A History of Marketing

• David Aaker: "The Father of Modern Branding" Returns

  A History of Marketing / Episode 24What does it take to build a brand that endures? Few people on earth can answer that question better than David Aaker.David Aaker, AKA the "Father of Modern Branding," is back to mark the launch of the 2nd edition Aaker on Branding. This book distills decades of Aaker’s work, covering brand strategy, portfolio management and execution. Our conversation is a great entry point.My last interview with David Aaker is the most popular podcast episode of “A History of Marketing” in terms of downloads and streams. I’ll be honest: I think this one is even better.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsWe cover a lot of ground in this episode, including: * New “5B’s of Branding” framework for brand-led growth* How Aaker’s pioneering work on brand equity elevated the role of marketing * A case study of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign* And moreNow here’s my conversation with David Aaker.Note: I use AI to transcribe the audio of my conversations. I review the output but it’s possible there are errors I missed. Parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity.Andrew Mitrak: David Aaker, welcome back to A History of Marketing.David Aaker: Yes, as we were discussing offline, that this podcast was one of the most popular that we shared in the last four or five years.Andrew Mitrak: Right back at you. This first episode that I published with you was the most popular episode that I've shared to date on this podcast as far as measuring downloads and streams. There's some magic, some little spark. And so I'm hoping we can go even bigger with the sequel. I'm just grateful to speak with you again and also speak to the new edition of Aaker on Branding, which I read, and I'm really excited to dive into.David Aaker: Good, good. Thanks for having me.The Enduring Influence of Philip KotlerAndrew Mitrak: Congratulations on the second edition of your book, Aaker on Branding. I actually wanted to start right at the end of the book and jump to the acknowledgments section. And you write in the acknowledgments section, "A special thanks to my role model, Philip Kotler."And I'm sure a lot of marketers, your readers, former students see you as a role model. And when I was reading this, I was like, "Oh wow, even David Aaker has, has a role model." So, could you share what makes Philip Kotler a role model for you?David Aaker: What I'm so impressed with Phil is that he has really introduced whole new concepts and perceptions of marketing. I mean, he came up with social marketing. He's done so much. He came up with the idea of a customer journey. And then he has turned to larger issues of the economy and our society and so on. And he's got a dozen or more books on that subject. And in those areas, as in all his areas, he's very good at conceptualizing, providing frameworks, overall frameworks, and helped people. And of course, that his pivotal work was the marketing management textbook that he did something like 20 editions ago.Jeez, he's just such a driving force. And then he's been such a personal friend. When I was a young professor at Berkeley, just a couple of years out of my PhD program at Stanford, Isat down with Phil, and he was a giant at that time. And he would listen to my discussion. I was a statistician. I was doing the most incredibly boring stuff. And he would sit and ask me about my material, and he was taking notes. He took notes. I was two years out. I wrote six articles on the stochastic model of consumer behavior. It was awful. No impact, no interest. And Philip Kotler was taking notes about it. He was always so curious about that.Then 11 years ago, in my first Aaker on Branding version, he labeled me as "The Father of Modern Branding." Then it stuck, and it's all Phil.He's just such a generous guy and he's such a creative, curious guy.Andrew Mitrak: Wow, that's great. I wanted to start with Phil Kotler because he was the person who actually introduced us. And as you mentioned, I had a similar interaction. I'm a very small little peon compared to a person of his stature. But when I spoke with him, he really did seemingly kind of just treat me as an equal and didn't talk down to me, didn't condescend. And he was nice enough to introduce me to colleagues like yourself to also interview. So he's, he's been such an early supporter of this, this podcast that I thought I would start there.As you mentioned, it was kind of tying back to Aaker on Branding. It was in your first edition that was published in 2014 that Kotler called you the "Father of Modern Branding." And it stuck. And can you just share more about your reaction to how that happened and what it meant to you to have this title bestowed upon you?David Aaker: I've written 18 books now, and I think most of them have Phil as, done an endorsement for me.If you look at the back cover of almost all my books, there'll be a comment by Phil Kotler. And he's just so generous with that. And that was his comment on this book.Andrew Mitrak: So one of the things that also reminds me, coming back to ideas around branding, is that a big part of brands is that they don't just reflect what you say about yourself, but brands are what other people say about you. And your brand being "The Father of Modern Branding," it's something that you don't bestow upon yourself or wouldn't, if you just called yourself that, it wouldn't have the same weight as when somebody else calls you that.David Aaker: Yeah, it would be really tacky to call yourself that. (Laughs)Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So 2014 was the first edition of Aaker on Branding. And your new edition is just coming out now in 2024. I guess the obvious question is, what's changed between now and then? Why revisit this book and what are the kind of the major updates to the new edition?What's New in the Second Edition of "Aaker on Branding"?David Aaker: Well, there's several motivations, but the main one was that a lot of my work and thinking since then has been engaged in applying branding to different areas of strategy and marketing. And I've written three books since then: the Creating Signature Stories, the Owning Game-Changing Subcategories, which is about branding and disruptive innovation, and The Pursuit of Purpose-Driven Branding, which is about signature social programs.And I've written about 150 blog posts. I've written about six or eight articles. And so, that needed to be incorporated because the whole point of the book is to kind of summarize my writing so you don't have to read nine books. But, the second reason is that really the world has changed. And there are at least three major challenges, three or four major challenges. And for each challenge represents a real opportunity for branders.And finally, I introduced what I call the Five Bs. And I did that as a way to make people understand the real breadth and depth of branding and not to slip back into this it's an image and awareness problem.The Five Branding Bs ExplainedAndrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about these five branding Bs. So the B does stand for brand in all of them, but I think what it speaks to, something you said in our last conversation is that you don't really talk about brands because "brand" alone is, is not descriptive enough, or it doesn't have, have enough. So you kind of have to have “brand” attached. So there's brand equity, brand relevance, brand image, brand loyalty, and brand portfolio. Those are sort of the five branding Bs that are discussed in this book. And what was the sort of the idea behind having, introducing this concept in, in Aaker on Branding?David Aaker: I don't want people to sort of short-circuit branding and think again, back in the old days when it was awareness and image, that they're kind of done. It's something that can be delegated. And I want to remind them of the scope of it. And so I thought that that sort of cute device might be a way to get people to, to make sure that they're thinking more broadly.It starts with the three pillars of brand equity, which are brand relevance. I said brand awareness is not enough. You need to have brand awareness in the context you're interested in. So if you make electric cars, it doesn't help if you have high awareness about your ability to make hybrid cars. It's not enough to know about the brand; it has to be credible. And that means there has to be no reason not to buy the brand. You have to think it's capable of doing what it promises. So relevance for me has become a really important topic. I talk about winning the relevance battle instead of the brand preference battle.And then brand image. What I want to make sure of is that people don't focus in on functional benefits, but they realize that any association that can contribute to the instincts about a brand, it can contribute to the relationship with a brand, is important.And the third is brand loyalty. Now, brand loyalty is what I used to attempt to change people's view of branding way back 30 years ago when people were indeed thinking of brand awareness and image, you could delegate it to middle management, you could delegate it to an agency. But when you introduce brand loyalty, it's so pivotal because it means that branding is involved in all aspects of the brand touching the customer. It's involved in product development, it's involved in the consumer journey, and it's involved in consumer insights, involved in segmentation. It's a strategic variable. And it's an asset.Brand as an asset is really huge. And that's what got marketing a seat at the executive table, CMOs, VPs of marketing, where they had heretofore been relegated to middle management. And so, so brand loyalty is, is just so important in conceiving of a brand and of implementing a brand.The Power of Synthesizing Brand ConceptsAndrew Mitrak: What I love about this book is, as, as you're saying, you just packed in so much there. And we're going to come back and dive more into a lot of the points you just raised and the examples you talked about. But what I love about this book at a high level is that, like you were saying, it takes a lot of the concepts you've written about in other books, packs them all into one. And so all of these pillars you've discussed, they've been books in themselves, and we could spend full podcast episodes, multiple of them, just diving into any one of these examples. But this kind of gives a great introductory view to so many of your ideas.At the heart of a lot of these ideas is, is really brand equity and what they, and brand as an asset, which is sort of a, a pillar of your career and contribution to the field of marketing. And when, when you spoke about brand equity and the introduction of it, and how it changed everything on the last podcast, this was like a new idea to me. I hadn't quite done my research on this. And I was almost skeptical, like, "Oh, that was when CMOs became a thing? and that's when branding really got elevated? Is it when brand equity became an idea?"And I'm going to share in the video version of this podcast in the blog that goes with it, this Ngram view where it looks at the frequency of word usage. And right around the time you publish, you start writing about brand equity, the mentions of brands (and branding) just shoot up, like it skyrockets.David Aaker: Really? That's interesting. I didn't know that.Andrew Mitrak: It's really interesting. Right around this time that you see the frequency of the word "brand" and "branding" is just jumps. It's like it's, it exists, but it's, it's not nearly, like right around the early 90s through the, through the 2000s, it jumps up. And then also, I spoke with Sergio Zyman, who was the first CMO of Coca-Cola, and he's, according to him, the first CMO in history. And it times out with what you were saying. He became CMO in the early 90s at Coca-Cola and got a seat at the table all around branding. It was one of those things where when you said it, I hadn't fully digested the implications of it. And since we've had a chance to talk and I've been able to reflect and kind of learn more about marketing history, it's like, wow, this really was a big, impactful event.David Aaker: Yeah, Sergio Zyman, wow, a name from the past. He was a very visible and energetic and kind of controversial CMO, but he had left his impact.Andrew Mitrak: He did. The Historical Context of Brand Equity's RiseAndrew Mitrak: So, do you have any other reflections on the historical importance of brand equity and kind of this, this time in history?David Aaker: In writing this book, I was reflecting on that, and I sort of connected the evolution of brand equity to what had been going on in the 1980s. The 1980s was characterized by the, the strategic model of the day was driven by the Boston Consulting Group's market share growth matrix. It was developed actually in 1971 in a famous article. But that was so influential. And what it said was market share is a driver, driver of success. And so, if you have high market share, that means you have scale economies, it means you have experience economies. And that means that you're going to have lower costs. That means you are, are going to can, can wipe the floor with competitors. And they had all this analytical data to prove that large market share companies were more profitable than small market share companies if you control for things.People would do anything to increase market share. They would buy market share with promotions, they would put out products that were cheaper, just to gain market share and to get a lower price. And, they destroyed brands doing that. And, but at the same time, in the mid-80s, scanner data came out. So you had the thing on every package, you could scan it. Gosh, you think that's what, 40 years old or something. But when that came out, people were so excited because now marketing could be done scientifically. No longer was it sort of rely on judgment and instinct and creativity. It was science. So now you could do experiments where you could change the appeal of the advertising, you can change the advertising weight, and you could see exactly what happened the next day. You could see what people were buying the next week, accurately, totally, absolutely accurately. It was the scientific world.Well, what they learned was that the only thing that moved the needle was price-off promotions. So everybody rushed into price-off promotions, which destroyed brands. Kraft took two years to recover from this debacle. And what they learned was they did not achieve growth, and the profits went down.The growth-share matrix and the scanner data with experience made people really receptive to another route. And that other route came in the form of brand equity.I was at the right place at the right time. At that point, I was very ill-defined as a brand myself. I was all over the map. I came out as a statistician, I wrote a market research book, I did all kinds of analytical statistical studies. Then I wrote an advertising book. I was really interested in advertising. And then I got into business strategy, wrote a business strategy book, market strategic management that was a textbook for that course. And so I was extremely ill-defined.Then came this brand equity thing, and people were really intrigued by it. The Marketing Science Institute, the support of academics, made that, elevated to the number one research priority. But nobody could agree what it was. Most people thought it was awareness and image.I wrote the book, Managing Brand Equity, in which I defined it to include brand loyalty. And then I also in that book put out the 15 ways that brand equity helps a business. That's when it took off. And the next book, Building Strong Brands, was how to do it. It just was a lot of luck. I stumbled into branding, and from then on, that's been my purpose in life.The Role of Marketing Science Institute and Academic CollaborationAndrew Mitrak: You mentioned the Marketing Science Institute, and I actually just interviewed a former president of MSI. But what was so interesting to learn about it, so the MSI is this institute that kind of gathers academics and then marketing practitioners. And there was this conference, and I think it was the 1988 one, where the topic of brand equity was elevated.And this is also an interesting commonality between you and Philip Kotler, by the way, is that brand equity was not something you invented, but you caught on to the idea and you brought it out of this niche, kind of siloed academic conference and brought it to the masses and made it so that the entire business community could make use of this and take action based on this idea and change things.Similarly, Philip Kotler, a lot of people might even think he invented the four Ps, which, which he didn't, but he took this, again, this, this niche, this idea that was sort of in academia, and he made it applicable to marketing managers and actionable. Recognizing that there's an interesting idea and spreading it in a way where the masses can more broadly use it and digest it and understand it and that it's a model that they can apply, I think is a really useful tool that, like identifying a good idea and spreading it. Like, do you see that as, as something in common, this, this idea of identifying the idea and evangelizing it to a broader community of marketers?David Aaker: I was told just the other day that by somebody that's a big contributor to branding, that I was able to form frameworks and structures that are broad and to position the totality of it and not just make a contribution within one part. That was Bernd Schmitt of Columbia, who's done a lot of work in experiential marketing and in the big think, he calls it. He noted that my work was the work that really provides the broader frameworks. And I think that's true for Phil too. You can take a concept and put a framework on it and position it