 10 years ago at today’s price, you would do it. But also if I look up lists of the greatest Super Bowl ads of all time, there aren’t that many that are from the last five years or so that make the list. Like I looked up one that had a hundred or so ads, and the most recent ones were kind of clustered around 2010.
There was “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like“ from Old Spice.
There’s “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry,” the Snickers one that really revitalized the last decade or so of Betty White‘s career.
Then there’s “Parisian Love” from Google, which is an ad that I love.
And those were all from around 2010, I think, which was 16 years ago at this point.
Do you think that’s maybe just bias against recent ads and they just need more time to sort of marinate and be part of the culture? Or do you think there was something from, you know, 15, 16 years ago that made ads more memorable than they might be today?
Tim Calkins: So I don’t think we’re at peak Super Bowl because the trends that have made the Super Bowl so powerful are still very much intact. You’re seeing the Super Bowl as an event remain incredibly important, and viewership is solid—viewership has been up in the past few years—and other options are beginning to fragment.
It is true that some of the most memorable Super Bowl ads are older ones. I think that’s true, though, for a couple of reasons. One, I think, is that there’s no question that Super Bowl advertisers have to play it pretty safe. And more and more it’s become true that taking a big risk on the Super Bowl, creatively or otherwise, is really pretty dangerous to careers. And not sure you want to do that. So that may be one reason.
But the other reason, I think, is that the overall standard of the Super Bowl spots is getting better and better. So when we began our whole journey on the Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review, each year there would be some that were just really not good pieces of advertising. And now that seems to be less the case. It just feels like the overall average quality of this advertising is getting better and better.
But I will say one thing you can be very confident of—I’m going to make one prediction for the Super Bowl this year—afterwards, people will say, “You know, the advertising just not as good as I remember.” And they’re going to say that. But they always say that because what happens? In our minds, we remember a few iconic spots. We remember Larry Bird. We remember the first of the E-Trade babies. We remember that Apple spot.
What we forget is that there were like 500 other pieces of advertising that ran over that period. So our memories, we’re picking out the highlights of the past 20 years and comparing this year’s collection of advertising to the highlight reel. That’s not a fair comparison. It’s a little bit like having a football team play the All-Star team. I mean, it’s just not...But people will say that because they always say that.
The one thing that might be a problem though for Super Bowl uh as a as a platform I think is streaming and how that unfolds. So you know right now there’s sort of the network broadcast you can stream the Super Bowl. The interesting thing is it’s not a given. My understanding is it’s not a given that the same advertising will run. And if I were in charge of the Super Bowl as a media property, I would insist that the same spots run on both because that way the advertising is seen by everybody and it can be the basis of conversation.
Where the Super Bowl begins to lose its punch to fragment like everything else is fragmented. And then instead of getting this big pop of a hundred million viewers, you start getting, you know, 20 million that maybe saw your spot on streaming or 60 million that maybe saw your spot on the network broadcast. And then I think you begin to ruin the Super Bowl as a big event that advertisers are worth really focusing on. That’s the biggest watch out. I have to think people will be smart enough not to get caught in that, but I do I do wonder if that could be a problem longer term.
Are High Costs and Risk Aversion Killing Creativity?
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned a lot of great points there, and one that I want to come back to is that advertisers are somewhat risk-averse with a Super Bowl ad, that you want to avoid being too controversial. I wonder if that’s partly just because of getting more expensive as well? Or it also is somewhat mirroring the phenomenon that we’ve seen in the movies, where movies are more and more—as movie budgets get more expensive—you see more Avengers type movies that try to appeal to everybody. You try to see the superhero movie that appeals to everybody, relatively inoffensive.
In the meantime, comedies—there’s almost no comedies in theaters anymore. What is comedy? It’s somewhat controversial in a way. And if I think of “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” the Old Spice ad, kind of a weird ad. Really funny, but kind of a strange ad and pretty risky too. Or “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry.” People tackling an old 90-year-old Betty White, also a pretty risky ad in some ways, pretty funny. And I don’t know if that ad would get greenlit today or get approved today in the same way because it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of risky.
I wonder if some combination of needing to appeal more as the prices get higher, really wanting to avoid too much risk if that kind of is all playing into why some of the ads might be a little less funny today as well. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Tim Calkins: I think there’s no question that companies are very careful with what they’re running right now, and that does impact the creative. It’s partly financial, but I think it goes way beyond the financial aspects. The thing to remember is that Super Bowl ads get so much scrutiny, and everybody knows they’re expensive, and everybody’s got an opinion.
So if you’re the CEO of a company, you know what you don’t want to have to deal with on the Monday after the Super Bowl? Is having to explain to everybody why did your company run that really either offensive, ineffective—call it what you will—piece of advertising. And I think a lot of companies and marketers will say, “We don’t want that kind of scrutiny. That’s a reason not to go on the Super Bowl.” You’ve got to be pretty brave to advertise on the Super Bowl, to be honest. And I think if you are on the Super Bowl, there’s still a desire to play it safe.
I mean, I guess the advertisers, I suppose, it’s not that different than the players on the teams. And the teams always have to balance how risky do you want to play and how conservative do you want to be. And the advertisers are working with that same set of questions.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s a really interesting tightrope to walk because you need to be risky enough that you’re able to break through and justify your spend and not be too boring. But also, if you are too risky, you can wind up really shooting yourself in the foot. I empathize a lot with these advertisers and everybody behind the budget and the approvals on it because you don’t want to make the wrong choice there.
Tim Calkins: Just imagine the process of developing a Super Bowl spot and how tough that is to navigate. Begin with the fact you have all these hierarchies within companies. If the vice president likes something, but the senior vice president doesn’t, you have that dynamic. But then they are all working with the outside firms as well. So an advertising firm will come in and say, “This is going to be just an incredible idea. This idea we have is so creative and unexpected. It’s going to be the best.”
But then the brand leader has to say, “Is that really the case or not?” If they don’t think it is, then you have to tell the creative person that it is not the creative idea they think it is. And the creative person is like, “No, I’m the creative person here, and you are not thinking big enough.” Then the brand person is like, “Yeah, but it is my brand and I don’t want to run something that creative.” But then the senior person says, “Oh, I think we should.” Just the complexity of it all is really tough to figure out. How do you end up with the creative idea that is going to run?
Andrew Mitrak: It’s almost a miracle that anything gets shipped at all.
Have You Ever Purchased A Product Because of a Super Bowl Ad?
Andrew Mitrak: So just wrapping up with the Super Bowl, I wanted to ask you, have you ever made a purchase or changed your buying behavior because of a Super Bowl ad influencing you?
Tim Calkins: The answer to that is yes, of course. Now, if you want me to pick exactly the example that I had, that is more difficult. That is a tough one. What did I buy? I did love the Kia Telluride spot that ran. That was an amazing piece of advertising.
Andrew Mitrak: I was going to bring Kia up because I have an anecdote. I have a Telluride that is sitting in my driveway right over there. I had never heard of a Telluride before, and I had never even considered buying a Kia before. But I saw that super bowl ad and thought, “Wow, that actually looks like a pretty cool SUV. That is a Kia? Telluride?”
I was driving a Prius, and then my second daughter arrived some time after the Super Bowl. I tried to drive my whole family home and thought, “Wow, this car is really cramped. I’ve got to upgrade.” I just started looking at reports of SUVs and I thought, “Oh, Telluride. That is well reviewed. Oh, I remember that Super Bowl ad.”
I didn’t just see the ad and go to the dealer the next day, but it certainly made it cool. It gave Kia a little more brand equity where they used to be a punchline of a car manufacturer in some ways. In fact, I think The Simpsons and Principal Skinner would drive a Kia and it was a joke. It was kind of disparaging.
Now it is a lot cooler. I think part of that—not the only thing, it is not a silver bullet—but part of that is that they advertise in the Super Bowl and they really try to use that as a mechanism to build awareness and reposition their brand.
Tim Calkins: I think it is an example of just a really effective Super Bowl spot they ran. Very risky. That was one, “We are not heroes.” We are an amazing Super Bowl ad. You look at the spot and all of a sudden, shoot, maybe I should think about a Kia. Maybe I should think about a Telluride. That is the power of it.
It is one of the things in marketing that I think people in general have to be careful of. When you ask people, “What brought you here today?” or “Why are you buying this product?” or anything like that, it is important to remember that people will never tell you it was the advertising. They will never say that. Or very rarely they will say that. They will say, “Oh, it was word-of-mouth marketing.” Or, “I saw something else.” Or, “I heard about it on...”
People say that partly because if you say, “Oh, I bought this product because of the advertising,” it makes you look like somebody who is not thinking fully. You can be persuaded by advertising. Who is persuaded by advertising? So people don’t volunteer that. But there is no question that advertising done well has an impact on how we make decisions and how we evaluate products and services. Absolutely.
Lessons from Managing Brands at Kraft Foods
Andrew Mitrak: With our remaining time, I wanted to ask you a few questions outside of just the Super Bowl. You mentioned Kraft Foods. You managed brands at Kraft Foods. I’m wondering just broadly, what did you learn from working at Kraft Foods?
Tim Calkins: Oh, I learned so much about teams, businesses, consumers, and marketing. It was just a terrific training ground for marketing. It really launched my marketing career. Even now when I teach at Kellogg, I look back to those days working on these brands to try to think about it.
What were some of the big things though? One of the things was just the challenge of delivering business results. Until you have been there and see the pressure of it, it is hard to quite understand exactly how that works. Just the need to bring in the results.
The other thing that is really interesting is trying to understand your consumers and figure out great communication—figure out how to talk to them in a way that will resonate. That is just really interesting and complicated. It is really fun because to do that well, you have to get in there and try to think about what is important to people. What are their values? What are the insights that motivate their life? When you do it well, you can come up with advertising and marketing efforts that really are incredibly powerful. They connect with what people value, think about, and care about.
But it is all hard because people don’t necessarily tell you what they care about or what they think about. Often people don’t even know what they really care about. It is interesting; people can’t express it sometimes. So that was fascinating, to understand and think about how you develop great pieces of communication. That was a big one as well.
Then there was a huge piece around working cross-functionally. On all those businesses, there are a lot of different things that have to come together. There is an operations side of things, a sales effort, a finance effort, market research, advertising, and promotions. Pulling together the team and getting the team organized, aligned, and working cohesively is really fun, but also challenging to do. That is the key though for any business. Unless everybody—all the different functions—are working together, it is really hard to get things moving forward in an organized fashion.
Brand Management: Kraft Mayo vs. Miracle Whip
Andrew Mitrak: I noticed on your CV you went from being brand manager on Kraft Mayo to senior brand manager on Miracle Whip. It just seemed like kind of funny consumer bases to market to back-to-back. I’m wondering if there was anything that you noticed jumping from one product to the next, advertising Mayo versus advertising Miracle Whip? Because they are brands that are so familiar. You see them in the grocery store every time. I see these. I imagine that there is probably some passionate consumer bases behind them. So do you want to kind of compare and contrast marketing those two products?
Tim Calkins: One of the great things about working on these products is you realize once you get in there just how different they are. You think about Kraft Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip and you are like, “Well, how different can they be?” They are both viscous products that come in the same jar, sold at a similar price point with similar usage behaviors.
But then you get in there and you realize they are totally different. Kraft Mayonnaise is a decent mayonnaise. But we were going up against Hellmann’s and Best Foods. At the time it was Unilever. Huge company, huge budgets, dominant market share. So we were sort of the scrappy little brand. Didn’t have a lot of resources. We had to find some way to scratch our way to some market share and try to keep that business going well.
But then you move over to Miracle Whip. Miracle Whip is totally different. Miracle Whip is this powerhouse of a brand. In certain parts of the country, it is a super high market share. The big thing about Miracle Whip is that it has no competition to speak of. No direct competition. There is a little bit of private label, but Miracle Whip is Miracle Whip.
So that is a totally different marketing challenge. It is around how do you activate your customer base? How do you resonate with people who really like Miracle Whip? It is a super polarizing product. But people who like it, really like it. So you just have to tap in to that consumer group and try to motivate them and try to get them fired up. That becomes the challenge for Miracle Whip.
It’s a really interesting piece. One of the interesting things about Miracle Whip that really helps that brand a lot is it is very tough to define what it is. What is it? You are like, “Well, it is a mayonnaise.” But then people will be very quick to say, “Well no, it is not mayonnaise.” It is a really different flavor than mayonnaise. If you like mayonnaise, you are probably not going to like Miracle Whip and vice versa. So you can’t call it a mayonnaise.
It is technically a salad dressing. That is the technical standard. But what is a salad dressing? What do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. So if you wanted to compete with Miracle Whip, I guess you would launch a salad dressing. But what do you do with salad dressing? You put it on salad. And what do you do with Miracle Whip? Well, you put it on a sandwich. So then maybe you are going to launch sandwich dressing. But what is a sandwich dressing? I don’t even know what that is. So Miracle Whip is just a totally interesting product. Makes a ton of money. No real competition. But so different than Kraft Mayonnaise.
Becoming a Better Business Presenter
Andrew Mitrak: I also want to ask you about presentations. You’ve spoken a lot about this. You are obviously a great presenter yourself. You wrote a book called “How to Wash a Chicken,” all about presenting. My question to you is, what do marketers most often get wrong about business presentations?
Tim Calkins: Presenting well is so important in the world of business because that is how you have an impact. That is how you get your recommendations put forward. What marketers get wrong about presenting, I think, sometimes they make things just way too complicated.
The thing about the world today, especially in marketing, is that there is so much data. There is so much information that is available. So it is very easy to end up with a presentation or a recommendation that is very clunky, full of studies, full of data, full of analytics, full of all of this information. But ultimately, that doesn’t lead to a really strong recommendation sometimes.
I think the challenge today is: How do you take all this information that we have and figure out which information really matters? And then, how do you lay it out in such a way that people can really follow the story? They can see the narrative and they can begin to understand what is happening on a business.
Marketing is all about action, all about moving forward. It is about recommendations: “Here is what we should do next.” To get there, you have to take people on this journey from where we are today to how that plan forward is going to be the best path. To do that, you really have to think about all the results we are looking at today, all the information, all this data, and how does all of that get us to the recommendation of where we want to go forward? That, I think, is the role of the presentation.
Andrew Mitrak: One of my tactics for presentations is I try to keep my presentations themselves pretty short, like 10 slides or fewer, but then I have a really long appendix. I kind of preempt because when I present—especially if I think of ones where I am presenting to a cross-functional team, we might have to influence somehow, or an executive I need to persuade—often they might even interrupt and start asking questions immediately. I want to show that I am prepared and jump to an appendix, but also not have all that information upfront because then, to your point, it becomes cluttered. There are too many different things.
Is my thinking about that the right way? Of just showing my homework in the back end but keeping it tight upfront? Or do you have any other tactics or tips along those lines?
Tim Calkins: The question I would always ask is: What will your audience need or want to see? So anytime you are doing a presentation, one of the first things you have to do is think about who are you presenting to. You think about what do they like and what are they going to want to see. If I am presenting to somebody and if I know that they are going to want to see a five-year P&L for the business, well then I am going to proactively go ahead and put that in because I just know they are going to be looking for that.
So I think that is a really important step, to think about your audience and then make sure you deliver against what they are doing. Ideally, when you are doing a presentation, you don’t end up going to the appendix. Ideally. Because if you have really done it well, I think you have a sense about what is going to be the next question they are likely to ask, and then you try to address it there.
An appendix is good to have though, in case you do get questions from out of the blue. Especially sometimes with cross-functional people who might ask something, and then some of that stuff might end up in the appendix. So I think it can be a really useful thing to have along with you. The bulk of the presentation though, that is always the question about: Okay, what do I need to put in here and what is all the stuff I can take out?
The Importance of Narrative Over Delivery
Andrew Mitrak: In my work as a marketer, I would say I spend more time making business presentations and presenting them than I do on actual creativity or actual strategy on marketing. Sure, there is strategy that sometimes comes up in the course of making a presentation. If you are presenting the strategy, you have to have done the strategy beforehand. But I spend a lot of time in slides and making them and presenting.
But also, if you look at the time I spent in school sort of learning presentations versus the time I spent on all the other stuff, I probably underinvested in learning presentation skills upfront. Is that a pattern that you see as a professor? That generally speaking, we underinvest in teaching marketers presentation skills?
Tim Calkins: Well, I think it goes beyond marketers. I think generally speaking, we do a very poor job in the world of business preparing people to put together good presentations. And there are lots of reasons for that. Part of it is that that doesn’t fall into anybody’s responsibility area. It is not the finance department’s—the finance department isn’t going to teach people to write a presentation. And the marketing department isn’t going to teach that. And the accounting department is not going to teach that. And the leadership group... Nobody really teaches it. Or few people. There are some communications folks you will see who work on it.
The other thing I see is though that very often when we do teach people how to put together a good presentation, we end up focusing very much on the delivery. We spend a lot of time teaching people how do you use hand gestures appropriately, and how do you move around a room, and how do you speak in a forceful voice, and things like that. It is the execution, the delivery. Which in my mind is fine, that is good, I think that is all great stuff.
But the real opportunity is before that. It is: How do you put together the recommendation? How do you lay out the story? How do you work with your data and turn the data into a logical story that leads to your recommendation? That is the part that is not really taught very well, in my experience. And it is something that doesn’t come naturally to people.
It is also something that generative artificial intelligence doesn’t do well. Generative AI will produce a list of pros and cons for you, and it can create a PowerPoint page showing a list of points or bullets, but it doesn’t really build a great narrative that leads you to this recommendation about where we want to go. That is the value add.
I actually think if you write—if you put together a great presentation—the delivery becomes really easy. Because the presentation almost does itself. Back when I was at Kraft, I would remember sometimes we would put together this really complicated recommendation presentation. And then we would send the summer intern up to go deliver the presentation. And the summer intern would be like, “What? I can’t.” You are like, “No, it will be fine.” The slides were good enough and the story basically just goes through it. It is just going to tell itself.
But all that work gets done before the meeting begins. And I think that is the opportunity for people, is to really think about how do you put together these stories, how do you lay out stuff that makes a lot of sense. If you do that well, the rest of it is going to take care of itself.
Andrew Mitrak: Professor Tim Calkins, I really enjoyed this conversation. It was so fun to revisit Super Bowl ads. I know I am much more prepared for the big game on Sunday. And also it inspired me to brush up on my presentation skills as well. So as we wrap up, where can listeners read more and find you online?
Tim Calkins: My website and sort of my blog and my newsletter, timcalkins.com. Also on TikTok, you can find me at marketingprof_tim. So I’m out there posting a little bit on TikTok these days around Super Bowl spots and presenting and all of that.
Andrew Mitrak: That is awesome. We will be sure to paste links to those in the blog that accompanies this post. So Professor Tim Calkins, thanks again so much for your time. I had a lot of fun.
Tim Calkins: All right, Andrew. Thank you. That was great fun.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 46
David Reibstein has spent his career straddling disciplines that don’t always talk to each other: quantitative analysis and behavioral science, academic theory and management practice, marketing departments and finance teams.
As a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the UPenn and the co-author of Marketing Metrics, Reibstein is a world-renowned expert on how to measure what marketing actually contributes to a business.
We discuss what David learned while under the mentorship of Frank Bass, a pioneer of bringing quantitative analysis to marketing and half the namesake of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Then we trace David’s early analysis on brand switching through his current research on nation branding and cryptocurrency confidence.
Along the way, we dig into why brand equity rarely shows up on balance sheets, why CMOs still struggle to justify Super Bowl ad spend, and what the Finance Minister of Saudi Arabia wanted to discuss over a private lunch.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
A few highlights from our discussion:
* How Frank Bass transformed marketing from “think like a customer” intuition into a data-driven discipline
* Why brand equity should account for both price premiums and volume gains
* The surprising reach of nation branding research (and the heckler who said his data were wrong)
* What crypto and meme coins reveal about confidence as currency

Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
And thank you to Bill Moult, whom you may remember from episode 23 of this podcast, for introducing me to Professor Reibstein.
The Influence of Frank Bass on Marketing Science
Andrew Mitrak: I thought I would start at the beginning of your career. One of the names that I saw you collaborated with and worked for was Frank Bass. I’ve interviewed a professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and we’ve talked a lot about their work on the podcast. We haven’t actually talked about Frank Bass himself, so I thought I might just start there and ask you about Frank Bass and what you learned from working with him.
David Reibstein: It’s a great place to start because that really is where my academic career began. He was known as basically one of the key people that was bringing quantitative aspects into the field of marketing. He was bringing meat into the whole category. He contacted me while I was in a master’s program. Frank started talking to me about, “You don’t need to finish that master’s program. Why don’t you come join the PhD program now?” I was three-quarters of the way through my master’s program, and I went and joined the PhD program, thinking if I go into academia, I don’t need that master’s. And I’ve never needed that master’s.
