Byron Sharp vs Mark Ritson - 5 big marketing truths we agree on

Summary

Podcast Summary: Uncensored CMO

Episode: Byron Sharp vs Mark Ritson – 5 Big Marketing Truths We Agree On
Host: Jon Evans
Guests: Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson
Date: July 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Uncensored CMO brings together two of marketing’s biggest academic adversaries—Byron Sharp and Mark Ritson—for a rare conversation focusing on the five fundamental marketing truths they agree on. Host Jon Evans facilitates a candid discussion about marketing orthodoxy, paradigm shifts, distinctiveness versus differentiation, the role of mass marketing, and the enduring (or not) significance of purpose. Listeners get firsthand insights, wit, and plenty of memorable moments from two leading minds in the industry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Marketing’s Paradigm Shift

Timestamps: 06:37–17:16

• Paradigm Change: Ritson frames the shift from a “Kotlerian” (Philip Kotler-inspired) marketing era to one underpinned by Ehrenberg-Bass empirical science, shaped by Byron Sharp's influence.
  • "We’re living through a paradigm shift...from the American or the Kotlerian school of marketing to one that is now derived...from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. But it takes time: we’re talking decades for one paradigm to shift to another." (Mark Ritson, 14:29)
• Mental Availability: Sharp asserts that the key marketing challenge is getting a brand to come to mind at the point of purchase, not fostering deep emotional relationships:
  • "Your job is to come to mind in buying situations." (Byron Sharp, 16:36)
• Image vs. Availability: They discuss the historic focus on brand image versus the newer emphasis on mental availability:
  • "How do I get my brand to come to mind is the dominant question. And that comes from Byron’s impact." (Mark Ritson, 15:34)

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2. Distinctiveness vs. Differentiation

Timestamps: 21:05–27:26

• Distinctive Brand Assets: Sharp & Ritson agree that Ehrenberg-Bass made ‘distinctiveness’ (how much a brand looks like itself) a foundational concept in modern marketing.
  • "Distinctiveness has got nothing to do with competitors. It’s a selfish decision: does the brand come to mind?" (Mark Ritson, 21:54)
• Role of Differentiation: Ritson argues there is space for relative differentiation, though uniqueness is rare. Sharp acknowledges situational differentiation exists, but stresses it’s not necessary for brand growth.
  • "Differentiation is everywhere, but it’s largely situational." (Byron Sharp, 23:56)
  • "Be greedy. First of all, yes, distinctiveness. But double D, you know, go for your differentiation as well. Relative, hard." (Mark Ritson, 24:42)
• Single-Minded Positioning: Both stress that positioning should be clear and focused for cut-through.
  • "If you need more than the page for the whole thing...it’s already over." (Mark Ritson, 26:54)

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3. Penetration & the 95:5 Rule

Timestamps: 33:12–41:46

• 95:5 Rule Origins: Sharp and Dawes discuss the seminal data point that, at any point, only about 5% of consumers are in the market to buy—a notion fundamental for understanding long-term brand effects.
  • "It was sort of a flippant thing...95.5, but it's very close." (Byron Sharp, 33:32)
• Implications for Campaigns: Performance marketing (targeting active buyers) yields fast results but is limited to the 5%; brand building (broad reach) targets the other 95% with cumulative, lasting effects.
  • "Short doesn’t drive long. I think that's the nuance. A lot of the brands that are over investing..." (Mark Ritson, 40:35)
  • "You will not see it in your sales. It’s impossible to see." (Byron Sharp, 40:37)
• Marketing Education Gap: Many marketers lack even basic knowledge of penetration.
  • "Only around 45% of marketers know what penetration is." (Mark Ritson, 38:23)

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4. Mass Marketing vs. Segmentation

Timestamps: 42:50–54:15

• Ehrenberg-Bass Revolution: The Institute shifted thinking from narrow segmentation to “sophisticated mass marketing”—reaching the whole category.
  • "We didn’t have distinctiveness before Ehrenberg-Bass...Distinctiveness as a concept just didn’t exist. They really did kind of pull it from the weeds..." (Mark Ritson, 21:05)
  • "You do have to reach everyone...That was Andrew Ehrenberg’s contribution." (Byron Sharp, 43:54)
• Challenger Brand Strategies: For new/small brands, building mental and physical availability in a focused region or subcategory may be practical, but the goal is still broad penetration.
  • "There are advantages and disadvantages of both [narrow vs. broad launch]. Can I get overlapping mental and physical availability...?" (Byron Sharp, 52:01)
  • "Not because you don’t want everything, but you can’t have everything to begin with and you have to bulk up." (Mark Ritson, 51:06)

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5. Purpose: Noble or Nonsense?

Timestamps: 69:14–76:53

• Purpose Skepticism: Both criticize the industry’s infatuation with brand purpose, arguing data shows little effect on sales or true consumer preference.
  • "I was always skeptical...taking shareholders’ money and spending it on favorite charity. That is actually unethical." (Byron Sharp, 69:26)
  • "Nobody cares what your coffee brand thinks about any of these issues. You're not that important...If there is an attribute that is relevant to the consumer that you’re not talking about, that's the cost of this stuff." (Mark Ritson, 71:00)
• Data Over Dogma: The guests praise the move to falsify assertions about purpose through real-world campaign data (ref. Peter Field’s IPA analysis).
  • "Purpose campaigns do not work as well on average, to be fair." (Mark Ritson, 73:41)
• Purpose for the Right Reason: Both acknowledge brands can have sociocultural aims, but should do so from genuine belief, not commercial gain.
  • "If you're saying the reason you're following this purpose agenda is it makes you more money, then you've instantly completely ruined your argument." (Mark Ritson, 76:06)

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6. Brand Building, Heritage, and Playing with Distinctive Assets

Timestamps: 59:01–67:28

• Enforcement Before Play: Ritson argues brands need to establish their distinctive assets for decades before 'playing' with or subverting them in creative work.
  • "40 years of enforcement. And then you can play." (Mark Ritson, 59:31)
• Heritage as Asset: The panel explores how luxury brands leverage history and heritage as a form of distinctiveness.
  • "If you wanted to look at an exemplar of good brand management and how brands grow or work, luxury is a good place to go." (Mark Ritson, 68:14)
  • Anecdotes from luxury—Krug, Ford, Burberry, Stella Artois—make this tangible.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• "The consumer doesn’t give a shit." (Sarah Carter via Mark Ritson, 18:12)
• "Our job as the Institute is to say, ‘OK, what are the empirical claims people are making? Let’s go get some evidence for them.’" (Byron Sharp, 00:57 & 69:43)
• "Be greedy. First, distinctiveness. But double D—go for your differentiation as well." (Mark Ritson, 24:42)
• "If you need more than a page for the whole thing—palettes of distinctive brand assets, whatever your positioning idea might be—it’s already over." (Mark Ritson, 26:54)
• “The purpose of purpose is purpose. The minute you put dollars onto it, it’s not purpose.” (Mark Ritson, 76:53)
• "You are immune to this swirling vortex of horseshit." (Mark Ritson to Byron Sharp, 38:00 & 83:51)

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Additional Highlights

• Academic Honesty & Rigor: Both agree on the need for empirical rigor and healthy academic debate:
  • "Everyone from the university tries to rip their data apart and then afterwards we go for a beer...You're being mean, but I'm pointing out an error." (Byron Sharp, 80:03)
• Championing Distinction, Not Invention: Playful banter about “Dark Lord of Penetration” (Ritson’s nickname for Byron), with Byron’s dry approval.
• Brand Longevity: It takes a decade or more to truly build a healthy brand—far longer than most campaign cycles.

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Conclusion

This episode showcases two thought leaders finding substantial agreement on marketing's enduring principles: focus on mental & physical availability, build (and enforce) distinctiveness, prioritize empirical evidence over received wisdom, and beware of fads like purpose-driven branding when unmoored from consumer reality. It is a masterclass in marketing fundamentals—delivered with humor, candor, and ample academic insight.

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For further reference:

• Distinctive brand assets vs. differentiation: 21:05–27:26
• The 95:5 rule and long-term brand effects: 33:12–41:46
• Challenger brands and mass marketing: 42:50–54:15
• Purpose, skepticism, and campaign effectiveness: 69:14–76:53

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For ongoing insights, sign up for Jon Evans' ‘One Thing’ newsletter to get weekly takeaways from each episode.

Transcript

[John Dawes]

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[Mark Ritson]

Only around 45% of marketers know what penetration is.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, I'm going to so slightly.

[Mark Ritson]

Good. I knew you would.

[Byron Sharp]

So, yeah, I don't like the term long term. I think it's hopeless. Communicating to a cfo. They just like that means I can't ever tell.