within marketing.Case Study: Dove’s Real Beauty CampaignAndrew Mitrak: I want to come back to Aaker on Branding and the Five Bs in the book and also try to weave in a little bit of a historical lens and a case study. And one of the examples that you mentioned earlier is Dove. And Dove features really prominently in the book. Unilever owns Dove and introduced Dove in the 1950s. The Dove of the 1950s and the Dove today, there's been a big evolution to that brand. So I'm wondering if maybe we could talk about them in the context of the Five Bs, and if you could tell the story of Dove's evolution as a brand and how Unilever has managed that brand.David Aaker: The Dove product came out of some research that was done in the Second World War on how to dress wounds. You, you need to keep them moisturized. And so they took that moisturizer idea, and its patent, in 1952, developed a soap around it. And they didn't call it a soap, they called it a beauty bar. And it was a bar with a moisturizer. Talk about disruptive innovation, talk about really being differentiated. They were. And it was a very successful product. And they built on that, always with this moisturizer idea. And they would have ads where they would pour cream into a bar of soap, and that was the moisturizer entered in, the moisturizer cream. So they had a very unique soap, very differentiated soap.And flash forward to 50 years, in 2004, they had extended that brand to other products, like shampoo and deodorant and body wash. And so it's hard to talk about moisturizer if you make a shampoo. It's not very relevant. To boot, they lost the patent, the patent ran out, the moisturizer. So they had competitors that were coming out with moisturizers too. And so they really needed a new start.And so they were doing some research on their market, the women that bought their soap. And they, I don't know how they did this, but they stumbled onto the idea that women really resent this beauty standard. You have to be thin and young to be beautiful. And they did some research and they found that only 3% of the world's women thought they were beautiful themselves. Only 3%. And this artificial standard was out there and it was so resented. So they took on the task of changing that. Almost every year they would do a, a some sort of visual demonstration that this was a phony standard.So one time, for example, they had a person that drew faces from descriptions. And they did it from the description of a woman, and then a second-hand description of a woman being described by somebody else. And it turned out the sketch based on the woman's own self-description was very unattractive next to the other one. So their tagline was, "You're more beautiful than you think."Incidentally, taglines are really underused, that's another topic. But anyway, they're really good at it. And, that ad, which came out in 2013, was the most viral ad ever up to that date. Can you imagine? The most viral ad ever. I mean, this stuff really struck a chord.They had campaigns like that that were every other year they had one time they had people go to a store and there were two doors. One is the beautiful door and the other is the plain door. and a lot of people would go through the plain door because they didn't think they were beautiful. They did such clever stuff. and of course the subject is ripe for creativity.And then they developed, two years after they developed Real Beauty, they developed self-esteem programs for girls. And they, that tended to involve a lot of people and in teaching or mentoring girls, and they had a lot of support for that. They developed workshops, they developed agendas, they developed plays and so on. And the whole thing actually changed the lives of hundreds of millions of women, hundreds of millions. And it drove energy and visibility and liking into a brand that was still making just horribly mundane products.And by the way, one of the things people worry about, and justifiably so, is that these are regarded cynically as, "Oh, you're just out to sell me something, and you only, you don't really care about this, you just want to get some leg up for your brand," which is absolutely true. But nobody says that about Dove. Nobody. It never comes up. And it's because they've made a long-term commitment, it's because they're passionate, it's because they're knowledgeable, they're thought leaders, it's because they're so successful.Analyzing Dove through Aaker’s 5 Bs of BrandingAndrew Mitrak: Yeah, there's so much in this example. The videos, first off, I watched some prior to this interview. They hold up so well. It's hard to not have your eyes well with tears as you're watching this. And they touch on, there's this emotional element to them. There's also this almost scientific element to it. It seems like a psychology case study. It seems almost like a scientific A/B test of one person describing.David Aaker: Oh, it is. It is. Most of their things are real experiments.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it really is. And it kind of gives it this another level of credibility where it's not just tearing at your heartstrings on an emotional level, but there's, there seems to be science and research and a surprising idea behind it, and it's all executed to perfection.If you tie these sort of back to your, your Five Branding Bs, there's so much to this as well. Dove was part of a brand portfolio. And you said how they had extended themselves into product lines that were a little less relevant. So there's the brand relevance idea that shampoo wise is, is not as relevant when it comes to moisturizing skin. There's the image, brand image, aligning themselves to this idea of real beauty. And that kind of pays off into loyalty by, by the longevity of them running this campaign for decades. You mentioned how they introduced this in 2004, but that video went viral nine years later in 2013.David Aaker: The video was made nine years later. It was just one of a, of a, of a dozen and a half things, such things.Andrew Mitrak: That the video was made nine years later, but that tells you they were working on this campaign and this idea and committed to this over the long term.David Aaker: Yes.Andrew Mitrak: All of that ladders up into Dove and Unilever accruing “brand equity.” So it has all the Five Bs, it seems like, working together with Dove.David Aaker: Now, in the case of Dove, moisturizer is a terrific example of a branded differentiator. It was really a brand in its own right. And real beauty as is the self-esteem program, are brands that are attached to them, and they're terrific branded energizers and branded differentiators.Brand Decisions: Objective Data vs. Subjective TasteAndrew Mitrak: When a brand like this is thinking of making this bet, say like Dove making this, this Real Beauty campaign bet, I don't know if there's any quantitative data that I would have in advance as a marketer or as an executive kind of buying into this campaign that would give me high confidence this would work. It seems like at some extent, like there's, there's creativity and there's instinct and there's taste, and it's the way that the campaign is executed. And I'm wondering how much of brand building can sort of be planned based on empirical data versus being a matter of gut instinct and taste?David Aaker: Well, I've always said that, that you need to test things and so forth. But the really, really great ideas, you don't even have to test. Some ideas just click and they're so powerful, so logical, so appealing that you could test them, but you know what's going to happen, it's going to work. So that's a nice place to be. But it is good science to test in the laboratory or in the field of a program.One of the classic experimental designs is before-after design. So you look at the situation before, and then you do a treatment and then you look at it after. So you could look at what Dove was, what its sales level was, what its attitude toward it, the loyalty level and so on. And then you introduce the Real Beauty program, and then the next year you can look at Dove again. And that's a nice experiment because you've controlled for a lot of things. It's the same product, it's the same company, it's the same kind of customers. All that's the same. And so you do the treatment and, so you can be pretty sure you're looking at the impact of the treatment. And then you can do the same thing from 2005 to 2008 to 2010 and get more information. Then if you do it on a pilot basis or in the laboratory, then usually you can run a similar experiment but a more controlled one.The Central Tension: Short-Term Results vs. Long-Term Brand BuildingAndrew Mitrak: When I think of your body of work and brand equity and a lot of the ideas in Aaker on Branding, I think there's a tension around you advocating for long-term thinking against all of these short-term tactics. And a couple of quotes here:"At the center is a drive to build strategic brand assets that will provide the platforms for future success as a counterweight to the dominance of short-term financials."And another quote in this book is that,"A brand is an asset with long-term value as an enabler of strategies, and the effort directed at short-term results should support or at least avoid damaging the brand."And this, this short-term versus long-term thing is something I encounter every day as a marketer. Every company I've ever joined, there's some like "close the gap" initiative and "hit this quarter's sales target" or "meet some growth milestone by a certain date." And in your role as an author, as a consultant, as, as a marketer, how do you advise people to manage this tension between short-term results and long-term thinking?David Aaker: Well, when I was writing the book, it came to me that this illusion that the brand is an asset thing has been growing for 30 years and we've got CMOs and Vice President of Marketing in place, that the battle is over. Turns out the battle is not over. Short-termism is just always there because it's driven by the fact that that's the way people are evaluated in business and that's the way executives are evaluated.And it's very easy to do that but it's very difficult to measure long-term results because a lot of it is conceptual, it's not data-driven. So that it raises its head. And it's now come up with its own label. They call it demand marketing or performance marketing instead of short-term results. So it's got a more respectable label.And my take is that, it's fine to have short-term programs, demand marketing programs, but if you're in a B2B, you have to create leads and so on. But it's important to do it in such a way that it doesn't damage the brand. Hopefully, you do it in a way that enhances the brand by leveraging some of the brand assets. But at least you should do it so it's neutral to the brand, so that people are comfortable. It's not so off-brand that they say, "They're doing that?"You know, you have Toyota dealers talking about the sale of the month or something, and you just cringe, and they don't have any control over that. If you do have control over it, you want to make sure it doesn't damage and at least it's neutral. That's one thing. The second thing is, what you want is brand programs that are so powerful that they create short-term results as well as long-term results. So there shouldn't be any controversy then.You look at the Dove program, that created enormous immediate sales every time they ran these programs.Andrew Mitrak: Funny enough, you mentioned demand, that's actually my full-time job title. I'm not a podcaster full-time, this is a hobby. But that's a funny thing because it's something I identify with. I'd like to do the campaigns that accrue long-term value, but sometimes you're pressured to get the short term results. But if I'm purely being selfish and I want to get promoted this year, there's a lot of incentive to focus on those quick wins. And even if there's zero or even negative impact on the brand, because if I'm purely being selfish and just want to climb the corporate ladder, there's this incentives problem where the thing that I'm measured on is in the near term. The long-term thing, I'll be promoted by the time they figure out that was bad for the brand, right? And do you think that this is some of the tension and how can companies need to fight against this?David Aaker: Oh, it's very much part of the tension. And it's, it's healthy to be decentralized. It's healthy to have these kind of objectives, but it can be really damaging. So what, what you need is somebody that is at a senior level that has the authority to take a big picture and say that, to make sure the brand isn't damaged. And you have to achieve your objectives in another way. And Prophet has done a study that indicates that the most successful companies have these two arms work together. And if that's done, then the problem is reduced.Andrew Mitrak: It strikes me that for most general life advice, long-term thinking is a good thing. If I could eat that donut today, I'll be really happy at this moment, but if I eat the salad, I'll be better in the long term. And we all know that's the right thing to do with most things. It's just something that maybe doesn't click or people have to be reminded of it when it comes to branding, that investing in, in the things that accrue long-term value, brand equity, is better than this short-term thinking.David Aaker: Yes.Brand's Role in Disruptive InnovationAndrew Mitrak: I want to transition and ask you about the role between brand and brand equity and disruptive innovation, because I think this is a really interesting idea of how those two things interact with each other.David Aaker: Yeah, I mentioned that one of the challenges that I see that's that it has always existed, but it's magnified manyfold. Disruptive innovation has always been the route to growth. "My brand is better than your brand" marketing almost never creates growth. But what's happened is that these disruptions are more frequent, they scale faster, and they have more impact on the marketplace than ever before.And what is also true is that branding has, has often been underused or even forgotten in the process because the focus is so much on creating the disruption and putting it in the marketplace, that branding is considered a tactical thing we'll worry about later on. So they want to get the disruption right and they want to get the resources, financial or otherwise, to make it happen. That's their priorities. And they usually don't even have access to marketing talent, or if they do, they don't use it properly.So the opportunity is for marketing to become a player in disruptive innovation, to help them develop what I call the "must-haves" that define the disruption and through their consumer insight and their being close to the market. And secondly, to position the disruption, to position what I call the new subcategory that emerges. And that's a marketing task. It's different than they've done before, but it's a marketing task they're good at. But you have to position the subcategory because the subcategory has to win. And that's the underbase of the strategy.And third, they have to build barriers. And you do that by scaling fast. You do that by creating a loyal group of customers, that's a branding problem in part. And you do it by branding the innovations. And because that will prevent people from copying you because they won't have access to the brand.Andrew Mitrak: Do you see it as brand plays a role on both sides?With disruptive innovation, there's the incumbent, and then there's the emerging startup that is going to disrupt the incumbent. And it seems like you're speaking to how the disruptor should also embrace investments in branding as a vector for disrupting the incumbent. But also the incumbent could invest in brands as a preventive measure to disruption.David Aaker: Yes. I outline the alternatives for the incumbents in the book. One alternative is to leapfrog and to create an even more superior must-have that will trump the existing one. So you fight the relevance battle by creating a super subcategory. The second thing is to do what Kevin Keller has talked about, develop a parity brand. So you develop some, some capability in that must-have dimension, and you don't need to claim it's better. You don't even have to claim it's as good. You just claim it's good enough. It's good enough so you shouldn't use this criteria to not buy our brand.So that's the parity option. The third option is to ignore it. And so this guy has got a thing. I think it's going to make my whole thing I'm competing in irrelevant in the future. I'll eventually close down. But in the meantime, I'm going to make a ton of money because I'm not going to invest in this thing. I'm going to milk my customer base, I'm going to milk their momentum. And I'm not going to have to invest in it. I'm going to make a ton of money and I'm going to use that money to create some disruptive innovation elsewhere. And maybe they're wrong that this is going to happen overnight.The fourth strategy is to say, "It's been a good run, I'm leaving." There's a time that comes that you're strategically better off putting money into growth areas than you are trying to keep alive something that's dormant.Andrew Mitrak: There are so many disruptive innovation examples we could cover. I think one that's struck me is Netflix. You, you do write about Netflix in the book and who they're disrupting is Blockbuster. And Blockbuster at one point had a pretty good brand, right? Like it was a place where people would go, it was pretty iconic colors and image, you would see, you'd see them. But they kind of got greedy with late fees. And Netflix disrupted them on a different vector, which is, is the DVD, which was small enough that could be shipped by mail and at a relatively low cost. And their differentiator was "no late fees ever." And then also they had this really long, long tail of