Andrew Mitrak: So Bass was a pioneer in bringing this quantitative side of marketing to the field. Could you just describe the field before him? What was the status of quantitative analytics and taking more of a data-driven approach and measuring the impact of marketing at the time? Can you give us a picture of the before and after?
David Reibstein: So if you think about what was marketing practice, it was “think like a customer.” There were a lot of consumer behavior aspects that were to it. Actually, when I was in my PhD program, I worked a lot with Jacob Jacoby, thinking about that. I had a minor in consumer behavior, but that was sort of where marketing had been. It’s now a major sector of the field of marketing.
The Evolution of Data and Econometrics
David Reibstein: But the quantitative side, if you think about the availability of data, it was 100% survey data with quarterly, at best, Nielsen data. We didn’t have a richness of data. Bass was looking at some time series data, how sales changed quarter to quarter. That’s sort of the field as it was at that time. He spent a lot of time, and some of the classes that we took with him—I say we, my fellow doctoral students—was thinking about econometrics as it applied to marketing. How sales changed over time with changes in marketing expenditures. That’s sort of where it is. If you think about where we are in 2026, the nature of data has exploded. You don’t need me in this session to talk about big data, but the abundance of data and moving away to a very large degree, but not entirely, from survey data has certainly been a prevalent part of how the field has evolved.
Andrew Mitrak: Once you left your master’s where you were three-quarters of the way through and got started working on your PhD program under the guidance of Frank Bass, what did you learn from him? What did you collaborate with him on?
David Reibstein: We spent a lot of time looking at brand switching behavior. It’s sort of related to brand loyalty issues versus just random behavior that happened to be there. He talked a lot about the stochastic man, that it’s all a stochastic process. There’s a probability of you buying certain brands, but what you bought last period doesn’t have an impact exactly on this period. There are different theories about how people switch, but a lot of what it is that I was working on with him at that time was looking at that switching behavior from consumers. That obviously would relate to frequently purchased goods (fast-moving consumer goods).
Current models and thinking about customer lifetime value and how long you think they’re going to stay with you over what period of time—some of that early work really feeds into trying to think about customers and how long you’re going to have them as customers over time. We were trying to change the probability of choice. It moved from being deterministic, “Here’s what they’re going to choose,” to “Here’s the probability that they’re going to pick these particular items.” Predicting probability of choice, we’re much better at doing that than predicting specific choice.
Andrew Mitrak: So this area became a thread throughout your career, tying marketing activity to measurable business impact. This is something that you worked on for decades afterwards, and it started back under your work under Frank Bass. Why did you see that this was the area to focus on for so long? Did you feel like there was a gap in this area where you could be the person to carve out your career here? What did you identify there?
David Reibstein: I’m going to go back to your previous question and tie it to this question. A lot of what I learned from Dr. Bass, from Frank Bass, is really methodologies. Econometrics was a major part of that, but certainly how to deal with data, structural equations, and trying to think about all of that. But it turns out that rather than just be a methodologist, what I thought was important was to spend some time trying to think about actions that management takes and then relating that to particular outcomes using the appropriate methodologies.
Bridging Methodology and Management
David Reibstein: So when I left Purdue, I joined Harvard. I wanted to spend some time trying to think about, “So how do we use this stuff? For what purpose?” So as I’m at Harvard, it was all “Just think about management,” and less thinking about the methodology. I viewed myself in a position to try and think about relating these together. I wanted to look at actual management behavior in marketing and how that relates to outcomes. So I wanted to know how it relates to profit because that’s what they really care about. I wanted to use quantitative statistical methods in a rigorous way to try and address that particular question. I think that gets to your specific question.
Andrew Mitrak: When you were studying under Frank Bass, would you say that the type of activity you were doing was more sort of large-scale, macro style—the quantitative side of marketing—or were you also working on some of the behavioral science, the micro, and the psychological side as well? Or did that come later?
David Reibstein: So the answer is yes and yes. Which is, originally working with him, it was looking at all the macro. And then what I evolved to, and what I ended up doing my specific dissertation on, was looking down at individual customers and seeing what their specific behavioral patterns were. Could we predict what those individual behavior patterns were? Which is why thinking about... you can’t look at brand switching on the macro level. We’re going to get market shares and sales, but not down to the individual behavior. What I started getting into in my dissertation was trying to think about indeed that individual level behavior and how people switched, and could we predict what those probabilities of behavior would end up being.
Andrew Mitrak: Really hard to do both. To be able to do both the large quantitative analysis and what I imagine to be lab work or very individual type of work with individuals and understanding psychology.
David Reibstein: Actually, what’s interesting in today’s world—today, 2026—most doctoral students as they’re coming out, they declare “I’m quantitative” or “I’m behavioral.” We sort of ask them, “Which group do you really fall in?” I’ve always been a straddler. And it’s like, how do we take what we could think about on the behavioral side and quantitatively analyze that? So I’ve published in Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research, but I’ve also published in the Journal of Consumer Research, trying to think about those two.
The Role of Marketing Strategy
David Reibstein: But I’m... most people will agree I’m an anomaly rather than a norm or a model that one should follow because you sort of are expected to fall into one of those buckets, one of those two buckets. And then I’m going to complicate it a little bit more because I also thought about the management side of that. So that sort of got me into marketing strategy, which is a lot of what I end up teaching now at Wharton, thinking about the marketing strategy side of that. So I’m going to add three legs to that stool.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, exactly. Is that a mistake of marketing academia in general to put people into one bucket or the other? Does the world need more straddlers? Do you need the understanding of the micro to be able to interpret the macro and vice versa? Do you need a strategy angle to be able to actually put it into practice? Is marketing shooting itself in the foot by focusing on everybody? Or is that just a practical thing that we need where people are specialists to some extent and we excel with specialists?
David Reibstein: So obviously I’ve got a biased perspective, right? As a straddler, I clearly have a biased perspective. But I think the argument could be made: you need to have depth. And it would be great if you had depth in some area. People generally don’t have depth as a straddler. So I was probably too shallow as a quantitative guy and too shallow as a behavioral guy, that the natural place was somewhere in the middle.
Andrew Mitrak: Or you might just be being too modest right now.
David Reibstein: Well, I’m rarely accused of that, but okay. But it turns out that I think we do need people that are quant jocks. And we need other people that are behavioral jocks. And I’m hoping that we need some people that can connect the pieces. There are several people that do that, but most are clearly within one particular camp. And I think we also need people to think about, “So how do we apply this and what’s the overall strategy of this?” I think those are important components as well.
Andrew Mitrak: Was there a time when you first started taking what you were learning in a lab or taking what you were learning from data analysis and then working with companies and practitioners and putting it into practice in the real world? What were the first elements of that happening?
David Reibstein: One of the things that we end up doing is we end up teaching executive education. And we end up being asked to work on particular consulting projects. And it’s like, “You’re great at doing that analysis. Help us with this problem.” And I go, “Hmm.” I actually think getting academics to do some consulting, or at least in the classroom with executives, is a really important thing. It’s not just we should shun it and think, “Oh, they’re just doing that rather than their academic stuff.” It really is asking people to be very focused on how do we apply this stuff.
And I think because of having some of those consulting clients and having some people in the classroom say, “Okay, I understand this methodology that you’re talking about or this behavioral theory that you’re talking about. How would I use it to apply this particular problem?” I think that’s a very, very healthy thing. And I think that external exposure helped guide a lot of the research I ended up doing and some of the work that I continue to do.
Defining and Publishing “Marketing Metrics”
Andrew Mitrak: Jumping ahead a little bit, you published the book Marketing Metrics in 2006, and it’s now in its fourth edition. It seems like this type of external work—working with practitioners, getting their feedback, seeing how marketing theory works in the real world—would be really informative for which metrics to prioritize, which metrics matter, how to implement them. Was that part of what helped inform this book?
David Reibstein: So some of the impetus for that book... and I have to give a lot of credit to one of my co-authors, Paul Farris, who was a major driver in all of this as well. But one of the pieces that was an impetus to that was I’d hear some people talk about one measure and some other people talk about that same measure but mean totally different things. And so, wait a minute, we need to have really clear understanding of what these particular measures are and to think about how could we use those. That was an important aspect of what needed to be done.
So that sort of led to, “Okay, could we come up with...” And the title of the original version was 50 Metrics Every Marketing Manager Needs to Know. We wrote that book with, “Here’s the 50 metrics.” And then the next thing we know is people are coming back to us saying, “That’s great. That really was helpful and you helped us understand how we measure that and how we would apply that particular term. But what about this other measure? And what about these new things over here?” And so it was like, “Oh, so 50 seems like an excessive number, but there’s more and more aspects.” And we wanted this to be something broad enough that could be used in .com spaces and industrial goods and frequently purchased goods and durable goods and used across different contexts. Before you know it, we took the number off of the title because it started to mushroom as we continued to develop that.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. And what’s funny, this book is very much the definitive book on marketing metrics and terminology. As I was researching your work, I actually saw a lot of Wikipedia pages where this book showed up as the top source for an entry into a given marketing metric. And for what it’s worth, I mean, that means a lot of people are using it. What does Wikipedia cite? It’s citing this book as sort of the definition of it.
And I’m wondering, you talked about how there would be the same metric used for different things. I’m also sure that there were a lot of duplicative metrics or there were metrics that were sort of passing fads and didn’t actually matter. I’m wondering what your process is for assembling a book like this. Is it sort of a matter of curation, kind of seeing what’s out there and then running that against industry and seeing what sticks? What makes the book and what doesn’t? What was the whole process behind it?
David Reibstein: I think you described it really well. So in spending time with organizations, with companies, what are the major metrics that they’re using? And in particular, what are the major ones they’re abusing or misusing was another thing. When they say one thing versus another. By the way, I ran into more than one industry, but people would say, “Here’s what my market share is.” And someone else say, “Here’s what my market share is,” in the same industry. And if you look at all the different competitors, those market shares would add up to well over 100%. And I’m going, “Wait a minute. Market share cannot add up to more than 100%.”
Defining Market Share and Brand Value
David Reibstein: Well, they could if we define it differently or if we have a different denominator. My favorite example is thinking about one company that always would talk about their market share in the inkjet printer market versus somebody else thinking about their market share in the dot matrix market and someone else thinking about laser printing. And someone else talking about, “No, I’m talking about printing.” And it’s like, wait a minute, we need to be really careful defining nothing else with what that particular denominator is.
And then huge confusion about the value of a brand. One of my favorite measures is trying to think about brand equity or the brand value. And often when I ask people, “So what’s the value of your brand?” they think, “Well, I’m able to charge a 10% premium over my competition.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, well that’s nice. But how much extra volume do you also get?” It’s skipping that part of it. Everybody wants to think about the value of their brand, but then coming up with a specific metric for that and a way to measure that, and thinking not just about price but also thinking about volume—I don’t see that very much. And so it’s a major component just to illustrate that there are different measures that people are using and thinking about it differently and some of it being, as I say, incorrectly applied. But to get back to your question, because I did wander off for a second. A lot of it comes from trying to think about what it is that people are using. And then also trying to bring some of my own insights into it, and that of my co authors thinking about. So what could be some of the measures that they should be using and trying to think about?
Andrew Mitrak: You brought up how brand equity can be measured in price increases—charging 10% more because I prefer the Kleenex versus the Kroger whatever, the generic brand. Or it could be used for scale. I think that’s a really interesting way to articulate it because there are a lot of brands, say like Coca-Cola, a very well-known brand but doesn’t actually increase its prices because of its brand. It increases its scale. Or Nike as well. Nike maybe charges a little more than a generic but not as much as you think they could. They could probably go way, way higher end and even more luxury than they are given the brand equity they have. So what do people usually get wrong about brand equity? Can you speak to some of the trade-offs between scale and price increases?
David Reibstein: So first of all, some of what they get wrong is because of academics who refer to brand equity in all sorts of different ways. “What is the purpose of the brand?” or “What’s the essence of the brand?” “That’s the brand equity. This is what it is that we’re known for.” So we as academics use the term brand equity in a variety of different fashions. And so I think I don’t want to just look at management and say that’s where the problem is. It’s right there. It’s within academia that we have some of that.
But from my perspective, I sort of think of it as there’s a demand curve. And as you develop that brand, it shifts that demand curve outward. And so I want to look at any point on that curve and how much extra price can I charge and how much extra volume can I get. And so there are some brands that take it clearly in terms of a price premium. And there are others that take it only in terms of volume. So Coca-Cola for a long time was the number one brand in the world and took very little of it in terms of price. But they had a huge market share. And that market share was clearly attributable to their brand. And people would choose Coca-Cola over RC Cola. Do you remember RC Cola?
Andrew Mitrak: I remember RC Cola. I’m not that young.
David Reibstein: It may even still exist, but they would choose Coca-Cola over RC Cola and certainly over “Dave’s Cola” because it was Coca-Cola. And it wasn’t necessarily because of price because Coca-Cola wanted to have their price there and be competitive. But boy, they had huge market share relative to their competition because of that. And so we often leave that part out of trying to think about what that particular value is.
Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and Finance
Andrew Mitrak: This is a bit of a tangent, but I think it all kind of fits into that thread of linking marketing to financial consequences—in this case, brand equity. And then also having marketing speak the same language as the CFO and CEO. I think that marketing metrics help with this, so a standardized set of metrics can help equip CMOs to speak to other executives and counterparts. Do you think that this standardization of marketing metrics helps elevate the role of marketing within organizations or gives it more political clout within orgs?
David Reibstein: I would hope so. I would hope that if we had a common understanding, then there could be some communication not just marketer to marketer, but within the organizations as well. Since you used that particular title, “linking marketing metrics to financial consequences,” which was the title of an executive program that I ran here at Wharton for more than a decade. When I first started that program out, half the participants were CMOs, or at least from marketing, and the other half of the participants were CFOs or coming from the finance side.
Finance was saying, “I don’t understand why marketers are wasting our money this way.” And the marketers were saying, “How do I communicate to the finance people the value of what it is that we’ve got going?” That sort of is what led to a lot of that particular effort, to try and get the two groups talking to each other so that they could understand, “Here’s what the value to the organization is.” Because many organizations today still look at marketing as something that we do, but I’m not sure what value it is that it produces.
The Bias of Short-Termism
David Reibstein: Actually, there sort of is this bias towards anything that generates short-term consequences. “Boy, I run a promotion and you saw sales go up.” But spending on anything that produces long-term consequences, people don’t think about what that particular value is. And that’s somewhat understandable because you don’t see it immediately. So part of what happens is when there’s an economic downturn, one of the first things that gets cut is marketing because, “What does marketing contribute? It’s what we do if we’ve got excess money.” And that’s a concern.
Andrew Mitrak: Coming back to marketing metrics, I published a few podcasts and had a few conversations with CMOs and academics on some of the unintended consequences of metrics. Usually, the general gist of it is that marketing teams get fixated on the wrong goals. You alluded to short-termism and promotions, and that there’s a temptation to game the system that drives the metrics but doesn’t always drive the long-term value. Everybody wants to be data-driven as an executive or leader, but have you seen companies sort of take the wrong message or take the wrong approach to being data-driven? Are there common themes where people who intend to be metrics-driven and adopt marketing metrics wind up missing an important piece of the puzzle?
David Reibstein: I think I was just alluding to that. I think what happens is I look at those short-term consequences and I put my weight there, on the short term. I run a digital ad and I look at that click-through rate and I look at, “Oh, that spending was good.” If I have another digital ad that helps create brand—oh, I’m going to start thinking about that brand, it’s going to be in my consideration set, and that over time I’m more likely to be buying it—that sort of gets washed out. People don’t give credit to that when maybe it’s contributing a huge part, but in a longer-term consequence. I think that gets way overlooked.
Does Brand Equity Matter for Small Businesses and Startups
Andrew Mitrak: I think also—I’ve worked at a mix of smaller startups and had my own business, and now work at a larger tech company. I think especially at smaller companies or startups, that the investment in brand is especially hard because it’s existential. If they miss a quarter or a year, it could be existential to the business. There’s no brand equity for a company that’s gone out of business. But then at some point, you kind of go from zero to one on your brand where brand equity doesn’t show up on the balance sheet, and then all of a sudden it is there as an asset. Do you have a sense of when companies on their journey sort of start to have brand as an asset where they should start to care about brand equity? Is it only for the Fortune 500? Is it for the mid-market companies? Do startups have that if they’re at the right scale? How do you think about that?
David Reibstein: Lots of people think, “Well, brand is only important for that Fortune 500.” And actually, let me narrow that down, for the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies. And I would say no. It’s not just consumer goods. For a long, long time, Intel was able to charge a huge premium and get incremental volume because of the “Intel Inside” campaign and the image of Intel. People were more likely to buy a computer that had an Intel chip versus not. Intel has run into their particular problems. But more likely to buy Cisco or more likely to use Salesforce.com. So let’s start with it’s not just consumers. That’s part of it. What was the first part of that question that you asked?
Andrew Mitrak: You answered another B2B component of it. Yes, it matters both for a B2C and for B2B brands, but also just the scale of a company itself, like as far as how large the company is.
David Reibstein: So it doesn’t have to be Fortune 500. Thank you for bringing me back to that. I would argue that my local florist—one shop—that my local florist has a great brand. She always has the best flowers. She always delivers on time. She is so good on that. And so if I’m going to order flowers again, I think, “Well, I could order them from any one of these different companies. Let me see what their prices are. I’m going to send a spring bouquet or a dozen roses.” No, I want to get it from this local florist. Really small company—I wouldn’t even call it a company, a really small shop. Does she have brand equity? Absolutely. So we don’t have to just think about it for a Fortune 500 company.
I don’t know what it is today, there were Amos’ Cookies or David’s Cookies. They started small. They really developed a great reputation. Great cookies. You’re catching me after meals, so I’m sort of thinking about cookies. But oh my gosh, that guy who was selling those cookies or that woman who was selling those cookies really developed a brand and it started to spread. That’s what we’ve got.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s right. And if your local florist chose to retire—I hope she doesn’t, she sounds like she’s got a great business—but if she was to sell her business, the brand equity might show up in the price of her sale. So even if it’s not something that’s helping to pay her bills week to week or shows up as some publicly traded company stock price, it’s something that she might be able to use to her benefit at some point in the company’s life cycle.
Does Brand Equity Show Up on the Balance Sheet?
David Reibstein: Now I do want to address one of the questions that you raised, which is: when does that brand equity show up on the books? And I think the answer is most of the time it doesn’t. We’ve got this weird accounting system which says if you buy a company, you can put its brand value on your books. If you build a brand, you can’t put it on your books. And it’s like, seriously?
I’ll give you a dated example now, but when Procter & Gamble bought Gillette, it said, “Here is the plant and the equipment and inventory that we’ve got, and here’s the value of the brand.” And that brand shows up on the Gillette books. Tide, Crest, Head & Shoulders—go through the list—they don’t show up on the books. And those are great brands. Those are great, great brands. And they don’t show up on the books.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s really interesting. It’s funny and a little bit of an aside, one of the startups that I was at—and I actually named the company when it went through a rebrand—wound up not working out. It basically went under, sold to private equity for less than the money they had raised. But the brand and the domain name wound up getting licensed to another company. It actually wound up being one of the most profitable parts—or not profitable, but of the things—the brand actually showed up and got some money for the private equity company where they actually got a pretty good deal on the brand and buying the company. So even for startups that fail, somebody can extract value for a brand and a name and a good domain name.
David Reibstein: That’s a perfect example. And it started off, I assume it was a relatively small company.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it reached a peak of like 80 employees or so. It was software SaaS, so pretty small in the scheme of the global economy. But it had its moment. It could have been big, but it didn’t work out like most startups don’t. But the brand was still worth something.
David Reibstein: Right.
The Economic Impact of Nation Branding
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about Nation Branding as well. This is a thing where you started publishing the Best Countries list in 2016, and this will mark the 10th anniversary of this project. Could you talk a little bit about this project and the background of it and what the impact of it has been?
David Reibstein: So it’s been one of the things that’s near and dear to my heart. I went to New York and I gave a presentation at an ad agency there where I was saying, here’s some of what my thoughts are about the brand of a country and how it contributes to the economy of that country. Thinking about a country that’s got a great reputation, people are more likely to buy products from them. Companies might be willing to build plants there and make other foreign direct investment. A country that’s got a great reputation might have more tourists that are there.
I tried thinking about how the brand of a country contributes to the economy of that country. Just in the same spirit as we were talking about for cookies or for florists or for Intel or Coca-Cola, there’s some financial return to a country based on the image of that country. So my theory that I presented in New York was: it’d be great to go and measure the image of these countries across a variety of dimensions and then to see how related that is to the GDP of that country. Where foreign direct investment, foreign trade, and tourism are three major components to the GDP of a country. And sure enough, I see that the image of a country is highly related to the GDP of that country.