[Mark Ritson]

What are you literally like, what are you talking about?

[Byron Sharp]

I mean, I think our job as the institute is to say, okay, look, you're having this debate in industry. What are the empirical claims that people are making? And let's go get some evidence for them.

[Mark Ritson]

You're not that important. Get back in your lane. But that's why you need miserable old, middle aged professors like us, because we genuinely don't care. Bayern will occasionally come onto social media and sort of spank someone. And I always imagine him coming up from the depths, like someone has summoned me with that nonsense. He goes, that's nonsense. We proved that in 1976. And he sort of submerges himself back.

[Byron Sharp]

I know sometimes people are like, you're being mean, but I'm pointing out an error.

[Mark Ritson]

And people are fascinated with what a strange motherfucker you are. Right. Because you are immune to this, you know, swirling vortex of horseshit.

[John Dawes]

We got you both here. Thank you for doing this.

[Mark Ritson]

Are we on now?

[John Dawes]

We've always been on.

[Mark Ritson]

Okay, yeah, sorry.

[John Dawes]

Don't worry. That's the point.

[Byron Sharp]

I'm now gonna get sued.

[John Dawes]

It's almost a decade since you two were in the same room debating marketing. Great conversation on champagne. Mark, do you want to open the champagne for us?

[Mark Ritson]

Yes.

[John Dawes]

You have the skills on the.

[Mark Ritson]

As I said earlier, and the knowledge.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Now may struggle because I'm extreme font

[John Dawes]

of champagne knowledge, quite literally. So as we were just saying there, the entry level, Krug is the pick. Right.

[Mark Ritson]

Well, look, there are a couple of pieces of advice I would give any aspiring marketer, having worked in the World of luxury but not wanting to spend too much money. If you want to get away with having good taste in wine and you know nothing about it, order a bottle of Krug non vintage. It infers you're an expert. And the other one is, if you're going to wear a watch, wear a Speedmaster because it's a relatively lower priced watch by the luxury standards. But no one in Switzerland will give you shit for wearing an Amiga Speedmaster.

[John Dawes]

There we go. I just. It's a camera there.

[Byron Sharp]

There we go.

[Mark Ritson]

I didn't know that there is a dark side of the moon which isn't there.

[Byron Sharp]

That did not sound like it screamed. There's apparently a pub in Adelaide that serves Krug in, you know, the Australian. The Butcher. The Glass. The.

[Mark Ritson]

The.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. And it's like it's always on the menu, apparently.

[Mark Ritson]

Well, you remember old. What's his face. He was a lord at one point. Used to serve it with his shepherd's pie in January.

[John Dawes]

Jeffrey Archer, he was the novelist, politician,

[Mark Ritson]

a lot of things. Jeffrey Archer.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

A lot of money. Right. From the, from books.

[Mark Ritson]

Krug and Shepherd's pie was. Was ultimate.

[John Dawes]

Com. There's something quite rock and roll about that.

[Mark Ritson]

Very rock and roll. Yeah.

[John Dawes]

So when did you guys first meet each other? Obviously the debate 10 years ago. I know your dating history here. When did you first meet?

[Mark Ritson]

We're quite old now, we can't remember.

[Byron Sharp]

It might have been in London.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, it would be in London. We have a shared sort of nexus at London Business School.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Patty Barwise and Andrew Ehrenberg had a link there and. And Byron would be in and out and I was there off and on and joined the faculty in 99.

[Byron Sharp]

Virginia. Virginia Beale worked for Petty Bowers for

[Mark Ritson]

a while, a couple of years.

[Byron Sharp]

And I think she stayed at your house.

[Mark Ritson]

I would imagine that's true. I, I've certainly. I've certainly been drunk with Virginia a couple of times with my accommodations.

[Byron Sharp]

So many attractive young women stayed at that house that he just can't, you know, when I.

[Mark Ritson]

Yes. There were people coming in and out, I admit that. And not everyone that I remember at that time. I was, you know, in my late 20s. Yeah, I think there was a few.

[John Dawes]

Well, cheers.

[Mark Ritson]

Cheers.

[John Dawes]

Thank you for doing this. It's great to get you two together.

[Byron Sharp]

It's like that joke about the 60s, right? If, if, if, if you were. If you were there and remember you

[John Dawes]

weren't, you were there.

[Mark Ritson]

I've got to tell you that we're almost the same age and one of the things about getting to you, sort of mid to late 50s, is you can't remember which countries you've been to, which is a new one. Right. I'm now at the point where I'm not sure if I've been to Budapest or Bucharest because it was so long ago. I'm now struggling with memories.

[Byron Sharp]

I think I remember countries, but, yeah, cities. Or when you were there. You're like, yeah, the winner.

[John Dawes]

Yeah. It could be a decade apart.

[Byron Sharp]

And of course, it was a business trip and you were shuttled from.

[Mark Ritson]

You weren't even there.

[Byron Sharp]

Airport, the hotel.

[John Dawes]

It's like, all looks the same, doesn't it?

[Mark Ritson]

I say, I've got a really nice nanny. And she's like, oh, my God, you've been to wherever. And I'm like, yeah, don't get too excited.

[Byron Sharp]

I didn't really go, yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

You'll be amazed the places I haven't been to.

[John Dawes]

I've actually been to. Yeah. Tragically now, you did your talk on Monday at the Palais. Congratulations.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Got an amazing reaction. What's been the feedback?

[Mark Ritson]

We should. We should do the setup, Byron. So we did. Absolutely. Someone said to me last night, oh, my God, it was so natural. And it was like, you didn't have any script or anything. I'm like, that's about right. How did you make it so natural? I'm like, well, we had no idea

[John Dawes]

what we were doing.

[Mark Ritson]

We went and sat down. So, yeah, I think we got away with it.

[John Dawes]

Had you agreed on the five things?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Dawes]

That was. You'd agreed on those?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, we.

[Mark Ritson]

A long time ago. And then I think your guys had done a slide, hadn't they? Yeah, yeah. I hadn't seen the slides. I'd forgotten about the slides. And I was bugging him. We have to have some slides. I'd not seen the slides then he forgot about them. So, yeah, that was. It was about as loosey goosey. And we were just starting to realize we really had no plan. Just as like 3,000 people were filing into the theater. And it was. Yeah, I mean, it went great, but I wouldn't do that again because we were. We were completely flying.

[Byron Sharp]

I like winging it because I think it makes much more natural.

[John Dawes]

It was. It came across.

[Byron Sharp]

But I was slightly nervous because, you know, it was five things that we agreed on and they're sort of very core things. And I was, you know, a little bit. Because I did see someone who said, this is a must see, although it will be predictable. And I went, oh, yeah, it's true.

[Mark Ritson]

It could have Been two. Two old white guys reminiscing and agreeing isn't the best session, do you know what I mean?

[John Dawes]

You did pull out a few disagreements, though.

[Mark Ritson]

We try our best. Yeah, we were.

[Byron Sharp]

I think we made it interesting, though, because we were able to say some things that people didn't know about it or. Yeah, I mean, which you're going to try to recreate here.

[Mark Ritson]

It was a good chance. Let's say we're 80 or 90 aligned. The main thing is we can bang the hammer for that 80, 90, a different way. Yeah, that's the real thing that floats both of our boats, you know what I mean, at the end of the day.

[John Dawes]

Exactly. Well, let's start with how brands grow. So we. We met first in 2010 when you're doing your book tour. Came to Britvic, Discover the book there.

[Mark Ritson]

Byron doesn't remember anything I was talking about.

[John Dawes]

Oh, do you remember when we met?

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Big moment for John.

[John Dawes]

Do you remember the really informed question I asked?

[Byron Sharp]

No, can't remember that one.

[Mark Ritson]

Nearly not.

[Byron Sharp]

You were only 13, this little boy down the front.

[John Dawes]

I don't know the challenge I had, though, I'll tell you. So it's a Brittany. I got some big brands and some big money. So you caught me at the wrong moment because I was working with like the head of Pepsi who had like £20 million a year. The head of Robinson's had 10 million. I was working on Liptonized tea with about 100 grand. So I was the poor guy in the corner going, what would you do if you only had 100 grand, Byron? Yeah, you know, that was my question, so.

[Mark Ritson]

And we should also mention that most senior marketers that have had Byron visit their company will always say, how was it? Well, bracing. Bracing. You know, Byron goes in with a, you know, you, you give it, you give it your. Your all, your all.

[John Dawes]

Everyone's clear on what you think. I think it's fair to say.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, I hope so. I mean, that's the challenge. Right. Communication is difficult.

