A History of Marketing / Episode 54

Few people have challenged how I think about marketing more than Professor Byron Sharp. His book, How Brands Grow, might be the most influential marketing book of the contemporary era. It told a generation of marketers that much of what they’d been taught was wrong, and it had the data to back it up.

Sharp is the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the world’s largest center for marketing science research. You may remember my conversation with Professor Rachel Kennedy that covered the institute’s history and the two researchers it’s named for: Andrew Ehrenberg, who discovered law-like patterns in buying behavior, and Frank Bass, who believed marketing could be studied like any other part of the real world.

This episode picks up that story, straight from the man who carried their work to a global audience. It’s a conversation that spares no sacred cows: Kotler’s STP, brand purpose, behavioral science, and personalized advertising all take hits.

We cover:

* How a young academic in Australia took on giants like Philip Kotler, and why marketing had the data to become a science long before it acted like one

* The difference between looking scientific and being scientific

* A round of overrated / underrated: Sharp’s hot takes on positioning, brand purpose, behavioral science, and personalized advertising

* Whether AI opens new questions for marketing’s most famous empiricist

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Special thanks to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, for reviewing and editing transcripts for accuracy and clarity. And to Nick Asbury, who you may remember from episode 53 of this podcast, for introducing me to Byron.

Andrew Mitrak: Byron Sharp, you’ve been at the top of my list of people to interview since before I started this podcast. So I’m looking forward to a conversation with you about marketing history and “the arrival of science.”

Byron Sharp: (Laughs) That’s not true because you interviewed Philip Kotler first.

Andrew Mitrak: Yes, well, I’ve interviewed a lot of people. I feel like I’ve had a chance to do my homework prior to interviewing you. Of course, I read and re-read How Brands Grow and then, for the first time, I went through How Brands Grow: Part 2. So that was excellent. So I feel like I’ve done my homework prior to speaking with you, between that and the other interviews I’ve done.

Byron Sharp: Excellent, excellent. At the end of your Philip Kotler podcast, he said, you know, “an inquiring mind” and “read a great deal of things,” and he was excited for the next revolution in marketing. He’d like to be part of it. I don’t know, when was that recorded? When did you record that with him?

Andrew Mitrak: I recorded that in October of 2024.

Byron Sharp: Okay, well, gosh, there has been a revolution. He’s obviously missed out on it.

“Have you looked?”: The Shift to Marketing Science

Andrew Mitrak: Let’s talk about that. So let’s talk back to sort of the Kotlerian era of marketing, and when you first encountered marketing, when did you realize that the prevailing marketing wisdom wasn’t sufficiently evidence-based?

Byron Sharp: You know, when I did my master’s by research, I read a lot of the American literature and things, and it was researchy. You know, it’s researchy. But it’s not terribly—it’s not the sort of science that we learn when we’re at high school. There was sort of, I don’t know, it’s weird. It’s a weird thing in the—I mean, Andrew Ehrenberg wrote this amazing article, published it in Nature, right? The world’s most famous scientific journal, called “Even the Social Sciences Have Laws.” And in there, he said that there was this sort of belief that you could not have scientific laws that concern human beings or crazy things like advertising and stuff. And it’s a great line from Andrew. I don’t know if it was ever published, but when people said there can be no laws in marketing, he would say, “Have you looked?” You know, if you don’t look, you’re not going to find. Because that’s always been—I mean, science is actually quite a new thing, and it’s only a few hundred years old. And it was just people looking systematically, taking systematic measurements of things. It’s not actually rocket science.

In the podcast with Philip Kotler, he talked about how—what was it?—in his time, finance was seen as science and marketing wasn’t. But even he is not talking about science; he’s talking about engineering. He’s talking about using numbers and spreadsheets and things like this, which is just not science. Science is repeating studies over and over and looking for repeatable patterns and then building—then when you find those, you can make predictions, and you can start to understand how the world’s working. And you can start to—you realize that some explanations work, fit with those laws, and some don’t. And you find weird things because the world is weird. There is only one science, right? People often say, “Can marketing be a science?” I’m like, “No, there’s only one science, it’s called science.” Science studies the real world. It can study marketing. It can study turtles. It can study whatever is in the real world.

But it follows a method that is designed to establish laws that are so reliable that we don’t, you know, I always joke, no engineer asks, “So what’s Brazilian gravity like?” We know. And that repeatability—so a lot of academia was always about new things, new words, or just coming up with new titles. “Social marketing” we’ll call it, as if people in charities didn’t realize that beforehand. I don’t, yeah, or buzzwords and things.

Applying Scientific Method to Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: So was there ever a moment where you were in some marketing lecture or reading a marketing book and just realizing, “There is no science here”? Like, what was the spark or the initial moment where you felt like, “Oh, this is not sufficiently science-based and therefore I could actually be part of the movement to make it more science-based”?

Byron Sharp: I don’t know. I think because I read philosophy of science, and I read writing by people like Frank Bass and Andrew Ehrenberg, and Andrew was actually doing it. And so I was very keen on replication, and I started a journal. I was advised, “Do a journal, it’ll be really widely cited.” It wasn’t. But I invited Andrew Ehrenberg onto the advisory board and then started working with him, and then sort of the rest is history, I suppose. But I came from the Phil Kotler school. I always liked how Phil Kotler was quite down to earth. He wasn’t like the Cannes crowd that I’ve just been with, you know. He was quite skeptical of the idea that advertising could manipulate people. There is a famous line about, you know, “People don’t have garages full of cars they don’t drive and fridges full of food they don’t eat” and things. They are quite experienced. And I liked that down-to-earth thing. So I sort of rebelled a little bit about the mystical part of marketing, the sort of magic advertising that subtly changed people’s psychology and things like that. I was quite skeptical about that. And at the same time, I thought, “Why aren’t people talking about memories? Why aren’t they talking about what we now call mental availability?” It seems that this is really underplayed. And that sort of got me doing research and discovering stuff.

The Pareto Law That Wasn’t 80/20

Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any hypotheses as to why it was that marketing was not more scientific, or stayed unscientific for so long? Or do you have any instincts, or have you looked at why—why wasn’t Phil Kotler more science-based, or why weren’t the folks of his era more science-based? Was there some bottleneck preventing them from being more scientific? Did they not have access to the research or the tools and processes to be more scientific, or do you feel like there was j...