The Country of Origin Effect
David Reibstein: Let me just, you know, if we think about you got two pairs of shoes and one of them is made in Italy and the same shoe—looks the same, the materials the same—happens to be made in Bulgaria. Which shoe are people more likely to buy? And which shoe are you more likely to pay for and pay a premium for? The answer is clearly Italian shoes would be better than—and I don’t mean to be negative about Bulgaria, I could have picked any other country. Italy is right up there. French wine, right up there. So more likely to sell some products, particularly fashion-related products, because of the Italian brand image that’s there.
David Reibstein: There are other countries that have negative images. And so if I told you there was a car—again to date me—there was a car called the Yugo. Do you remember the Yugo?
Andrew Mitrak: The Hugo? The Yugo. No, I don’t know the Yugo.
David Reibstein: How far back does this go? It came out of Yugoslavia.
Andrew Mitrak: Okay.
David Reibstein: Totally died. Totally died.
Andrew Mitrak: Sounds like a fun name, Yugo, like “you go.” But yeah, I understand. The Yugoslavian car, you think of sort of the Eastern Bloc, probably not having the same appeal as say a German car or even an Italian car or something like that.
David Reibstein: So actually, just thinking about that, I have a former student who started Harry’s Razors.
Andrew Mitrak: Amazing.
David Reibstein: Do you know Harry’s Razors?
Andrew Mitrak: I think I’ve seen them at stores. I’ve seen them advertised online. So yeah, familiar with them.
David Reibstein: You should know them better than me. But Harry’s Razors, if you look at their advertising, they don’t say “closer shave.” They don’t say “fewer nicks.” They don’t say “longer lasting.” Their advertising says: “We bought a German manufacturing plant. And that’s where we make our blades.” And it’s like, boy, Germany has got this great reputation for precision. Their trains run on time, supposedly. They’re actually known for some of their precision cutting and manufacturing. “We bought a German manufacturing plant. You should buy Harry’s Razors.” And so because of that image of that country, they’re selling those particular products.
I gave a presentation in front of a group of 40 ambassadors to the United States. And it was about Nation Branding. The Swedish ambassador stood up and she said, “Come on, this is just a beauty contest. It’s just, who’s on the red carpet? What are the particular rankings?” And she said, “Why should we care about this beauty contest that you’re running?” And my response is related to what we were talking about: “You should care because how you are perceived relates to the economy of your country. And if you are perceived on these particular dimensions, you’re more likely to have people buy products from you. You’re more likely to have people invest in your country or come visit your country. You should care about your external image because it affects what people do with their money.”
Nation Branding and the Automotive Sector
Andrew Mitrak: When it comes to how countries have marketed themselves, you mentioned Yugo as the Yugoslavian car that I hadn’t heard of. But if you asked me also 20 years ago when I was first getting my learner’s permit and driving, “Would I ever want to buy a Chinese car?” I probably would have said no. I don’t really associate that country with cars. But I just was reading that BYD is now the best-selling electric car on the market. And I’m like, I’d kind of like to test drive a BYD. Those look pretty cool and pretty affordable.
And that country, China, has obviously had a lot of changes there over the last 20 years, and automotive is one of them. And I’m wondering, should countries think about this as far as where to invest and turn around and build a market against all odds? Or should they sort of just focus on—if you’re Italy, just focus on shoemaking and lean into your strengths? How do you think countries have shifted their brands or how have they used tools like your Best Countries research and data to help change how they invest and market themselves?
David Reibstein: BYD, what does that stand for?
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know.
David Reibstein: I think it’s “Build Your Dream.”
Andrew Mitrak: Oh, wow. Okay.
David Reibstein: It’s in English. So in fact, BYD, those letters don’t exist in Chinese. Those are English characters that are there. Yet I’m still willing to bet that when BYD comes into the United States, there’s going to be hesitancy to buy the car because it’s Chinese. And actually, they want to have an English name and they want to disassociate that they’re Chinese because that’s going to have a negative impact on what the particular sales are of that particular product.
David Reibstein: Actually, Lenovo. Lenovo is the number one PC in the world. They changed their name from a Chinese name to call it Lenovo. I hear the name Lenovo, I think, “Lenovo, what country is that from? Oh, Lenovo. It must be Italian or something.” I don’t know. But that’s because that country had a particular image and needed to overcome that.
In contrast, by the way, look at what South Korea has done. South Korea has really, on the backs of Samsung, have developed a changed reputation of that country. We used to think products that come out of South Korea, they’re cheap and not reliable. And Samsung has come out with great products and have been able to help change the image of South Korea. And so we’ve seen Hyundai that has come—they again had this low price, low quality image. And they’ve got a great car now called the Genesis. And originally it was called the Hyundai Genesis. And they couldn’t sell very much relative to the quality of the car. They now just call it the Genesis and they’ve dropped the Hyundai name. And many people think of, well, Genesis, that sounds like an American car. It doesn’t sound like a Korean car. And they’ve been able to ratchet their price up. But in general, South Korea, off of a number of different dimensions, has been able to raise the quality image of their country and have been able to do really, really well with that.
Global Reactions to Nation Branding and the “Best Countries” Project
Andrew Mitrak: Through doing this Best Countries project, I’m sure you’ve gotten to meet leaders from a lot of countries and they’ve asked you questions about marketing and branding. What’s most surprised you? Are there any specific interactions you’ve had with countries or world leaders who are thinking about their brands? What are some of the most surprising interactions you’ve had as a result of this project?
David Reibstein: I was giving a presentation in Israel. And I had a heckler in the crowd. Not unusual, but I had a heckler in the crowd who said, “Your data are wrong.” And I had to stop and I said, “This is what the data are. The data say this is how people perceive you. You have dropped the ball. And you need to change what those particular images are. If your product is better, if your country is better than the perceptions, then that’s an issue that you’ve got. It’s not that the perceptions are wrong. People invest or go on tourism trips based on what their image is, not necessarily what the particular reality is.” So that was one that really caught me by surprise.
One that really surprised me was I’m at a conference at NYU and I get a WhatsApp call from some number I don’t know. And I pick up the call and the guy said to me, “Professor Reibstein?” I go, “Yeah.” He said, “I’m the Finance Minister of Saudi Arabia. Could you meet me in Washington, D.C. next week? I’m going to be there.” I have no idea why he wants to talk to me. But I thought I’m intrigued by it. I went down to Washington and I met him. And he has a private lunch for just the two of us. And here’s the Finance Minister wanting to talk to me about “Brand Saudi Arabia.”
So first of all, you talked about marketers and finance. Well, here’s the Finance Minister of a country who’s worried about the brand of that country. And well he should be. And Saudi Arabia is doing a lot to try and change what their global image is. And I think they’ve done a pretty good job of helping change what that image is.
Well, that was another huge surprise for me. The Minister of the Economy of Serbia just contacted me last week and asked me to come speak in Serbia. It’s like, gee, I’ve never been to Serbia—formerly Yugoslavia—and they want me to come talk about nation branding. So I’m really surprised at some of the reach, how far it’s gone, and that people do care about what the image of their country is. And I wish the United States cared a little bit more about it as well. I had to throw that in.
Andrew Mitrak: No, I hear what you’re saying.
Cryptocurrency as a Brand
Andrew Mitrak: Another one, this feels like it couldn’t be any more different, but the Best Countries and nation branding, and then the Wharton Consumer Cryptocurrency Confidence Index and crypto branding. How did you get into cryptocurrency? What was the spark to start tracking the brand and consumer confidence of crypto?
David Reibstein: Well, here’s this industry. You talk about, could small brands develop a brand? Bitcoin. It did start small. And boy, has its brand really grown. But again, by the way, it is a blending of consumer and behavioral science and looking at some quantitative methods. So what I’ve been doing on the crypto side is I’ve been looking at: could we measure consumer confidence in crypto? And then how that’s related to crypto prices.
David Reibstein: There’s been crises that have happened. There’s been this person indicted in this currency that’s just going to hell. And then we have a President who’s endorsing it. All these different things that lead to this huge volatility. Well, has there been that volatility in consumer confidence? And is that related to the prices? And one of the things the quantitative side has sort of led me to do is: is confidence a lagging indicator or a leading indicator? Do people have confidence in crypto which leads to its price going up? Or as its price goes up, that people gain more and more confidence in it? And not to hold that behind the curtain, the answer is yes, it’s both. And then trying to parse those two apart of how much is leading and how much is lagging, I’m diving deep into some analytic methods to try and get to those distinguishing characteristics.
Andrew Mitrak: It seems like something that would track pretty close to one-to-one, right? Like very, very positively correlated because if there’s no confidence in it, there’s no value in it. If you won’t accept my Bitcoin, then my Bitcoin has no value. Or that if I can’t exchange it in some way and there’s no confidence. You see a lot of this with the meme coins that are out there, that they’re basically entirely a brand, right? It’s a meme, they slap a thing on it, there’s no underlying technology that differentiates it. They claim it has a value, there might be a spike, and then everybody loses confidence and it basically drops to zero. Is that sort of the behavior that you see with it where it’s almost just the value is the confidence in a way? Those are so tightly coupled together.
David Reibstein: So they are pretty highly correlated. But the question is which is leading which? And by the way, we refer to crypto as a currency. It’s not treated like a currency. We call it a crypto coin, right? And think of it as a currency. That’s not at all how people are thinking about it. People are thinking about it as a risky stock investment. It’s like, “I’m going to invest in crypto.” We don’t often as consumers say, “Oh, I’m going to invest in the dollar,” or “I’m going to invest in the Pound sterling.” No, it’s like this is not a currency. This is an investment. I ask people, “Do you want to get paid in crypto?” No, don’t pay me in crypto. That’s too risky. I want to get paid in US dollars.
David Reibstein: And so part of what’s happened is as we hear more and more about crypto... the paper I want to write, I know the title, which is “Crypto Creep.“ That it continues to expand and creep and more and more. And as it creeps more and more people... I’m seeing crypto ATMs. And it’s like a crypto ATM? I want to get my crypto dollars out. But as we see this crypto creep, that contributes to confidence. And I think there are some people that are saying, “Boy, I keep hearing about the crypto prices going up. I don’t want to be left behind. And so I need to invest in that stock that’s going up.” Even though it’s got that volatility that we talked about.
Andrew Mitrak: We’re veering a little bit away from the history side of marketing, but I’m going to ask you about stablecoins. Is that part of your research as well? Because there are USDC coins where people, I think also for foreign exchange or for remittances or things like that where it might be useful to bypass other foreign transaction fees and things like that. Where it’s pegged, it’s not supposed to be like Bitcoin where it’s going up. It’s hopefully pegged to the US dollar. And that seems like one where if there’s ever a gap between consumer confidence and that stablecoin, it might not be so stable. And that might be a bad thing. I’m just curious, I think they’re also one of the largest buyers of treasuries today now or something too.
David Reibstein: That’s right. That’s right.
Andrew Mitrak: So I guess, has that come up? Is there a risk that the unsavory parts of crypto might have brand damage to the stablecoins that are trying to be more legitimate?
David Reibstein: The question you’re asking goes beyond what I’ve currently looked at so far. But I think I’m going to end up having to look at that. And I think any of the unsavory part or negative aspects of crypto, as you were just referring to, will spill over and have an impact indeed.
The Challenge of Measuring Marketing Impact
Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you a selfish question. You hosted Measured Thoughts for several years. This is a radio program where you interviewed CMOs and marketing leaders from across the world. You recorded this over many years so you have dozens if not more than 100 interviews. I’m just wondering, what did you learn from talking to CMOs around the world? And do you have any advice for a fellow marketing interviewer?
David Reibstein: So my advice is when you’re talking to those CMOs and other senior marketing executives, push them. Because they all want to talk about, “Oh, this is what we’re doing and these activities.” The whole theme of Measured Thoughts was really sort of inspired by the book. And so I had this SiriusXM radio show where I wanted to know: how do you measure? What are your thoughts about how you measure the impact of your marketing? And we’d like to believe that in, again, 2026, that we’re so much better at measuring the impact of our marketing. And my response and what it is that I’ve learned is we’ve got so far still to go.
One of the things I liked really doing was taking people, CMOs that had invested in Super Bowl ads, and say, “So you just spent $7.4 million on that 30 seconds. How do you justify that? And to hear all their flowery talk about, ‘Oh, it’s just wonderful and...’ How do you justify that to your CEO or to your CFO? That you just spent... That’s what the airtime cost. How do you justify that financially?” And it is shocking how in today’s age we still haven’t gotten there.
Now, while I say that, I do this Facebook ad or I buy this on Google and I can see what the conversion rate is and ching-ching, I can count it. Does that mean that that’s more valuable? So I’m not saying Super Bowl ads are not worth it at all. What I am saying is, do we have a way of capturing what that value is? And we still have a ways to go. And trust me, it’s not an easy problem. But it is amazing to me how far we are from getting our hands around being able to say something concrete about that.
Andrew Mitrak: I love that advice and that type of questioning because you’re just asking them to justify it, which they should be able to do if this is a highly paid executive who spent a lot of money. It’s not saying that it’s wrong, it’s just asking them to explain why. And also it’s a good note for someone like me because as a podcaster, I think podcasting is generally a friendlier conversation, right? I want to learn and I want to have a professional relationship. And it’s not like I’m a 60 Minutes investigative journalist trying to ask gotcha questions. But also, it doesn’t mean that we should just totally let people get away with saying anything either, right? That we should be able to ask hard questions. And we all benefit from debate. We all benefit from critical thinking. And it shouldn’t all just be kind of the glossy veneer that marketers are prone to do sometimes.
David Reibstein: For sure. For sure.
Andrew Mitrak: Professor David Reibstein, I really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who have enjoyed it too and want to learn more about your work, where should they find you online?
David Reibstein: Actually go to measuredthoughts.com and you can see a whole bunch of stuff that I’ve been doing and working on that. Or go to my Wharton web address as well.
Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. I’ve visited your website and your Wharton address and there’s a lot of great material on there. So I encourage people to go visit and listen. So thanks again so much for your time, David. I really enjoyed the conversation.
David Reibstein: Andrew, thank you very much for having me on the program. Good luck with this. I think it’s great and you do a wonderful job. So appreciate it. Thank you very very much.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 45
Today marks exactly one year since I hit publish on the very first episode of A History of Marketing. I wanted to do something special for the anniversary, so I’m happy to share my excellent conversation with Rory Sutherland.
You may know Rory from his Ted Talks which have been viewed by millions, or his TikToks which have been viewed by tens of millions. He is the Vice Chairman at Ogilvy and the founder of their behavioral science practice.
I’m a big fan of his book, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life. As we discuss on the podcast, Alchemy is all about how marketers think, rather than just what we do.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
We also cover:
* The real David Ogilvy: Rory shares about meeting David Ogilvy, and the parts of Ogilvy’s life you won’t find in his books, like his stint as a British spy in Washington during World War II.
* The “Capital M” vs. “small m” marketing mistake: Why the industry got marketing wrong by turning it into a department rather than a way of thinking.
* Behavioral science and business: How to practically apply behavioral science and “nudge” to marketing strategies.
Rory has a way of using history and behavioral science to reveal “unseen opportunities” that most traditional data misses. This conversation changed how I think about the role of marketing, and I hope it does the same for you.
Special Thanks:
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
And thank you to Paul Feldwick, whom you may remember from episode 30 of this podcast, for introducing me to Rory.
Espionage, Aerophobia, and the “Hidden” Psychology of David Ogilvy
Andrew Mitrak: I wanted to ask you about David Ogilvy. I wanted to start with him because he’s such a big figure, and I love his books. I haven’t actually discussed him that much on the podcast, and you’ve worked at Ogilvy since the late ‘80s. I’m wondering if you have an element of David Ogilvy’s success that you’ve learned from working at Ogilvy that I wouldn’t have learned from reading one of his books.
Rory Sutherland: I only met him once, and I can date it more or less exactly because it was after the Eurostar opened—the tunnel train tunnel between France and the UK. David was absolutely terrified of flying. In fact, in later life, he crossed the Atlantic by ship in preference to flying. He was absolutely paranoid about flying. I’ve met people who met him off flights, and he kind of emerged down the jetway as a kind of physical wreck. So, he was only really prepared in later life to travel to London after the train service opened. Consequently, I only met him once. I knew his wife, later widow, quite well subsequently because we used to have Ogilvy events and WPP events indeed at the Château de Touffou where he’s in fact buried.
I think actually there’s a part of his life as well where he will emerge actually even more interesting than he’s believed to be at the moment. Part of his life, which was effectively with British Intelligence in Washington, D.C. during World War II, when he worked with, for example, Ian Fleming and a few other people.
Andrew Mitrak: There’s the book about this called The Irregulars. It’s fantastic.
Rory Sutherland: The Irregulars, which is absolute—yeah, which I think I might have actually discussed this with the author. Of course, he was, whether it was just discretion or he was actually D-noticed or had signed the Official Secrets Act, but I’m fairly sure that during his lifetime he wasn’t really allowed to talk about this period of his life. A large part of which, I think, was effectively persuading the US to enter the war in the very beginning of 1940-41, pre-Pearl Harbor. He was engaged in persuading the US to enter the war, and then presumably also persuading the US to enter the war in Europe before they fully embarked on the war in the Far East. So, a large part of that was probably involved with his previous experience with Gallup; he would have been effectively gauging public opinion and working out the right strategies for getting American support, which was by no means, certainly in terms of the war in Europe, by no means automatic, certainly before Pearl Harbor. It’s very similar to World War I, in fact, where obviously Woodrow Wilson—who bizarrely is my fourth cousin twice removed—where Woodrow Wilson effectively fought an election on the whole basis of isolationism and then had to do an about-face. So, I think there’s a whole part of his life which he couldn’t write about at all, which, being a showman, which he was—and I make no apology for that—he would have undoubtedly loved to have written about, but simply couldn’t.
Ogilvy’s Psychology of Leadership
Rory Sutherland: When I said I met him the once, he presented his work and gave a talk. Interestingly, we’d sort of heard rumors that he was slightly losing his marbles because this would have been—he would have already been in his 80s at that point. But he was completely lucid and fantastically clear in his presentation. I always remember a detail, which is that he’d pinned up a lot of his work, which was then laminated and stuck to the walls. Of course, he then needed it collected, and you had that little awkward social moment where nobody wants to be seen doing the—in a large group of people, no one wants to be seen doing the menial work of collecting the drawing pins and putting everything back in a bag. He simply made the point that he said the work has been pinned up on the wall by the European chairman of Ogilvy, so it shouldn’t be beneath anyone’s stature to help me take it down. So, there was that psychological astuteness, a very, very clever bit of behavioral science. Look, if the second most senior person in the room has pinned this work to the wall, none of you should feel any diminution of status by removing the drawing pins. So, he was clearly that sort of very astute psychologist even in his—I’m trying to work out the date, he was born in 1911, so he would have been in his sort of mid-80s, I’m guessing. He died in ‘99 [sic], I think, if I’ve got that right.
The Limits of Traditional Market Research
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So, you mentioned how he has this intuitive behavioral science sort of understanding. He also worked for Gallup, and he really preaches about research, research, research in his books. A lot of your work is sort of where does research fall short, right? A lot of your insights are about what is intuitive or psychological where people aren’t stating their preferences? Marketers are being intuitive and uncovering revealed preferences through behavior. I’m wondering, do you have a heuristic for where research falls short, or where you might disagree with Ogilvy on his take on marketing research?
Rory Sutherland: I mean, we can overstate this, because it’s often taken, my view, that market research is a terrible thing because people don’t know why they do what they do, which is to some extent true. Now, this is not to say that a lot of research can’t be both useful and accurate. If people really hate something and they say they hate it, it’s undoubtedly worth taking that on board. You could learn an awful lot about what you’re getting wrong by simply researching your customers. There are also, which David didn’t have to the same extent, completely free sources of information like call centers, which I always think are a massively underutilized resource because they’re the place where you learn what you’re getting wrong, or what your customers can’t do online, or all manner of things. So, don’t get me wrong. He never said this famous phrase often attributed to him: that the trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say. That’s somebody else who said that. I don’t think David would have said it because he was undoubtedly a research advocate because he preferred the discipline of research to what he called sort of random creative self-indulgence.
Tacit Knowledge and Entrepreneurial Arbitrage
Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny because I want to pause on that line real quick because it’s in your book. It’s in Alchemy, but you say in Alchemy that you don’t think he ever said that, or you can’t confirm whether he ever said that. So you found out that he did not say that?