[John Dawes]

It is, yeah. Yeah. And make sure you repeat it. So, Mark, how.

[Byron Sharp]

I'm not. I'm not quite so. Like yesterday I was the event and I channeled like. Because you can sometimes be really critical of stupidity that coming in the audience. And I come on those and I actually went. So I channeled you with like, you're delusional,

[Mark Ritson]

but on it. Yeah, that's good.

[Byron Sharp]

They were arguing that in the future people will use AI to choose, you know, like what brand of frozen peas.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Wow.

[Mark Ritson]

Full AI nonsense.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. I mean maybe if you've got a robot and you send it. No, I don't even think like if your robot comes back and they've got all these brands that you don't buy, you tell your robot off.

[John Dawes]

Right? Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

So far the large language models appear to be more brand centric than humans. They're using the brands themselves as shortcuts. So yeah, it's going to matter more.

[John Dawes]

Could matter more.

[Mark Ritson]

It's the old argument about, oh, in the age of the Internet we won't need brands anymore. A bunch of economists basically.

[Byron Sharp]

Oh yeah, they got so excited about that, didn't they?

[Mark Ritson]

Because they forgot that, you know, there are many, there are many utilities of brand and one of them is saving consumers time. So the more information you throw at them, the more they're going to lean on brands. But everyone. 10 years ago, was it about Simonson and those guys?

[Byron Sharp]

Right, yeah. This is a bit of an economist's wet dream, isn't it? That all brands will disappear, karma will disappear, advertising will disappear, you know, so

[Mark Ritson]

you've got to remember John. So we, we were part of this generation of marketing academics. Before us there was the economist ruled jungle. Absolutely. And the rational man and economic man. And then we were, you know, all this irrationality and stuff and they really were assuming we were passing fad. And now marketing's been around sort of 40, 50 years and they're really pissed off. So when the Internet came. Aha. Now the law.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, I did economics to my degree and you're right, it's all about maximizing utility and it's just a functional trade off of how do you get the most utility for the.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, I remember my industrial economics lecturer who I swear came from the pub, did. But you know, doing the marginal revenue equals marginal cost. You maximize profitability as a way to decide how much to spend on advertising. Well, you can do that, you can do that for purchase availability in store because everything should show up in sales. But you can't do that for advertising. I remember talking to a colleague going, that is impossible. You cannot do that for advertising. And he was like, well then what, what? How else could you do it?

[Mark Ritson]

I was like, reality?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

It's like, wow, now you got some criticism even, I believe, didn't you, on your talk?

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, always, yeah. I think the best one was there was a, I think an academic posted on LinkedIn the next day. I wasn't at the session, but basically here's what's wrong with it. And I, I saw it was very early the next morning. And I thought, shall I? And I went, yes, I will. And I said, I think. I think you have to be at the event to critique it, otherwise you might go foolish. But, yeah, yeah, that was. That was the top moronic comment of the day.

[John Dawes]

Now, that's a classic AI world, isn't it? You know.

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, look, I'm porting it.

[John Dawes]

Not being.

[Mark Ritson]

But. But again, I mean, in. In the world of mental availability, at least everyone's thinking about it, even if they're thinking about it in a stupid way.

[John Dawes]

True.

[Mark Ritson]

Still good.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, it still helps.

[Byron Sharp]

It's quite a lot of hubris there, though, right, that I. I feel I can comment on something even I wasn't there. You know, I do sometimes get that with. Have you read how brands go? Well, no, but I got the gist

[Mark Ritson]

of it from a. From a YouTube. I mean, he's very patient.

[Byron Sharp]

You.

[Mark Ritson]

Everyone butchers the work. Do you know what I mean? And you sort of see him wincing when someone's sort of quoting it, but getting it completely wrong. Right? You go, well, that's.

[Byron Sharp]

That's.

[Mark Ritson]

You know, that's not it. It's my work. You know, I do. Do know what it means.

[Byron Sharp]

And you. And you don't sometimes have to go and look, I don't see it. I did not. No, I did not.

[Mark Ritson]

My worst ever academic experience is I went to Oxford to give a talk and I had published a paper in the Journal of Consumer Research, and on the train from London to Oxford, I sort of jammed up on it and I couldn't understand a fucking word of it. And I remember on this train thinking, what is this guy talking about? It was my paper, you know what I mean? And I got to the end of the train journey and I was like, I really am struggling with what the hell this is all about, you know, that's when you start realizing something wrong with what academics are doing, including me.

[Byron Sharp]

You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, that journal, right, is.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. You had to. You had to write in a certain way.

[John Dawes]

Oh.

[Byron Sharp]

Style over substance is huge.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. And that's a. There's a tribe, right. There's the Journal of Consumer Research tribe. Yeah. And they're also the ones who do the most fraud, the most retracted artists.

[Mark Ritson]

I saw that. I saw that.

[John Dawes]

Do you?

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. Academia is a whole.

[John Dawes]

I didn't realize it was a hotbed of fraud then.

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, my goodness. You want to.

[Byron Sharp]

Fraud. I don't know. Breaking news, particularly from the Netherlands.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. The Dutch are hot in it. And any behavioral economist is basically. Do you know What? I mean, like, it's counterintuitive because it's fiction, you know, but. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I suppose it

[Byron Sharp]

becomes an arms race. Right. You have to have another counterintuitive.

[Mark Ritson]

Let me surprise you again. You think it's a cat? No, it's a dog.

[Byron Sharp]

There's a bit of pressure to.

[Mark Ritson]

To keep pulling these rabbits out of the hat. You love that.

[John Dawes]

Now, coming back to how Bram's growth. Sixteen years since you wrote the book.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

As you look at the reaction to the book, what a market is still not understanding that they should understand there's no one thing. Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

It's like, you know, it's patchy. I mean, people implement better in other places and get on top of certain things. Humans have a wonderful ability to muddle their way through to, you know, we do, we do. We progress, astonishing progress. But it's very mud, which messy engineers hate it, you know, and, you know, academics sort of hate it. You know, we need to replace all this democracy and things that just let us. We'll just decide everything. They love that.

[John Dawes]

And Mark, what would you say the impact of how Brian Square has been?

[Mark Ritson]

I. I think it's still a work in progress, and I think we're all very clear on that. We, we. It sounds fancy talk, but in, in academia, we've always looked at paradigms in a very specific sense. Kuhn's idea of there's a socially constructed vision of truth within a scientific movement. And the paradigms do shift. That's where that, that phrase comes from. And what we're seeing in marketing as we live through it is a paradigm shift from what we could call the. The American or the Cutlerian school of marketing to one that is now derived not exclusively, but mostly from the Aaron Burgbas Institute. But it takes time and we're talking decades for one paradigm to shift to another. And if you wanted to understand one example of that, if you take what the school would say about brands, they would take awareness as a small gateway into a much bigger question then, of, do you have an image for the brand? You have a relationship with the brand? How do you feel about the brand? What does the brand feel about you? And on we go. Right.

[Byron Sharp]

Do you remember? Yeah, I do.

[Mark Ritson]

If you take what Aaron Bergbass has done, they kind of have inverted it. And what they've said is that awareness or mental availability piece, do I. Am I there? Do I exist in your consciousness? Is most of it. My bullshit figure is always 70 to 80% of it. There may be a sliver of image or association there in their case category entry points. But it really is. Do I exist is where the focus. I think that's right, yeah. But it's also an inversion that typifies the two schools now. And if you think. If you. If you were in marketing in the 90s, you'll remember it was all about what's the image of the brand? How do I feel about the brand? I have a relationship with this brand, I'm loyal to this brand. We're now entering a period where how do I get my brand to come to mind is the dominant question. And that comes from. From Byron's impact. But we're not there yet. We got 20 more years of banging away at the same drum and even then it, you know, it'll take.

[John Dawes]

That's what people forget, isn't it? I think it's what you said, your job is to come to mind in buying situations.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. That's the mental availability. It's not just one queue. You don't just. It's not top. But you're not just. You can't just be the leader, you'll be. Well, I suppose you could lead on everything, but that's, you know, unusual. Yeah, I love. So, yeah, even big, even, you know, banks are shocked sometimes with their like. So you, you just filled out, you know, satisfaction form and, you know, you said you loved us and you do give us most of your banking and you just took out house insurance which we sell with someone else and. Oh, yeah, now that you mention it, I remember you do sell health insurance, but I didn't think of you at the time.

[Mark Ritson]

And it's hidden by awareness data. So all these banks, of course, have got data showing that our aged awareness score is 96%. It's never 100%. There's always 4% of lunatics that haven't heard of British Airways and NatWest.

