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Northwestern Kellogg Professor Jim Lecinski on being a whole brain marketer | Modern Marketers
00:23:58
This week on Modern Marketers, Jim Lecinski, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, joins Google’s Joshua Spanier and Bethany Poole to talk about Jim’s career pivot from tech executive to...
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- [00:02]
Joshua Espanier
Hi everyone. This is Modern Marketers by Think with Google. I'm Joshua Espanier, VP of Media Lab within Google Marketing. I lead teams around the world who plan, invent execute and measure marketing programs on behalf of Google's brands. Each episode I talk to game changing marketers and founders who are delivering modern marketing today. I'm here with Jim Lecinski, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern's University Kellogg School of Management. Also joining me today as co host is my colleague and global Senior marketing director at goog, Bethany Poole. Let's dive right in. Hey Jim, how's it going?
- [00:38]
Jim Lecinski
Well, hello Josh. Hi Bethany. It's going great. Nice to be with both of you today.
- [00:42]
Joshua Espanier
So let's start jumping into some of these questions. Are you feeling ready?
- [00:45]
Jim Lecinski
Let's do it.
- [00:46]
Joshua Espanier
So Jim, great to see you again. Why don't you tell the audience who you are and what you've been doing and a little bit about you.
- [00:53]
Jim Lecinski
Awesome. Well, I'm Jim Lecinski. I'm a lifetime marketer, spent my career in the media marketing, tech advertising world and at present for the last number of years I've been a, a full time professor of marketing here at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
- [01:09]
Joshua Espanier
Bethany, do you think we're going to be schooled today? Feels that way, right?
- [01:12]
Bethany Poole
I think we will. I mean I have to say I have spent some time in Evanston. I was trying to go to get my MBA from Kellogg. I ended up and of course I ended up at Google. But the tech alert me to Stanford. But I really, I mean Kellogg is number one for marketing when you think about business institutions. So we are learning from an expert here.
- [01:32]
Jim Lecinski
Well, happy to share what I can with you and excited for this conversation today.
- [01:36]
Joshua Espanier
So Jim, you are a professor at the Kellogg School of Management. What does that entail day to day? What are people learning? What are you teaching in this context?
- [01:44]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, so I teach marketing strategy, I teach omnichannel marketing and I teach AI and marketing. And in my courses the next generation of marketing leaders and some of those folks will go on to you know, full time marketing roles. Like a title in marketing. But you know, we have lots of people who are going to go into consulting or go into finance, going to sales or ops. We have a lot of people going to sort of, you know, strategy and ops roles and you know, to have a good understanding. I know we're going to talk about this Josh, of you know, what is modern marketing and how to think about marketing is what we endeavor to prepare people for in a Very sort of practical, tangible way.
- [02:21]
Joshua Espanier
So you've got a front row seat into who the next generation of marketing leaders are. So tell us a little secret. Can you tell. Do you have a sense, can you see what core attributes like would make a great marketing leader in 10 years time and see who's got it in your classes today? Or would that be playing too much favoritism?
- [02:37]
Jim Lecinski
No, I mean, I do think that marketing is an applied science, an applied discipline that can be learned. But at the same time there are some people maybe who have a natural leg up on that and it's somebody who's naturally curious, who has a sense of empathy, who's willing to do the hard work, to walk a mile in their customer or prospect's shoes, who has a little bit of that, I don't know, sort of Sherlock Holmes like why do people behave that way and how do they make decisions? And what if we said this, which I think lends itself to sort of the practice of modern marketing, which is very much about test, learn, optimize, iterate, refine and scale. And so I think the people who naturally lend themselves to that, but we believe we can sort of teach anybody to be excellent at that kind of a process.
- [03:26]
Joshua Espanier
What do you think about creative taste and judgment in a world where we're moving beyond classic TV first sort of long form brand video advertising into this, whatever we're moving into?
- [03:37]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, look, I mean I'm very much a believer and I know my colleagues are here at the Kellogg School, that the best marketers today and into the future are what we would describe as whole brain marketers. Right. They are people who have creative judgment or innovative spirit or risk taking, but at the same time are also grounded and rooted in, you know, the increasingly available amount of information, data assist spreadsheets and the ability to combine left brain and right brain into being a whole brain marketer, I think is what makes the best individual marketers the best marketing teams and leads to the best brands and customer experiences.