Rory Sutherland: Well, certainly nobody, and several colleagues of mine had tried to find an accurate attribution. I think if you go to something like Quote Investigator online, it has been attributed to other people, possibly earlier than David. And by the way, I mean, that’s not completely true. A lot of the time we do actually think what we feel, and we say what we think, and we do what we say. What is important, though, is that the tacit information is disproportionately valuable because it’s there that you can find yourself either under a massive illusion about what people really want because it’s what they say they want. Lower prices would be an example. It would be very, very dangerous to take that literally because people always say it because it’s a rational-sounding answer. “I’d do this more often if only it was cheaper.” Well, that’s both true and not true, and in any case, there will also be a chunk of people who will never tell you that they’d do something if it were only more expensive. So, around price, for example, there’s an enormous amount of misinformation. Also, information that’s tacit, which therefore isn’t in the public domain, is disproportionately valuable because it’s a source of kind of entrepreneurial arbitrage. And you know, I mean, okay, if you—nobody when Steve Jobs came along was really actively saying, “I’d buy a computer if only they weren’t so f**king ugly.” Okay? Nobody was really saying that. And so, an awful lot of entrepreneurial activity involves a bet on something which you assume to be felt but not said. Because the things that are said are already in the public domain and there’s no competitive advantage to be gained. It’s a bit like the stock market; it’s already priced in.
I’ll give you an interesting example of this because I’ve been campaigning recently that hotels should provide monitors in the room. Because my argument is, I spend much more time in hotel rooms working than I do watching TV. And so, if either you had a USB-C cable which enabled you to connect reliably to the 4K TV, or you had the option of paying for a monitor in your room, I think a lot of people would go, “That’s great.” What’s weird about that is that until I said it, which was a hypothesis, nobody else was saying this. Because it’s one of those things that’s obvious in retrospect, but because the consumer doesn’t expect there to be a monitor in their hotel room, nobody complains about there not being a monitor in the hotel room. So, you know, all these weird things. I’ve mentioned other things like it really annoys me when I travel with my wife that most hotel rooms either have naught or only one inadequate desk. So one of you always ends up trying to work by propping up a laptop on the bed or on some woefully inadequate table or having to sit outside on a balcony. And the interesting thing about these things is that there are these unmet needs out there in the marketplace, which are really unmet because they’re unsaid, and they’re unsaid because they’re unthought, and they’re unthought because they’re unfelt. However, if you provide these things, my hunch is—and we can disprove this very easily by just charging 20 quid a night for a monitor and seeing what happens—it’s very easy to test that hypothesis.
Why Data Without a Hypothesis Fails
Rory Sutherland: Quite often, I think what we’re trying to do, and Roger Martin is the real guru on this—what we’re trying to do is use pre-existing data as the basis for making a decision. And the problem is pre-existing data is not representative; it’s often completely wrong, or it’s miscategorized, or it’s misunderstood, or it’s simply inaccurate. The proper way to do business is to develop a hypothesis, design an experiment to reliably test the hypothesis, perform the experiment, analyze the data to see whether it refutes or confirms what you believe, and then rinse and repeat. Or act on the information that’s derived. But that starts with a hypothesis, which is an act of imagination. So, David would argue completely—and I wouldn’t disagree for a millisecond—that if the data you already have basically rubbishes a hypothesis, then that data’s really valuable. Or if it likely confirms a hypothesis, then that data could be very valuable in helping you decide what to do next. What isn’t a safe thing to do is this idea of kind of theory-free science where you just rely on the data to tell you what to do.
Rory Sutherland: I have a wonderful story about this. On the basis, someone told me this very lunchtime, fantastic person who works for The Times—that’s the proper Times, not The New York Times. And they invested a huge amount of money in a science publication because they had very reliable data that told them that their readership loved reading things about science, and all the most read articles in The Times were about science. So they went and spent a fairly large sum creating a new sister publication and creating an app for it and publishing—and it went nowhere. And it turned out when they investigated it, that what had happened was that all articles about sex and relationships had been tagged as though they were effectively science articles. Because nobody knew how to define them, so they defined them not as social science, I think they defined them as sort of human science or whatever it was. And so all the articles like “Sex in the Olympic Village,” which was the most read article of ten years, which was talking about sexual practices at the Beijing Olympics, were tagged as being science articles. Brilliant informants said that based on that information, we would have probably been better off launching a pornographic magazine than a science publication. Because people are very interested in sex.
Andrew Mitrak: Especially among Olympians.
Rory Sutherland: Particularly Olympian sex is, of course, massively—you can imagine, that’s the most click-baity, fantastic title imaginable. By contrast, she said, we had a huge success launching a thing called Sun Bingo. And the simple insight was from a single journalist who said, “As soon as they ban smoking in bingo halls, the demand for the online bingo is going to go sky-high.” Now, that was a single anecdotal hypothesis which made them a fortune. And so this idea, I think, this is a product of defensive decision-making. And this is something which is also attributed to David, which he didn’t say, but I’m sure he quoted a lot. It was, funnily enough, originally said by another Scotsman, which is, people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination. And I think what we’ve got to be very careful of is there’s this massive tendency to go, “If you start your presentation with ‘the data tells us...’” Does it mean you’re going to make a very good decision? No. It might help, but I mean, it doesn’t certainly. On the other hand, does it mean you can be absolved of any blame in the event that things go wrong? Yep, absolutely.
Research vs. Showmanship: Hopkins, Ogilvy, and Feldwick
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned how David Ogilvy was a showman, and of course he’s a showman. We talked to Paul Feldwick about showmanship; that’s a big topic of Paul Feldwick. We also talked about Claude Hopkins and his book Scientific Advertising.
Rory Sutherland: Which Feldwick is less sympathetic to that book than I am, I think. And that’s because he comes from above-the-line advertising, and I come from below-the-line advertising, even though we went to the same school.
Andrew Mitrak: I want to get your reaction to this. This is the thing about why he’s sort of dismisses it partly, is that the book is Scientific Advertising and the book would be like: give facts about the product and don’t be frivolous. But then you look at what Lord & Thomas did at this time, and they were doing big publicity stunts like baking the largest cake in the world, which had nothing to do with the product, and they were doing showmanship, and preaching on the one hand facts and scientific advertising, and then doing very unscientific things in a way it was sort of using science as a way to kind of sell your agency, because that’s what your buyers wanted.
Rory Sutherland: He tells this wonderful story about Sunny Jim, which is the character that was used to promote Force cereal. And the bizarre thing is they went away from absolutely jingle-led entertainment in the US because Lord & Thomas, I think it was, told them they had to be more scientific and talk about the product. In the UK, the marketing department clearly went rogue. In my own childhood, we had a—and by the way, that was not just an advertising campaign, it was a branded merch campaign, because you could send off a certain number of box tops and £2.50 and have your own cuddly Sunny Jim, who was a weird kind of 18th-century roué character whose sunny disposition came from eating large quantities of the product, presumably. And he makes the point that the brand absolutely succeeded in the UK where it continued with its entertainment-based jingle-led platform, whereas the imposition of scientific advertising in the US was something of a catastrophe for the business.
Rory Sutherland: So it ended up being one of those weird things which survived much better in the UK with what you might call a looser advertising regime than in the US. Now, Claude Hopkins, a lot of what he says is absolutely true for bottom-of-the-funnel advertising, direct response, which is before someone can send off a coupon. Okay, it’s very boring to say this, but putting “allow 14 days for delivery,” telling people when to expect their product. In many cases, someone can’t actually buy a product without—they can’t buy a car without knowing how big it is, because they need to know whether it fits in their garage. So at the point of final irreversible commitment, there is a whole lot of factual stuff. And I don’t apologize for this. And by the way, I don’t think internet advertising is always very good at it. A lot of online advertising seems to fall between two stools; that it is neither entertaining nor informative. It’s just transactional. Quite often you go, “Is this thing dishwasher proof?” would be the kind of thing I might want to know before I spend 200 quid on an ice cream making machine. That’s the kind of thing which is really, really important.
Rory Sutherland: So Claude Hopkins wasn’t wrong, by the way. He was just talking about a very particular kind of advertising which was off-the-page, which was obviously—but was Lord & Thomas based in Chicago or New York?
Andrew Mitrak: I think they were Chicago.
Rory Sutherland: Well, you see, there you go. Because Chicago is the world capital of direct marketing. All those great direct marketing powerhouses like Montgomery Ward and I think Sears Roebuck started as a direct marketing house. Chicago, because it was the rail hub, was the direct marketing capital of the US. And so it always had a kind of slightly more Midwestern practical, pragmatic tone of voice because its target audience was farmers. And also it was often doing off-the-page sales or direct marketing of some kind or another, where at that point in the customer journey, there comes a point in the deal where you go, “Okay, I’m happy to buy this car, but when will it be delivered? What color can I get it in?” All that sort of specific stuff. You can leave out of the upper stuff, upper-funnel activity. But at some point, you need to absolutely be clear: okay, what is the deal in which I am now engaging? What am I signing up to? What’s the absolute deal here? What’s the worst-case scenario? Because there’s the creation of desire at the top, you might argue, and there’s the elimination of anxiety at the bottom. And Hopkins was quite largely right, I think, about what you need to do to get someone over the line. There’s a point where you’re looking around a house and the estate agent can crack gags, but when it comes down to the fine print, even someone as frivolous as me would go, “Okay, we do need to get a bit serious about whether the washing machine’s included.”
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that’s fair. I think also what I’m just putting together now is Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, and you, I think all started in direct response, right? And I think that’s a certain—
Rory Sutherland: Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy didn’t actually, but he always said that it was the best place to start. That’s what he said. He always said that the best place for an account person to start was Procter & Gamble, and the best place for a creative person or copywriter specifically, I think, to start would be to spend three or four years working in a direct marketing agency where you learn what works. And where also, by the way, you learn one of the things you learn which I think Hopkins is probably right about as well, I think all good creative people understand this instinctively, is that really small things make a huge difference.
The Behavioral Economics of “Small Fees”
Rory Sutherland: I was just reading a piece of behavioral economics by the great George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon. It’s a famous paper from quite a few years ago, and he’s identified the population basically divides into unconflicted spenders who spend basically pretty sensibly. Then there’s a group of people which is probably 30% of the population who are skinflints. They find the pain of parting with money at the moment of purchase so agonizing that they don’t even buy things that they should buy that would make them happier in the long term. And then there’s a 20% of people who are spendthrifts. Now, here’s one of the most extraordinary findings, which amazed even me, which is they did an experiment where people had basically won or were given as a reward for some piece of work a box set of their choice. It was kind of like Family Guy, The Simpsons, the first season of whatever it was, some DVD program like Breaking Bad or something of that kind. I can’t remember the details; might have been The Sopranos. And then they were told, “We’ll send this to you free within a month, but we can also rush it to you overnight for a fee of $5.95.” Now, that basically put off the majority of the skinflints; they went, “No way am I paying $5.95 to get it four weeks earlier.” However, if you phrased it as, “We can rush it to you overnight for a small fee of $5.95,” then a large number of the skinflints were actually happy to pay. Brilliant, brilliant experiment. To an economist, they would be pained by that because $5.95 to them is $5.95, but if you refer to it as a small fee, then mean people go, “Okay, it was only $5.95.” If you say a fee of $5.95, “No, I’m not paying that.” Now, that’s even by my enthusiastic adoption of behavioral economics, that struck me as pretty goddamn weird. But nonetheless, it may be that a certain group of people find paying for things really painful, and you have to almost mentally prepare them for the act of parting with $5.95 by saying, “It’s almost, I think the implication is, this isn’t the market price, it’s just obviously it’s just a mere bagatelle.” But I find that so interesting.
Why Marketing is Fat-Tailed
Rory Sutherland: By the way, I think that we’ve got marketing wrong because I think marketing is fat-tailed. We’re judging particularly performance marketing as if it’s thin-tailed, as if one unit of expenditure delivers a unit of value. Every quantum of cost has to be matched to a quantum of incremental value; otherwise, you’re not allowed to do it. That’s just marketing now defers to finance. And my argument is, I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think the reason you do marketing is because one time in 10, 15, 20—if you’re getting it right—every now and then, you just stumble on something which is a complete game-changer. And I would argue that the way to judge—not all of it, but the way to judge a portion of your marketing expenditure should be very close to, well, for example, a Silicon Valley investment fund, a film studio, a pharmaceutical research laboratory, a publisher, an A&R man in music.
Andrew Mitrak: The big hits pay off for the duds, right?
Rory Sutherland: The big hits render everything else irrelevant. But whereas if you’re in music A&R and you’ve signed The Rolling Stones, that’s basically your career taken care of. In marketing, if you do the equivalent thing and you sign the Rolling Stones, well, you just get to work for another six months, and then the credit for all subsequent revenue emerging from that breakthrough goes to somebody else. It’s just swallowed into the balance sheet under the line “revenue.” And so, as a marketer, you’re held responsible for every quantum of cost, but you can only claim a small part of the upside, which is exactly what Steve Jobs noticed when he first joined Pixar.
Why Steve Jobs Hated Making Commercials
He went into making commercials, because Pixar was too expensive to make a feature film using that technology. So he was making commercials. And very rapidly Steve Jobs went, “This is s**t. I don’t want to do this anymore because I can only lay claim to a small, finite and predefined portion of any upside I create. I create a commercial that sells $110 million of product, I get paid $300,000. That’s not the kind of business I want to be in.” And every marketer finds themselves effectively in the same position, and every agency also, by the way, finds themselves in the same position.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. It’s funny, you mention these Pixar commercials. They did these Chips Ahoy! commercials, you know, those terrible chocolate chip cookies and all that stuff. And I still think of, like, when I think of Chips Ahoy!, I think of those commercials. And those are from when I was a little kid. And it’s like, that’s still playing dividends today for that company, even though they paid Pixar once.
Rory Sutherland: If Jobs realized, “If I make a film, you know, if you make Toy Story, I’m still earning money from that bad boy ten years later—you know, they’re the DVD sales or the streaming rights and the da-da-da.” Whereas if I make a commercial for Chips Ahoy!, I get paid for making the commercial and the upside—well, actually, it doesn’t even go to the marketing function. It probably goes to the marketing department in the first instance for the first six months of uplift, but the fact that you’re still remembering that ten years later, no one’s getting any credit for that.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I think it’s like 25 years later, 20, 25, something like that. Those were before Toy Story, which is like, what, 30 years old now?
Rory Sutherland: Crikey, you’re right. That is seriously old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really old.
Why Humanities and History Matter More in a World of AI
Andrew Mitrak: So, I want to ask you also about history, because a lot of your examples in your book, in your talks, they draw from history. Of course, there’s like the Frederick the Great potato example, and you have, you know, going through your book, there’s like pictures of a design of a fencing sword from hundreds of years ago. There’s the Parthenon, and you have a chapter called “There’s Nothing New Under the Sun.” I’m wondering, do you read history a lot to get marketing ideas, or is history underrated? What’s your interest?
Rory Sutherland: I think that you’ll find that people with a humanities degree become weirdly disproportionately valuable in an AI world.
Andrew Mitrak: Totally. I’d like to think so.
Rory Sutherland: And you know, I think that we’ve overvalued technocratic skills in relation to creative skills very, very badly in all the Western—and probably everywhere else—education systems. And actually, people who do hardcore degrees like engineering would probably come to agree with that. Einstein actually made exactly that point, which is that it’s the imagination that ultimately is the magical quality that makes us human. Therefore, if we can to some extent automate all the other stuff, what we’re left with is really a massive need for people who can ask better questions rather than get reliable answers, because the second part has already been done for us. You know, that’s taken care of. It’s a bit like, is there any need in an—just as you could ask the question: is there really any need for people learning log tables in an age of electronic calculators? Is there any need for people—I still, I did quite advanced mathematics, I still have no clue what a cosine is. I can’t remember. Okay? I’ve never had to work out the surface area of a cone. But on the other hand, statistical knowledge, I think, becomes more and more valuable because that’s more nuance-ridden. You know, actually, if you’re a statistician with a bad nose for statistics, you can make catastrophically bad errors while thinking you’re being perfectly logical. And so, as technology, in a sense, takes care of one thing, my ability at addition becomes less and less important—I probably need to understand the principles—but whereas my ability in other fields then becomes more and more valuable. So, AI will also sort of, if you like, further move the goalposts a little bit in terms of what we need.
Rory Sutherland: And also just general, by the way, the great thing about advertising—which I’ll defend working in advertising and marketing on this grounds alone—which is, if you’re an actuary, you don’t really become a better actuary by sitting outside a cafe and watching people, or going to see a French art-house film, or watching people in the pub, or having a chat with some friends. But as a marketer, anything counts. I mean, you seek inspiration from wherever you can find it. David Ogilvy himself said, a good copywriter is characterized by being an extensive browser in all kinds of fields. And it’s kind of pattern recognition at some level. So, the more parallel field—nothing excites me more than to meet a copywriter who’s into jet engines or trains, or indeed a brilliant copywriter I met in Belgium whose main interest is branding in the medieval era. So he’s absolutely fascinated by medieval history, creative director in Brussels. And he draws extraordinary inspiration from things like, you know, why Charlemagne the Great was the first king ever to be crowned by the Pope. Which was effectively a kind of branding exercise which meant that you no longer had to completely defend your position in combat because you were now effectively divinely sanctioned. And therefore, anybody who sought to actually undermine you was actually taking on God rather than—now, he was chatting to me about this. Now, this is the kind of thing which automatically I find wonderfully reassuring. To be honest, there’s probably a high degree of ADHD which you’ll find in a creative department. Because, funnily enough, being distracted—I mean, of course we mustn’t mischaracterize ADHD—it also makes possible extraordinary feats of concentration. But the capacity to be easily distracted is to some extent in that job, it’s a feature, not a bug. It’s more virtue than vice, I would argue.
Modernizing Ogilvy’s ‘Rolls-Royce’ Ad for the EV Era
Rory Sutherland: And people find creative people frustrating for all kinds of reasons. You know, they tend to miss deadlines or they start—more characteristically, they start work late because they’re waiting to get lucky or they’re waiting for inspiration. Or they change the subject, or they obsess about something which seems completely irrelevant. E.g., David Ogilvy is writing an ad, the Rolls-Royce engineers hated that ad because they’d spent a whole load of time improving the drivetrain and the suspension, and David was writing about the clock.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, the electric clock that’s quiet.
Rory Sutherland: I was saying a similar thing, which is my 21st-century equivalent of the Rolls-Royce “60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in the new Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock.” I was talking to a bunch of people involved in climate change awareness and particularly the transition to electric cars. I said, you can talk about efficiency till the cows come home. But the best ad for—I don’t know, have you gone electric in your car?
Andrew Mitrak: I’m still running on dinosaur juice.
Rory Sutherland: You’re on dinosaur juice. It drives, by the way, petrol-heads absolutely insane when you call it dinosaur juice. But I said the best ad I got for my electric car happened when it snowed, and I drove about a hundred miles, and when I arrived, there was still snow on the hood of the car. Now, in any petrol car—now, that’s an ad for the inefficiency of an electric car in a way that humans appreciate because there’s zero waste heat. I was astonished myself, because every time you drive anywhere, you’ve got snow on the hood of the car, and you drive for 10, 15, 20 miles, the heat from the engine melts it, it slides off, it melts, it liquefies, whatever. And then I found myself in a car park and you look at the car park and all the electric cars still have snow on the hood and all the petrol cars, it’s all melted. And that’s a wonderful ad for the extraordinary energy efficiency of the electric motor. But it’s an ad translated into human perception rather than scientific notation.
Capital M Marketing vs. small m marketing: How Rory became accidentally famous
Andrew Mitrak: Something that really resonates with me is this interdisciplinary thinking you bring. You know, you call it alchemy in the book, and really there’s psychology, there’s economics, there’s design, salesmanship, showmanship, culture, history, of course. And something about my podcast, “A History of Marketing,” people say, “Oh, that sounds really niche.” It’s like, well, marketing is kind of everything. It’s kind of all these things, and everything that happened before this moment is history. I’m wondering if you kind of also align with that?
Rory Sutherland: This is the big mistake that marketing made, is it became a department. And it defined itself by what it did. And so people think of marketing as crayons, or it’s the coloring-in department, as it’s often called. Or it performs services like producing marcoms or brochures or hosting exhibitions or doing PR. That’s Capital M marketing, which is a tightly defined discipline and function within an organization. Then there’s small m marketing, which is the application of psychology to wider problems. Which literally, the market for small m marketing is a hundred times larger than the market for big m marketing, and yet we’ve sold ourselves both as marketers and as agencies. And this is—this is why I became accidentally famous. I keep telling people this. I said the reason I became—and I mean accidentally famous, it wasn’t my own strategic genius or insight that led to this. It was simply that I ended up giving a load of talks to people who didn’t work in marketing, which marketers don’t normally do. When marketers talk to people who don’t work in marketing, they immediately adopt the language of finance, which is defensive. It’s the worst possible, I think, way in which to actually communicate the value of marketing, which is to say, “Honestly, some of this stuff actually works. Look, we spend X and we got Y.” And it’s a completely subordinated view of selling your discipline.