[John Dawes]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, but, yeah, so they're looking their awareness data going, we got no problem with awareness. Everybody knows about us. But to Byron's point, not in certain category entry points subcategories where, you know, I always think about banking.

[Byron Sharp]

Not every day.

[Mark Ritson]

No. And consumers don't want more than one financial institution. They would love to have a single one. But it's this failure to be able to take the whole, you know, I'd like my bank to take, you know, all of my stuff.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, that's a good example, isn't it? Because most of us have multiple banks. It's like, why? Oh, well, you know, I love it when you're like, you know, you're at lunch with some bankers and they, you know, they pull out their credit card to pay for them. It's not their bank.

[John Dawes]

It's true.

[Mark Ritson]

It's true.

[John Dawes]

I love the Sarah Carter quote. You are not the customer.

[Mark Ritson]

Do you know this quote? You might not know it. I saw Sarah last. Sarah Carter is a phenomenal account planner from ddb and she said something about, I don't know, but it's one of these things I have chosen to make it famous. Right. I very.

[Byron Sharp]

I thought it was your quote.

[Mark Ritson]

No, no, I stole it from Sarah. And it's every. Every advertiser or marketer should have a post it note on their desk saying the customer, the consumer, doesn't give a shit. And it's a very important quote because it opens the door to a lot of things. Yeah, it's. It's a very banal sounding quote. It opens the door to a lot of Ehrenberg bas work. It opens the door to understanding fundamentally your brand is not important. No one cares about purpose. Your brand isn't coming to mind. And my big point has always been to brand managers, you think about your brand all the time and that's great, but it is an exact inversion to what your consumer is doing out there with 700 brands and 42, you know, free brain cells. You've got it, you know, and it's about them, not about you. You're overthinking it.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. So paradoxically, branding becomes more important.

[John Dawes]

Yes.

[Byron Sharp]

But not for the reasons that people thought.

[Mark Ritson]

That's the key point. When I say it to marketers, I say it a lot. They sort of wince and challenge you and say, well, how can you say brand isn important?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

But Byron's point's the key thing. It's true. And it will make branding more. If brands are less important, branding becomes more important.

[John Dawes]

You know. Now this brings me nicely to my favorite Ehrenberg bass chart. Even though I don't fully understand it.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[John Dawes]

You did a test.

[Byron Sharp]

Not me.

[John Dawes]

You as in.

[Byron Sharp]

I think it's Nicole.

[Mark Ritson]

Nicole.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Asking marketers how distinctive their brand assets were.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. Or being able to. Yes. To be able to judge them. Yes.

[John Dawes]

And then compare that to the actual customer.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

And look, what did that reveal?

[Byron Sharp]

I mean, they're not terrible. You know, people are able. Sometimes there's something that's fairly obvious, but yeah, they way overestimate, you know, they're not the customer. Yeah. They're not the customer.

[John Dawes]

But there's.

[Byron Sharp]

I think there's also. Isn't this Wasn't there? There was a period where people were doing really quite great research, like comparing society values and, you know, what's important to them and things, and then surveying people who work at ad agencies.

[Mark Ritson]

And it's like, yeah, I love that word.

[Byron Sharp]

You live in it.

[Mark Ritson]

It was social usage. There's a great early study that was like, they looked at agency people, what the penetration was on Twitter and Facebook, regular normal people. And they were labeled like normal people, which I really liked. And then they asked the agent, Asians people, to estimate what's the, you know, how many normal people are on Facebook. And the numbers were exactly like the agency number and completely unlike normal people. And it's like. It's a beautiful example if you think you're the consumer and you're definitely.

[John Dawes]

Exactly, exactly. Now what. In this conversation we were having in the Palais, one area where I think you had bit of difference was on distinctiveness versus relative differentiation.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. Well, let me summarize that, because I think Byron's got the difference point. So we're all aligned. And I'm certainly stealing this from many years ago from Eberg Bass. I think it's worth pulling this one out a bit. We didn't have distinctiveness before Ehrenberg Bass. Okay. There are many things that have been rebranded and repositioned, but it's the same old, same old. You can argue as we'll see. Well, branded has been around for a long time, but distinctiveness as a concept just didn't exist. They really did kind of pull it from the weeds, you know, the D word, and had to explain it very nicely. So we all became converts to that. And distinctiveness has got nothing to do with competitors. Yeah. I always think of it as a selfish decision. You know, does the brand come to mind in this particular moment? It's really about, you know, is the brand.

[Byron Sharp]

Do we look like us?

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. And his great quote that I've always loved is a brand that looks like itself.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Is, you know, either from the category entry points being associated, or it leaps out of you because you look like yourself. The brand comes to mind.

[Byron Sharp]

I think you didn't used to wear

[Mark Ritson]

glasses like that or when we were young men. I didn't know I had brown ones.

[Byron Sharp]

Right. But there became a time when, yes. Those glasses became Mark Ritson.

[Mark Ritson]

Distinctive comes to mind.

[John Dawes]

You. You took those glasses off your LinkedIn profile for a while, and I was like, dude, what are you doing?

[Mark Ritson]

Because I think I did. Yeah. Well, it's so bad now when I do video Q and A'S for my classes. I don't need them. I'm, you know, I'm short sighted but I have a pair that they're a non prescription so I can wear them even though I don't need to wear them because no one knows who the fuck I am.

[John Dawes]

Exactly.

[Mark Ritson]

Who's that old blow from there?

[John Dawes]

It's me.

[Mark Ritson]

It's me, you know, so anyway, so distinctiveness, the distinctiveness and this coming to mind is, is the thing. Now, my bullshit stat has always been it's 70 to 80% of the job. Yeah. I still maintain that there should be a quotient on top of that, which is about differentiation. Now there's a caveat there though. I think Michael Porter was very wrong when he talked about differentiation. He conflates being different with being unique. Those two things are not the same thing. And we've been on a quest to find uniqueness for our brands, which is almost impossible. But if we see differentiation as a relative thing, that this bottle is slightly taller than that bottle or whatever it might be, there is the potential for differentiation. Now it doesn't happen a lot, it's hard and most marketers are crap at it, but it is possible. And I think the one thing I got from our talk that I wouldn't have thought was Byron was. Yeah, in theory that's true. And not just relative differentiation in the very prosaic sense which you've always accepted. One is green and one is blue. There is room.

[Byron Sharp]

I've always said this. I'm writing this book, you know, differentiation is everywhere, but it's largely, you know, situational.

[Mark Ritson]

Yes.

[Byron Sharp]

Like this one's got my size. These people will deliver today. These people won't. You know, that's there everywhere. But that's not really brand level.

[Mark Ritson]

But, but your acceptance purchases. No, no, it's got to be there. But your acceptance was also. Yes, there is room for Volvo to be perceived to be more safe. It just doesn't happen very often. And that was a new thing. There is room there even in the Ehrenberg Bass universe, which is dominated by distinctiveness. And I always say to brand managers, be greedy. First of all. Yes, distinctiveness. But double D, you know, go for your differentiation as well. Relative, hard.

[Byron Sharp]

I don't know if you have to,

[Mark Ritson]

I mean, don't have to, but because

[Byron Sharp]

Andrew Irma once said something to me which shocked me as a. Because I, I, you know, came through the sort of differentiation school and John Dawes and I wrote a, you know, very academic article on, on, you know, what is Differentiation and all the theories and things. And Andrew said, well, you know, it said, you, you can't launch a Me Too product. But why not? Like, And I was like,

[Mark Ritson]

that's really radical.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. And I thought about it and I thought, well, yeah, I guess, I guess

[Mark Ritson]

a lot of them are unintentionally. Me too. Yeah. So why not just.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, pretty much every, every accountant who leaves accounting school, business school and goes and starts their own practice launches a meto accounting practice. We'll do your tax return. Oh, really? Wow. Like, yeah, I can't leave anyone else that does it. Yeah, well, Adelaide Central Market, you know, you send that and there's, oh, it's fruit and vegetable and then what's next to it? Fruit and vegetable.

[Mark Ritson]

And your point would be? If they're distinctive enough, they'll win the day, Right?

[Byron Sharp]

Well. And of course, they do have some differentiation, like. Well, where? Over here. So, you know, brands, you know, even what things we think of as really the same still don't compete the way the economists would like to think they do.