- [04:16]
Joshua Espanier
I love the notion of a whole brain marketer. I haven't heard that one before and I'm going to steal that with pride. But I'll credit you, Jim, of course. What's the best piece of career advice you ever got, Jim?
- [04:25]
Jim Lecinski
Best piece of career advice I ever got was from a previous boss and mentor of mine and she kind of repeatedly told me, meet the universe halfway. Meet the universe halfway. And took me a minute to figure out what she meant by this. But, you know, there are kind of two ways to manage your career. One way is sort of, I guess, what we could call the tumbleweed approach, which is like, you know, hey, whatever comes my way, whatever happens to hit my inbox, whatever opportunity, you know, the wind blows at me, you know, if it sounds cool, I'll take it. And then the opposite approach is the wrestle the universe to the ground by the horns approach. And we've all met people like this, which is, you know, in 2.77 years, I will be from level 5 to promoted to level 6, and at which point I will have a 12% pay increase. And I mean, you know, like, you can't wrestle the universe. Right. The universe has its own intention, but yet you can't have zero plan and purely be a tumbleweed. So to have some intention about your career, but also be open to things that come your way, thus meet the universe halfway.
- [05:25]
Joshua Espanier
I love that. So, Jim, you've had a varied career, and he really jumped between different Things, notably from 12 years at Google in a sales role to now being a professor of marketing. Was that scary? How did you know it was the right time? What led to that decision? I'd love to hear a little bit more about making those significant swings in your career.
- [05:45]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, I think on the surface, it looks like a complete career pivot, but actually it was a conversation I had, oh. In early 2006 with Eric Schmidt, and I said to him, I was new at Google at the time, And I said, Dr. Schmidt, what's your advice for me to be successful here? And he said, and I never forget this, he said, teach, don't market, pitch or sell, and the results will follow for our customers, for Google and for you. And at that moment, it sort of reframed my mental model as to, like, what business I'm actually in. Right. I'm not a seller, I'm not a marketer, I'm not an advertiser. I am a teacher. And, you know, at that moment in time, digital marketing, search marketing, social marketing was new to a lot of advertisers who, you know, were used to traditional or classic marketing. And so, you know, that led to the book we wrote called Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, which was really intended to kind of teach the industry how to think about this sort of new way of marketing, but still rooted or connected to the traditional way of thinking. It was a yes and approach. And so that then led to a, you know, I talk about meeting the universe halfway. I got a phone call from former Clark client of mine at Kraft, who said, hey, Jim, I'm retiring. But I had this position as adjunct at Darden at the University of Virginia Business School. Would love for you to take this over. And initially my reaction was like, I got a full time job. I didn't go to University of Virginia. I'd never been a professor. But meet the universe halfway. I said, all right, tell me more about this. He said, just let's go down to Charlottesville and let's see what this is all about. And that sort of opened my eyes to the sort of interacting with MBA students, being a professor, teaching. And then Google was kind enough to allow me to continue working with Darden and then teach classes both at the University of Notre Dame, executive MBA program, and then ultimately at Northwestern while I was still at Google full time. Part of that was to help recruit some MBA talent to Google, but it also exposed me to what this is. So then when the opportunity for me to teach full time came along, I saw myself as a teacher. Over all those years, I had already taught some classes and it wasn't a total shock as to what I was signing up for and then was happy to leap when the opportunity came and the universe knocked at me halfway.
- [08:07]
Bethany Poole
Josh, I'm going to just jump right in because I have a burning question for Jim. You are talking to the rising the next generation of marketers, but in your previous role, you talked to CMOs every day and you probably still do talk to CMOs every day. How has that conversation changed and what's top of mind for them?