Rory Sutherland: Now, what happened is I ended up talking to a load of people, like, I’d talk at a bloody procurement conference or a compliance conference, or I’d go on a podcast which is all about engineering. And pretty quickly I’d go, “Well, there’s no point about talking about ads incessantly.” I’d show a couple of ads because they’re funny and illuminating and illustrate a point. But you know, if I just become a “how to make an ad” person, these people are never—99% of these people are never going to have to make an ad in their life and I become irrelevant; they won’t ask me back. So I just change—I just changed the script without really out of necessity, really, not out of inspiration, which was: let’s not talk about what we do, let’s talk about how we think. And suddenly—and that’s what the book is about—I suddenly realized that’s what Alchemy is about. This isn’t about what marketers do, it’s about how good marketers think.
And suddenly I discovered—I expected Alchemy to sell to, you know, people in, you know, creative businesses and marketing people and, you know, a few curious other people who wanted to get a job in advertising or whatever it might be. But instead, I got bombarded by, like, engineers contacting me, hedge funds, venture capital firms. “What the f**k’s going on here? Right, okay, I wasn’t—I wasn’t expecting this.” You know, I mean, I went on a radio show with Chris Evans, and the book was like, for the next three days, it was like in the top 30 books on Amazon. Not 30 advertising books, not 30 marketing books, top 30 effing books. “This is f**king weird, right?” My argument was it was an accidental discovery that the market for how and the, by the way, the strategic and corporate importance of how we think, which is to look at something as if you’re behind the pupils of a customer, with the mental apparatus of a customer rather than looking at something through the lens of a manager or a, you know, a business operator. Which therefore makes possible, because of the vagaries of human perception, this makes possible a solution to problems which seems intractable in the physical world can be solved psychologically by simply understanding the psychology of the consumer or the, you know, the customer, whoever it may be. Or indeed your own employees, by the way, or your colleagues.
Rory Sutherland: And so, what I—again, I’ll be absolute clear about this, it was a lucky accident, you know, it was born of necessity. And then I suddenly realized we’ve been total idiots because we’ve spent the whole 30 years defending what we are—our existence on the basis of what we do and what we’ve done. Whereas the real story here is how we think. And you know, I’ll give you an example. I think that government is increasingly hated by the population. Not because government is bad on policy or it’s too left-wing or it’s too right-wing or any of those economic or legal things. I think government doesn’t know how to relate to people. I think it’s become so tied up with sort of economics and law that it simply doesn’t know—I’ll give you an example. In London, in London, they introduced 20 mile-an-hour speed limits. Now, generally popular with cyclists, popular with pedestrians, popular with the residents of the road, very, very unpopular with motorists. Now, I support that decision on the basis of life-saving alone, and by the way, there are arguments which say that if you got rid of traffic lights and replaced them with small roundabouts—I know you don’t do roundabouts over there, although Florida has a few, actually—you could actually speed journeys. You could actually reduce journey time because although people are actually traveling more slowly, they’re able to interact with other vehicle drivers without the dirigiste intervention of a set of traffic lights. In other words, you could have much more free-flowing traffic over long distances.
Rory Sutherland: But I said, look, if you said two things, right. One, the fine and the punishment for going 25 in a 20 limit should be less than the punishment you get for going 85 in a 70 limit. That’s the first point. In other words, it’s ridiculous to find—and I’ve just been fined actually for going 25 in a 20 limit on a—on what was actually a dual carriageway. Now, if you said to me, “Okay, because it’s only 25 and because it’s in a 20 limit, you pay two penalty points rather than three and the fine’s 50 quid rather than 90,” what the consumer would go, “Okay, you’re meeting me halfway. You’re being reasonable.” Okay? The second thing I would have said is: we’re going to introduce these 20 limits but we’re going to get rid of speed bumps. Because, okay, look, Mr. Resident, you’ve already got your 20 limit, the cars are driving past safely, you know, the 20 limit’s being enforced. Don’t make people drive over f**king obstacles as well, okay? Now, if you’d done this quid pro quo, consumers aren’t so bothered by the size of the quid and the size of the quo as long as there is a quid—sorry, a quid for the quo. If you just impose a rule with no concession made anywhere else, I think for entirely understandable evolutionary psychology reasons, people view that as being demeaning. Nobody in a free market business would ever conceive of approaching someone with a deal in which the counterpart was only a loser. They might try a deal where you get not very much in return for quite a lot. They might try that on. But no one would try on a deal where you go, “You give me this and I give you f**k-all.” Right? I mean, even to the point where if you make a donation to charity, they give you a little sticker. Right? You get something. It signals. Yeah, I get a bit of signaling value and you know, I don’t get bothered by other charity people because I’m wearing the sticker.
Rory Sutherland: And yet government is basically institutionally autistic. In other words, it just imposes things that it decides are optimal without considering the emotional effect on the person who’s disadvantaged by the legislation or by the policy. It’s completely unlike every other form of transaction that exists between humans on the planet. It’s like Domino’s Pizza going, you know, “Pay us some money and we won’t s**t in your pizza.” It’s kind of like, what the ===? Right? That’s not—that’s not a deal, that’s basically an imposition, okay, yeah. Domino’s, “Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, I’ll have the express delivery. Oh, pay us four pounds and we won’t s**t on it.” Right? That’s basically how government behaves. And then they go, “Nobody likes us.” But—and by the way, I don’t totally blame politicians. I think politicians who are elected have quite a good eye for and actually are quite instinctive marketers in many ways, and some of them are certainly. I think it’s probably the bureaucracy with which they’re dealing which is institutionally autistic. That would be quite fun to do as the experiment. That would be really good fun to do as an experiment. “Yeah, pay us five pounds and we won’t s**t in your pizza.”
The Future of Tipping and Service Incentives
Andrew Mitrak: I sometimes feel that way when I’m offered a tip on a page, because everything offers a tip now, and I kind of think, oh gosh, if I don’t put the tip in, what’s going to happen, right?
Rory Sutherland: By the way, I’m unusual for a Brit in that in many settings I’m pro-tipping, because I think it does provide an incentive to provide better levels of service and so on. It also gives you a discretionary amount with which you can provide financial feedback and so on. Obviously, for reasons of total self-interest, I like to tip in places where I’m a regular, because I don’t want to be known as “Stingy Rory.” So, there are rational reasons. But in the US, I kind of go—like coffee shops—this is getting a bit weird. I am not the guy in the Reservoir Dogs.
Andrew Mitrak: The thing is, now with terminals, you’re presented with the tip option before the service has been rendered. I think it works well as an incentive after, like, “Hey, you’ve done a good job and I’m going to leave a tip after.” Even the Reservoir Dogs scenario is more about that. But now with these Square terminals or whatever, it’s before I’ve even gotten my sandwich from you, I’ve got to tip you 20 percent.
Rory Sutherland: And you haven’t even made the—so a large part of restaurant tipping, the reason you didn’t tip in McDonald’s is you hadn’t got your meal yet, so it was too early to decide whether the actual experience was tip-worthy.
And now as you said, you’re at the terminal and it’s kind of like.
Andrew Mitrak: Are they going to s**t on it? Is that the thing that’s going to happen if I don’t give the tip?
Rory Sutherland: I absolutely agree with that. I think there might be a really interesting technology around tipping which I’ve actually discussed with someone once. I would like a world where you could tip call center staff, because the best five to 10 percent of them are worth their weight in gold. And I think they deserve a lot more money and I don’t think they’re paid nearly enough. So, there are areas where I’d like a mechanism.
This is my idea, you actually have a load of cards with a QR code on them, and you basically hand them the card, which is for an indeterminate amount. Then when you finally check out of the hotel, you can basically apportion a reasonable amount of tipping to everybody in proportion to the value they’ve delivered in the course of your stay, rather than tipping the doorman when you arrive on the fear that they’ll treat you like s**t if you don’t. It also encourages perverse behaviors, like that business of insisting on taking your luggage up to your room. For crying out loud, I can manage a wheelie suitcase and an elevator. I don’t want you to take my laptop. Leave me alone.
Why Behavioral Science Struggles in Corporate Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: I wanted to come back to something that you brought up that was sort of a lightbulb for me, which is “Capital M” marketing, which is more like marketing organizations and how marketing presents itself, and then “lower case m” marketing, which is a little more marketing in practice and marketing thinking. I’m wondering if this is partly why I don’t see behavioral science and nudge really showing up within a marketing org. I feel like it’s somewhat at the margins. It might be a little experiment, it might be a pilot project, it might be something you hire a consultant for, but I don’t really see it embedded into individual roles or into org charts at a company. Do you see that as sort of why it’s a little at the margins of marketing?
Rory Sutherland: Well, I somehow think that I don’t think it’s salvageable with conventional corporate structure. I think the way to solve it in part—but I don’t know if this works or whether it would be any good—is I think businesses should have a customer board where you actually talk about value creation rather than cost control. Because at the moment, what is ostensibly a board meeting is really a kind of exercise in cost reduction. It’s not a proper strategic discussion because it doesn’t include either the customer or the future. You can’t really develop a strategy without considering those two highly nebulous variables.
Rory Sutherland: Of course, people who are certainty-addicted, typically like finance, who are basically variance-averse, they want to live in a low-variance deterministic world. Those people hate discussing those things because of course they are nebulous. It’s rather like I always think that cost reduction is immediate and quantifiable, which is why McKinsey & Company is an enormous business. Whereas value creation is non-immediate, it’s deferred, and it’s to some extent unpredictable. Consequently, people who are variance-averse overweight cost-cutting activity and are never held responsible for the opportunity costs that are incurred. There’s a trade-off between being efficient and being effective. There’s a trade-off between being short-term stingy and long-term rich. There are all these kind of trade-offs going on, but if you turn the thing purely to a kind of financial exercise, I think you’re killing a business in the medium to long term.
The Strategic Advantage of Family-Owned Businesses
Rory Sutherland: When I was tootling around Texas, every time I encountered a really impressive business, I’d make inquiries as to its ownership structure. Nine times out of ten, it was either founder-led or family-owned. I suddenly realized the family-owned businesses have this fantastic advantage over publicly held companies. Because one, they’re free to decide their own time frame. Two, they’re free to decide their own metrics of success. I don’t think you can be a brand unless you can design some of your success metrics that are actually chosen by you, not imposed on you by some investment analyst aged 27.
Rory Sutherland: In order to be a brand, you have to distinguish yourself or differentiate yourself in some way, or at least make yourself distinctive. You’ll only do that by following metrics which are unique to you. I’d apply that to your individual life. I think you’re only a free individual—I don’t know if you’re one of these people whose parents wanted you to become a lawyer or a doctor—you’re only really a free individual if you say, “No, I don’t regard being a doctor as a badge of success. I want to go into contemporary dance.” That’s the definition of a free individual, which is you don’t allow all your targets and metrics to be imposed on you; you devise some of them yourself.
Rory Sutherland: So, that’s a really important distinction. I think family-owned companies can play different time scales; they can play to a one-year, two-year, three-year time scale. They’re not fixated on the next quarter. They can define their own metrics of success and their timeline of success. Also, they’re focused on the customer and to some extent their own staff, more than the narrow preoccupations of not of share owners, by the way, but of shareholders, the institutions that hold the stock. They aren’t there to distract them all the time.
Why Observing Reality Beats Investment Statistics
Rory Sutherland: The final point, which Dan Davies, a wonderful writer who you ought to have on the podcast, makes is that the big advantage of being customer-focused over shareholder-focused is that your customers actually live in the real world. So, you are spending your time actually observing what is happening in reality rather than devising some artificial statistics to keep the investor community happy for the next three months. You are vastly better off devising your inspiration from reality than you are effectively pandering to a bunch of economic theories which were probably considered slightly dated at Harvard Business School in 1971, but which nonetheless pervade the general preoccupations of investment analysts.
Rory Sutherland: I went to Buc-ee’s and I went to H-E-B and I went to all these Texas companies. You go, “Wow, these companies are actually brilliant. What’s going on?” Fortnum & Mason in the UK is just a luxury store, but there’s something about it when you go there. It’s almost imperceptible—it’s not imperceptible, but it’s kind of something you feel as much as you can quantify—which feels that no, these people are actually interested in being themselves and helping me.
Rory Sutherland: The contrast is the economist and writer John Kay, Professor John Kay no less, went out for lunch with a friend of his at a lunch venue which they’d frequented regularly for some years. One day they turn up and he goes, “Something here doesn’t quite feel right. It feels like it’s been bought by private equity.” Sure enough, one of them gets their phone out and sure enough, four months earlier, private equity. Here we go. They’re going to build it up, looking for a way to offload it in a certain time frame, and the customer can go hang.
Why Big Ideas Require More Marketing Effort
Andrew Mitrak: I love your ideas. I love your book and I love your way of thinking. I’ve had a hard time implementing it at scale or getting it through at a large organization. Do you have any advice for marketers like me who work at large organizations?
Rory Sutherland: My contention is that what marketers understand that often tech people don’t is they think the bigger the idea, the faster it’s going to take on and the less marketing it needs. I used to think that. Then I suddenly, because I’m 60, I’ve lived through the mobile phone, I’ve lived through the air fryer, I’ve lived through all these kind of patterns of tech, the microwave oven, I’ve lived through the DVD player. What you realize very quickly is: one, actually the bigger the idea, the slower it is to take off and the more marketing it needs. That’s because the bigger an idea is, the more behavioral change it requires for its adoption. Humans find behavioral change difficult for all kinds of evolutionary reasons. We like doing what we’ve done before and we like doing what everybody else does.
Rory Sutherland: So, there are certain things which marketers are right about, which I think the rest of the business world is too influenced by mainstream economics, which is almost, “If you build it, they will come” stuff. Nah. Everybody quotes this phrase, “If we build it, they will come,” approvingly. But the film, Field of Dreams, was about a mad person who builds a baseball stadium in a cornfield to attract ghosts. It’s not really the basis for business wisdom, is it? I thought his business plan was terrible. You probably had a catchment area of 27 people and you’re the middle of bloody nowhere. Not where you build a baseball stadium, generally.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s an odd one where I think the quote is probably bigger than the movie at this point.
Rory Sutherland: Exactly, yes. Yeah.
Recommended Reading: Humanocracy and the Unaccountability Machine
Andrew Mitrak: Rory Sutherland, it’s so great to speak with you. I really enjoyed it. I love all of your work, all your books, all your podcast appearances, and talks. Is there anything that I could point listeners to? I mean, there are so many places. Where do you point people to?
Rory Sutherland: Oh gosh. There are a few books recently. Gary Hamel’s book Humanocracy, I’m going to plug. I like plugging really interesting books. I’m probably about three years late with that book, by the way; it’s quite old. Dan Davies and his book The Unaccountability Machine. Dan makes a really interesting point, which is not a bad point at which to end, which is: he said a business is an artificial intelligence. Once you create a structure for decision-making, you have created an artificial intelligence, which is not the same as natural intelligence within an individual human brain. It’s fundamentally artificial because you’ve done all these things where you’ve defined things, you’ve categorized things, you’ve tagged things, and so forth. Consequently, collective decision-making is artificial.
Rory Sutherland: And yet almost no thought is given to how those information flows are designed. In particular, Dan’s book is called The Unaccountability Machine because the primary motivation of people within an institution is actually career insurance and risk mitigation—reputational risk mitigation—not the success of the organization. To prevent that, you need to design decision-making very carefully. You need to have reasonable symmetry of upside and downside reward and punishment. We’ve often created organizations where if you make a small mistake, you get fired; if you come up with a billion-dollar idea, you get a pat on the back and possibly a promotion in two years’ time. I don’t think the way in which we’ve calibrated organizational decision-making is that good.
Rory Sutherland: My weird conclusion from years of behavioral science, which is supposedly about human irrationality—I mean, Amos Tversky met someone in, I think at Stanford, as it would be. And this person said, “I study artificial intelligence,” and Amos said, “That’s funny, because Daniel and I study natural stupidity.” Now, interestingly, my kind of hunch—which is a feel—having spent years looking at this stuff, is individual human beings, when they don’t have to justify their behavior, make surprisingly intelligent decisions. Which are surprisingly intelligent once you realize what they’re ultimately trying to do. What their ultimate, maybe unspoken, maybe unthought objective is in buying a pair of Balenciaga sunglasses; you actually realize that what they’re doing makes sense within the constraints of ecological rationality, even if it’s not economic rationality.
Rory Sutherland: The thing I also think is that collective decision-making is incredibly vulnerable to collective insanity. We’ve allowed, for example—I don’t know how this has happened—but we’ve allowed HR and finance to have the right of veto over almost any form of business activity. I don’t know how this has happened; it seems to be universal in all organizations. We’ve probably allowed, for example, within governmental decision-making, we’ve created these entities in terms of environmental sustainability or diversity or whatever it may be, which are actually massive opportunity costs. In other words, they prevent lots of things happening or even being tried or even being experimented on. We’ve allowed this to happen and no one really is speaking up.
Rory Sutherland: There’s another brilliant guy called Philip K. Howard, who’s written a book about “can-do.” Fundamentally, we need to get back to the idea of business as a discovery mechanism, not business as an efficiency mechanism. The efficiency tail has been allowed to wag the discovery dog. That’s a terrible analogy and an awful place on which to end, but ultimately the solution to these things has to lie in how we design institutional decision-making better.
Rory Sutherland: My hunch is that AI—okay, this is a kind of gag, but it’s nonetheless telling—what happens with all these people in finance and HR and everything else and IT: they never downsize themselves. There is no way of measuring how efficient they are or what contribution they make to the organization, and yet they are deeply involved in assessing the efficiency of people doing the real work. Often front-line service workers who aren’t even that well paid. Now, my hunch is: it’s those jobs that should be replaced by automation, not the front-line service jobs, because they’re specific to the brand and the business itself. Those are generic jobs which are a kind of internal corporate oncology all of themselves.
Rory Sutherland: The old joke used to be that the factory of the future will consist of a man and a dog. The man’s there to feed the dog, and the dog’s there to stop the man touching the machines. That was the old joke about automation. Now, my contention is: the factory of the future will actually be a man and a dog, then there’ll be four procurement people who are continually reducing the size of the food bowl. There’ll be three compliance people who are legislating about the safe use of the lead to which the dog is attached, and there’ll be five people in HR to make sure the man doesn’t misgender the dog. I don’t know how we’ve allowed this to happen in organizations, but it’s what I call Soviet-style capitalism. It’s a kind of command-and-control mechanism where almost the internal political—what you might call ideological purity—of the activity is more important than the value of the activity. How we allowed this to happen, I don’t know, and what caused it, I don’t know, but until we do something about it...
Why Video Conferencing Remains Underappreciated
Andrew Mitrak: Is history just a big sequence of over-corrections? That’s what I wonder. Are we just continuously doomed to be swinging too far in one direction versus the other?
Rory Sutherland: Is this even correctable? I don’t know. By the way, a separate talk I’d love to give one day is I don’t understand why we’re talking so much about AI relative to the importance of, well, Google Meet. Because video conferencing is an enormously important technology because it makes physical co-location unnecessary to a discussion. It massively reduces the costs of interaction. It means, for example, that your staff could move not to a low-tax jurisdiction but a low-rent jurisdiction, which would be far better off for them. Actually being able to move to affordable housing would make a bigger difference than a 10% cut in the rate of income tax in some cases.
Rory Sutherland: Now, what everybody’s doing is this stupid thing where they compare like with like. Just to take an analogy with electric cars: the reason I support electric cars is not because electric cars are better than petrol cars in 2025, although they are. Petrol—I think they are better, but we can debate all that. I’m totally happy to have people go, “I go on a skiing holiday once a year and there’s nowhere I’d get 600 miles.” Okay, I buy all that. But the real reason to support electric cars is that in 20 years’ time, electric car technology could spawn a hundred meaningful innovations, and internal combustion engine technology won’t do that because it’s run out of road.
Rory Sutherland: Now, what we’re doing with video conferencing versus physical meetings—which, by the way, is another form of transportation if you think about it laterally—is we’re saying: is a video meeting better than a conventional meeting? Maybe it isn’t quite as good. I don’t generally want to smell our clients; I’m perfectly happy just to talk to them face-to-face. But no, there are a whole load of incidental conversations and serendipity in the workplace; I buy all that stuff. But the point is that video conferencing in five, 10, 15 years’ time, if you reorganize your organization around it, has the potential to be transformative, whereas insisting on physical location does not have the potential to be transformative because we’ve been doing it for a hundred years and we’re not going to get any better at it.