[Mark Ritson]

But I would pull that back again, though, to when we look at brands positioning this again, back to the Sarah Carter quote. Almost every brand I've ever worked with has so much in its. First of all, they very rarely have the palette of distinctive brand assets, which is crucial. And second of all, they're trying to jam 500 different words into the customer's head. And none of them, none of that's going to get through. I mean, one of the challenges to get Byron to tick the box and go, okay, this is possible, is you can only position on one or two things to be relatively strong on. And if you look at Les Burnett's really nice quote about this, and then what you do is you keep saying it more than the competition, you do it more than the competition, you don't do other things. And you do that consistently for a long time. There's a chance you can be the safest brand, like Volvo, but, you know, there's a chance you're the snack for break time. Like KitKat, both these brands have spent literally 40 years pretty much just saying that.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

So brand managers and market have to make a choice with positioning these keyholes and onions and all that nonsense. My simple rule has always been if you need more than the page for the whole thing, the palette of distinctive brand assets and whatever your positioning idea might be, it's already over. And again, no coincidence that at Nestle, KitKat has a one page position. The Volvo guys, I think, are pretty aligned as well, it still isn't guaranteed to work.

[Byron Sharp]

No. And you've got to be careful you don't lose side of the main game still.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Which is staying competitive.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Now, you know, I mean, KFC is chicken, it's not burgers.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

But it still competes with McDonald's and stuff.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

And you got to understand that you still do that. So fast food, speed matters. So this really hit me between the eyes. When Years ago. And we ended up writing it up. We only wrote it up as a conference paper, I think, but it had a lovely title. Positioning versus Partitioning. Right. No, I think we mentioned it somewhere and. But we did perceptual map on Australian department stores. And of course you get, you know, David Jones is the upmarket store and Meyer's over here. Yeah. And then Harris Scarfe, it was in the middle, it was the down market store. And then we did duplication of purchase of people's shopping things. And you're like, whoa, it largely fits the law. But there's oversharing between Harris Scarf and David Giant. It's like, that's not supposed to be like that.

[John Dawes]

So what? The most premium and the least premium big overlapping bars.

[Byron Sharp]

And then we got something explained another model called a map.

[Mark Ritson]

That's brilliant. A literal map.

[Byron Sharp]

A literal map. And you realize. Oh, yeah. Well, the David Jones store and the Harris Garage store are opposite each other. And a mile, one is further down.

[John Dawes]

The thing was it at Burger King that said that their strategy was open within 100 yards of McDonald's. McDonald's did the research.

[Mark Ritson]

Well, I mean, I'd even go further. I mean, the one we all miss, we all forget about is products. Right. You know, this, these quotes about, you know, Seth Godin has a horrendous quote, but it's not the, it's not the company that has that. The company doesn't win, that has the best product. It's the one that has, you know, the best conversations or whatever. Product is important, probably. Yeah, it's important.

[Byron Sharp]

It's not everything, but it's probably a

[Mark Ritson]

bit better more than anything else. Right. And. And, and yet a. We don't think about it enough. Is your, you know, at the end of the day, is your product good satis. Yeah. And also our marketers involved in it.

[John Dawes]

Well, that's the issue. I did the research on this recently and I think 91%. Yeah. 91% of marketers own promotion. Only 23% of marketers own products, and

[Mark Ritson]

even less on price.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, exactly. And they don't have influence either as well. You know, influence follows.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. I was years ago, very young, he was doing some honors course with some industrial relations professors and. And I explained the four Ps to them and they went, in industrial relations, we call that an ambit claim. Yeah, you control all of those.

[Mark Ritson]

I mean, the back step we've got now is, okay, we're never going to have a. Maybe we never did have a situation where marketers control product or price. But if we don't have input, particularly understanding. I mean, I think a lot of marketers, thanks to this. This culture we've built, think, not only do I not have input into product, why would I? Yeah, right. I'm doing marketing, I. E. Advertising. They don't even realize it's part of our remit. And what, by the way, the P, the four P's were originally created to remind marketers, these are your four levers.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, it was a checklist. Right. Don't forget, don't forget.

[Mark Ritson]

And of course, what did we do? We started then all these other P's.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

You know. Oh, no, it's about personality and it's about, obviously purpose and it's about people. And the whole point was to say, no, it's about these four things. So while we're asking about over here with other. All remarkably beginning with the word P things, we lost product, we lost pricing, we lost place. Distribution. Exactly. Because we didn't read the bloody book. You know what I mean? So, yeah, it's a. It's a sad old story.

[Byron Sharp]

I won't mention the company, but they asked me to come and look at a whole lot of failed launches in Asia. And we looked at their plans and I'm like, where's the distribution plan in this?

[John Dawes]

Oh, really?

[Byron Sharp]

And I went, just. Did you just think because you're big, you just would automatically get it? Yeah, maybe.

[Mark Ritson]

Pretty much, yeah. Same with Pro. I remember leaving luxury goods.

[Byron Sharp]

These were all failures.

[Mark Ritson]

I remember leaving luxury goods in a world where every CEO literally knew the names of the people that were making their products and where they were made and going back to a regular fashion brand and saying to the senior team, so who's making your product now? We have no idea. Literally, we have no clue who makes this. And you think, well, you know, at the end of the day, you'd have to be a luxury good to really worry about that. You know, product design, who's. How's it sourced? How do we make it and does it work? I mean, it's got to be the

[John Dawes]

most important P. This is definitely A big company problem. I remember my career. I moved from a small, a private equity backed business where I kind of, I literally managed all these. Everything into a kind of big quote unquote CMO role. And then we were launching this new water brand and someone in a meeting goes, oh, we don't seem to have a listing. W.H. smiths. And W. Smith is the biggest, you know, vendor of water on the go, basically. And anyway, because I just come from this small business, I phoned the buyer in the meeting and said, can we get it on the shelf? And he said yes. And we did the deal, you know, and everyone's looking at me go, going, you phone the buyer, you know, you know how to get it on the shelf. But because in large companies you're so distant.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Dawes]

You know what I mean? And different departments are managing different things, their own objectives. And that's why the 4P influence matters because somebody's got to knit that thing together and make sure that it's our operation.

[Mark Ritson]

The contrast with the consumer who automatically integrates it all into a gestalt straight away.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, we've atomized it all out in the departments and, and various different towers. Meanwhile, you can always have digital, traditional. Right. We've created these two silos of communication. We have big debates about brand and performance. And the consumer just goes, yes, perfectly every time.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

We've just got to replicate that in our planning system.

[John Dawes]

Now the other thing I think so many people get wrong is the short and long. And like my favorite Ehrenberg Bass data point probably since you wrote the book, is the 95. 5 rule.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, well, I love that we're talking about.

[John Dawes]

Yeah. Just, just explain the origins of it because it's just, just so profound. The reason I love it is common marketers understand it.

[Mark Ritson]

We're realizing what.

[Byron Sharp]

That's crazy.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

We have now, as Mark says, you know, now people. Yeah. Really love it and get it. And John Doors just, it was sort of a flippant, you know, thing. He was just struggling to communicate, you know, the negative binomial distribution for B2B that most people aren't in your market. And any. Which actually is not a bad, you

[Mark Ritson]

know, it's a number, but it's a good.

[Byron Sharp]

It's very close to the, as I say, scientists. We're not that worried. You know, let the engineers worry about whether it's 95.5, you know, but it's.

[Mark Ritson]

And it came from B2B, which is important because I've had a lot of people in B2B say, yeah, okay, 95.5. But does it work in B2B? I'm like, it came from B2B and

[John Dawes]

it's even, probably even. Presumably it's longer in B2B because people are only changing hands.

[Byron Sharp]

Oh yeah.

[John Dawes]

Every five years. Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

And if it's like premium whiskey or cars.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

It's even more extreme.

[Mark Ritson]

I use haircuts. I find that's the best example. Example. And I said men with haircuts because women and haircuts is a more complex. I don't understand it, but I understand men with haircuts. I always say to a room, I say if, if you go outside right now and I start offering free haircuts, first of all, it would be odd.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

But five out of the hundred guys that pass me will sell them. I just, that's exactly what I need.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And the other 95, even though it's free. Well, I don't need a haircut.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And it's a good way to get that, that model in. But I love to Transpose John's model. 95.5. You explain it, you literally show it. And then I go, so that's why we need short targeted performance communication, because that's where all the money is.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, that's purchase availability, trying to catch, get them off the 5%. Yes, we want our more than our fair share.

[Mark Ritson]

We want to get in there because the money's there. But there's 19 times more people who are not buying right now. They haven't experienced a category entry point. But we know from other data that, that if I can be the salient brand for the 95, 70, 80% of the time, the brand I will buy when I enter the 5% is that brand. And again, that's just as B2B as it is B2C. The B2B guys will give you a lovely drawn out explanation for why they got to whatever company they bought. But it will be 70 to 80% of the time the one that they were all thinking of before they experience.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, they gave that one a chance.

[Mark Ritson]

Yes, yes.

[Byron Sharp]

You know, and 99, they'll deliver the goods.