their back catalog of more obscure titles that wouldn't make sense for Blockbuster to stock, but Netflix in a warehouse could. And so they found different vectors to, to compete with Blockbuster. And of course, that's even before they got into streaming, which is a whole other angle. That was them leapfrogging as well.David Aaker: Well, that's what I was going to say. Netflix is one of the rare, rare companies that are able to do a disruptive innovation against themselves.I mean, most companies just cannot bring themselves to do that because they're making a lot of money doing what they're doing, and they're very good at what they're doing, what they're, and they're not, they're not going to be good at anything else. And so they resist it. But Netflix is a rare company that was able to do that.The Underrated Power of Taglines and JinglesAndrew Mitrak: Last time we talked, we talked about the disappearance of taglines and how they're less and less common nowadays. And I wanted to ask you this time about a fun one: jingles.Jingles are virtually non-existent now, and you haven't heard a jingle in a long time, in a long time. You know, they were a huge part of advertising and of a brand in the, in the 50s and 60s. They lingered around to some extent in the 80s and 90s, and now they're virtually non-existent.To come back to Netflix, all you get is a little audio "dung dung."They, they do a little sound, not a jingle at all.So it's like they've gotten more and more compressed and maybe there's some branded audio element to them, but not very much. So I'm just wondering, do you have any, any thoughts on jingles and why they're virtually non-existent today?David Aaker: There used to be a saying in advertising, "If you have nothing to say, sing it."Yeah, it's a really interesting question because jingles are really important. They catch in your mind. They're, it's a way to make a tagline come alive. Very interesting question. I suspect that as things evolve, there'll be people here and there that will figure out a way to make a jingle relevant and work again. But I'll just say a thing about taglines. I got involved in the political campaign of the year. I was involved by giving advice that nobody listened to, but nevertheless, I was into it. And I was so frustrated by the fact that these people are really good at owning the news of the day. Something would happen in the morning, they could use AI or something, come out with an ad in the afternoon, put it in the marketplace, and it would be really topical and they would win the day. But the net result was a barrage of ad hoc, ill-focused ads with no message that you could remember. What cried out to me as you needed a tagline and you need a visual symbol and hopefully both.It's not easy to create a great tagline, but you always ought to try. And you should have a set of three or four campaigns around three or four issues with taglines for each. And it just seems so obvious to me. They wasted so much money. And so I wrote a chapter in the new book called "Taglines and Symbols" to let people know why those things are so important and what they can do.Final Thoughts and Future LearningsAndrew Mitrak: You inspired me. It strikes me that this podcast– I don't have a tagline, I don't have any symbols, I don't have a jingle, so I got to get to work on some of those things.David Aaker: Well, yeah, but you have a good title.Andrew Mitrak: Thanks. (laughs)David Aaker: And the name is kind of like a tagline and a symbol. If you get the name right, and that's not so easy to do because a name can lock you in and so on. I mean, if they called it Amazonbooks.com, which people thought was the intelligent thing to do back then, they would not be where they are now.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it's funny. On the title, I had the title before I had the podcast. I kind of thought of it. I'm like, "Does that exist?" It doesn't. I better do it.David Aaker: Yeah, it's, it's really unique. There's nobody else that looks at things from an historical point of view, and it's so useful.Andrew Mitrak: Thanks. And to get guests like yourself, like Philip Kotler, who doesn't want to be part of history? Right? If it was, if it was about me like it was “the Andrew Mitrak Show”, which nobody cares about, right?You wouldn't want to bother with that. But if it's, "Oh, I'm worthy of history." This is clearly about elevating marketing to hopefully a higher stature, and who wouldn't want to be a part of that?David Aaker: And there's so much to be learned from experiences that could be 30, 40, 50, 100 years old. A lot of learnings there. And also it's really interesting to know the process by which something evolved because that's a, that's a great teaching for what's going on today.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, for sure. There's this Charlie Munger quote that I like that goes, “There's no better teacher than history in determining the future,” and that… “There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.” I've always enjoyed his writings.Why do we do the things we do? How did marketing get to where it is? That I'm really grateful to be exploring with experts like you on this show. So I've really enjoyed your time and your expertise, and thanks for coming back for a second episode. I've really enjoyed this conversation.David Aaker: Yeah, I want to mention, Andrew, about my new book. I'm going to have 10 learnings, one a week, every Wednesday in my blog on LinkedIn. And one of them, the third one will be the history of brand equity that we discussed.Andrew Mitrak: That's amazing. If listeners aren't already following on LinkedIn, they absolutely should be. It's such a great resource to find continuous inspiration and insights and lessons as well. Also, listeners should definitely purchase the new, second edition of Aaker on Branding. It's a great read and follow David Aaker on your blog at Prophet and also on LinkedIn as well. All really great resources. So, thanks again, David.David Aaker: Thank you, Andrew, for having me. It's always fun. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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• Bill Moult: The Marketing Science Institute & Connecting Research to Results

  A History of Marketing / Episode 23This week, I'm joined by Bill Moult, an entrepreneur and executive who spent his career at the center of the marketing data revolution. Bill has served as CEO and President of companies central to advertising research, new product forecasting, brand metrics, and media measurement.Bill also served as President of the Marketing Science Institute, an influential non-profit that bridges the gap between marketing academics and practitioners to drive business performance.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsIn this conversation, we explore Bill’s historic career and learn timeless lessons in leadership and marketing insights. We discuss:* The evolution of new product forecasting, from expensive regional test markets to the sophisticated "simulated test markets" pioneered by his company, BASES.* How scanner panel data and advanced modeling allowed companies to accurately forecast sales for new products before they even hit the shelves.* A high-stakes case study of a major CPG company that ignored a data-driven forecast and lost $100 million on a failed product launch.* The shift in advertising research from measuring single metrics like "recall" to integrated models that incorporate persuasion and predict in-market sales.* The role of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) in connecting academic and business worlds, and how it served as an early platform for ideas like Clayton Christensen's "disruptive innovation" and David Aaker’s “brand equity”* An inside look at how Nielsen actually worksNote - I use AI to transcribe the audio of my conversations. I review the output but it’s possible there are errors I missed. Parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity.Andrew Mitrak: Bill Moult, welcome to A History of Marketing.Bill Moult: Well, thank you. I appreciate it, Andrew. I am delighted to be part of it. I think what you've done already is really ambitious, and if I can help in any way, that'd be great.Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure you can. I'm so excited to speak with you. You've had this amazing career as a marketing research executive and an entrepreneur, and you've intersected with foundational organizations: Ipsos, which is one of the world's leading market research firms; Nielsen, which is a name everybody's familiar with, the top analytics firm; and the Marketing Science Institute, a non-profit that's been brought up on the show in previous episodes, that brings together leading marketing practitioners and academics into one forum. I'm hoping to use this conversation to cover your career, the life and times of Bill Moult, and use your career in marketing to explore these institutions and the evolution of marketing research and the industry more broadly. Does that sound good?Bill Moult: Fair enough.The Influence of Philip Kotler and Early Marketing ScienceBill Moult: You and I were talking before this video started, but I'm going to come back to your first interview, which was with Philip Kotler. Which, I would say, Andrew, was a great choice. I'm fortunate to know Phil from my Marketing Science Institute days. The reason it was a great choice was, he had gone through a much more intense educational experience than I did and studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in economics. Then he went for his doctorate at MIT where he studied under Samuelson. I mean, both giants, obviously. Phil could have worked anywhere because he has smarts, he had drive, he has charisma, and he certainly learned a heck of a lot about economics. But he chose to work in marketing. The reason he did that, in part, was because he recognized that there was some science in marketing.Over time, there's been a lot more science developed in marketing and marketing science, in particular, as a part of the field. I worked in marketing science for almost my entire career, in different kinds of marketing science. It was during periods of time when those different parts of the industry were starting to develop. I never had an interest in a mature business. I was too much of a risk-taker, so I liked stuff that was either a startup or a turnaround. Fortunately for me, there were plenty of those opportunities that happened in the marketing science field.I felt that my, starting with my work at Wharton, it prepared me for taking a scientific view of marketing, marketing research, and marketing analytics. That's pretty much lasted through much of my career.Andrew Mitrak: I was very fortunate to speak to Phil first. Had he not responded so quickly and wanted to do an interview with me, who knows if this podcast would even be happening. Both for his contributions to the field— his textbook was the first major textbook that I had in marketing—and his impact on this podcast.Bill Moult: Yeah, I am very, very grateful for Phil Kotler. Do you know what edition you had?Andrew Mitrak: Fourteen.Bill Moult: I had two. The second edition. Now, when he wrote his first edition, I was in the Marine Corps, I was in '67, so it wasn't too long after he did the second edition. I am really humiliated that yours is much more recent.BASES: From Booz Allen to a Leading Forecasting FirmAndrew Mitrak: (Laughs) Back to your career and your journey. You went into the private sector, and the company that you joined and became president of was called BASES. You built this organization, you led this research organization, and I think this was right around 1980 that you joined and you grew it throughout the 1980s. Can you just share what BASES was and what drew you to this organization?Bill Moult: I wouldn't say I built it. I joined it very early. It's very important to say where it came from. There were three or four key executives at Booz Allen. BASES actually stands for Booz Allen Sales Estimation System. One of them was Jack Brown. One of them was Lynn Lin, who is a very, very talented statistician, mathematician, econometrician. One of them was Regg Rhodes. They started BASES as a business. Then they asked me to join. I was there three months and they asked me to become the president. It was maybe my favorite organization in my career. I was there about 10 years. We took it from, I wasn't there to take it from zero to one or zero to two, but I was there to manage it from 2 million to 20 in the first six years I was there. Then it grew again by a factor of 10 and more after that and became the leading new product testing and forecasting company in the world. It was a real success story.Bill Moult: We weren't the first one in the business. We had some very good competitors, but we managed to do a lot of things pretty well, and we relied very heavily on the data that was available, not just to our company, but to our sister company, AdTel, a split cable testing company, and others that had this amazing new scanner data and scanner panel data that was coming on the market. We figured out how, Lynn Lin really figured out how to make some magic out of the depth of that data. Working with things like what was called a repeat decay curve, trial repeat, purchase cycle, and all that kind of stuff. Ended up being able to forecast new product sales really well.Navigating the New Product Landscape in Consumer Packaged GoodsBill Moult: The new product business, particularly in consumer packaged goods (CPG), which is where some of our sophisticated clients were, went through a state, went through moving from very big regional test markets, which were hugely expensive, to smaller regionals, then to large individual markets like Charleston, West Virginia, and Orlando, Florida, which AdTel did and so forth. Then BehaviorScan (associated with IRI) came along and said, "Let's make them really small market." This is Information Resources in Chicago. They went to very, very small markets, about eight or 10 around the country, and figured out how to make it effective even on a much smaller scale. Meanwhile, the stuff that BASES worked on and competitors of ours were called simulated test markets. They figured out how to do this without even a test market, but with getting very deep survey research, very extensive analysis, and were able to forecast sales before the product was even ready to be in the marketplace.That took off because it was economically so viable and such tremendous leverage. But the other reason it took off was, when people went to test market, there was something important that happened. They were so committed to this thing as a company – these are the clients like Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods and so forth – that no matter what happened, they were going to go national. That was a really bad idea and it lost them a lot of money. The earlier you could make these things provide answers and predictions, the more likely they're actually able to drive the prediction as opposed to not really end up driving a good decision.Product Demand Forecasting ExamplesAndrew Mitrak: Let's dive into a product example that BASES would work on for a Procter & Gamble or General Mills or one of those large CPG companies. What if you could talk like, okay, you've met the client, they're introducing a new product, they want to understand the market viability and product forecasting for it. Then what? Is there a specific example that you think could illustrate the journey for this?Bill Moult: I probably won't, even with this 40 years in between, I probably, I don't think the statute of limitations is even that short for brand specific stuff. I will tell you my favorite client was Procter & Gamble. I can probably talk about some things that happened there without disclosing the brand. You would develop a concept or product, and they'd have to have enough supply of the product that they could actually put it into the hands of two or 300, four or 500 people and have them use it in their homes for two weeks and then come back and respond. You have a chance to see, how do they respond, how do they react to the individual advertising position? Could be a board, or it could be a video ad or whatever.Andrew Mitrak: Just to ground this. Let's say this, for the sake of argument, it's a laundry detergent. Like say Procter & Gamble or whatever large company, they're introducing new laundry detergent and they want to see, do the consumers buy this? Like it? Use it? And then they come to BASES to help figure that out. Is that the right way to think about it?Bill Moult: Yeah. They would have, let's say in that if that were the product, they would have a product that they developed or a concept that they developed. Usually you'd have both a concept and a product and you say, okay, this is the way we're going to advertise it. This is a board that shows how we're going to advertise it. This is positioning. It may have to do with cleaning, may have to do with scent, may have to do with sustainability, it could be anything. Is that an attractive enough idea that somebody's going to actually buy it? You go through the process of determining that, whether somebody's likely to buy it. Then among those, a subset of those people that are most likely to buy the product, you actually give them the product. In many cases, it's just a white box with black printing on it. It doesn't have the final stuff. You give them a chance to use it in their home for two weeks, typically. They would go home in that case and they would try it on their laundry. Then we would call them back, as agreed, they knew we were going to be calling them back and ask them, "Well, okay, what do you think of this? Would you buy it if it were available?" and so forth. The first part is about trying to figure out whether they would try it the very first time. The second