Rory Sutherland: So it’s like evolutionary potential, effectively. That’s the way to look at those two things, not side-by-side comparison on the now. It’s what offers you the biggest optionality and opportunity to innovate. Not what is better right now. In the case of the internal combustion engine, not that much opportunity. Electric vehicles: you’ve got electric scooters, cargo bikes, you have micro-mobility, you’ll have driverless cars, you’ll have all this stuff, none of which could happen with a gasoline engine. So we should be optimizing for optionality, not optimality. Don’t look at short-term optimality; look at long-term optionality. The scope of what you might call the adjacent possible is much, much bigger for video conferencing than it is for everybody in the office in a bloody expensive bit of real estate.
The Failure of the Open-Plan Office
Andrew Mitrak: And also, I want to come full circle back to Ogilvy as well. He did all of his writing at home, right? He’s a work-from-home guy right from the beginning.
Rory Sutherland: Right from the beginning. There are certain things you cannot do in an open-plan office. The open-plan office was imposed; it’s in some ways catastrophic to all sorts of things. It’s neither sociable nor is it solitude. I think to work well, you need sociability and solitude; you want a pub and a library. But actually, what we get is something which isn’t a pub and it isn’t a library; it’s just this sort of weird hinterland sort of thing. It’s a no-man’s land sort of DMZ useless zone in between the two possible spaces.
Rory Sutherland: So my argument is, look, I think what will happen is that if you’re McKinsey, say, 20 people internationally can form a consulting firm with the ability to draw on the 200 people in the world who know more about a subject than anybody else on the planet, and they’re going to out-compete you. Because they’ve got an access to talent that you haven’t got because you’re insisting everybody has to be based here and commute into a stupid building five days a week.
Rory Sutherland: So the point is you’ve got to look at what the technology makes possible ultimately, not what it does right now. And that’s why I find it weird that we’ve effectively invented teleportation and no one’s talking about it. We take it for granted. And that’s just because the technology was old. But all really important technology takes ages to reach its level of full adoption. The fact that the technology is old means we don’t talk about it because it doesn’t make us look very cool. But I mean, the fax machine was a hundred years old before it reached sort of 5% penetration.
In Praise of Paul Feldwick
Andrew Mitrak: Well, this has been great. I’m going to check out Humanocracy, The Unaccountability Machine, and your future talks on teleportation and AI and everything. So, Rory, I could talk with you for hours. This is a real pleasure to speak with you and meet you. Thanks so much for your time.
Rory Sutherland: It’s been an absolute joy. Paul Feldwick recommended you very, very highly. Good name-check. So let’s also mention, if he was too modest, all of his books, including Why Does the Peddler Sing?, are absolutely astonishing.
Andrew Mitrak: Yes.
Rory Sutherland: They’re a tour de force.
Andrew Mitrak: Excellent books, and anybody who enjoyed this conversation and enjoys your work would also certainly enjoy Paul Feldwick’s work because it’s excellent.
Rory Sutherland: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 44
When I launched A History of Marketing at the start of this year, I had a vision of exploring the origins of our craft. But I never imagined that 2025 would be bookended by “The Father of Modern Marketing.”
Dr. Philip Kotler kicked off the podcast as the first guest I interviewed. Now, it is my distinct honor to welcome him back to the show for our final interview of 2025.
The Year in Review: 69,523 ThanksThis year has exceeded every expectation I had. To date, this podcast has been downloaded and streamed 69,523 times across YouTube, Spotify, and various podcast platforms.
What started as my personal quest for knowledge has reached marketers on every continent (save for Antarctica).
I’ve received notes from a wide range of listeners: from global CMOs and Ivy League professors to high school students and interns; from entrepreneurs who have scaled million-dollar businesses to self-described Marxists and lifelong marketing critics.
To every one of you who has listened, shared, or sent a note: Thank you.
This show has been like the best possible version of a self-directed MBA. I’ve learned, I’ve made new friends, and I’ve become a better marketer because of it.
A Legend Who Listens
One of the most incredible moments of this year—and this interview—was learning that Dr. Kotler doesn’t just appear on the show; he listens to it.
Much of the success of this podcast is due to Kotler’s early support. Phil was my first-ever guest, and his recommendation opened doors to other legends like Jag Sheth and David Aaker.
As we wrap up 2025, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Philip for his mentorship and to you, the audience, for coming on this journey with me.
What We Cover in This Episode:
* The “Mount Rushmore” of Marketing: Kotler names the practitioners he admires most (and his answers might surprise you).
* Addressing the Critics: His refreshing take on those who try to build their names by opposing “Kotlerism.”
* The 4Ps vs. The 7Ps: Why Kotler sees “promotion” imoving toward a more expansive “Communication System.”
* Marketing’s Mathematical Turn: The tension between “people people” and “number people.”
* And much more
Enjoy the final conversation of the year with Dr. Philip Kotler. I’m looking forward to what we’ll discover together in 2026.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng of Syracuse University, who reviews transcripts for accuracy, adds helpful links for readers, and gives me feedback to improve the show.
The Enduring Legacy of Philip Kotler
Andrew Mitrak: I’ve recorded more than 40 interviews with marketing executives, academics, and authors, and you are the single name that is most referenced across all of these interviews, across everybody. Do you ever think about why your work has endured? I’ve seen so many other marketing frameworks come and go, yet 60 years on, folks still reference Philip Kotler and your work. Why do you think that is?
Philip Kotler: Well, that’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about it until you asked it. By the way, I’m a watcher of all your programs, and I’ve learned a great deal about the history of marketing, and I tell others to also follow your work.
Your question is, why am I still around in the marketing world? I did some thinking about that. I think a lot has to do with my textbooks. I have three textbooks: Marketing Management, Principles of Marketing, and Marketing: An Introduction. All of them are already in their 16th, 17th, or 18th edition. So therefore, lots of people around the world—in fact, those are books used around the world—know me that way.
I’ve also published, besides three big textbooks, many other books on marketing like entrepreneurial marketing, transformative marketing, and so on. So I think that makes a difference. I have traveled a lot around the world, many countries, to upgrade them on marketing thinking. Particularly, it started with 12 annual visits to Sweden, 12 annual visits to Milan to say what’s happening in the field of marketing. And then I got a lot of honorary degrees. So for some reason, those all have added up to lasting in this field and enjoying it very much.
Andrew Mitrak: So it’s accumulated over time—all of these degrees, these textbooks, all this work. And today you are often referred to as the “Father of Modern Marketing,” but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when you were early in your career; there was a time when you were midway through your career and you were just publishing your first books. Did it ever feel like there was a turning point when you started to feel like a major name in the field versus feeling like an earlier career professional trying to establish yourself?
Philip Kotler: What happened is every time I published a book, it had good reviews, and that meant getting more readers. I think that getting honorary degrees abroad—I received 22 honorary degrees abroad—in each case, I visited the university giving that award. All of that happened way before I was ever called the Father of Modern Marketing, and to this day I don’t know who first used that expression. It wasn’t that I created it and publicized it. So I’ve been very lucky to be recognized for my work in marketing.
Andrew Mitrak: It didn’t strike me that you would have bestowed that title upon yourself… that doesn’t seem like your style. [Laughs]
Kotler on Addressing Critics
Andrew Mitrak: One thing I’ve noticed since publishing this podcast and being, I think, more attuned to your work and how other marketers speak about you, is that there’s a common way that marketers will try to make a name for themselves or their ideas. They’ll define their ideas almost in opposition to Kotler, almost in opposition to you. They’ll say things kind of to the effect of, “Oh, Kotler’s principles, they don’t work in this segment,” or “They don’t work in this country, and you need my framework to succeed.”
It almost reminds me of a boxer who is kind of trash-talking the champion to get publicity for himself or something. It seems like, “Oh, because you’re the Father of Modern Marketing, they’re trying to elevate their ideas to your stature.” I’m wondering, not to dismiss, I am sure their ideas merit a lot, and the tactics they use, if you’ve noticed this over the course of your career and how you’ve responded to it.
Philip Kotler: Well, I relish those challenges. In fact, I’ve often said that I wish someone would replace my theory or system of marketing thinking with something better. One fellow from Ireland, he’s a professor in Ulster, Dr. Stephen Brown, really took to that position. He wrote an article saying that the specter of marketing is Kotler, or “Kotlerism.” It’s like Kotlerism is around too much. And he actually tried to explain my being visible because he thought I was following what Karl Marx did to become known. It’s a very interesting article.
He also wrote a whole book of a fictional marketing department, and it was really about Northwestern University and my role in the marketing universe. So I get those things, and I find that’s fine. Recently, someone just wrote a book called Marketing is Dead, which is to say that they have a better answer to what it should really be. I welcome those things. As a matter of fact, my complaint is that marketing doesn’t have enough debates. A good field is going to have some real opposition about concepts and theories and measurements and so on, and we need more of that.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s a great outlook. I’ll try to look up that article you were referencing and see if I can paste a link in the blog that accompanies this post. You mentioned how marketing doesn’t have enough debates. On this thread, what is your overall assessment of how marketing has evolved since you’ve been in the field? Let me ask in another way, if you’re, quote, “The Father of Modern Marketing,” how do you feel about how your child has grown up?
The Evolution from Mass Marketing to One-to-One
Philip Kotler: It turns out that I’ll start with the fact that the first big debate I really had with the rest of the profession is whether marketing is only a commercial subject of relevance to commercial firms, or it applies to all organizations and even groups and individuals. And I made the point that marketing is done by everyone in so many ways. A vote was actually taken on that issue by the American Marketing Association, and we won. That marketing is far more than just a commercial subject for firms.
Marketing started pretty much with mass marketing as an area because of the image of Coke and McDonald’s and stuff like that. But then along came segmentation, targeting, and positioning (STP), meaning that you got to focus your marketing on a group with a very specific need to be solved by your solution. And that ushered in several decades of work—interesting work—the whole idea of what is a segment and how do you target and position it.
Then the next stage, which we’re in now, is one-to-one marketing. We never thought that we need to have more than the geographical look of a demographic to not know the individuals in that demographic. But the fact is, now we can collect information on every individual, which allows us to customize and personalize our messaging so that it’s correct messaging at the right time and for the right purpose. So I’ve seen that happen.
Now, how many companies are really going to do one-to-one marketing? Because we are in that stage of celebrating it. Not that—well, it’s interesting. The smallest companies tend to be one-to-one marketers, if I mean by that the small pastry shop where the French consumer comes every week and says hello and is greeted. They are into one-to-one marketing. But what’s impossible normally for large companies is to know each individual and have a nice way to greet them. But now they’re trying to do that. So that’s an interesting effort to get close to individuals even though you’re a huge company. Something must be lost in that process, but that’s where we are now, and we’ll see how far we can go with that.
Andrew Mitrak: On that thread of something being lost in the process, do you feel like there were any inflection points over your career where marketing as a field took a wrong turn? Did the discipline ever get focused on what you feel is the wrong areas or the wrong priorities?
Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders
Philip Kotler: I thought that some people writing about marketing were possibly leading us in the wrong direction, particularly Vance Packard. Vance Packard is well known for writing a book called The Hidden Persuaders. And implied in the book that the great marketers have hidden techniques. The audience is watching a movie, and they don’t realize this, but there’s a message coming through about how good popcorn is. So they get up during the movie and automatically go and get some popcorn. We don’t have those techniques and don’t want to use them.
He went on to talk about that marketing creates a lot of waste. And by the way, he’s not wrong there. You remember the famous statement, “Half the marketing I do doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half.”
Andrew Mitrak: John Wanamaker.
Philip Kotler: Yeah, the department store guy. And he wrote a book, The Status Seekers, that we create classes by our marketing. Now, there’s some—it’s worth reading Packard, but if we took Hidden Persuaders seriously and found there are some messages where we could sell much easier by hypnotic effects on consumers, I wouldn’t want the field to go that way.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny how many times Vance Packard and Hidden Persuaders has come up in the interviews I’ve recorded. Inspiring both—one person I interviewed recently was Jean Kilbourne, and she’s sort of a longtime critique of the portrayal of women in advertising. But she was inspired initially by Vance Packard. And then another person, Robert Cialdini, who’s an earlier episode, he writes all about persuasion, and he mentioned that early in his career he was inspired by Vance Packard.
It’s interesting that you highlight that because I think it was written in the mid-1950s, and it really inspired a lot of people who didn’t necessarily replicate his work exactly or even went off and took it in different directions, but it was an initial spark and inspiration for them.
Philip Kotler: Yeah, sure.
The Rising Role of Math in Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: If you place yourself at the start of your career, do you think that there’s anything that would surprise you most about how marketing functions today?
Philip Kotler: Well, I think the thing that is a big surprise to everyone about marketing is that it is getting to be mathematical. What I mean by that is, in the business schools, students sort of divided themselves up between those who loved numbers and those who loved people. Those who loved numbers went into finance. Marketing was considered at least not formidable mathematically. Well, one big change is that it’s quite formidable mathematically now. We even have a journal, Marketing Science, and the articles are almost unreadable to the unmathematical person. Which means that they may have great findings, but they’re not going to reach the CMOs, the Chief Marketing Officers, for use.
I am often asked by students what field they should go into. I often say, well, if you really love being with people and want to help make lives better, go into marketing. It’s the best access you could have to be helpful in that regard. If you like numbers better, it’s still going to keep you busy in finance then.
Are the 4Ps still enough?
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you also about the 4Ps, which you popularized. I’ve also noticed as a marketer, marketing is overwhelmingly just focused on one of those Ps, which is Promotion. So it sounds like you would agree with that assessment. I’m wondering if marketing primarily being seen as promotion is sort of a missed opportunity for the field.
Philip Kotler: Oh, I think it would be bad for the field to be seen as only a promotional activity. It denies all the homework that was done by the marketer to understand the world he’s living—or he or she is living in—and how to make a good impression for the good in the world.
So here’s the thing. You’re talking really about what we call the marketing mix, which in shorthand is the word for the set of tools that marketers can work with to have influence. And known as the 4 Ps originally. Originally, my late friend Dick Clewett at Northwestern taught Jerry McCarthy that there are three Ps and a D: Product, Price, Place, and...
Andrew Mitrak: Distribution?
Philip Kotler: Distribution. Product, Price, Promotion, but he used a D for distribution. Jerry made it a P for Place. Smart move. Four Ps. Okay. Now, do you realize that originally Neil Borden at Harvard University many years earlier said there are 12 elements to the marketing mix? Okay. So down to four is good.
But I’m more comfortable today with seven. And I got to the seven in this way: When it comes to Product, you got to add a separate mix for Service. It doesn’t begin with a P, but if you have a good product and poor service, you don’t succeed. Then I also want Brand to be mentioned when Product is mentioned because you could have a good product, but it’s not a brand. It hasn’t attained a differentiation really—a value differentiation from other competitive offerings.
So and then I took Price and said, you know, you never set just a fixed price. It moves around with new situations. So I think we have to add Incentives. Incentives and disincentives, basically. Because most often brands are at discount too. So we got to use that notion.
And then I like to generalize away from the idea of the word Promotion. I really want to call it a Communication System. That marketers must manage a system where they can get to know and communicate effectively with people, which means knowing much more than what hot button to touch to get them to buy. It’s to really know what their lives are like and how to help improve their lives. So when your basic question was about promotion being the essence of marketing, I think it’s such a narrowing of what it’s all about.
The 4Ps: Is Marketing Too Focused on Promotion?
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. Just to clarify what I’m saying, I’m just thinking of my own experience as a marketer who works mostly in B2B companies. When another department thinks of the role of marketing, they think of marketing as just, “Oh, that’s the promotion person.”
There’s another product department, and of course marketing has to be aware of the product; there’s a field of product marketing.
But with distribution, there might be a supply chain team, there might be some procurement team, there might be other teams.
Pricing is often handled by some other strategy and operations group that’s outside of marketing. Hopefully marketing has a seat at the table, but if I think of the marketing organization I’ve worked in, there hasn’t been a pricing person who’s a marketer per se.
I’m wondering if marketing in practice sometimes is being squeezed in that promotion box. At least the perception of others outside of marketing sees marketing as being squeezed into promotion.
Philip Kotler: Well, you’re onto something. In the academic world, there’s been talk about how marketing should be in control of the 4 Ps, but they aren’t. Pricing is done by a financial guy.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.
Philip Kotler: Product is developed by a group without the help of marketing, and then marketing only comes in when they now say it’s ready to be launched. At which point the marketers say, “We wish you had included us because you left out an important feature that would be attractive, and also your price is much too high to command that price for that product. So we won’t be successful with what you did by not involving us in the decision-making process.”
We’re going to change that. That marketers have to be present in the development of innovation. And innovation is so crucial. And to innovate without a marketing mind in the mix is wrong.
Are “incentives” underrated by marketers?
Andrew Mitrak: And one of the words you mentioned earlier that I want to come back to is incentives. And that’s something that within marketing, I feel like is a very underrated word. Or it’s under-appreciated. When I think of most of the problems that I encounter, well, maybe through life in general, but certainly in marketing or in business or in sales and relationships, it’s somewhat just misaligned incentives. And I find a lot of my job is just trying to identify where is there misalignment and how do I realign it to be better, and that fixes problems. So I think that’s an idea that I don’t hear talked about often enough, and I’m glad you brought that up.
Philip Kotler: Right. We need incentives is potentially a very strong pointing out of what else can be done in successful marketing.
The Gap Between Marketing Academia and Practice
Andrew Mitrak: I want to shift also to another thing that I’ve noticed. Over the number of interviews I’ve done, I’ve noticed a really wide gap between marketing academia and marketing practice. Several academics I’ve spoke to don’t seem that up to speed on how marketing is practiced today; they don’t actually seem all that interested in today. And a lot of them, frankly, I think they’re very critical of marketing—the practice or just the existence. And that’s fine, they can have their ideas, but it just seems like their title might be Marketing Professor, but it seems pretty removed—it seems very, very removed actually sometimes—from the marketing that I do in my profession.
And also many practitioners aren’t interested at all in academia. The folks that I’ve interviewed who are executives and entrepreneurs and other marketers, they very rarely mention, if at all, any marketing academic work that’s influenced them. And I’m wondering—you’re nodding your head—it seems like you also perceive this as a gap that exists. And so why do you think it persists, and do you think it’s a problem?
Philip Kotler: It is a problem. I encountered it at my university, and others have encountered it. The form it took is that our faculty was so—in the department of marketing—so incentivized to produce academic articles if they are to advance to—from assistant to associate to full professor—that they are needing to identify things where they can make an original contribution. And there is little time left to talk and mix with CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, or other types of marketers who are in the real world.
And that explains why if you talk to a lot of CMOs, they won’t mention names that the academics just respect so much. That problem is still going to stay around. We got to maybe have meetings between some academics and some CMOs talking about all these—how to get together better.
Andrew Mitrak: Can I ask you a number of lightning round questions? Sort of shorter ones for you.
Philip Kotler: Okay.
Kotler’s “Mount Rushmore” of Marketing Executives
Andrew Mitrak: If you were to build a Mount Rushmore of marketing practitioners, what are some of the names that you feel like must be included in this?
Philip Kotler: Oh, okay. And we’re talking about the practicing marketers?
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so entrepreneurs, executives, marketers themselves.
Philip Kotler: I think I would be more very careful answering the one about the best academic people because I don’t want to leave anyone out who is very good. But let’s stay with your question. Professional marketing, we know it when we see it, but there are some people who have done it so well. For example, Procter & Gamble has had many good leaders. One of them is just outstanding, his name was A.G. Lafley. And A.G. Lafley, you know, running a company that has so many brands and knowing all of them and knowing how to get the right response from employees is a big problem.
Now, the same thing happened at Unilever, which I consider a very great company. I remember when I was in India, Lever was known everywhere for their work in India. But in any case, it was handled by Paul Polman recently for 10 years. Paul did a remarkable job. People now know Unilever for their work with Dove and all women are beautiful.
The two things he did that made him exceptional is he said he doesn’t want to do quarterly reporting of marketing because that means he’s going to be either complimented or criticized if that quarter the results didn’t come through. He wants only annual reporting of marketing results. Very smart move because then he can be a long-range planner and get to do the right things.
And then he also said that of the seven groups that are stakeholders in marketing—with of course customers being the first group and employees the second group—he says the last group are the investors. In other words, yeah, think of all your stakeholders, but the one you can pay the least attention to is stakeholders because if you do the others well, the investors will get a good return too. So we love the storytelling about some people like A.G. Lafley and Paul Polman as leaders. And I can name a number of others as well.
Andrew Mitrak: I’m glad you mentioned those names because sometimes folks will go straight to Steve Jobs or maybe Walt Disney or David Ogilvy or some other name, but I’m really appreciative that you found names that you don’t see at the top of lists all the time. So that’s great.
Besides your own work, is there one book you believe every student of marketing should read?