[Mark Ritson]

And you've got that mental, you know, the tilting of the, of the, of the thing where once it's come to mind, you really, you want it to win so you don't have to think of any others. You know, you're already backing it in a sort of cognitive way.

[John Dawes]

I think the data on B2B, I think what you're referring to there was how people make Buying decisions. And the fact that 80% of buying decisions in a pitch process are made even before the pitch process.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

So it's the brand that comes to mind first, before you even go.

[Byron Sharp]

It's just getting on the list. I mean, if you're. If you're not. If you're not on the wine list, you're not.

[Mark Ritson]

You can't do it over, you know.

[Byron Sharp]

You know, and if someone wants auditing things and then they've got a thousand. They're not going to look at a thousand options.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

They're going to have a short list of like, three or four being on that. Three and four is your 70% of the battle, right?

[John Dawes]

That's right, yeah. Where I got properly schooled on this one was. So I was managing Leukozate, so number one energy drink in the uk, and we went through sugar tax and said to me, yes, yes, absolute freaking disaster.

[Mark Ritson]

Right.

[John Dawes]

Huge backlash. We made the mistake of telling people we're changing it.

[Byron Sharp]

It. Yes.

[John Dawes]

Which is a disaster. Well, people didn't drop out because they didn't like it. They dropped out because they heard it had changed. It was. It was the rumor of it, not the thing that actually led to the disaster.

[Byron Sharp]

It's also the. How dare you.

[Mark Ritson]

Like, it's not your problem.

[John Dawes]

You're messing with it. Yeah. 85 years I've drunk the same thing.

[Mark Ritson]

And, you know, I remember with New Coke, it was, who do you think you are? Mess around with Coke. We're Coca Cola. And they're like, who do you think you are?

[John Dawes]

Well, there's an amazing article actually, called the Wrong Question Question, which is basically, they asked when they did classic Coke, do you like the taste? And everyone said, it's amazing. In fact, it's better than the previous one.

[Mark Ritson]

It was.

[John Dawes]

And the right question was, how do you feel about the fact we've taken your choice away? Oh, no, don't change the Coke. I would literally not drink it, however good it was, because it's the one that I like.

[Mark Ritson]

That's right.

[John Dawes]

And so they'd ask the right question, we'd answer it. But the point I was going to make was we were forced into doing a big relaunch. And so the team. Then I asked the team to get the penetration.

[Byron Sharp]

You were forced because of your mistake to do.

[John Dawes]

Well, exactly. We had no choice, but government pushed, you know, government change. Anyway. Okay, my defense, so. So I asked the team, I said, give me the penetration data. And we're looking at 26% market penetration in the last 12 months.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. In a whole year.

[John Dawes]

Well, I'd, I'd got everyone in the team to reread your book. I said, look, before we have this conversation, you lot are going to read the book and then you come back.

[Mark Ritson]

Was that a punishment? Was that a punishment?

[John Dawes]

Right. You know, we clearly have to get back to basics. I then changed the question. I said, what's our penetration over three years? 46%. And literally seem like what, 20% of the population stereotypical.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Dawes]

Is that 20% of the population?

[Byron Sharp]

Three is the penetration doubles for a consumer.

[John Dawes]

We had been given an objective of an eight week relaunch.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

I'm like, this needs to be eight years. Are you freaking kidding?

[Byron Sharp]

That's very good.

[John Dawes]

We can't just like, you know.

[Mark Ritson]

But I draw, It's a lovely example. I draw your attention to other data we've just collected using Ipsos. Only around 45% of marketers know what penetration is. I can calculate it. I just want to bring us back. Yeah, that's true.

[John Dawes]

Less than half.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, less than half. Representative samples is this.

[John Dawes]

Uk, us.

[Mark Ritson]

You go, uk, us, Canada and Australia. That data point would hold.

[John Dawes]

And they're the best marketers.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

Possibly not traced on this data. So I always think about him because I think, you know, we can have a very big argument about penetration. But first of all, we're gonna have to explain to half the people in the room what we mean.

[John Dawes]

That's wild.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, yeah, we shouldn't forget that.

[John Dawes]

Right, but that, that underpins this whole point, doesn't it, about be yourself, be distinctive, keep doing it, turn up consistently, the whole thing.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah. Lots of, you know, your customer, but you, you know, you look at your 25%, it's good. No, no, that's, that's not really true. Your penetration is way more than that. But it'll take you a long time to reach those people.

[John Dawes]

And it brings to the next point, actually, which is.

[Byron Sharp]

Sorry. That's why I don't like the Tim long term. I think it's the ce, it's hopeless for communicating to a cfo. They're just like, they're just really suspicious. Like that means. That means I can't ever tell. Right.

[John Dawes]

I've changed my mind on this a little bit. I agree with you because I mean,

[Byron Sharp]

I get the idea that investments pay off in the long term, but they're like, the impression is, I think it's worse.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

I think they think this is going to take a long time for impact. It's even worse.

[Byron Sharp]

And the reality is, no, it's having a sales effect immediately but it doesn't show up in your sales next week because only 5%.

[Mark Ritson]

Very important thing.

[John Dawes]

This is why I use 55 because it really frames it as lasting effects.

[Byron Sharp]

Spread out.

[John Dawes]

Because each week you got your different

[Mark Ritson]

5% and you see it with that system 1 data. If you look at the best brand building campaigns that really work on the brand building level, they all also beautifully correlate with short term sales spikes as well. So if you have a great. But the reverse is not true. If you do something very, very promotional which is extraordinarily targeted, which works great at the sales spikes. Like it doesn't do anything for the brand. Yeah. So. So the long and the short long drive short. But short doesn't drive long. I think that's, that's the nuance a lot of the brands that are over investing.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, I'm gonna so slightly.

[Mark Ritson]

Good. I knew you would.

[Byron Sharp]

So yeah it is true. It is working in the short term but it will not show it. You will not see it in your sales. It's impossible to see.

[Mark Ritson]

So it'll stretch out after that point.

[Byron Sharp]

The, the signal is, you know, like you're doing a fairly big ad campaign. So you've got about 5% reach in the week.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

So even of the people who are buying this week, a tiny. Even the people who are buying you, most of them have not had an exposure. So you just have. No. So I just had some data on this fits with huge meta analysis. The typical advertising elasticity for broad reach advertising is zero.

[Mark Ritson]

Is that right?

[Byron Sharp]

Which means you move it up, you move it down and your sales guy,

[Mark Ritson]

you don't see it.

[John Dawes]

You just can't see it in the short term, presumably.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's no way of doing it in the long term.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Because you're like I just cannot see it.

[Mark Ritson]

And you're back to 95.5.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

You've got to go to the 95 who are not in the market and look at their memories. Have I moved those? Because I cannot see it myself. But I purchase availability. Like I close the doors of the store. What happens?

[John Dawes]

100%.

[Byron Sharp]

So I can do lots of optimizing. If I buy that search word or that one or I buy this facing, I use a gondola end. If it doesn't show up in sales, it's not working so great. Optimize there, do your marketing mix, modeling, whatever. Do not do that for broad reach advertising. So the elasticity is for media that are much more like performance digital and things 10, 20 times higher.

[Mark Ritson]

Interesting.

[Byron Sharp]

So TV for latest meta analysis is like for TV, that the elasticity is 0.0008, which we could round to zero. But if it's. If it's search, no way. You turn the search word on or off. Some of them go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Dawes]

Well, batch 955, aren't we?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, because it's. Yeah, because it's. It's.

[John Dawes]

If someone are looking, someone types a

[Byron Sharp]

new washing machine, they're in the five.

[John Dawes]

They are in the five. Exactly. That's the point. I mean, this brings us to the third point you guys were agreeing on, which is the role of mass marketing. And that's quite a change, isn't it, from where we were.

[Mark Ritson]

It's another credit to Ehrenberg Bass. Yeah, I mean we. In the early. Where do you want to pick? Sort of 90s. We'd reached a point where it was. It was the classic story of Henry Ford Eddie Car. You like, as long as it's black. Mass marketing, stupid. And then from Ted Levitt onwards at Harvard, who's one of my heroes, it was like, if you're not talking segmentation, you're not talking marketing. You must go after a smaller group, customize that smaller group, exclude the other groups and really focus on them. And we really were there. And we got to the point in the 90s where it was kind of bizarre that the excluding bit was kind of what marketers would boast about. I only want these. I don't want those horrible guys. We're for these guys. And that was when Aaron Burgbas came in with. And I remember the initial reaction, it was the thing everyone was most skeptical of when the book came out, mass marketing. And we should be clear, you know, they don't mean every. You know, my, my simple example is always dog food. When Ehrenberg must say mass marketing, that means sophisticated mass marketing. It's everyone that owns a dog or even smaller. It's not everyone in the population.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. And not necessarily treating them the same. You know, some people have smaller houses, so they've got to have. Have smaller tins or they've got smaller dogs. So they don't, you know, you don't have to treat everyone the same, but you do have to reach everyone. And I think that was really Andrew Ehrenberg's contribution. He maybe couldn't sort of espouse it, but because he looked and he saw the negative Binoma distribution and Gerald had done the duplication of starters viewing law. And he's like, so you're looking at the marketing textbook, but I don't see that in the data because if you really were able to carve off a segment, you wouldn't just. When a brand grows, you wouldn't see that it pulls from every single group in the thing. So it does not match.