part is about whether they would rebuy. The third part goes on and on for this thing called the repeat decay curve, and the purchase and purchase variability and the package sizes, all that kind of stuff. You put it all in a model, you crunch, crank it out, and you give them an answer. Both of those things, they're based on empirical research that says when people say they're going to definitely buy something, actually, a lot of them don't. After use, there's also you ask questions like, "definitely, probably would buy," and so forth. The same thing is true, but the percentages are totally different. You need to learn how to do that by looking at literally hundreds of new product introductions and you link these databases.How Ignoring Forecasting Data Cost a Client $100MBill Moult: One that I'll give you, I won't say specifically what the company or the product was. We did this product and we knew that this was a very, very high-profile product and an initiative within the company. I was presenting it myself. We go into this presentation of the outcome, and usually there might be five or eight people in the room or whatever. There were 40. We had heard, we had already read, you could read in the press that the world knew that this company was going to be introducing into this new sector for them, and it was a big deal. Once I saw 40 people in the audience, it kind of filled out the story. One of the most, so one of the things that happens, you have to have the concept, how you're going to present it. You have to have the product so they can take it in their home and use it and so forth. You actually have to have a very, very good understanding of what they're, how they're going to introduce this product. How much money they're going to spend, how they're going to advertise, how they're going to promote, and so forth. It's like, I don't know, 25 pages long as a detailed plan. It's really hard for them to do it. It was an unpopular part of the process, but an essential part of the project process. They did that, and they laid the entire thing out. The single most important thing in that marketing plan was one question we asked: "What is your minimum business requirement? What will it take for you to get in your first year of retail availability, how much sales will it take for you to say, 'Okay, this is worth doing'?" We focus on that number a lot. We did this product, and the concept wasn't bad, pretty good. The product wasn't bad, it was pretty good. But it couldn't deliver the minimum business requirement. I'm giving this presentation, and I'm reading the tea leaves in this room. They sort of appreciated the learning, but they didn't appreciate my conclusion at all. I said, "It's not a bad." I said, "You got to understand, this is not a bad concept. It's not a bad product. You have no chance of achieving your objective." Then I said, "In fact, I'm begging you not to introduce this product in the way you're doing it." About two weeks later, there's an announcement in the press that this company, well-known, respected company, has decided that they're going to go into a test market with this product. I was elated because I knew they go into a test market and they might lose 2 million bucks, but they wouldn't go national and lose $100 million. I was thrilled. Then a month later, they introduced nationally. They even admitted at the time that the test market was a head fake. They were trying to throw off their competition. They did go into the market and they did lose $100 million.Andrew Mitrak: Wow. Gosh, it's a shame you can't tell me which company this is because it's an interesting story.When Forecast Data Doesn’t Favor Your ProductAndrew Mitrak: As a forecaster, you have to tell clients what they don't want to hear sometimes, and it's up to them whether they listen to your advice. That was a company that didn't listen to your advice. Are there any examples of companies that, taking the laundry detergent example, say, "Hey, we did the study, this doesn't clean the clothes well enough, go back to the drawing board."Or do they change the product? Do they change the advertising? Do they change something else? Do they decide to just kill that one and do something different? What are the outcomes that a large company might do?Bill Moult: You must have read stuff. All of the above, Andrew. All those different things happened.The thing that was nice about BASES was it was early enough and it was inexpensive enough that they could iterate and they could go through the stage more than once. Yeah, there's some huge, a lot of the products introduced during the 80s, 90s, whatever, a lot of the most successful products had been BASES tested. We couldn't tell anyone they were BASES tested, but sometimes the clients did. They would even go into the retailers and say, "You should give us some credit for the fact that we've tested this thing carefully. Here are our BASES results, so we know this is going to be a successful product. Therefore, you want to put it on the shelves here of your retail outlets."The rise of the Product Forecasting IndustryAndrew Mitrak: Was BASES a new category of forecasting company because of new methodology or new technology? Or did companies like BASES exist before? What did companies like Procter & Gamble use before BASES and what did BASES do differently? Can you frame BASES in a historical sense of where it fit in the evolution of forecasting?Bill Moult: I love that question. I love it because we were not the first. BASES was not the first. The first one was Yankelovich LTM. The second one, but what became the most successful before we entered the business, was Assessor. MDS Assessor was, MDS was a company in Cambridge, Mass. associated with MIT, and they, really smart people. Then ESP was the model that came out of NPD. NPD was one of the leading, one of the first and for many years, one of the leading companies in the panel data business. What panel data is, is to look at not purchases by store, but by household. How does that happen over time? That's how you can get this idea. We were actually the fourth one to enter the business, but we were committed to using the best available data, and the data that was coming along with scanner data, scanner panel data was amazing. There weren't that many people that knew how to, that had it or knew how to use it effectively. There was no one else that had Lynn Lin, who really built these very sophisticated simulations. We were the, maybe the fourth one to enter the business, but we probably had or used the best available data. We were also in the AdTel business, which was a split cable business. The person in your house and the person next to your house might actually receive different advertising messages by the split cable, and you could see the responses that they would have over time, or receive more advertising or less advertising and so forth. That was the test market, the electronic test marketing business and AdTel and BehaviorScan did that. But they had just fantastic data.Understanding Scanner Panel DataAndrew Mitrak: You mentioned the source for some of this data was scanner panel data. Scanner panels are something I've heard brought up on this show a couple of times, and I've visited the Wikipedia page a bit for it. But for listeners who might be hearing of a scanner panel for the first time, at a very nuts and bolts level, what exactly was a scanner panel? How did that data get collected?Bill Moult: Okay, first of all, the scanner refers to UPC scanners at the supermarket. Prior to that, at the supermarket, you had a sales clerk checking things out and it was very, very labor intensive and so forth. Somebody figured out how to develop a little UPC code, and so it could be scanned in a second rather than half a minute to get the complete identification. The industry really got into that because it worked really well for retailers. If it works well for retailers, you got to figure out a way to make it work for the people that sell to retailers. That was the UPC. It used to be audit data or warehouse withdrawal data, but scanner data allowed you to get very, very detailed data, not only for a market, but for a store. Taking it beyond the store, you could recruit people to participate in panels and they might present a card when they check out and get a little bit of discount for checking out. The real purpose of the card is to have an identification so you know regardless of where that person shops at many different stores and chains in their market, you know what they buy. You know if they bought it once, twice, or three times, and you know how often, you know what quantities they do. That's what a scanner panel is, is a group of thousands or tens of thousands of families who purchase information that is directly linked to the stores and to the individual products. You start with a scanner, it becomes a panel when people are recruited to participate. They might participate just by presenting a card or the initiative they actually write stuff down. Then there's another level too that I should mention beyond that, which is it's great if you get that data that has all their purchase information. But what about their exposure to advertising? Well, that's an entirely different set of data. If you can get that and incorporate it, it's called single source data. That's unbelievably powerful because then you have a chance to see, Andrew bought this, was exposed to this advertising, his neighbor didn't get exposed to it. This is the behavior that came down and how can I quantify it over time? Therefore I can predict the sales as well as understand what's really working and what's not working. Those are the different kinds of data and that's what, those are the reasons that models were changing so fast because the data was getting so good, and it was getting really, really complete. Then it went further later in the career that I wasn't as involved in single source data. A woman by the name of Leslie Wood did the best analysis on that. There was a project that was done, I'm jumping way ahead because that was what happened later in my own experience. Single source data ended up and continues to be a really powerful tool that's used particularly by consumer packaged goods.The Convergence of Data and the Rise of ASIAndrew Mitrak: This intersection of scanner data, panels, single source data, it was all coming together around the 1980s and creating innovation in the accuracy of forecasting with models like those that BASES was pioneering at the time. From BASES in the 80s, you went to ASI, which was an advertising research company where you became their president, their CEO. Can you tell me about this move and ASI and what advertising research looked like at the time?Bill Moult: Every job I did, Andrew, was either a startup or a turnaround. This one was a turnaround. When I joined, the people at ASI didn't know we needed a turnaround, but you could see it from the outside. The history of the advertising testing business, it had actually started a company called Burke, and it was really sponsored by, very visibly sponsored by Procter & Gamble. It measured what they called related recall. I show you an ad and ask you, ideally within the program, a television program, ask you to watch a program, agreed that you will talk to us a day later. What Burke did was call you a day later, ask you about the program, and they really weren't interested in your answers to that. Then they ask you about the advertising you remember from that program. In particular, what they really wanted to do is get what was called related recall. Does somebody remember an ad and are you able to correctly associate it with the brand that was actually being advertised? It's a very simple measure, very important measure. Procter & Gamble was pretty visible in supporting that and that was I think the most important reason why that became pretty much standard requirement for many advertisers. They really used one measure, which is that related recall measure. Then another company came along, and the company was called either ARS or RSW, they actually had several different names. They also had one measure, but it was a different measure. It measure was called persuasion. They said what's really important is, am I going to change what you buy based on you seeing that ad? They would try to relate the exposure to the ad to the brand choice, not whether you remembered it, but whether you changed your brand choice. It's a good measure, but it was one measure. It was obvious to me shortly after I joined ASI, if not before, that ASI had very good people, but they were really losing their momentum. The reason was, this other guy came along and came up with a better measure. When I joined ASI, shortly after I joined, it became clear to me that we had to change. We had one company with one measure, another company with another measure. They are both good measures, but they're incomplete. I said, we need to have an integrated measurement of more than one dimension. We need some measure of recall and some measure of persuasion, and we need to put them together, ideally with some analytics. In order to do that, I have to walk away from the single measure system, which was very profitable and had a long history to it. It was probably the biggest risk that I took in my career for the company. We did take that risk. This one I will tell, I'll tell you a Procter & Gamble story on this one because they're so important. We not only changed the system to have multiple measures, I made the decision that we would wait until we had an unbeatable combination in the business proposition, the analytics, and everything else before we go back to Procter & Gamble. Because ASI had some of their early Burke people as a part of the team at that point. They were familiar, but we waited five years. We went back after five years, we said, "We think we're ready to show you something that we think is better than anything that we've done before, but anything that anyone else has done before." It incorporates these multiple measures and it links them to actual sales response based on market mix modeling and a few other things like that. The same thing happened there that happened in all cases when the real thought leader client in the industry changes, people tend to follow. ASI managed to grow very dramatically after having gone through this difficult period. Then I went to the owners of ASI. These guys were great. Terry Elkes and Ken Gorman. Terry had been the CEO of Viacom before Sumner Redstone bought Viacom and ran it himself. I love these guys and they were really good to me and they were pleased to see what was happening with ASI and so forth. I said, "I need a meeting with you guys sometime soon." I met with the two of them and I said, "Terry, Ken," I said, "I've loved working with you guys. But I've got to tell you, I've come to the conclusion that to fill myself out as a business person, I really need some international experience. I know ASI can't provide that. We don't have the resources, the wherewithal to go international." For that reason, I'm giving you 18 months notice. Ken or Terry said to me, "Bill, thank you, we hear you, give us 24 hours to respond." I went, we met back 24 hours later, I had no idea whether they were just going to kick me out or what. Terry said, "Bill, we have decided that we would rather sell the company than replace our chief executive. You can decide who to sell the company to." I was blown away that they would say that. Fortunately, there were four companies in the industry who, once they knew we were available, who were very interested, and three of them were very willing to have this crazy president or CEO at that point have a tour in some international company. The one that ended up buying ASI was Ipsos, which is based in Paris. Not a bad choice. That's what we did. We sold it to Ipsos and I got a chance to spend some time in Paris.Measuring Recall, Persuasion, and ResponseAndrew Mitrak: There's a lot that you covered in this and I want to go back to what you were saying at the beginning of ASI, that they had been measuring one vector, which was recall. So how well could an ad be remembered at all? Important, but insufficient potentially. Then a separate competitor was emerging and they're measuring persuasion. Which is more about the ad's effectiveness in a way. You have to remember it and it has to persuade you for you to make a purchase. This is sort of building a more multi-dimensional model for ASI's product offering. Is that the right way to think about it? That you kind of took both those two and brought them together? Were there any other dimensions involved?Bill Moult: Those two, but more importantly to linking it directly to response. I knew the people with the data, I knew the people that had the modeling. We brought in some fantastic modelers and we were able to not only use these two measures, but to combine them in a way that was empirically derived and related to actual sales effect. No one had done it before. That was a pretty good combination.Andrew Mitrak: At ASI and advertising research companies more broadly, who were your main customers at this point? Were you primarily working for a CPG company like you were with BASES? Were you working with advertising agencies? Within customers, who was your key stakeholder? Was it a marketing department? Was it somebody who's overseeing advertising? Was it finance? What did that relationship look like or who was the primary connection point?Bill Moult: It varied a little bit, but primarily the clients of those sorts of things, the lead clients of those sorts of things are the consumer packaged goods companies. The reason is, that's the industry that has the best data. They know how to get the most out of the data, and it requires these models and these capabilities and these talented people. Yeah, so the companies involved at ASI were primarily, and I would