- [08:27]
Jim Lecinski
Well, I think there's some similarities or consistencies in those conversations, you know, over the past years, over the past decade. And there's also some new aspects of it. I would say most of the conversations that I have revolve around kind of four topic areas. What's going on with my target audience, whether that's my consumers, you know, B2C. B2B. You know, we always have this adage that I teach in class that, you know, all customers are different but all customers change. And so keeping up with the changing face, the changing expectations of my customers is sort of the when good marketers start the conversation with me, they always want to work customer back, not company out. The second are sort of business expectations. What is my boss, my CEO, my cfo, my board, or my investors? If I'm in a startup founder like what are, what are their expectations or needs and how do I meet that? And you know, this pretty quickly gets to the, you know, tenure of a CMO and what's expected and is the CMO role here or is it changing or is it going away like those kinds of issues. The third are technology kinds of questions. And I mean, there's always been some level of technology involved in marketing, even if it was, you know, back to database or you know, the technology required to publish a catalog or direct mail campaign. Obviously the amount of technology and technology knowledge has greatly ramped up and we can talk about AI and some of those things. And then the fourth area is conversations that I have with them about their teams. Right. How do I recruit talent, how do I train and up level talent, how do I retain talent? How do I create the right roles for people? Are the roles that we had and the job descriptions that we had previously the right job descriptions moving forward or how should I be thinking about those?
- [10:13]
Joshua Espanier
So Jim, you wrote a book about AI before AI was the big thing, published in 2021 and the AI marketing canvas. It's a great book, I've read it. What made you see that AI was going to be this thing so you could actually get a book out and publish before the rest of us really were cottoned on to how big a deal it was going to be?
- [10:33]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, thanks for the shout out. Very proud of that book, the AI Marketing Canvas, written with my co author and fellow professor at Darden, Dr. Rajkumar Venkatesen. And Stanford did a nice job putting that together and publishing that book for us. But really what I saw was when we were together at Google, Sundar and Eric Schmidt and others really, Jeff Dean had a vision that this new technology had the potential to be transformational. That new technology, of course, was the breakthrough which became known as the transformer model, which was written up in the famous paper at Google in 2017, 2018, which really was able to take something that had been theoretical and not really feasible economically. And now it really had a commercial breakthrough because now with the continuing cost of processing, as Moore's Law, GPUs, all of that became more economically available to do the processing on the silicon on the chipset. Availability of data in order to train these models continued to be better and better and better, more and more data. So now we have processing power, we have data. But the last piece was mod that could actually generate generative AI, generate useful output. And so it was sort of the triangulation or the confluence of those three things that I saw that we saw that said, hey, this is not just going to be another hype cycle. This is not going to be another thing that venture capitalists or Silicon Valley puts out there as the next thing. There's really a, there There. And so I spent a lot of time digging into, okay, what are the practical applications? What are the implications for marketers? What does it. Because again, if it's going to change how consumers make decisions in their path to purchase, it therefore is an imperative for us as marketers to pay attention and change how we interact with consumers on that path to purchase.
- [12:36]
Joshua Espanier
So I found the copy of the book I've had from Michelle's for a couple of years and I sort of look back at the conclusion actually in preparation for this conversation and look, a lot of it is still incredibly prescient and relevant today. I wonder if you could just touch on a couple of the conclusions of the book, but then also what might need adjusting now if you were to put out a new edition in 2024.
- [12:59]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, I think some of the core conclusions of the book, and again, thank you for pointing that out, still definitely hold today. I mean, even as much as AI has rapidly advanced and changed, those conclusions are that marketers need to pay attention to this first and foremost. The second conclusion is you yourself as a marketer need to be hands on with these tools. And you know, we then and now still use the analogy of like, you know, if you want to get good at search marketing or you want to get good at social marketing, you can't just like watch a PowerPoint presentation about Instagram or you can't watch a PowerPoint presentation or a Google Slides presentation about Google search, right? Like you have to put it on your phone and you have to use it and you have to engage with it. And so same thing here. And we give marketers the challenge that, you know, you need to be using these tools personally yourself, either for business or to manage your life five times a week. And that's not a very high KPI, but you'd be surprised. A lot of marketers are using it one or zero times a week themselves personally for a variety of reasons. So the second conclusion is get your hands dirty, right? Like get in there and use it. And then the third conclusion is that, you know, there's, there's a sort of a maturity curve, we call it the AI ladder here, crawl, walk, run, if you will, that you can't just wave a magic wand and instantly hire 20 computer scientists from Stanford or Northwestern and build your own in house models and go from zero to superhero, as we say, with a magic wand, blink or a snap of a finger, you have to walk your way up, which starts with all the usual steps. And that is, well, you need zero party and first party Data to train these models. Do you even have any? And go from there. I think those three conclusions of it matters, pay attention to it, get your hands personally, personally dirty and understand how you get from zero to superhero through a couple of stages of maturity. I think those things very much matter.