[Mark Ritson]

That's his south back time. Or it's before that. When was he seeing that?

[Byron Sharp]

Oh, no, that's. That's before London business school.

[Mark Ritson]

The early, early days.

[Byron Sharp]

It was. They had a problem at Atwood panels, I think. So a panel was quite small in those days. And they had one household who, who bought something like 14 times for Cadbury drinking chocolate. And they're like. Which skewed up there.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Like, do we take this panel, this household out and that's gonna change completely? Or are they like normal or whatever? Andrew went, okay, well, so what is normal for heavy? You know, how many heavies should you have?

[Mark Ritson]

And that's how it begins.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And it's important to realize that, you know, Byron became a convert of this because of Andrew Ehrenberg and also important to realize that he's kind of our alpha. Alpha candidate from, from the new paradigm. So it's Andrew coming up with a lot of this stuff initially. And.

[Byron Sharp]

And Gerald.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, and Gerald.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Being laughed at. Literally laughed at because they're in the middle of the American paradigm. And I saw Andrew present a couple of times in America and it was just this strange reaction which was. What are you literally like, what are you talking about? Yeah. And they didn't know what to make of it. I remember, I think it was an acr, but any one of the early conferences I went to as a doctoral student and, and this very interesting man who was English, which is quite rare back then as well, making this very interesting presentation and this, this weird. They were respectful. But the, the, the big American business school professors who were all the legend I was. Oh my God. They're such and such were just like respectful, but nonsense. Yeah, I can remember that.

[Byron Sharp]

Gerald. Okay, Gerald tells a story where because the English had different paper size. Right. You had a four in the Americans. So they could tell, you know, just by. By the paper size who was submitting this journal article.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

And it's all completely different for reviewers saying something like, the authors are obviously British, need not count against them.

[John Dawes]

That's very good.

[Byron Sharp]

I should have said that with an American accent.

[John Dawes]

So the challenge I'd put in on this one is what do you do if you're a challenger brand. So going back to when we met in Briviko, you had Pepsi, Robinson's. They had tens of millions of pounds.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

I have my hundred thousand pounds on Lipton. And if you look at, say, you know, Fever Tree or Red Bull, what they tend to do when they launched is they focus on one part of the market and they grew penetration in that part of the market.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. Which is a.

[John Dawes]

And then you see them gradually expand. So I did this in this. Look at this data.

[Mark Ritson]

Where I looked.

[Byron Sharp]

Fever Tree saw an opening that had just. Schweppes had just left.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Their thing. So we are shrimp of essence. We're up market, except we're selling 2.5 liter warm bottles in Tesco. And Fever Tree went well. The. The world is getting richer. Bit more premium. It. If they're in small bottles, the sparkle stays better. You know, like just. They've just left that area.

[John Dawes]

Wild about that. So. So Britvic is obviously named after. So Britv is the. After Schweps, the number two tonic brand. No one knows that, but Britvic is a tonic. That's how the company was created.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[John Dawes]

So Britvic Tonic. So I. I thought I was poor one lips and iced tea with my hundred grand. There's zero budget on Britvic Tonic.

[Byron Sharp]

Right. But if you hadn't. And if Schweps hadn't, Fever Tree wouldn't be here.

[John Dawes]

Well, this is.

[Byron Sharp]

This is.

[John Dawes]

This is the idea. This is what happens next. Right. So Fever Tree go in and go. Well, Schweppes is the. Is the last player on the. On the team sheet. Britvic Tonic's the last player on the team sheet. They all had almost perfect distribution because everywhere they went and they needed a tonic, you'd put in Britvic or Schweps.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[John Dawes]

So Fevature did what they did. Fever Tree then became bigger than Britvic in market capitalization.

[Mark Ritson]

But this is.

[John Dawes]

Starting from that point.

[Mark Ritson]

This is the story of disruption that Clay Christiansen talked about that nobody ever understood. He did that beautiful work at Harvard. Looking at how is it that a dominant brand can be usurped by a smaller player? And the answer is, for the longest time, it doesn't look like usurpation. It looks like a part of the market that. That's unprofitable, uninteresting and small. So we. You service them, we don't want them.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

But what happens over time is that becomes the source if you Netflix supplanting Blockbuster. Blockbuster didn't want the DVD market because it was tiny. The niche of the niche, as he as the CEO called it at the time. But over time, this is how disruption occurs. So I think it's a really important part of. I hate the overuse of the word disruption and the ignorance of Clay Christensen's work. Everyone in market's disruptive. You don't know what that means. It's a. It's a very different thing, you know, a very important thing.

[John Dawes]

Galloway's got this lovely quote which is, the less sexy the industry, the greater your return on investment. And I think there's something in that find the most boring category that comes

[Byron Sharp]

because other people won't look at it.

[John Dawes]

They won't look. Yeah, exactly. And then they can't be bothered. And then by the time you. It's like, who gives a crap? Toilet roll, Right. They've gone into. I mean, who's innovating? Toilet roll. And then they've had a free run.

[Mark Ritson]

It's a great point.

[Byron Sharp]

Point. But with the fever tree thing, I mean, I think, I do think it was that Schweppes would just chase volume and the volumes in supermarkets and big bottles and, and. And they just left some territory that they previously owned. I mean, they were the posh brand.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, but I think that that's it. You chase margin, you chase revenue, you chase categories, and, and that's. That's the correct thing to do for now. But it's not, as you spin it out over time, you've left, you know, Clay's original work looked at the ste. Indians supplanted the Americans in the steel industry. And the Indians took all the little jobs that the American firms didn't want until suddenly they had the confidence and the scale to expand out. And if you're smart, like the Chobani story is a good one, you choose a subcategory because you're too small to take on the big yogurt brands. So what Chobani started out tiny, right. So what they did was they said, right, there's a subcategory of Greek yogurt. No one's in that subcategory. So we'll be. We will take that and we'll build our scale and our. And our salience and everything else in that category. And then, of course, we will grow that category out with us inside it. You know what I mean? I think it's a very important. You can. You know, we know about penetration. If you're not big enough, you go after a segment very simply defined because you can't afford to do the math, or you go after a subcategory. For the same reason. Not because you don't want everything, but you can't have everything to begin with and you have to bulk up.

[John Dawes]

Exactly, exactly. That's basically what doing lips and iced tea. Because in the uk, I mean, I know obviously in Australia, elsewhere, iced tea is phenomenal. It's everywhere.

[Byron Sharp]

Didn't used to be, though.

[John Dawes]

No, exactly, exactly. In the uk, no one drinks iced tea, so why would I have tea cold? So that was our problem. But because it was a unique new category, I was able to own that category and be the iced tea in the category. But I had, But I had to start really tight. I had to start literally in central London to get, you know, to build up the physical availability and the mental availability and then kind of almost.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. So this is what we say that if you're. We used to get asked, right, if I'm a small brand, should I start in a little regional thing and then move out or should I try to. And we would say, well, there are advantages and disadvantages of both. You know, if you start small, there's less risk and you can win it. But of course, you then prove to the others it's a business success and they can trump you, you know, so, you know, you start in Sydney, you start to move west, and someone started in first and come the other way and we're like, I don't know, you

[Mark Ritson]

gotta make it choice.

[Byron Sharp]

We've both seen, you know, we've seen successes either way, but now what I say is the way to decide is, can I get overlapping mental and physical availability? So if you are a national player and you can do that, go national.

[Mark Ritson]

But it's going to be detected by physical availability, which is probably the harder lever than the mental one.

[Byron Sharp]

Well, for some companies it's not okay.

[Mark Ritson]

Depends on the category.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. If you're a PNG, they can go, I can get like over 80% weighted distribution in a couple of weeks.

[Mark Ritson]

And also we've got a great competence of doing that mass advertising.

[John Dawes]

Yeah. So here's.

[Byron Sharp]

But if you don't have that, if you've got limited budgets, which everyone haven't you. You might go, all right, I'll. I'll start, I'll start in New York.