say this is also true for our biggest competitors, primarily consumer packaged goods companies. The part of the company, to answer that question, was either the research company, in some cases they changed the name to insights, or sometimes the marketing company, marketing part of the company. The agencies would usually be involved, the ad agencies, which were independent, would usually be involved, but they were kicking and screaming about it. No one likes to have their papers graded. So many of them were resistant at first until they realized that it actually helped the entire system, and some of them became really good users of research and in fact, good innovators of research. Both ASI and BASES were overwhelmingly consumer packaged goods.Consolidation in the Market Research IndustryAndrew Mitrak: BASES was acquired by Nielsen, ASI was acquired by Ipsos. Some of the other companies you've mentioned that are in this industry have also been rolled up or merged or acquired. It seems like there's this gravitational pull towards consolidation in this type of industry. I'm wondering why is that? Why is it not more distributed across a lot of small companies? It seems like there's a trend towards rolling up and consolidation.Bill Moult: I think both for data reasons and for financial reasons. I'll talk about Nielsen a little later because I think it makes more sense then because I think there's a couple of companies I worked for before I worked for Nielsen myself and I can comment in that context. Yes, there's been tremendous consolidation of the research industry, no question about it. I think it's generally been good, but it can go too far. In some cases, you have seen them consolidate and then they split up again. Nielsen's done that about three times.The Marketing Science Institute: Bridging Academia and PracticeAndrew Mitrak: This leads us to the Marketing Science Institute, which you joined after ASI. Can you share about what the Marketing Science Institute is? It seems like a different type of organization than you've previously worked in. What attracted you to it and what was the organization doing?Bill Moult: Oh, it's definitely different. Different than any others I've seen. I was first exposed when I was a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, I was exposed to MSI because MSI, the Marketing Science Institute, actually started at Wharton. Then it moved to Harvard. Then while I was at Harvard, they made the most important decision, I think, to make it independent so that it wasn't associated with any one school, but could work with any school. I was there to see parts of that evolution. A guy by the name of Stephen Greyser, who was the longest-serving executive director. It was an organization that deals with both business people and academics in the field of marketing. It turns out that if you think about those two groups of people, they're generally not all that interested in each other. Most people in business don't really care that much about academia except their own alma mater. Most people in academia, even in marketing, have relatively little interest in real life business. But if you get the few people that really are interested, you get that subset of the people together, you do amazing stuff. Let me use this as a chance to jump into PIMS, because PIMS was, stands for Profit Impact of Market Strategy. It was a very, very ambitious project that started at General Electric (GE). Now, there was a point when General Electric had dozens, maybe hundreds of different businesses. They called them strategic business units, but they were a great consolidator to use that term. They were in all these businesses and they said, "Well, we're in all these businesses, we got to figure out what really makes a business successful, what makes it profitable? What is the profit impact of things that we do, including the marketing strategy?" That's what PIMS stands for, Profit Impact from Market Strategy, but it went way beyond marketing. They said they did this analysis and they got all the different business units to fill out ridiculously long questionnaires about every detail in the business so they could do this big, sorry, they could do a large, sophisticated analysis. It was a really cool idea, but then somebody finally realized, "Well, wait a second, we're only looking at General Electric's business. How are we going to know what really matters if we're not looking at any other businesses? We're not even looking at our competitors." They said, "We need to we believe in this project, we think we can learn from it and benefit from it and change our business as a result of it, but we have to include a lot of different strategic business units." We need to do it independent. They chose MSI as the company that could be an independent middleman for this process. Bob Buzzell did that process. That was the first time that, for example, a sophisticated analysis said, "Yeah, there's really a good reason for you to generate a high share rather than a low market share because there's a very strong financial link." You only know that if you build these sort of extensive, sophisticated, and broad-based analyses. That's what PIMS did. But Marketing Science Institute did more generally was to get those marketing people and the marketing companies and the academics together doing research that made sense. For example, the business people set the agenda. They said, "You guys are doing all kinds of research that we think is wasted." At the same time, we really need this done. For example, we need to figure out what the World Wide Web is going to be all about. Can you guys focus on that and change the, set the agenda for the marketing people? Then the marketing or the academic people. The academic people would spend a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of smarts, and they would answer these questions. Usually it would take them years to answer them, but they'd answer them to the Marketing Science Institute. There was some really good stuff done. The interesting thing was that people that were involved in the Marketing Science Institute, there was about 70 member companies and they were all the blue chip companies. At least as many leading academics involved. They would kind of do this stuff first. One of the best examples was disruptive innovation. You know Clay Christensen. There was a book that Clay Christensen wrote that said, "This is the way you need to think about innovation and disruptive innovation in particular." It was very successful, it was a bestseller. Two years before he wrote that book, he wrote a Harvard Business Review article, basically said the same thing. Two years before he wrote the article, he presented it at the Marketing Science Institute. What was happening was people were getting involved very early on in the developing areas, and it didn't always happen quite that beautifully, but that was a good example of when it did. The Marketing Science Institute was a wonderful experience and it was unique because it brought the academic world and the business world together. It was hard to do. It's currently part of the ARF (Advertising Research Foundation), but it's still independent, largely.Andrew Mitrak: That Clay Christensen example of disruptive innovation originating or having early beginnings at MSI is a great example. There are other ones that have come up on this podcast. I interviewed David Aaker who's really popularized the concept of brand equity and brought it to the masses and it defined a big part of Aaker's career. But he originally heard about it, on this episode he was talking, or on this podcast with him, he was talking about how he learned about brand equity at the 1988 MSI conference. You have these conferences that set a theme and bring major thinkers in marketing together and there would be presentations and papers published and an exchange of ideas and somebody could latch onto that and bring it out of this, out of MSI to marketing and business more broadly and actually have an impact.Bill Moult: That's a great example. One other thing that happened at MSI I got to mention to you though. Dave, there was, the way it's organized is it's led by two people as peers. One who's a president, who's hopefully around there for years, and the other is an executive director who was an academic, and we tried to serve both groups. I was the president for a number of years and there were two different executive directors while I was there. But one of them said, after we'd been working together for a while, he said, "Bill," he says, "I, we got really smart people from the advertisers or the member companies. But they're all from market research or sometimes from market strategy and so forth, but they're really not the people that are doing the marketing for the company." He said, "Whereas on the academic side, we have all the right academics, the science-oriented ones, the quantitative and so forth. How do we fill the gap?" We identified an opportunity to make a connection with chief marketing officers. Now it was a relatively new concept. I learned on your podcast that Sergio was the first CMO. Now I can say Sergio because he only needs a first name, he's like Madonna, the Madonna of the marketing world. He was the first one, I think you said in '93. A little bit less than 10 years later, we were able to make invitations to between 40 and 45 of the best CMOs, mostly in the United States, but a few international ones, and they almost all, once invited, came. We got them together with some academics. It didn't last forever, it went a few years and it was really good because it got the marketing people, not just the marketing research and the marketing analytics people, connected with the academics.The Evergreen Challenge: Connecting Marketing Academia and BusinessAndrew Mitrak: I think this idea of the intersection between academia – I've interviewed a lot of academics on this podcast – and business leaders, I've interviewed some of them too, is an interesting idea where I feel like it's an evergreen challenge to get them to speak and connect and communicate. Connecting academia to the real world is just an ongoing thing where it doesn't seem to happen as much within the field of marketing. If I think of other areas of the sciences, in biology, a breakthrough that's a published paper can all of a sudden spin up a new biomedical or pharma company that can really be productized. Similar in computer science, a white paper on AI can spark a whole revolution in a field. That just doesn't happen quite as often in marketing. Why do you think that is? Why do you think it seems to be an evergreen challenge that we needed institutes like MSI to bring these people together proactively because it's not happening naturally? Why do you think that is?Bill Moult: I don't know. I share your frustration that it doesn't happen more often than it does. I think some of the things that happened in Silicon Valley, where, especially Stanford academics were very closely involved. I don't know that it just hasn't happened in that way in marketing or marketing research. One example is a guy by the name of Michael Ray, do you know him? Or do you know him by reputation? Okay, so he was a marketing professor that focused on advertising, but he went to Stanford or spent much of his career in Stanford, and he ended up being a guru in the area of innovation. For whatever reason, he was interacting with a lot of the right companies in Silicon Valley and they were a heck of a lot more interested in innovation than they were in advertising. He basically changed his focus as an academic guy. I think there was a different environment there. No, it's frustrating, but I also think it represents an opportunity. Some people make it work really well.Nielsen: What do they actually do?Andrew Mitrak: I'm going to jump ahead a little bit and talk about Nielsen because you were the president of Nielsen Media Analytics and Knowledge Collaborations. You were also the CEO of a company called Interscope Research, which you later sold to Nielsen, and you've had advisory roles within Nielsen. Nielsen is one of those companies that even before I got into marketing, you'd hear about Nielsen, you'd hear about Nielsen ratings. I think a lot of people have heard about Nielsen, but it has always been a little bit of a mystery to me what they actually do at the end of the day, how they actually work. Can you help demystify Nielsen or speak to your time there? What do they actually do? What was your role within Nielsen as well?Bill Moult: That's a tall order, Andrew. I was hoping you'd demystify it for me. Nielsen's an amazing company or companies. It started really by two guys that were phenomenal in terms of their impact, AC Nielsen and then AC Nielsen Jr. What they did, among other things, they created the concept of market share. They said, "All these companies are doing their own thing, they're selling their product, whatever, they think they're doing well, they don't know if they're doing well." They really needed to understand whatever else is selling, not just what their company is selling, but everyone that competes with them. We're better off if we can gather data that measures the sales not just of your company, but every company that's in that category, and then compares them and tells you not just what are you doing in terms of sales, what are you doing in terms of market share? Market share turns out to be a very strong concept. They did that starting with, this is way before scanner data, they started with audits, and they did those audits, and then they succeeded in that business to the point that everybody felt that that was required really to run their business, they would have to get that data. Then they found that the same opportunity existed in media. It wasn't enough to just know something about your viewership, you needed to understand competitive viewership or listenership or whatever it is in order to do the other. They started Nielsen Market Research, Nielsen Media Research. Those companies have been together or separate, together or separate multiple times in the history of those companies. They come up with good reasons why they should be together and then for a while it doesn't work and they split it up or whatever. It's separate now. When I was there, it was together. They're interesting because, partly because of the capabilities they have. I'll tell you one of the things that's underestimated is how good the people were. I'm going to use two or three examples here. One guy is, you will recognize his name but for the wrong reason. His name is Dave Calhoun. Dave Calhoun has been well, very visible for the last three or four years because he was on the board at Boeing after he left Nielsen and after he left Blackstone, he was on the board of Boeing when Boeing crashed two 737s. They asked him to get off the board and run the company, become the CEO. With the idea that all the problems that Boeing had would go away. Well, they didn't go away. Boeing's had a very, very difficult time and in my view, Dave's got too much of the share of the blame for what was really could be explained by a lot of things and a lot of people. He was the best CEO I've ever encountered in my career. Dave was CEO when I was at Nielsen, and when I was at Nielsen, that was one of the periods of time when they were all together and they were making, creating real value from being together. I'll give you another example. The quality of some of the people that were there both what they did before, during, and after their Nielsen thing. One of the best examples is Steve Hasker. Steve had been a very successful consultant at McKinsey. Dave Calhoun knew Steve, I think they worked together on some stuff. Dave said to Steve, "You know, I was very fortunate. I, Dave, was very fortunate that I learned a lot from Jack Welch when I was at General Electric. When I was running two different, two or three different businesses that Dave ran while I was there. I learned from him a lot." He says, "Steve, you've been a consultant at McKinsey helping people understand what it takes to run a company well. Would you actually like to do it? Because he says, I think I could teach you as much as Jack Welch taught me." That was, you have to jump at that opportunity. Steve did and he did really well there. Now, he's the CEO of Thomson Reuters. There was a lot of quality in people, but they also had a lot of opportunities and challenges, partly because they were in these different businesses, both businesses were changing, they had different cultures, very, very different cultures. The media business and the advertising business and the marketing business, these are different animals and some of the people involved. The quality of the people and the resources that they had that they could be linking these databases made it a really interesting but also challenging business to be involved in. I was fortunate, I think, to be involved. I came in to start a start a business. In these two businesses that they call watch and buy. Watch is the TV or internet or whatever, and buy is the UPC scanner data. There's two different businesses, separate sometimes, together sometimes, whatever. One of those businesses, the buy business, with UPC scanner data, had built over time a lot of good analytical services. The other had built none. The media business was saying, "These are how many people are watching your show and that's pretty much it." I mean, I'm obviously exaggerating, but there was a very a total disconnect between the level of analysis and support of that sort on the buy business versus on the watch business. They asked me if I'd come in and build a business on the watch side. I said, "Yeah, I'll try." I found that there were three relatively small businesses that were going on just in a very custom basis. We pulled those together, we built some other capabilities, and built some standardized services. Some of them did pretty well. I was only there about three years. They have gone through one or more of these combinations versus separations since. I can't tell you exactly what the status of it is now. But as one more example of the quality of the people, I had the pleasure and the honor of starting the media analytics business for Nielsen. My successor in that role as president of Nielsen Media Analytics was Karthik Rao. He's the CEO of Nielsen Media today. I was fortunate in the quality of the people that I got to interact with and the stuff that we did there and I have very good feelings about a company that's been complicated and as you said, a bit of a mystery to people off and on for many decades.The Importance of People Above All ElseAndrew Mitrak: Something that's true that you've called back to a lot is that even as the technology changes at these various companies and latest and greatest in marketing research changes, having great people be leadership, be leaders at a company, that stays true as a constant of what makes a great marketing company. I'm wondering about if you think of the last several decades of your career and the time that we've covered on this, on our time together, there's been all this change in, we haven't even talked about the internet that much and all sorts of changes in the marketing and advertising and research landscape. I'm curious about what hasn't changed though. What's still true today that was true when you started your career?Bill Moult: Well, the most important thing in my career is the people that I dealt with. I was very fortunate there. What hasn't changed is this is a business that's going to succeed or fail based on the quality of the people, the level of their commitment, their ability to work as a team. I think that remains true. The data's changed. A mathematician might say things haven't changed at all, that is you're all really crunching numbers in a different way, but they're all the same underlying things. But if you're looking for a constant, I would say, I'd choose the team every time.Andrew Mitrak: I think that's a great message to wrap up on. Bill, it's been such a pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks so, thanks so much.Bill Moult: As did I. Thank you so much. You take care. Good luck with this entire initiative. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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• Ian Leslie: The Beatles' Marketing Genius