- [14:58]
Bethany Poole
I'm going to follow up on AI usage. So Jim, talking about modern marketers and AI usage and you said you have to use it, you have to get in there and practice and use it. I would imagine you have your students playing with all sorts of tools and I would also imagine that they don't have the same, I don't know, probably narrow thinking that some of us that have been marketers for a long time think when we tackle that tool, we may have a preset mindset of how I could use it. What are you telling your students to use? How are you telling them to approach these tools? And what should I be telling my team that they need to get in on every day?
- [15:35]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, look, so the use of AI in education at all levels, from primary school all up to MBA and PhD is a hot topic. Right? And I think it's forcing all of us to rethink our, you know, the fancy word is pedagogical approach, how we teach and how learners learn. You know, in the business school, the classic way is professors like me would write a case study and then we would ask students to read the case study and do a write up on the case study. Well, of course you can't do that anymore because you take the PDF, you shove it into ChatGPT or Gemini and you say, here's the assignment from the professor, write the case right up. So we're all forced to kind of up our game on this, which is a good thing. I like this. So what am I telling my students? We had this discussion in fact yesterday. I say, first of all, the real world, the business world is using this. So we're going to use it here in class. I know there are some professors, some institutions who are just forbidding this as an honor code violation. That's not my belief. If we're training people for the real world, AI is in the real world, we need to put it in the classroom. I say for early on purposes like brainstorming, ideation. Hey, here's what I'm thinking. How would I approach this problem or how would I approach this discussion coming up in class, a little bit of use, using it as a tutor, back and forth. I think I encourage that. That's a wonderful use. Early on. Equally at the end of the process, when we do have some deliverables to use it as a polisher, as an editor, say Gemini 1.5 Pro, you are the world's greatest copy editor at the New York Times. Please read my paper and correct all syntax, grammar, logic errors, et cetera, and you can push it to the end of its limits. But look, I mean, these things are exponentially learning and getting better and better and better. And so my point is not to write it off and say, ah, see, it's useless. One of the things that I encourage people to do before they go do a sales call or meet humans or go to a conference is, you know, if you actually know who you're gonna meet, you can go into LinkedIn, you can right click download their profile, which is public, right? They're proud of it and they put it on LinkedIn. You can download that as a PDF, you can upload that to your chatbot of choice, you know, using one of these frontier advanced models like Gemini 1.5 Pro. And you could say, I'm gonna have lunch with these. Here's what I think I'm going to talk about with them, or here's the pitch I think I'm going to make. How will they react? And you can pre role play how that works out in advance. And so, you know, there's a really powerful use of preparation in order to, like, you know, meet the real world and be better prepared.
- [18:13]
Joshua Espanier
So this podcast is named the Modern Marketers Podcast. Can you just expand on what you think modern marketing is today and how we are in this sort of different era and what that means for marketers and brands going forward?
- [18:24]
Jim Lecinski
Look, I would say that from my perspective and in my experience, modern marketing is about marketers who start by saying, our job is value creation and growth as opposed to our job is likes, friends, fans, embeds, downloads, fame, engagement, those kinds of things. Those kinds of measures could be means to an end. But the best marketers, modern marketers, start by saying the end has to be revenue, profit, or share growth. And that's a conversation with your board, with your investors, with your founders, with your CFO and your CEO to say, what is the business goal here? And how can I as a marketer and my marketing team make outsized progress and contribution to that goal? Because honestly, Bethany and Josh, like, if we're not doing that, then we should all be fired, right? Because if the investment, the pool of money, the resources, the headcount, the budget that the CFO is giving, marketing, if we're not contributing to that End outcome for the business. Well, then they should fire us all and give that budget to, I don't know, sales or manufacturing or R and D or. Right. Some other department. And so, you know, I'm very much a big believer that modern marketing starts with the mindset of a marketing return on investment. For every dollar of budget that we're given, we should be returning back $1.10 or $1.20 in not revenue, but profit. Then we go figure out how to do that.