Philip Kotler: I think that for inspiration, not only about marketing but about how to think well about the contributions of business to life itself, Peter Drucker is my favorite. And you could read in fact one of many of his books, but one is called The Essential Drucker. And it’s probably got marketing in it because—in fact, some scholar recently wrote how Drucker was the first marketer or major thinker in marketing.
Advice for Early Career Marketers
Andrew Mitrak: Is there a piece of advice that you most often give to people who are early in their careers in marketing or considering a career in marketing?
Philip Kotler: Yes, I first want to be sure that they love working with people as well as numbers. But I would say that to be successful, they should go toward studying a niche of some kind. You know, it’s just like in literary work, everyone is doing a dissertation on Shakespeare, but we’ve overdone Shakespeare. So find something that has rich possibilities.
Now, let me give you an illustration. I have great admiration for Hermann Simon, who is not only professorial but he also is engaged as a CEO. And he said that he noted—he was in Germany—and he noticed that there were a lot of companies that were not well known, but they were small, but they were specialized, and that they were making lots of money. And he says, “I think I’m going to study why should a small company make so much money? What’s the secret?” The secret is they’re making the best of something.
And he wrote a whole book about—and his reputation started on that basis—that we turned to him. He knew each of those dozen companies that he was talking about. And so you as a new person in the field of marketing, observe something that triggers your curiosity and get deeper into it because there is so much now—data is so available on so many things. I think you can be a head start person.
Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to ask you a follow-up on this one because a thing—I think that’s totally right focusing on a niche. If I was to modify it, ideally you can find a niche that can then expand. That you’re not going to be pigeonholed too much into a niche. Many companies, like Nvidia, which is a very big company today, started with the niche of graphics cards for video games, but then expanded to data centers and AI. Or Amazon started with books but then expanded to everything.
If I also kind of even think of my own interest in marketing history, one of the reasons I chose it is that marketing history sounds very niche, right? And not a lot of people cover it. But when you think about it, a lot of things can be considered marketing, and a lot of things can be considered history, and so it has the potential to expand in a lot of interesting directions. And that’s something that I’ve thought about as well. Would you agree or disagree with that idea?
Philip Kotler: Yeah, actually not only maybe study a niche, but study how a niche grew into a big firm. Because a lot of niches just die. So what was common to the success stories of niches that grew into bigger businesses? And there’s other ways to make a mark in marketing. Probably someone will one of these days list a set of problems that are still to be solved by marketers and get more people focused on those problems.
Is marketing still a good career?
Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that marketing today is still a good use of one’s career? If you were starting your career all over again today, would you still choose marketing as your place to work?
Philip Kotler: Yes, I find that there’s no such thing as a master of marketing because every marketer is going to continue to be challenged by changes that are occurring in this vast area. So I would choose the same career I had. I mean, I can think far out to entirely different careers. I could have been into literary works and commenting on Shakespeare and all that, or been into music, which I love. But I would say that one good field that is enriching and not tiring often is the marketing field.
I would say—now, you know, it’s interesting because when you take the field of law, I spoke to a lot of lawyers who are just tired of being in law, unhappy about having chosen—their father got them to become a lawyer. I’m not hitting lawyers because my wife’s a lawyer too, and she has her feelings about this. But the thing is, the field of marketing keeps changing and keeping you alive to new things all the time.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. I’m about, depending on how you count it, 10 to 12 years, maybe a little more, into my career in marketing. And something that I love about it is that I can learn about marketing if I keep my eyes open and really stay curious. I can learn marketing lessons almost everywhere or see it in practice in everything. And it’s something where—and also you can kind of talk to a lot of different fields because it’s a discipline of disciplines. My wife’s a therapist and is deeper into psychology, and I can obviously learn a lot from that. And speaking to anybody at the companies I work at—of course sales and product and engineering and finance and operations, everything—marketing has sort of something to learn and something to say and something to contribute. And I just find it very enriching.
Philip Kotler: Yeah, good. So you would choose the same field.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, marketing is great. I’m a fan, and I hope other people can find as much pleasure in the field.
Kotler’s Core Philosophy: “Customer is King”
Andrew Mitrak: When future generations of students read the name Philip Kotler in their marketing textbooks, is there a single most important idea that you hope they associate with your work?
Philip Kotler: I don’t know, but I would suggest they should think “Customer is King.” One possibility. Just to remember the focus of marketing: Customer is King.
And I would say a belief in the fact that marketing is about trying to improve the life experience of people by exposing them to new possibilities, new wonder goods and services, and all about increasing their well-being as people and their happiness as people. That much of my marketing is about trying to make a happier and a healthier life for people as a purpose of marketing.
Andrew Mitrak: I love the sentiment of those ideas. I think that in my own role when I market, I often think like I’m trying to advocate for the customer across the board. That different departments have different goals, and back to incentives, those goals may not be aligned with what’s in the best interest of the customer.
Sales might have some near-term target they’re trying to hit and want to do tactics that might come off as aggressive and off-putting to potential customers. And marketing, of course, you need to support sales, but you need to also support the customer, and you need to sort of advocate for what’s in the best interest of the customer as well. So I think that’s a really actionable piece of feedback.
Philip Kotler: You remember that some companies insist on putting an empty chair during their deliberations. And who’s in that chair? The customer. Just a reminder.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, we need to figure out a way to do that on virtual meetings too, of having an empty little tile on your Zoom or your Google Meet for the customer.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any advice for me as I continue my exploration into marketing history?
Philip Kotler: Well, I’ve watched all of your 40 films, and I learned a great number of things. We might ask you to identify some of the people who are CMOs, Chief Marketing Officers, who do have an academic background too. You might talk about how their practices have been very informed about the findings of people because maybe that message being watched by other CMOs might help bring them into more consciousness of what to look for in academic work that might be of interest to them.
The marketing that is done in different—quite different—countries would be very interesting. Especially if you find a country which says they do a very different type of marketing that is not mentioned. For example, the old idea is if I’m going to buy a rug –a carpet– in the United States, let’s say, there’s a price. If it’s in a department store, you don’t generally negotiate. But if it’s a carpet in Iran or somewhere else, it’s a game. You’re playing a game before you ever get to a price. So maybe a lecture or two on what is different about marketing in your country from what the textbooks say marketing is about. What is your marketing mix of tools?
Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. I once bought a rug in Istanbul, and the process that I went through buying that was so different. It was nothing you’d ever read in any marketing textbook. I went in, the person served me tea and snacks, and I sat and they brought them out. And I paid way too much for this rug, which is now stored away in my basement somewhere. But I felt so obliged just based on the experience. It was almost like I was paying for an hour of entertainment or paying for an hour of the tea or meal or like the way you’d overpay for tea at some fine dining hall or something. And so I don’t necessarily feel ripped off in a way, even though the price for the rug that I paid makes no economic sense at all, but the price I paid for the experience of it makes a lot more sense. And I think there’s something—and also there were still things like haggling and there was friction in the process—and it’s something that you just couldn’t—that doesn’t appear in any Western marketing sources. So I’d be really curious to dive into that.
Philip Kotler: There’s another thing that I noticed is they’ll show you some rugs and you say, “No, I can’t find anything interesting to me.” They’ll say, “Well, wait, we have another room here. We’ll show you some rugs.” And you get excited, but they’re more expensive. But still you don’t move. And then they say, “Would you really like to see the real rugs? I mean, just to show you what they are.” And they take you to a third room. And I’ve seen that technique work not only with rugs but that they take you—you really feel special to have seen the best.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, there’s a special episode coming just on rug marketing. [Laughs]
A Heartfelt “Thank You” to Philip Kotler
Andrew Mitrak: Phil, you mentioned that you watch the show, and that just means the world to me. If I was just doing this for a viewer of one, I would do it. And also that you were the first person to appear, you shared a kind note about the show with your network, and you also introduced me to some really amazing guests as well early on.
I just want to sincerely thank you so much for your support. You don’t need to do that, you don’t need to be as kind as you are. So I’m grateful to have met you through this project and to have your support throughout it and your viewership of it. I’ve learned so much from you. Thank you for everything.
Philip Kotler: Thank you so much.
Andrew Mitrak: As we wrap up, are there any recent publications or upcoming publications that you’d like to promote for listeners?
Philip Kotler: Yes, we’re putting out books on transformative marketing, which is much more sophisticated. And I’m working with V. Kumar, who’s one of our great researchers in marketing, on what we call transformative marketing. So we will be coming out with material on that. Thank you for asking.
Andrew Mitrak: Of course, yeah. I’m glad you’re continuing to collaborate with Professor Kumar. VK was a very fun interview to do and such a great thinker. So Dr. Philip Kotler, thanks again so much for your time. I really enjoyed this interview.
Philip Kotler: Andrew, thanks to you for what you’re doing. We’re all benefiting from it. Keep it up.


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A History of Marketing / Episode 43 If you studied marketing in school, you likely carried Kevin Lane Keller’s work in your backpack.
He co-authored Marketing Management, the all-time best-selling marketing textbook, alongside Philip Kotler. And with Strategic Brand Management, Kevin he defined how a generation of marketers understands brand equity.
As a Professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, he has spent decades bridging the gap between rigorous academic theory and elite corporate practice. He’s consulted for giants like Disney, Nike, and Ford, but perhaps his most interesting “field research” came from working with the Australian rock band, The Church.
This conversation is a rare treat for our listeners. Despite his massive impact and the high regard of his peers, Kevin keeps a relatively low profile and seldom sits for deep-dive, long-form interviews. This episode offers unique insights from one of the primary minds to shape modern marketing.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
In our conversation, we discuss:
* The P&G Playbook: How he helped transform Pampers by connecting functional technology to emotional “brand mantras.”
* The Art & Science: Why great branding requires both a philosophical “philosophy of consumption” and disciplined data tools.
* Managing The Church: What he learned about marketing, fan engagement, and “continuity vs. change” while managing a legendary Australian rock band.
Now, here is my conversation with Kevin Lane Keller.
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
Collaborating with Kotler on “Marketing Management”
Andrew Mitrak: Kevin Lane Keller, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Kevin Lane Keller: Thanks for having me.
Andrew Mitrak: I’m so excited for this conversation because like a lot of people, Marketing Management was my textbook in grad school, and your name was on the cover there right alongside Philip Kotler’s. So, how did you get involved with becoming Philip Kotler’s co-author?
Kevin Lane Keller: It’s interesting. I actually used the textbook too when I got my MBA. I had the third edition, so it’s going back a ways. I think it was the fall of 1978. I have enormous respect and he is a legend, but was a legend back then when I was taking the course. But I had the chance to publish my own textbook on Strategic Brand Management. I had done that and that was really my area of interest, but I’ve always been a marketer at heart in a very broad sense. So the publisher was looking for someone to be a co-author, and because of my experience and some of the things I was interested in, it seemed like a nice fit. So I actually did the 11th edition. Phil and I worked together just to sort of try it out, kind of both sides, and it went well. I enjoyed it a lot. And so I think it made sense and starting with the 12th edition I was formally the co-author and have been a co-author ever since.
Andrew Mitrak: When you write a book like that, that is so widely read and is sort of the Bible for a lot of folks who are just getting into marketing—if a professional marketer reads one book, that’s often the one that they reference—is there a lot of pressure when you write a book like that to make sure it’s accurate and up to date? Do the stakes seem very high for it?
Kevin Lane Keller: It’s daunting. When you think about it, it’s an impossible task because you’re trying to capture all the richness and all the detail and manage to distill that down and package it and write it and source it and reference it and everything, and make it engaging and interesting. So it is difficult. I enjoyed doing that. I think the challenge of that. And you break it down. It’s a little bit like building a house. You think, “Oh my God, building a house.” Well, you’re doing rooms and within rooms there are certain things you have to do. So you really break it down. It is very modular in how to approach it. But the big challenge is really keeping it up to date and making sure that it captures what modern marketing is and, more importantly, maybe what it should be.
The Challenge of Keeping Marketing Texts Relevant
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I have a question around keeping it up to date because there are probably certain core principles that you want to keep tried and true. Things like segmentation, targeting, and positioning, I think, were in my version of the book. I’m sure the Four Ps were referenced in it and things like that. But then there are a lot of things that change. So how do you think about what changes versus what doesn’t change?
Kevin Lane Keller: I think there is always continuity and change in marketing in general. I’ve worked with a lot of brands, I’ve worked with a lot of legacy brands, really strong brands, and that’s always the challenge: how do I move forward, but how do I move forward in the right direction and in the right way, at the right pace and all of that. It’s no different with a textbook. You are thinking about what are the new ideas and the new concepts. And sometimes new frameworks and new ways to organize and think about things. But yet at the same time, there are those core principles and segmentation and targeting in some sense, and positioning in some sense. It may change some how you think about those, but that notion and those concepts themselves at least at a high level are ones that are retained. But a lot of things change and especially with digital and with AI, we’re really trying to make sure the book reflects that.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I was thinking just about that example exactly. Like I’m sure SEO is covered in a book, right? It’s a very big thing. But then even the language around it is changing. Sometimes it’s called Answer Engine Optimization with an AI. Sometimes called Generative Engine Optimization, GEO or AEO with AIs. And then it’s sort of just you might just call it LLMs. And the language itself, especially at this moment when we’re recording here in November 2025, is changing so much where if you committed to something in a book very quickly it could be outdated. If that version is used for years, it could just wind up being a thing where you’re like, “Ah, kind of missed the boat on that one.” So how do you sort of think about staying relevant without becoming outdated too much?
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think you think about updating more frequently. I think that is probably one of the answers because there is nothing you can do. You can only go and be as current as you can till literally the moment of publication. So you’re always having the final proofs and you’re looking at them and you’re literally making changes and edits to try to make sure everything is as up to date as possible at that point in time. But at that point in time, then you move on in some sense. It is a little more dynamic with publishing. You have more opportunities to do updates and bring that in. So that’s the advantage of the e-text and the more digital versions versus the hard copy, the kind of classic textbook version in that sense. But you are always trying to. And look, the AI, that is an area that is just exploding so much and changing so much that it’s going to be a moving target for a while.
Andrew Mitrak: Oh yeah, keeps it interesting.
Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, it does. Yes.
Collaborating with a Marketing Legend
Andrew Mitrak: So what was it like collaborating with Phil Kotler?
Kevin Lane Keller: I had known him some through the years. He had actually tried to recruit me as a PhD student to Kellogg at one point in time, wrote a very nice letter when I was just first getting my PhD and through the years. He’s one of these guys. I joked when they had at one point an event to kind of honor Phil at Kellogg at Northwestern, and I joked that there had to be like three Philip Kotlers and we only actually had one of them in the room and the others were busy doing all the other things that Phil Kotler does because he’s just remarkably productive. I mean, unbelievably so. And the way he gets things done. But he’s the nicest guy. His ability, his radar to pick up on what matters. His ability to synthesize that, clarify it, put it into context. It’s just amazing. So for me, I’ve learned so much, which is great. But I’ve also enjoyed it so much. So he’s made it fun. So it’s just been great. And he’s still heavily involved with the book. So he definitely is still providing a lot of input, a lot of feedback. So he’s definitely part of the book still.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s amazing. Even into his mid-nineties. I think because he was the first interview on this podcast and he had a similar experience where he would just respond to emails so quickly and kind of be on top of things so fast. It’s amazing that he’s able to do it all.
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, there are three Philip Kotlers. I’m convinced. But maybe if it’s just one, it’s even more extraordinary. I’d be amazed even with three.
Andrew Mitrak: When you first started collaborating, him having this Father of Modern Marketing type legendary status in the field, were there ever any disagreements you had with him? Or did you feel like you could push back or evolve things? Or did you feel like because of that, his status, you had to be deferential to him and also he was sort of the original author? What was that dynamic like?
Kevin Lane Keller: That’s a good question because that’s a big issue. A lot of times it’s just people, you know, we all have that issue. We’re kind of territorial or we just sort of kind of want to stick with what we’ve done and for whatever reason. And he’s been always really flexible and open-minded about that. So that has just not been an issue, which has been great. I think there are certain topics he’s reluctant to give up in the book that sometimes, maybe they’re not as important now as they once were. They’re still important, and I get the reasoning, but that’s the one area is just sort of in that space where it’s just always harder. It’s easier to add than subtract. That’s always the hardest thing is subtracting. And you need to do both. That’s the challenge. Is what do you not include when you’ve included it before? And maybe there’s a reason to still include it, but if you do that for too much, then the book gets too long.
From Ad Retrieval Cues to Brand Equity
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that makes sense. So along with marketing management, you’re best known probably for your contributions to brand. And one of your early papers in 1987 I think, was “Memory Factors in Advertising: The Effect of Advertising Retrieval Cues on Brand Evaluations.” And so you were kind of early in working on brand and sort of connecting advertising, memory, around brand. So what led you to researching this area of advertising, memory and brand?
Kevin Lane Keller: That paper was my thesis paper. And that came out of my co-chair was Jim Bettman from Duke University. He wrote a paper on memory factors in advertising that had an example about Life Cereal and Mikey. It was a very popular ad, but people could not remember the name of the cereal so they weren’t getting the impact from that because the ad was working but not branding well. People liked it but didn’t connect. So they put a little picture of Mikey on the front of the package, framed it with a television set, and said “Try the cereal Mikey likes.” So I called those “ad retrieval cues.” And so I studied those. It made a lot of sense to me because it’s trying to make those connections that memory just aren’t strong enough in memory. You’re helping people out in retrieval.
But back door that got me into branding because the question was, “What did Life Cereal stand for without the cue and how did it tap into or remind people of the ads?” So I did a whole lot about memory and advertising and everything. But that’s how I got into branding. And then my most famous paper was in 1993, which was a paper I wrote about Customer-Based Brand Equity. And it’s a paper, 30,000 or some whatever Google Scholar cites. And it’s taught in seminars to this day. And I’ve written a couple follow-ups on that. I’ve written a ton in branding. But even on that specific paper, I’ve revisited it in some instances. But that’s really kind of... it all came down to understanding how brands work for people and especially in their memory and their knowledge and what they learn and how advertising affected that, but then how everything... how just brand in general operated.
The Explosion of Brand Equity in the 1990s
Andrew Mitrak: So it seems like in the late eighties to early nineties, brand was sort of the right topic at the right time. This is just as the idea of brand equity was really gaining traction. Can you talk about that transition that was happening with brand in the era? What was it before and then what was changing at this time?
Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, I mean it was one of those things where it really came out of what was happening in the eighties—all the mergers, acquisitions. People were having to value, so the intangible value of brands. So people were starting to recognize that. Brands obviously mattered to the CPG, the packaged goods companies, the more traditional consumer products. But all of a sudden a lot of different people, services and different organizations were all starting to realize in different forms that their brands really mattered. And so it was an exciting time because all of a sudden people were thinking differently about their marketing and literally what they did. And so to be sort of at the front end of that, which I was with some others, and to be able to talk about it and work with companies and help them understand that, you know, was just a really exciting thing to do. So it really, really took off. And when I published my book in even ‘98, there was just so much interest. And so the book sold a lot in trade even though it was a textbook because people at that time, there weren’t that many branding books.
Andrew Mitrak: If you look at a Google Ngram of the mentions of the word brand, it really explodes in the early nineties or so. And that brand equity just led it to be a more elevated word within marketing and business in general. Did you see that wave coming and place yourself there because it was the most interesting topic area? Or did you feel like you were just interested in it independently and it happened to coincide with this? Were you thinking like, “Oh this is a big wave that’s coming, I want to be at the forefront of that”?
Kevin Lane Keller: A little bit of both. I was fascinated by the topic. I thought it was really interesting and important. And I certainly recognized that others were feeling the same way. Interestingly, and eventually it, where we are today, it’s like part of everyday vernacular. I mean everyone talks about brands now. That was not the case 40 years ago or even 30 years ago or 20. So it took a while for that diffusion. And there are still some industries that are a little still maybe not embracing brand as much as you might think. But it was a realization that this is something that’s really important. It hasn’t been studied much. It needs academic study. It needs rigorous research.
Comparing Brand Equity Models
Andrew Mitrak: I interviewed David Aaker twice for this podcast actually, and we talked a lot about this era of brand equity and his work in this area. Did you work with him at all?
Kevin Lane Keller: So Dave, I met Dave in 1985 actually when I was interviewing for my first job. And he was at Berkeley and on the faculty there. And that’s where I joined the faculty. And at the time Dave had been doing a lot... he was known more as a quantitative sort of marketing person, but he had been starting to move into strategy. I was somebody who had been studying advertising and, as I was saying, in consumer psychology and memory, moving into branding. And so it was a natural thing for us to work together. So he, some of his first papers, some of my first papers in branding were together. And they were on brand extensions. So which was at the time a big area. There were a lot of brand extensions that were happening and sort of but there hadn’t been much research. So we were developing models and running experiments and things like that. So we worked together for a good almost five years or so. And then we sort of went slightly different directions because he started working on trade books and going to a more practitioner audience. And I was at Stanford, you know, in the process of getting tenure and publishing research and writing a textbook. So I went a little bit more the academic route, although, you know, there’s obviously a lot of overlap between what we did.