  A History of Marketing / Episode 22Today marks Sir Paul McCartney’s 83rd birthday. To celebrate, I’m publishing my excellent interview with Ian Leslie. Ian’s the author of the New York Times bestseller: John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, published in April.It’s my favorite book I’ve read this year. It tells the story of the creative partnership at the heart of the most influential band in history. I’m pretty familiar with Beatles’ story, but this book tells the story in an intimate way. I laughed, I cried, and I didn’t want to put it down — except to stop and listen to the songs. Now you might be wondering, “That’s nice, but what do the Beatles have to do with marketing history?” Great question! For one, as the best-selling musical act of all time, the Beatles knew a lot about marketing. They deliberately crafted their image, they mastered media relations, and they engaged their fans with tactics that were way ahead of their time. In marketing speak, the Beatles created a new category and they dominated that category as the brand leader.This episode analyzes the marketing masterclass that was The Beatles, and Ian Leslie is the perfect guide. Not only is he a great biographer who's immersed himself in the world of The Beatles to write John & Paul, but he's also a marketing veteran who spent the first part of his career in advertising and brand strategy.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsIan Leslie is behind the popular Substack The Ruffian. (I am a paying subscriber and highly recommend it!) Prior to John & Paul, Ian also published a viral essay “64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney.”Now here’s my conversation with Ian Leslie. Note - I use AI to transcribe the audio of my conversations. I review the output but it’s possible there are errors I missed. Parts of this transcript have been edited for clarity.John & Paul: A fresh look at the best-selling musical partnership in historyAndrew Mitrak: Ian Leslie, welcome to A History of Marketing.Ian Leslie: Hello, Andrew. Good to be here.Andrew Mitrak: Great to have you. I loved reading your book, John & Paul. You told the story of The Beatles, and of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in such a fresh and intimate way. I just devoured this book. I made my wife read it, and she loved it, and we've had the joy of just talking about this book, revisiting The Beatles' music together, and listening to some of Paul's solo work. So it's been such a joy, and I just wanted to start by saying thanks for writing this book.Ian Leslie: Well, I'm delighted to hear that. Thank you very much.The Beatles as business innovatorsAndrew Mitrak: So, given your background in marketing and in business, when you were researching and writing this book, did you ever find yourself, either consciously or unconsciously, analyzing The Beatles through the lens of marketing, promotion, and business strategy?Ian Leslie: Yeah, there were several points where you reflect on how certain decisions impacted their success or slowed it down in some way. And apart from anything else—apart from the creative and the artistic story, which is obviously where I focus in the book—it's an incredible story of innovation and creating a whole new market. You know, we talk about inventing the future a lot. I mean, these guys really did invent their own future because they weren't satisfied by what was around them.First, a big brand in their home market, and then they become a huge global brand, and they're absolutely dominant. And it turns out to be an enduring brand, too. It's not just for a couple of years. And they're creating a new category, or new categories, as they go, both in terms of the overall category of being a pop group that isn't just a flash in the pan. And also products like the album, which hadn't really been a best-selling product type until they came along. So yeah, it's an astonishing story just from a commercial point of view.‘The Beatles’: The best or worst band name ever?Andrew Mitrak: I think for me, one of the first parts of the story of establishing the brand was actually just the selection of their name. The name "The Beatles," I think, is just the perfect band name.And it sounds so perfect, it almost seems like it just came from the heavens organically, but it was a really consequential and deliberate decision they made. And they tested a number of names. Prior to The Beatles, of course, they were The Quarrymen to start. But do you have any thoughts on or reactions to their approach to naming and the name "The Beatles" itself?Ian Leslie: That's interesting because it's interesting that you see it as the perfect name. And I'll invite you to expand on that in a minute. Because I could see it both ways. I mean, obviously it worked out pretty well. But you might say it's like the worst name ever, as well. And it's almost like these two things are inextricable. It's either going to be the worst or the best. It turned out to be the best.But let me just put the case for the worst name before we get onto the case for the best. It was not a recognizable type of name, if you see what I mean. Basically, the stars of the time in the late '50s and early '60s were solo stars or a solo star plus a backing group. So you had your Elvis Presleys, and you had your Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Right? So you had your X and the Ys. And the idea that you could just have "The Somethings"... you know, or Buddy Holly and the Crickets. But the idea of just "The Crickets" or "The Somethings," it wasn't really a thing. It wasn't really a precedent for that.And it got The Beatles into a lot of… it slowed down their progress in a way because they were so determined not to have a frontman for various reasons, that promoters and so on found it hard to say, "Well, who are these? I don't understand. What is this group?"And then the other thing is, it's just this really cheap pun. I mean, the stories differ on the origin of it, but something to do with maybe they took inspiration from The Crickets and they chose another insect, but made a pun on it because they were playing what was called beat music at the time. And they end up with this pretty cheesy pun. And the name had to be explained over and over again. And you see this all the way through, right up until they start becoming famous, all the promoters, all the record label guys, and audiences are like, "The Beat… The what? The Beetle? What?" And they have to spell it out. "Yeah, it's spelled B-E-A-T."So it's this laborious thing where you have to explain it. And then once you get it, you're like, "Oh yeah, that's The Beatles. I'm in on it." So, this I think is where we flip into your "best name ever" case.A big improvement over “The Quarrymen”Andrew Mitrak: The case for it being the best name is – I've had the chance as a marketer to name a couple of companies and products– And I think what you look for is you want something to be short, right? Aside from "the," it's a couple of syllables. It's easy to pronounce. It's unique and it's clever, but it's not like some weird misspelling. Beat, B-E-A-T, right? It's easy to spell. Also, I know it existed 40 years before Google and SEO, but if I was to name a thing today, it seems very SEO-optimized, which is kind of funny.And also, it enables them to grow... you know, they were The Quarrymen, which sounds like a very local, schoolboy kind of name, right? I think it alludes to the school they attended, right? And I couldn't see The Quarrymen having Quarrymen-mania, right? And Quarrymen merchandise being a global phenomenon. It's a very… a hard name to spell.So "Beatles" just seems to have a certain universality to it. They also feel like they're a group, which is really enabling their success. And it was really prescient of them to not be "Long John and the Silver Beetles."And also it's more distinct. Something like The Animals... it sounds a little vague though, right? It doesn't sound as unique and ownable in a way. So that's my bull case on the name The Beatles.A high risk branding bet that paid offIan Leslie: So, the way I see it is, names like this that are not descriptive of the product in some way, that are just sort of odd or weird and need explaining, they're like high-risk bets. You know, they can easily go wrong, which is why a lot of, or maybe most, brands when they're naming their product—brand managers—they choose a name which explains a little bit what the product is. So, say this is like Microsoft versus Apple. I mean, Microsoft… it's actually a bit of a weird name because they were weird guys, but at least it was something to do with microcomputers and software. I don't exactly know what the derivation is, but you get the general area. Whereas Apple is just like, what? It's got nothing to do with computers. I don't even get it. They're both successful, obviously, but Apple's probably the cooler, better brand name. And it paid off in spades, right?So yeah, The Beatles chose a name which isn't descriptive. It's not "Something and the Somethings." It doesn't tell you anything about them, really. It's an odd name. But once you're in on the secret, then you feel like you're in a club. And so it helps to generate this early community of fans and community, which a lot of startups really look for when they're in the first year of existing. So I guess there's something in that.Creating and managing the Beatles’ imageAndrew Mitrak: So, they had this really distinct image in their early days: the mop-top hair, the matching suits, the Beatle boots. Literally iconic from head to toe, from their hair to their boots. So, would their manager, Brian Epstein, deserve a lot of credit for this? Or do you think this was leaning into some of The Beatles' organic tastes of fashion? What are your thoughts on the initial image they created?Ian Leslie: Yeah, it's an interesting question. Before they met Brian Epstein, they had a… they always had a strong look. They always looked… and they looked very different from the other groups that were around. The other groups tended to wear flashier gold lamé suits and look very much like they were in show business. And The Beatles went for a scruffy leather jacket… It looked like they were just thrown together, but actually they all wore the same thing. And it was all definitely part of their image as scruffy upstarts.Now, Epstein comes along and he's like, "Well, you're not going to get on TV if you look like this, right? You have to find some compromise here." And looking back on it, Lennon was like, "Oh, he made us sell out," and so on. But I don't think that's quite right. They already looked a bit sort of try-hard with their leather jacket rockabilly look. It looked a bit like they were trying to be throwbacks to the 1950s. There was something a bit, "Ah, we've done that now, guys." So I think they were already ready to move on.And the other thing is, they took his cue to smarten up, but then they chose really cool suits. Like Yves Saint Laurent-influenced, collarless jackets and narrow trousers in cool materials. So they found this… it was a bit like a Motown group, really. So they find this way of saying, "Okay, I understand the goal now. The goal is to break into mainstream media in effect, and you can't do that if you're dressed for small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg. But also, I don't want to just be like all the other groups." They've always hated being like all the other groups, right? We're never going to do that. "So why don't we find our own way to smarten up?" So that's the interesting lesson there, is like, you're going to compromise with the audience or the market in some way, but that doesn't mean becoming less individual. You just find a new way to be individual.Andrew Mitrak: It also strikes me that their look and their image— I think of The Beatles as the black-and-white era Beatles and then the color era Beatles. And that there's, you know, sort of A Hard Day's Night and there's Help!, right? And Help! and beyond. And that this black-and-white image, it was the 60s, but a lot of things felt like the 50s still. And that it somehow just seemed to look good on black-and-white television, just their silhouettes and their image. And it feels like they were really attuned to the actual media that was presenting them.Ian Leslie: Yeah, and you can see that in the album covers as well from pretty early on with With The Beatles and Beatles for Sale. And they are opting for a kind of moodier look. They don't want to be just these grinning guys or these glamorous pop star image. They're doing something new, and it's a bit more European. It's influenced by Germany and, you know, by Astrid Kirchherr and by French culture. And more to the point, what they're doing now is taking control of their brand.The Beatles as a vertically integrated brandIan Leslie: You think about the fact that Lennon and McCartney were writing their own songs and singing and performing and then recording them. That was pretty much a new model, certainly for a group. And they were effectively… because before that, you had groups, and then you had songwriters, like Tin Pan Alley songwriters. And the labels would distribute the… they would match the songs to the group or to the solo act. They'd say, "Okay, try this song, try this song, try this song." And very quickly, The Beatles were like, "We don't really want to do other people's songs. We'll cover rock and roll songs or soul songs that we love, but we're not going to accept other writers' songs because we've got pretty good songwriters."So they vertically integrate the creation of the content and the distribution of the content, if you like. And also the front end of the content, not just in the recordings, but in the actual packaging of the product as well. So they take control of that creative process from beginning to end. They do that pretty quickly, really within the first year of getting famous. So it's an extraordinary amount of very audacious act of confidence and a land grab which opens the way for this whole new category, in effect.Andrew Mitrak: It's just astonishing the intuition they have, the boldness of it, and that they were able to get this control. And they were just little kids, like they were 20, 21 in this era. And they have such great intuition about so many things. Of course the writing of the music and the performing of the music, which is at its core, but then also their image, and as you said the vertically integrated end-to-end ownership of the process. Not only really good musicians, but also really good at a lot of other things.Ian Leslie: Yeah, I mean, I still don't really understand where they got that confidence or that audacity from. But I think it is partly to do with just having been together and experienced so many amazing experiences, both traumatic and joyful and hard and fun together in those years as teenagers in Liverpool and then in Hamburg, that they felt, you know, John and Paul in particular, but the whole group, really felt kind of indestructible and had a sense of, "Well, you know, you take us or you leave us." You know, they weren't absolutely against compromises, as we've seen in the sense of, you know, in terms of how we dress and so on. But they did have this sense of themselves as artists. They might not have used the word, but they did think of themselves as artists rather than just entertainment stars who were going to do music for a year and then become game show hosts, which was the conventional career route for most pop stars.