- [19:54]
Bethany Poole
Jim, one of the benefits we've had most recently is you've been doing a guest series for Think with Google and talking and offering your perspective from all of the amazing cmos you talk to and also what you teach. Recently you did an article about creating an annual marketing plan that actually excites the C suite. Can you tell us a little bit more about it and for the marketers listening, how they might do that?
- [20:16]
Jim Lecinski
Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. A great honor and privilege to be invited to write some pieces, some thought pieces for Think with Google. And that one that you referred to, Bethany, is all about how to rethink or maybe take a different approach to building your annual marketing plan. Look, in my experience, we've all seen hundreds, maybe thousands of marketing plans. We've written them and the most common approach is, you know what I describe in that article as a task based approach and that is the marketing team sits down and says, what are all the things we'd like to do next year? Oh, we'd like to upgrade the website. Oh, we'd like to add more staff. Oh, we'd like to get serious about our Instagram account next year or whatever it is, right? And that's a list of activities tasks that we'd like to do. You then put a price tag against those tasks and you hand that to your CFO and say, here's what we'd like the marketing budget to be for next year. But of course, you know, I mean, easy, clear, traditional. But the drawback with that is basically, if you think about what we're doing, there is we're handing the CFO what looks like a bill, right? Like, here's all the stuff. Yeah, here's all the stuff we want to do and here's what it costs. And every good CFO worth her salt is going to look at any bill and try to do what? Reduce it, cut it, trim it. Right? And then this is the sort of, you know, do more with less. My management doesn't get it. Venus and Mars, like all the kind of, you know, strife and agita that comes with that kind of an approach. And so, you know, what we wrote about in the article is to do a strategic shift. Here is to say instead of task based approach, what if you focus on what we'll call an outcome based approach which starts with what are the business goals? Revenue, profit or share. There those three are again next year get aligned with the C suite, in particular the CFO and say, all right, look, if what we're trying to do is deliver, you know, 10% revenue gain next year or 20% profit growth or 20 basis points more of profit, marketers again then need to take the customer based view and say, okay, well what does that mean? We need 1,000 new customers to sign up for our SaaS based B2B service. Or you know, we need our B2C users to buy twice as often. Or what, like break that down into customer behavior and then say, you know, what would it take for us to drive that incremental change in customer behavior and what's the, I'm going to use the word now investment required to deliver that resultant growth back to the company. And now we have a investment based decision with the CFO as opposed to a price tag or wish list based conversation with the cfo. And look, I mean that's always a stronger footing and a conversation that the CFO will more happily engage in versus you know, I'd like to have six more weeks of 30 second ads in my TV media plan next year.
- [23:02]
Joshua Espanier
Nice. That's an exciting project. Look forward to seeing it.
- [23:04]
Jim Lecinski
Hey, thanks for having me on the podcast, Josh. Bethany, great to see you and I've enjoyed this conversation.
- [23:09]
Joshua Espanier
Jim, thank you so much.
- [23:11]
Bethany Poole
Thanks so much.
- [23:14]
Joshua Espanier
A huge thank you to my guest this week, Jim Lisinski and as always my colleague Bethany Poole. If you like this episode, please subscribe to get the latest updates and the next recording as soon as it's ready. We'll see you next time. For Modern Marketers by Think with Google.
- [23:28]
Frankie Guadagnino
Thank you for listening to Modern Marketers by Think with Google. Our host is Joshua Spanier. Modern Marketers is brought to you by Google and Attention. The podcast is produced by the Google Ads Marketing team and Frankie Guadagnino, Tiffer Baucher and Emily Behrens for attention. Our technical producer is Kevin Fisher. Modern Marketers is edited by Sean Colello and the this podcast is mixed and mastered by Andy Inglot. Our theme music is by Jerry Matei. Thanks for listening.