Andrew Mitrak: That explains sort of your different models a little bit because I don’t want to frame it as competitive per se, but it seems like you’re both people in the field of brand who are introducing your Customer-Based Brand Equity model. He has his brand equity models. And I could see if I’m a marketer at the time wanting to learn about brand equity, I’m like, “Huh, which model do I use?” Was there ever sort of a competition for mind share among both of you in your models? Or what was that dynamic like?
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think they’re complementary in some ways. I mean Dave’s is much more of a strategy... it’s a little bit more asset-based in some ways. And mine is much more rooted in consumer and consumer behavior, consumer psychology and all of that, and to develop certain strategic principles that come out of that. But a lot of our recommendations are the same. Even though because some of his assets are ones that are consumer behavior related and my consumer behavior, I make sure I drive that into more outcomes and other things that capture sort of more financial and asset sort of based things. So there is overlap in that sense. So there really wasn’t... I see them as complementary in a lot of different ways.
Constructing the Brand Resonance Pyramid
Andrew Mitrak: Totally, absolutely. Can you walk through... as you created this Customer-Based Brand Equity model in 1993, what is the approach to building a model? I’ve never built a model before. And it seems like a model you have to be sort of broad enough to encompass a lot of things and a lot of different industries, but also specific enough that it’s really meaningful and actionable and all of that. And of course grounded in reality and actual behavior. So what is the approach... where do you start with a model?
Kevin Lane Keller: You know, it’s funny. The model that I’m probably most well known for, there’s the Customer-Based Brand Equity sort of definition and concept. And then the actual framework is the Brand Resonance framework. And that’s one where it is very much the sort of looking at how to build a brand and thinking about the stages people go through in their development. But I think that that’s one where I really, I literally sat in the back of a room and tried to lay out sort of the questions that people would ask about a brand and sort of just really tried to be as comprehensive as I could be, but then as concise and cohesive I could be as part of that. And so I think that was really the key was to do that.
Andrew Mitrak: What I like about this is that this pyramid has very plain spoken language. It’s: Who are you (brand identity), What are you (brand meaning), What about you and what do I feel about you, and that’s brand response, right? And then What about you and what kind of association and how much of a connection would I like to have with you, and that’s brand relationships. And sort of it’s very a natural flow of like, “Hey, I need to understand this one to kind of understand the next one.” And was building it in sort of a plain spoken way where it’s kind of simple and logical, was that sort of part of your idea behind... or was that part of your approach to making it?
Kevin Lane Keller: Definitely. And I mean the goal with that, like I said, was to be comprehensive but also to be as clear and logical. And I was trying to capture everything that I knew about marketing and consumer behavior and how brands are built. You know, so there’s an awareness and image component which are fundamental to brand associations, fundamental to any model, including Dave Aaker’s model, my model, etc. So had that and then the judgments and feelings, the head and the heart. And then resonance where you actually the customer feels in sync with the brand. They really feel a connection. So deep, you know, sort of intense active loyalty relationships. But each level of that pyramid had a wrinkle that like salience at the bottom was about breadth and depth of awareness. It’s like how easily is my brand thought of and how often? Is it in all the right times and places and ways? And points of parity, points of difference the next level up, which is my positioning model that I developed with Brian Sternthal and Alice Tybout at Northwestern. A different way of thinking about how those that brand image level. So I tried to make sure it was comprehensive, covered the key concepts, but also was original in certain ways that I thought were important to kind of bring in.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. Yeah. It seems like a model also has to be original enough to merit a new model, right? While also not being so radical that it’s you have to throw everything else out, right? You have to kind of build on what’s already there. So kind of meet people where they are with their existing marketing activities and but also offer something new that’s actionable for them.
Kevin Lane Keller: That’s right.
Applied Branding: Transforming Procter & Gamble
Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about putting this into practice because you’ve consulted with a lot of really amazing brands: Accenture, Disney, Ford, Intel, Levi, Nike, many more, the list goes on. And are there any case studies from your career that you’re able to share about where you took this model and helped a brand implement it and had sort of real world outcomes?
Kevin Lane Keller: So the ones, I mean like I said, I’ve had the chance to work with an awful lot of the top companies and multiple engagements, you know, which has been great. And the one relationship I had that I think was one of the more productive was with P&G, so Procter & Gamble. And it was in the kind of the 2000s and Jim Stengel was their CMO. Brilliant guy, wonderful guy and very sharp. But he really wanted to upgrade the marketing there. And so it was a nice relationship because I worked with some of their thought leaders in improving their toolkits when it came to positioning. This resonance model I described became their tracking tool. It was called “Equity Scan” and they used that to measure the strength of their brands and their development of their brands around the world. So they operationalized this in a survey form. I helped them with brand architecture, like how to think of whether it was Crest or whatever brand where you’ve got this complex portfolio and sub-brands and extensions and how to think about architecture for growth. And it was just across the board. It was just a lot of fun. It really made I think a difference for them because it really helped to get them thinking in a rigorous, relevant way in many ways they’d done before, but it was as we were saying before, kind of bringing in some original thinking to put on top of that layer.
Andrew Mitrak: Procter & Gamble, this amazing, iconic brand, the originators of a lot of the original thinking about branding back in the 1930s, really long legacy of brand, but they have this big portfolio of brands that they offer. So were there any specific examples of where you applied your model or worked with them within their portfolio of brands?
Kevin Lane Keller: I had a chance to work with a couple different brands, but the one that was probably my favorite was Pampers. It was a really successful brand and they had a great team, so they were obviously doing really, really well. But they sort of embraced some of the thinking that’s reflected in the positioning model and the resonance model: the duality of a brand and especially the emotional and functional components and how to connect them. So coming up with a brand mantra, “caring for baby’s development,” which really took the functional benefit of dryness and absorbency and the fact that the baby sleeps better and feels better, but then learns and plays and develops. And so really made that connection functionally and emotionally, which is exactly what the model that I have talked about. And so we workshopped that some and got to a really good spot and business really took off. And all credit to the team because they had built this thinking and structure in place that allowed it to kind of go that next level. But it was just a great, for me, a personal experience where applying some of these models and working with a team and just seeing the outcomes in such a demonstrative way for their biggest and most successful brand to take that to the next level was quite a thrill.
Andrew Mitrak: I love it. I’m kind of smiling here because the brands that you have referenced, I have three daughters and I have one who’s six months old, one who’s three years old, and one who’s five years old. And the five-year-old is obsessed with Life Cereal, and you were talking about Life Cereal. That’s her favorite breakfast by far. And then yeah, we have Pampers in our house for the six-month-old. And it is, you’re right, it is actually amazing technology behind diapers as well, how they work. But also that I don’t necessarily buy diapers because of the technology per se. I look at price and a lot of things, but also Pampers, you just sort of trust it. If you see that on a shelf versus sort of a store brand or something, you’re like, “Oh gosh, is that going to cause an itch? Is that going to be worth it?” And it’s like, let’s just stick with what we know.
Kevin Lane Keller: Right. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And it’s a great functional benefit, but there’s an emotional payoff that you always want to make sure people are aware of because it matters so much to their lives.
Bridging Academia and Practice via the Marketing Science Institute
Andrew Mitrak: So you also worked with the Marketing Science Institute for years. Bill Moult was a previous guest on this podcast as well, and he sung your praises as far as your contributions to the Marketing Science Institute. So can you talk about MSI and where an institution like that sort of fits into your work on brand?
Kevin Lane Keller: So they were really instrumental in so many ways. So I won the doctoral dissertation proposal competition in 1984, and I was just starting to work on my thesis and I wrote something up, submitted it, and I was one of the first two co-winners. And that was really important for me because I still wasn’t sure what direction to go. I had a math-economics background. So they helped point me in the right direction—as it turns out, the right direction. I got great validation. And then all the branding work, they were very supportive and gave that gave me a platform to work with others, to share my ideas. So they were a real catalyst for that for me and for the field of marketing. And then I got more involved after that. I became a trustee, eventually an Executive Director on the board for a long time. And it’s just a great concept. The organization is a great concept because it’s that bridge between academia and industry practice and bringing together thoughtful practitioners and practical-minded academics to talk about the most important problems and the most interesting and challenging decisions. So it’s just a great concept and great organization.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. It seems like we need more of that connection between academia and practitioner because it is a gap I’ve noticed on this podcast even when speaking to both people on the academic side and then folks on the practitioner side. There is a gap there, so we need folks to work on closing it.
The Art and Science of Branding
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about the phrase “Marketing Science” and how it relates to brand. Because I think, speaking broadly, when I’m at a company, the brand folks are a little more of the art folks. There’s a little more of a general sense that brand is something that’s intangible, a little more difficult to measure. You think of brand and creative as sort of going hand in hand. And then what I think of like the data scientists I work with, often they’re measuring individual channels or they’re doing ROAS, or they’re doing ROI of specific campaigns. And that’s a little more the science element. I guess, do you kind of agree that that characterization sort of broadly exists? Or do you have any thoughts about that?
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, I think there is some truth to that. One, it doesn’t have to be that way, and two, it shouldn’t be that way. And so I actually think it’s an art and a science. I think marketing, branding, anything. And I think the more you bring those together and celebrate those, appreciate that, and either do it in a holistic way across an organization, but even within individuals and those who are able to bridge that. But I think it’s really important. And I worry on the branding side, I don’t want it to be seen and licensed to be artistic and not feel that you need to have the rigor and discipline and other things to really make sure that you’re thinking things through in the right way, even while being creative, that you’re still mindful of other kinds of things.
So I always talk about having, when I talk about art and science, part of the art is having a philosophy of how branding works. So there’s creativity, but it’s like, how does it work? Because you’ve got to somehow, no matter what you do. And so having that philosophy. So I tell my students that’s the key to me for the art and science is: what is your philosophy? What assumptions do you make about consumers, about competition, about brands? How they work, how they don’t work, all that. And you build those over time. I’ve got certain philosophies. You grow brands through little steps. I have certain tenants that I have just learned through experience and research and etc. So that combined with the tools that you can apply, like the resonance model and whatever that might be, but you need the blend of those because just having the tools is not enough. Just having the philosophy is not enough. You need to have the two of them.
Andrew Mitrak: I’m going to take the bait. What are some of the tenants that you’ve learned? Or what are sort of the core things that you’ve learned personally that just seem to kind of apply across the board?
Kevin Lane Keller: I mean, just at the heart of a great brand is a great product. I mean, that’s one of the ones I fundamentally believe in. But not everyone does. I mean, there are people who really don’t think it matters as much and what have you. And so, that said, every brand contact matters, you know, because it all affects knowledge. It affects what people think and feel and learn. So you sort of develop these tenants of that kind. And balancing continuity and change, and innovation and relevance. Making sure you have innovation so you’re always moving forward at the right pace and in the right direction and in the right way, things we talked about earlier. So you kind of develop these and then they inform how you apply your tools.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. No, I think that’s a totally true tenant and it’s something I’ve actually thought about in marketing in general is that who are the greatest marketers of all time? They’re the people who work on the best products. If you kind of think of the Steve Jobs of the world or the Disney or the folks who have kind of changed marketing itself, there’s always a really great product behind it. And if there’s a great marketer and you can have a brilliant campaign, but if the product’s not there, you’re kind of going to forget about it and it’s not really going to have the mark it has. So part of it is having taste and choosing the right products to market as a marketer.
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, but also product is part of marketing. And that’s really important. When you think of the 4 Ps, everything about that. So all the marketing should inform and work with R&D and everyone else to design the product to satisfy customer needs and wants in better ways and all that. So that’s why I mean it’s just making sure you don’t take the product as a given and not constantly thinking, especially now where you’ve got these platform brands. Brands and products are platforms. And so the product is one part of that. So you got to really think about how you’re enriching it in different ways with services and information and whatever else you can experience, other things you can do.
Rock and Roll Marketing: Kevin Lane Keller & “The Church”
Andrew Mitrak: Changing gears here, you manage a band called The Church. They’re one of the biggest bands that’s ever come out of Australia. And it seems like such a surprising thing. I’m just wondering, how did you come to manage The Church?
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, “manage” is a little maybe overstated. I have to be careful with that. I’ve definitely helped manage them, so at different times. Less so now for sure. So I’ve been executive producer for them for a number of albums. And what happened, it was just a fortunate coincidence in 1998 where I happened to see them in San Francisco, in Melbourne, Australia, and then over in London. And it was just, as luck would have it, and some other things. And I kind of realized as great as the band was, the music business is incredibly unforgiving and they just needed help of various kinds. And some of it was financial. So I was a little bit of a patron of the arts, if you will. And this is before all the different ways now exist online where bands can do different things to try to support themselves. That didn’t exist back then. So really kind of stepped up and then also got involved in trying to help them financially and beyond financially—business-wise, career-wise, etc. Incredible band, very talented. I’ve learned a lot about the music business in the process. And it is a tough business. There’s just no question about that. A very, very challenging business. But it’s been hugely enjoyable and it was just pure luck that I kind of fell into this and then played this, took this role at that time.
Andrew Mitrak: Did you have any background in the music industry? Or was this kind of bringing some of your brand and marketing consulting to the table? What was it that sort of set you up to be able to help them out?
Kevin Lane Keller: Well, my background was hundreds and hundreds of albums and records and CDs and cassettes and everything. And I was just a huge rock and roll fan. I was, it was 1967, “Summer of Love,” I was 11 years old listening to a transistor radio. So I just always loved music and I loved the 80s music. I loved a lot of different decades and genres. But I especially loved The Church. I just thought they were an incredible band and were always special to me. And I always thought that they were a band I did not want to see go away for any reason. And so that’s why I stepped in. But I followed it some. If you’re interested in marketing, interested in business, interested in music, you can’t help but be thinking about—I’m the same way with movies—just all aspects of the marketing and business side of that. So I certainly had that armchair view, but I never actually worked with anybody before.
Andrew Mitrak: You mentioned movies. There was a, I think when I first heard them, there’s a movie called Donnie Darko that came out where the soundtrack was very popular. It had 80s songs and I think it had “Under the Milky Way“ on it. And I think that’s probably the first time I ever heard The Church. Were you involved with any of their placement on movie soundtracks or any of that?
Kevin Lane Keller: Not as much as I would have liked because that was something we always strived for. And it happened some, but we just weren’t, we didn’t have our act together enough. We weren’t organized enough at that time. It was a pretty grassroots effort. And so we were relying a lot on just the sheer talent and love and respect that people had for the band, and the brand I guess, if you will, to sort of move it into different arenas, which happened. There was one ad, it was a famous ad for Volkswagen “Drivers Wanted” going back in the day where it was literally supposed to have “Under the Milky Way,” which is one of their famous, most famous songs from their most famous album, Starfish. And at the last minute, somebody subbed in, and the person loved The Church, but subbed in a Nick Drake, who is an English folk singer, a song, I think it was “Pink Moon“ or whatever it was, into the ad instead. And it was just very disappointing because it would have been, it had got a lot of exposure, a lot of attention. It would have been a nice little nudge if you will. But that’s the way it works in this business.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s a missed opportunity. But at least they were replaced with Nick Drake, who’s pretty great and not some just kind of schlocky song.
Kevin Lane Keller: It was hard to complain for that very reason, but it still stung a little bit.
Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry
Andrew Mitrak: So did your expertise in marketing and brand, what did you bring from that to a rock band? I am sure a lot of things were brought in. Were there any specific things or surprising things that you were able to apply to working with The Church?
Kevin Lane Keller: It’s funny. It’s one of the things I see with other, even with companies. There are times they make things harder than they need to be. It’s always hard enough as it is, so the last thing you want to do is make it harder than it needs to be. And with bands, it’s a little bit of, just as an example, your setlist when you tour. Touring is important. But like what songs do you play? And you got to, there are a set of songs people want to hear. You may feel like you played them enough. You may feel like you’re kind of tired of them. Doesn’t matter. And it’s funny, the band went through a period, The Church, where they did kind of have that hit a wall with some of those songs. Didn’t really want to play them. But they’ve gotten past that now and I’m so happy for them. They really appreciate how much that means to people and they put their heart and soul into it and they put on these great shows with a balance of the old and the new. It’s back to what we talked about: that continuity/change. But you got to make sure you balance that. And that’s again a lesson I see for a lot of companies. Don’t make it harder. Don’t make it more difficult, you know.
Andrew Mitrak: They want to rebrand, have a new slogan, do some new messaging where it’s like, well, you’re seeing it all the time because you’re a marketer at the company, but your audience, they don’t see it as frequently as you do. So maybe stick with the campaign that works a little longer.
Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, or just when you’re thinking of decisions, you’re just talking yourself into all these different things where, look, there’s just a lot of times just focus on what matters in different ways. And I think to be honest, that’s where the tools and the frameworks, because a lot of times the compliment I love from companies is when they say that you make it so simple. “You do it, it’s been great working with you, you just made it so simple for us.” And I’m always thinking, well, sometimes you’re making it so hard. I’m just providing structure and clarity and just trying to get them to see and then be able to make the decisions in the right way.
Andrew Mitrak: So did managing The Church or working with The Church teach you anything about marketing? Or were there any things you learned that you were able to kind of apply the other direction towards your work?
Kevin Lane Keller: I mean the one thing, music has always had a community and a fan base and everything. And obviously brands have embraced that in a much bigger way. But this was something that music was way ahead of in some sense. And connecting with them and letting them be the advocates, if you will, which has been so helpful for the band. So they benefit from the again, the love and support of their most devoted fans. So I think that’s definitely a lesson and just in general about how finding ways, it’s about engagement and the right ways to develop that and cultivate that. But recognize that not everybody’s engaged and so you’ve got a more casual fan base and they’re really important too. So that’s kind of one of the real lessons I got early on that was really helpful was just learning about that.
What Remains Constant in Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: Wrapping up, we were talking at the start about Marketing Management, all the updates that need to happen and AI and all these things that are changing in tech and in digital and in marketing. But I’m also curious, what are the things that aren’t changing? Are there any things that have stayed consistent and will continue to stay consistent for decades in the future?
Kevin Lane Keller: Yeah, I mean we talked before about segmentation, targeting, positioning. I think just the general strategy notion. I think the ways you execute and implement that obviously change. I think Integrated Communications. I think Omnichannel, integrated channels. The mixing and matching of how you go to market, both in what you say and where you sell kind of, or how you sell. It’s at that high level, but then there’s so many unique things that are changing underneath that about how you actually execute that, how you implement that, even how you plan a lot of that. So I think that’s where you see so many differences I think. But I think there’s some of those kinds of high level areas of marketing and tasks that have to be done that I think that are still sort of relevant today.
Recommended Resources
Andrew Mitrak: Kevin Lane Keller, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. For listeners who’ve also enjoyed it and they want to dive into more of your work, where would you point them?
Kevin Lane Keller: So I’ve got lots of articles and a lot of research that I published, but I’d have to go with my textbook. And I wrote it as sort of being and wanted it to be seen as sort of the Bible of branding, this authority. And it’s now co-authored with Vanitha Swaminathan who helped me out on the book. But I think that’s the one. It’s written to have the rigor and the relevance, to be comprehensive, lots of examples. It’s not too dense or too academic, I don’t think, in the treatment of the subject. And so I think that’s one. It is daunting because of length and all that kind of goes with that. But that would be the place I’d go for those who are interested in really diving into again, those more thoughtful practitioners who want to kind of get into different frameworks, different ideas, different concepts, different research advances, whatever. That’s captured in the book. But I think it’s packaged in as user-friendly way as I can. So that’s probably where I’d send people.
Andrew Mitrak: And this is your textbook, Strategic Brand Management, which is now in its fifth edition?
Kevin Lane Keller: That’s right. That’s right. And again, for those interested in marketing management more generally, just want to know the fundamentals, I’d go back to the Kotler book that has been around for decades and still I think is a really useful resource for what’s going on in marketing and how to think about different topics and providing structure and insight and all of those kinds of things.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. If you’re listening to this podcast and you made it this far, pick up a copy of Marketing Management as well and just keep it as a reference because it’s just, it’s worth just having just because even if you’re already familiar, it’s something that a lot of other people will have learned. So it’s worth just having as a reference guide. So Marketing Management and Strategic Brand Management. And Kevin Lane Keller, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation. I had a lot of fun. And so yeah, thank you.
Kevin Lane Keller: No, thank you. I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with you and good luck. I think it’s a great series that you have and looking forward to seeing who else you have on next.



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