‘Beatlemania’ and the merchandising machineAndrew Mitrak: I was watching the Beatles 64 documentary, this is the one that was produced by Scorsese and I think it's streaming on Disney. And it struck me that when they came to America in February of '64, their fans already had all the Beatles merchandise, seemingly. They have this clip in the documentary of people having the mop-top wigs and buttons and knockoff Beatle boots and all this merch that they had. And it's like, these people, they just came onto the scene. I think their music had probably been on the radio in the months preceding their visit, but still, it just seems like, just operationally, how did they get all this merchandise produced so quickly? I'm sure it was some mix of knockoffs and maybe some legit merchandise. But do you have any sense of the merchandising machine that surrounded The Beatles in this era?Ian Leslie: I don't know, it's a good question. I'm not an expert on that side of things. But I think a lot of it was not official merchandise. I think their record label, Capitol in America, very quickly did a big merchandise effort when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" becomes their first smash hit in America. And then they did the wigs and they marketed them as these four mop-tops and so on. But then I think, America being America, lots of small entrepreneurs just sort of pitched in and did their own thing. And the thing is that they hadn't tied down the legal rights to that and the commercial rights to that merchandise.And it's one of the things that Brian Epstein gets criticized for most harshly in retrospect, is that he didn't tie down merchandising deals and therefore left an awful lot of money on the table. How far he was expected to have foreseen that boom in merchandise, I'm not totally sure, but it's true that they weren't making a lot of money from this stuff.‘A Hard Day’s Night’: Expanding to the big screenAndrew Mitrak: There's A Hard Day's Night. I don't know how it was also released in 1964 or how they had the time to film such a good movie. But they make this film, A Hard Day's Night, which stands up really well. And did they see films as sort of a way to promote their album sales and their concert tours? Or did they see this film as an art form in itself that they wanted to really break into? What was their approach to where film fit in?Ian Leslie: Well, I think it was very conventional at the time for pop stars, you know, Elvis Presley most famously, to make movies as an extension of the brand. And yeah, as another way to distribute your content and another way to meet your teenage fans.So that wasn't innovative, saying, you know, "Oh, you know, we're pop stars, now we need to do a movie." The innovative or the thing that was different about them was that they decided it would be good.You know, we can put it more like, you know, they wanted it to be innovative or artistic or creative. But basically, they were just like, "We don't want to do a crap movie because we think all these teen pop movies are crap."I don't know exactly how they chose Richard Lester, the director, or the writer, [Alun Owen], but the writer had spent time in Liverpool and was part of the beat scene, he got them. And so they helped choose him. But they end up with this team, including a cinematographer, a brilliant cinematographer [Gilbert Taylor]… he went on to shoot Star Wars. You know, so he's probably responsible for the two most powerful visual properties of the 20th century. So they had an amazing team and so, you know, some of that is talent that was around in Britain at the time. Some of it is luck, but a lot of it is The Beatles' driving force, which is, if we're going to do this, we want it to be good. We don't want it to be mediocre and embarrassing. And you can get a long way with that attitude.John, Paul, George, and Ringo: A whole product rangeAndrew Mitrak: There's a quote that you wrote in your book on A Hard Day's Night or this era, and I'm going to read it back to you because I like it a lot."After A Hard Day's Night, The Beatles had distinct personas in the minds of the public, vividly drawn but crude cartoons. Ringo Starr as the doleful clown, George Harrison quiet but deep. John was the Beatle with the sharp tongue and scathing wit. Paul, the cute and charming one. The Beatles conspired to create these masks, but by 1966, they were wary of them."And I just think this is an important passage because it sets up a lot, but what stood out to me is "they conspired to create these masks." Why did they conspire to create masks? Could you unpack that line?Ian Leslie: Well, they realized, together with Brian Epstein, that being this unusual type of group which didn't have a lead singer could actually be… on the one hand, it made them difficult to comprehend within the music industry, but once you get over that barrier, it actually presents this huge marketing opportunity. Because then you can have all four characters, and all the fans could choose their favorites. And you have this whole product range, if you like.They wouldn't have put it like that, right? But certainly, Epstein was central in, before they were famous, at the Cavern saying, "You know, make sure we give George a turn at the microphone. I want you swapping between John, Paul, and George."And when they're on stage, you see Ringo raised up, so Ringo's not this anonymous drummer, he's very much part of the visual presentation of the group. So in that sense, it was a conscious presentation. And then when it comes to the film, obviously the film is this heightened version of Beatlemania, a comedy, ironizing version of what's going on with them in that first year of fame. And it creates these caricatures which are rooted in some truth about what they're like, but are not the whole deal. So yeah, they're very much part of creating that story. But obviously, it's somewhat in tension with their mission as artists and their desire to be individual human beings and not just fodder for the entertainment industry.Andrew Mitrak: It’s useful to have this shorthand or a “crude cartoon” but down the line it does put them into a box and plant the seeds for music criticism of their solo careers, and the legacy of John vs. Paul as that becomes a central point to your narrative.Ian Leslie: Yeah, true.Engaging super-fans with Christmas recordsAndrew Mitrak: One of the other things they do in this era that I wanted to highlight is that they'd have an official fan club and they'd do these Christmas records.And they'd record these, they'd mail them to their fans, and they'd be sort of lower quality recordings, but they'd have improvised jokes. And it felt like a really… if you can listen to them, I think they've been packaged on the Anthology and are on YouTube and such, but it feels very modern as far as a marketing tactic to have this this special, raw, authentic, hear directly from them, hear their improvised jokes on the recording. It feels like it was almost recorded in a living room where they're having drinks or something like that as they're recording these. And then they just send sort of their authentic selves to their fans, almost like an early newsletter. Can you talk about this? Was this a common thing in the time or is this something that The Beatles sort of helped pioneer or perfect?Ian Leslie: Yeah, that's a great point and a great sort of analogy for how fans communicate. Yeah, they were communicating very directly with fans, weren't they? I don't know the answer. I don't think it was that conventional. I don't think they did it in a conventional way. And they were always very assiduous about looking after their core fans, I suppose. All the way through, they were replying to a hell of a lot of letters, for instance. So many stories about people coming in and seeing them after gigs or before gigs, just going through piles of fan mail and writing replies.Making Christmas recordings and sending it to their fans they were doing that all the way through the 60s, even after they're growing their hair and being cool and doing drugs and being weird, right? They were still doing Christmas messages. There's a very amusing conversation in 1969 when they're all splitting up and they're grown-ups now and it's all so different and changed. And John is saying, "Yeah, but what are we going to do about the Christmas message? We need to get that out to our fans." They're still thinking about that. So they did have this intense focus on the bond that they had with their core audience.And comedy was a big part of it, being funny was a big part of it, right? It's not not just about music. It's about this personal connection. And they always had that, as well as the music and as well as the image, they always had this strong personal bond with their fans that they were very keen to cultivate.Expanding their fanbase from teenagers to everyoneAndrew Mitrak: On their fans, what's really funny to think about also is just how their fans evolved over time. That in the Hard Day's Night era, in the Ed Sullivan era, what you see mostly on the screens are overwhelmingly teenage girls, right? And I imagine that a lot of their fan mail was from teenage girls. But then pretty soon, they'd have universal appeal. Abbey Road is only six years or so later, and the fans for that don't seem like an album for teenage girls at that point. Same with Sgt. Pepper's. And they expanded their appeal with that core teenage girl audience, but they didn't limit themselves to that. Can you speak to how they thought about expanding their appeal and keeping their teenage girl fan base, but also expanding it so they weren't limited to that little box?Ian Leslie: I don't know. I mean, I actually think that for all that we're talking about them being intuitively great marketers, which I think they were, they didn't really strategize about their audience in that way, right? So they weren't ever thinking, "Oh, we need to move on to a different audience now. And how do we manage that transition?" They really were just thinking, "How can we delight everybody now?" and "What's going to delight ourselves?" And it turned out to be the same thing to a remarkable extent.Now, with the teenage girls, I think what's interesting about that is that the teenage girls who caught on to how amazing this music was before the rest of the country… before all the older blokes who later on took ownership of this story and said, "You know, you don't understand the music, it's all about…" Like, okay, well, you completely passed you by. And that the screaming was basically the most appropriate response to a change in music and culture that was this seismic. So I applaud all those teenage girls.The other thing to say about this is that The Beatles never took those teenage girls for granted. They never talked down to them. They were never scornful about them. So they might have complained about the noise at the concerts now and again, but you will search high and low for interviews in which they make any mean-spirited comment about their fans. Do you see what I mean? And I think, particularly from John and Paul and George, I don't think they would ever… they ever thought in terms of, "Oh, now we need to get rid of this shallow, silly teenage girl audience and move on to the mature male…" I just think they thought, "We want everybody in." You know, this is a big tent, we want as many people in it as possible.Andrew Mitrak: There was a quote that I had highlighted from the book as well."As well as female fans in Liverpool, McCartney's ballads later helped win over older generations. But the ballads were more than a marketing tactic."And I think that songs like "Yesterday," which is just this astounding piece that stops you in your tracks, and it's not the whole band, it's Paul solo with some orchestration on the record, that doesn't necessarily feel like it's pandering to the teenage heartthrob audience, although he's the cute one. But it also has this appeal to a broader crowd than just the teens who are watching Ed Sullivan.Ian Leslie: Yeah, absolutely. They always had this incredibly broad appeal. And so, in a way, they were the voice of a young generation, they were subversive, they were anti-establishment, rebellious in some ways, but they were always charming with it. It was impossible to resist the charm about, you know, "you just rattle your jewelry," you know. That remark from Lennon at the London Palladium was just the perfect Beatles-Lennon style remark where it's satirizing the rich, but it's kind of in a quite a warm-spirited way, you know, it's not that mean. So, they did have this remarkable appeal. And then they become really the brand leader for pop and rock music.The Beatles as brand leaders in their categoryIan Leslie: You think about brand leaders in any category, what I learned in my marketing theory days—it's not always true—is that the brand leader can win on all the attributes in a category. It can lead on all the kind of key attributes that people care about when it comes to this product type, right? And then the challenger brands have to come in and take one of them, compete on one of those dimensions, because it's only the brand leader that can compete on all of them.So in Andrex, we have a very famous brand of toilet paper in Britain called Andrex, and it was the brand leader for many years, and I'm not sure if it still is. And its slogan for many years was "soft, strong, and very long."So there you have all the three things that people care about in toilet paper, right? It's soft, it's strong, and there's lots of it. And you can have those "and" kind of brands when you're a brand leader. But then if you're a challenger brand, you just want to come in and say, "No, we're the softest," right? It might not be the strongest or the longest, but we're the softest.And that's what you start to see in the 60s because you see The Rolling Stones come in and consciously position themselves against The Beatles and say, "Well, we're not going to try and be for everyone. We are going to be the voice of the teenager versus the parent, right? The rebel versus the establishment." And we'll position ourselves against the brand leader and kind of, you know. So they opened up this space for different brands to kind of come in and take different parts of the market.“Let’s write a swimming pool…”Andrew Mitrak: There's a quote from Paul, I have it here:"John would be getting an extension on his house or something, and the joke used to be, 'Okay, let's write a swimming pool.' It was great motivation. And then in the next three hours, 'Help!' appears from nowhere. And suddenly you get this idea, this is a hit, this is a good one. And you become aware that what we're doing is making money, making good money."Not that all their songs were probably written just purely for money, but it was something that was in their mind and that they were thinking about the appeal of their music and the marketability of their music as they put it together. So it does seem like it was a conscious driver of their work.Ian Leslie: Definitely, definitely. I mean, they always wanted to be rich, and they always wanted to be famous, right?But I think what that comment is so revealing of is how our ideas of how to make money were flipping around this time and how kind of almost shocking it was that you could do this, right?Because you're growing up in an era where, roughly speaking, the amount you earned was somewhat equivalent to the amount of work you put in, the number of hours you put in. And certainly, you know, their alternative careers, which were working in a factory or or maybe becoming a teacher if you're lucky, you know, you worked really hard and then you got a salary for it.The idea that you could just spend half an hour writing a song and earn a hundred times a teacher's salary in that half an hour, because there was something so extraordinary and desirable and contagious about what you created in that half an hour, that was just breathtaking and and sort of hard to get their heads around. So I think that's what Paul's joke is about.They realized that this thing that they liked doing anyway, which was writing songs together, yeah, they could earn huge amounts of money from half an hour's work, and then they could... I mean, that was crazy. And we're a bit more used to that idea now because we live in this kind of world of mass creativity, mass entertainment, and passive income and all these other concepts. But then it was pretty new.Release strategy: albums, singles, and non-album singlesAndrew Mitrak: On this songwriting and song release strategy, one thing that strikes me about The Beatles is both their albums and their non-album singles, which seems like a unique thing. Well, one, most albums would usually have a few good songs and then a bunch of filler, a few good songs if you're lucky, right? There's some filler. But The Beatles' albums, especially from Rubber Soul onward, didn't really have filler. There was no room for filler. There weren't covers the same way there were on the early albums.And on top of multiple albums a year of just great music, they'd also release these non-album singles. And some of their best-known songs, like "Paperback Writer," "Rain," "Lady Madonna," "Hey Jude," "Revolution," were never on an album, or they weren't packaged on an album. You'd buy them as a single.What was their strategy behind this? Is it just that they wrote so much good music they couldn't even fit it all on the albums, that they were just overflowing with great hits? Or was there more of a deliberate approach to doing this both album and non-album single approach?Ian Leslie: Yeah, you know, it goes back... I can't remember if "Please Please Me" is on Please Please Me. It's the kind of thing I should know, but I forget. But certainly "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," I don't think are on albums. And yeah, you see that all the way through. "Penny Lane," "Strawberry Fields," is probably the most famous example, you know, recorded for Sgt. Pepper and then kind of, "No, we'll release these as a single." And obviously it's a single...Andrew Mitrak: By the way, you're in England and you know the UK albums. I know the American albums, and so some of these, I think, would be on albums for the ones that I purchased as well, but they weren't on the UK albums.Ian Leslie: …You don’t look old enough to have purchased the American version...Andrew Mitrak: Well, I didn't purchase them back then, but I'd go to my local Best Buy and buy the CD of it, right?Ian Leslie: Oh right…Andrew Mitrak: Even on streaming, when I look at the US albums, which is what I probably default to on my Spotify or YouTube Music or whatever, it just always has those singles on an album. I think "Penny Lane" is on Magical Mystery Tour…Ian Leslie: They did put them on Magical Mystery Tour. That's fine. But they were recorded for Sgt. Pepper. So they were meant to be part of that. There's a famous thing which is like, "Oh my god, what if they had been on Sgt. Pepper? It would have been even more amazing."But yeah, but generally a lot of singles, a lot of their most famous songs are not on any albums. And their albums are really pretty good. So, I don't think this was a normal thing. I think this was them from the beginning deciding that they didn't want to rip fans off, and they wanted to kind of give fans more than fans expected.You know, these days the cliché is, you know, "surprise and delight your audience." But it was that kind of thing. It was like, "How can we actually go further than we need to in terms of, you know, generosity and giving our audience more?" And in a way, it became a bit of a rod for their own backs, I think, because once they'd established that habit, they didn't feel like they could get rid of it.So I think they maybe regretted not putting "Strawberry Fields" on Sgt. Pepper, etc., etc. But by that stage, they'd established the precedent. But yeah, I mean, I just think it's another beautiful example of The Beatles just always doing more than they needed to and being better than they needed to at every stage, in every aspect of their creative production.The Beatles as PR pioneersAndrew Mitrak: One of the other things that strikes me about them is their public relations. So much of the footage we see from them in the 60s is them in front of the press with a bunch of microphones in their face, especially in their touring years where they'd sit and everybody from the city that they were touring in would have the local media asking them questions.They were just so witty and have this kind of meta-commentary about being interviewed in a way, or kind of there's a self-awareness to how strange it all was. And they just strike me as the folks who would do really well on social media today as well.So do you have any thoughts on their approach to public relations and media relations and how it differed from other artists at the time?Ian Leslie: You know, it's funny, as you're talking, it does remind me of these current debates in politics about how to present your... how to get yourself across, you know. And the contrast between the way the Democrats handle communications in the election campaign and the way the Republicans do, or at least the way the kind of Trump wing of the Republicans do it, which is much more free-wheeling and kind of, "Here I am," and unscripted and rambling on, versus the Democrats who are more conventional politicians, like, "Here's the script." And I don't want a free-wheeling conversation because I might say something wrong, right?And The Beatles did have that kind of, like, "We're unafraid. We'll just come on and talk to you, and we'll answer any of your questions. It's fine. We might kind of take the piss out of you if you ask a stupid question, but we're not going to just do the scripted kind of delivery." And they hated that kind of artificial, synthetic kind of being a good boy in front of the press and saying the right things, just as a lot of people today hate the kind of conventional politician, you know, just being on message all the time. The Beatles never wanted to be on message. They always wanted to be themselves. And you see that in the press, in the PR as well as the music.Where does it come from? I mean, I think this again goes back to the fact that they spent a long time together struggling to become famous for several years. I mean, obviously John and Paul and George had been together for like five, six years by the time they got famous. And they've been performing in all these terrible places. And they've just been kind of pushed together, and they've got this very strong sense of who they are. They have a very strong internal culture, organizational culture, if you like, which... and so by the time they get famous and are in front of the world's cameras, they just know exactly who they are, and they're not prepared to compromise on that. They're just like, "Well, this is who we are. We like making ourselves laugh, and we hope you're going to laugh along." And by and large, the world did.Facing a PR crisis of biblical proportionsAndrew Mitrak: On this topic, one of the things that seems appropriate to bring up is the "more popular than Jesus" quote. And this is also an area where a band is probably dealing with something that no other band has really dealt with before, like a PR crisis about the importance of religion and comparing themselves to that. And it seems relatively like a kind of a blip.Obviously, it's an important point if you see a documentary or in your book, it's covered, but it is something they also recovered from pretty well. How do you think they handled it or what was sort of their approach to handling that?Ian Leslie: Well, yes and no. It was a blip, but I think it was quite a scary blip at the time, both because when they were on tour in the States and there was this whole kind of hoo-ha about being bigger than Jesus, they felt under assault. They felt sort of unpopular for the first time, or they felt hostility, real hostility towards them for the first time, which was very unsettling. And they felt a physical threat as well. There had been rumors of snipers getting into concerts, maybe someone's going to shoot us. So that was all quite scary.And some of their concerts didn't sell out. That tour, you know, there were empty seats in those stadiums, right? Which had kind of never happened before. So I think it felt a little bit like this might be it, you know. There was some sort of sense of real jeopardy there in terms of their career.But the way they get through it is by returning to this sense of inner conviction and determination to tell the truth, as they saw it, without being kind of overly combative or rude. They say, "Look, you know, it wasn't intended as a criticism of Christianity, and we weren't saying we're like Jesus or better than Jesus. We were just making an observation about the way society is going, right?"What terrified them actually was not so much... I'm certainly sure this is true of John... not so much the prospect of a career ending, although that was pretty bad. It was, in a way, something even worse, which was this sense that he would be forced to lie and to sort of not be himself and that they would all kind of have to say, "Oh, yes, you know, we're terribly sorry. We do believe that Christianity is just as, you know, will always survive and be bigger and..." I don't know what whatever the lie would have been that would have satisfied these people, if there was anyone. I think that sense of, like, "We might have to compromise ourselves." And then they pretty quickly work out, "No, we're not going to do that. If we stick together and we talk our way through this and we're just confident, we can get through this." And even if it means hurting our commercial popularity, what's the big deal?In negotiation terms, they had a BATNA, they had a kind of walk away thing, which was like, you know, "Well, fine, you know, we're just going to carry on making music and enjoying ourselves. And if this is it, we've already done way better than we thought we would do." And so that gave them a kind of fearlessness.Rock critics and the Beatles’ breakupAndrew Mitrak: In the late 60s, there's the rise of rock music criticism for the first time. It doesn't seem like rock music criticism was really much of a thing. And Rolling Stone magazine comes out, and John Lennon is the first person on the cover. Do you have any sense of how they approached rock criticism? Or did it actually have any impact on sort of their commercial sales or anything? Or what are your reactions or thoughts on sort of rock criticism at this time?Ian Leslie: It didn't really have any impact. And as you say, it wasn't really… they sort of created, like so much else, they sort of created the whole category of grown-ups thinking and talking and writing about rock music, right? Their music was way ahead of the… the category of, or the sector of entertainment, music, and wasn't really ready for music of sophistication and depth and complexity. So they were way out ahead of everyone for a long time with a few peers like Bob Dylan and the Beach Boys and The Who. But the charts were mostly full of kind of quite bad sort of pop acts really up until the mid-60s.So there suddenly starts to become this whole kind of rock critic, rock journalism. And then it does become quite important. It's never really important to them in terms of sales, I don't think. But particularly, it starts to bite around the time that they're splitting up in the wake of The Beatles' breakup, when they're doing solo albums.The extent to which they really cared about what critics said about their albums is really striking to me looking back on it now. It seems almost unbelievable because, like, McCartney's first solo albums sold really well, pretty well, but he was devastated by the bad reviews. And it really, really hurt him, really got to him. So there was a sense that there was this kind of, like, how am I seen by critics, by my peers? That's really important to me, as well as whether or not people are buying my records. But I think that happens towards the end of the 60s, early 70s, and really the early 70s, maybe through the 70s for a few years, is the heyday of the really, really powerful rock critic establishment.Andrew Mitrak: I was reading some of the contemporary reviews of Paul's solo work. And I think like I'd brought up Venus and Mars on the in the Rolling Stone review at the time of Venus and Mars. And the opening lines are something to the effect of like, "Gosh, you're really seeing how important John Lennon was." And that it's really missing the presence of Lennon. And it's a Paul review, but the first person mentioned in the review is John Lennon.It seems like there was this image of John as the tortured artist and the brilliant mind behind the group. And Venus and Mars is an album that I think has aged pretty well overall, and I think a contemporary, like a review today would be different about its assessment of it. I also think Lester Bangs was like a popular critic at the time who'd, you know, called Paul "Muzak" and very, very dismissive of it. And like, they could be really mean about it. So it seems like it's something that, you know, if you're an artist, like, how could you not be impacted by that in some way if something's going to be so vicious about your music?Ian Leslie: Yeah, and they were very much of their time in that they were mostly male. They responded to Lennon's kind of strong kind of, you know, what we might call kind of like high-agency vibe and his kind of counter-cultural vibe. And, you know, who's making big kind of political gestures around this time in the early 70s. He's part of the kind of anti-Vietnam, anti-Nixon movement. He was on the right side of history, in inverted commas, right? And he was very much part of the kind of counter-cultural movement, which was really where all the kind of hip people were, right?And McCartney was not really there. I mean, in a sense, he was political. There were certain things that he cared about and campaigned on, like marijuana legalization and vegetarianism. And you arguably had a much greater impact on those causes over time than Lennon did in sort of dabbling with counter-culture for a couple of years. So it wasn't that he was apolitical, and he did make a song about Northern Ireland as well. But it's that he didn't see himself as an essentially political figure in the same way. And he was also just somebody who was unashamedly into being a dad and a loving husband. And that was totally uncool.It didn't really fit with the kind of prevailing ideas of being a rock star and being a man, you know, being an artistic man and being a genius, you know. You were meant to be conflicted and difficult and weird and messed up and do unconventional things and throw TVs out of windows and and take drugs and maybe be really horrible to women, that's kind of part of it as well. And McCartney was just sort of refusing to do any of that stuff. His reputation took a battering in the 70s, and it got much worse after John's death because John then becomes kind of deified and it takes many years for his [Paul’s] reputation to recover from that.Apple Corps: A strong brand, but a disastrous businessAndrew Mitrak: One other thing I think that's worth highlighting for the marketing element of The Beatles is Apple Corps. And they name their company Apple Corps. We were talking about naming earlier, and you cited Apple as the great computer brand. And it just strikes me that what do they name their company? Apple Corps. And that even though the company wasn't especially successful, that name actually became pretty valuable because of the trademark and licensing and legal settlements with Apple Computer, which they could have never known at the start. But they picked this really great name, and it seems like that seemed to be among the more valuable parts of that company itself. And it seems like it was reflective of some smart branding intuition. Do you have any thoughts on Apple Corps?Ian Leslie: Well, it was Paul McCartney's name, and he took it from, I think, from a René Magritte painting. You know, McCartney is a huge fan of René Magritte. He just got into him at the time, and you know, there's that famous picture of the man with the apple in front of his face. And I think he took it from that.He liked the sense of artistic subversion that it was associated with. And they were very much running on instinct through the whole Apple thing. In business terms, that proved to be disastrous because it turns out your artistic instincts aren't that good when it comes to running a business. But in anything to do with the creative side of it, it was they were still pretty good, and yeah, Apple is a great name.How George Martin is like Eric SchmidtAndrew Mitrak: Thanks for this conversation, this tour of Beatles history. I know that we've taken a marketing and business approach to this book, but it's... you know, this book is so much more than that. In fact, this business element is just a footnote in the book, and at the core is just this amazing, heartfelt, intimate story of these two geniuses and we were lucky enough that they crossed paths as young men and made all the contributions they made.But as you reflect on this conversation, are there any reflections on lessons that marketers can draw from The Beatles or other things we didn't talk about when it comes to The Beatles and some of the innovation they did around marketing and branding and promoting their music and their work?Ian Leslie: I mean, I think there are more. The thing is, like, the more you think about it, the more stuff comes up. One of the things I was thinking about the other day was the analogy between George Martin and Eric Schmidt at Google. You know, when you have a startup and you have these brilliant young guys, and then it's like, "Well, you might need a gray hair, experienced guy." And Eric Schmidt was the perfect guy for the Google co-founders, and he kind of helped. But in other cases, it hasn't worked out because the gray hair thinks he knows better than these kids and tries to impose his experience on them, and it doesn't work.George Martin was in that Eric Schmidt mode. He used his experience, but he recognized very early on that they were the talent and that they really knew what they were doing, even if they weren't musically educated like he was. They had great musical sophistication and great musical intuition.So his ability to put his ego to one side and say, "Well, how can I help these guys?" rather than trying to impose my ideas on them, I think is a great lesson there for for startups and and growth.But yeah, I'm sure we could talk for a lot longer. There's so many lessons.Subscribe to Ian’s Excellent Newsletter: The RuffianAndrew Mitrak: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for the conversation. As one final question, where can listeners find you online?Ian Leslie: Well, I think the easiest place to get me is my newsletter, my Substack newsletter, which is called The Ruffian. So if you just Google my name and Substack or The Ruffian, you'll find your way to it.Andrew Mitrak: Yes, I'm a subscriber to The Ruffian. I love it. It's a really great newsletter that covers a lot on John and Paul and also a lot of other great topics. Ian Leslie, thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed the conversation.Ian Leslie: Thank you, that was brilliant. Thanks a lot, Andrew. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

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

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

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

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

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