[John Dawes]

But here's the thing, right? So even on. At the same time, I launched Lips Iced Tea, Coke launched Coke Zero. They. They, they were the textbook. They went 95% distribution in six weeks.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

No one ever done that, which they would do. Yeah.

[John Dawes]

And they got the, and they got the Coke brand. They relaunched three times the next 10 years. In fact their sales went down 50% in year two too. So even Coke was struggling to keep the listings in because it was a new concept at the time. I mean, you know, you could argue about Diet Coke where they duplicating.

[Byron Sharp]

Well also because mental value is, is, is it's always for those companies it's always slower. Even when you Coke, you know, like. Well, even when you're coking you're spending staggering, you know, well a large amount you're probably still only getting weekly reach of about 10 and it's accumulating to. I've gotten, I've got 90 weighted distribution to get 90% of people even knowing my name is probably going to take two years.

[John Dawes]

That was it. In fact it's about 10 years until they got to probably a sustainable level.

[Mark Ritson]

10 years is a very good figure for a lot of things. I think one of the things, you know, we've got these lovely very fast digital firms now and it's you know, create an ad on Monday, run it Wednesday, have the data Friday, you know and that's largely true. But if you step back and look at how long does it take to build a proper brand, how long does it take to fix a broken brand? Invariably we come back to about a decade to truly get what you need to be in a decent position. And that's a mind blowing data point for you know, for an industry where as I learned on Monday the average brand building campaign is 40 days long.

[John Dawes]

That's insane. Well, I got, I got the. When I did my soft drink project looking at innovation over 10 years, my conclusion to the paper was it takes on average of 7 years to have an overnight success.

[Byron Sharp]

40 days actually get some people to crunch some numbers on that of like what if without the Super Bowl.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

How much reach could you actually really ever expect to get in 40 days?

[Mark Ritson]

Talk to Tiltman here at Cannes. He's got. It's a good study from about. And these are the big brands, big spenders. $2 billion worth of investment. Yeah the average is. And that's not the activation stuff. It's just they're named that when they've said it's a brand building campaign. The 40, 40 days.

[John Dawes]

Is that the award entry? Is that based on entry data?

[Mark Ritson]

I think they've actually, I forget they've used an actual media monitoring company to look at it. So it's pretty solid data.

[Byron Sharp]

It's very hard without time to get a lot of reach.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

With super bowl side it doesn't matter how Much you spend what. You'll just be spending more money, but your. Your frequency be going through the roof. It's all going to be some people who go, what? No, I've never seen it.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Because the most creative work will be the one that runs the shortest amount of time around an event like Super Bowl, Christmas, World Cup. So it could be linked to that rather than.

[Mark Ritson]

And it's getting marketers to say, look, it takes two or three years for your campaign to work. Okay. You could run some of these ads through that, but just have a campaign which is joined up. I was with AB InBev yesterday, who I do think are, you know, you can argue, how do they get these prizes? They probably are the most advanced advertiser. They really know the excellence. I was waiting to do my talk and I watched them all presented. They're on it. You know, they're really on it. They're the only ones getting this point that my campaign will run for two or three or four years and there's no reason to change it just because we're all sick of it.

[John Dawes]

You know, they're well on that. Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

It's very rare, though. They're scholars. They really are scholars of effectiveness. And you.

[Byron Sharp]

It used to be part of Procter and Campbell's, and their competitors would fear this, the fact that Proctor would do their homework and then they would commit to something for two years, and so

[Mark Ritson]

they wouldn't let it go.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

How did you feel about Pritchard and the gang? They adopted your work early. Are they in the center?

[Byron Sharp]

No.

[Mark Ritson]

He read your stuff before.

[Byron Sharp]

Oh, yeah, yeah. He's very complimentary. So it's good.

[Mark Ritson]

And it must have felt you and I both have the same, you know, foundational love of png. You know, it invented so much. Right.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

It must have been quite the thing. I mean, I worked for them for free a couple times. I asked them, I said, send me a razor. And they're like, a razor. And I said, I want a Gillette razor from Cincinnati sent to me by png. And I still shave with it. It means a lot to me because it's png and they invented brand management. So when they. When Pritchard was clearly singing from your hymn book, I thought, geez, that's a.

[Byron Sharp]

A.

[Mark Ritson]

That's a moment for Byron there. And that was seven, eight years ago.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They. It was. It's. I remember saying to them, and they

[Mark Ritson]

were, sorry, they were the cutlerian segment target positioning. Yeah. Until suddenly they weren't. And it's one Thing to hear Byron say it. Mark Pritchard's on a stage talking about sophisticated mass marketing. I'm like, what was that?

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah, but I remember, I remember, I think probably the first time I visited PNG and I said something like to them though, you're held up as the best marketers on the planet. And they went, what?

[Mark Ritson]

They're a humble bunch.

[Byron Sharp]

No, but they also had things because there was a long period where they were very C and so they didn't win awards here and stuff. I mean, and they would say to me, oh, we can, you know, like those ads you showed Brian, that's great. But we can't do that because the chemists control everything here. If we don't have, if we don't talk about their new XY something enzyme.

[Mark Ritson]

You know, the playbook was, was very sort of taught and serious.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, but that. Yeah, so it was sort of, it was wrong. But they did very well because they were still much more disciplined than anyone else.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. And they were halfway down your road and PNG carries that way even among their competitors. You know, I think it's still, I think the portfolio is looking very dusty these days. But I still love, I mean what they did in Covid for me was still like his png.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

They've got again, it's a hundred year old playbook. In a time of great recession, we will go, we will double down. Not because of the recession, but we know all of our competitors will pull back and we will get shared.

[Byron Sharp]

We did some fantastic stuff with things like Old Spice, some fantastic advertising. Actually that's a bit weird for P and G because that brand is actually hard to find.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, it is, it is. No, I agree. Yeah. But that's a really good example.

[Byron Sharp]

That's weird.

[John Dawes]

Yeah. Because I interviewed the guy that did that. That and that double. Yeah, George Felix. Yeah, fantastic. I mean really, really good. But that did double market share. Got them back to number one position within 12.

[Byron Sharp]

And then he went from there to KFC.

[Mark Ritson]

He did.

[Byron Sharp]

And we worked with him there and he did you. Yeah, and he. And you know, distinctive brand assets.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Brought the Colonel back.

[John Dawes]

Yes.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, very interesting.

[Byron Sharp]

Someone, someone decided, you know, it's this white guy from the South.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, yeah. Don't mention, for God's sake, don't mention the Colonel.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, yeah. And now they're like, we're really leaning into the kernel now.

[Mark Ritson]

No, and they. And then, oh, here's a great one for you. So my only contribution to distinctive brand assets was the idea of playing with them. And I think Jenny misses it. Right. And I think she covers it better now. But. And the point would be, my rule, which is incredibly basic, is 40 years of enforcement.

[Byron Sharp]

Oh, and then you can play.

[Mark Ritson]

And then you're allowed to play.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And if you actually. If you actually look at when it works, you really need the kfc, for example. Example. Sure enough, they've had the Colonel as a. As a DBA now for X number of decades.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

You can dress him up as a. Yeah. As a cowboy and all of that stuff. But the other message to marketers is don't play with it until it's been enforced. Enforced. Enforced. Like both Glico, I work for. We can play with the yellow, Tiffany can play with the green. We've. We've earned the right.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, I. I agree with that.

[John Dawes]

It's like at the World Cup. You saw the World cup that they. Because of the naming.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[John Dawes]

Convention where you can't have anyone that's not a sponsor. In the us, most stadiums are named by brands, so they've had to cover them up.

[Byron Sharp]

Yes.

[John Dawes]

And in the leave on the Levi's stadium, I saw that they covered it.

[Byron Sharp]

Sorry, it went over my head.

[John Dawes]

First of all, they covered up in the shape of the Levi's logo, which I thought was brilliant.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. But maybe they should have used, you know, color as well or something. Yeah.

[John Dawes]

If they're allowed to, I imagine. Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

So I think this is weird, so I agree with you, but I think. I think. What would Jenny say? What?

[Mark Ritson]

James says, let's paraphrase the woman here. Yeah. Let's mansplain her theory.

[Byron Sharp]

I think she would say, hey, guys, you. But you have to do a bit of research and know how you can play. And. And she has had. There have been more PhDs of looking like, well, can you play by, you know, sticking it next to another brand?

[Mark Ritson]

Yes, yes.

[Byron Sharp]

And. And, yeah, my love.

[Mark Ritson]

My love of it was when I worked for Louis Vuitton, we did this thing with Takeshi Murakami where we took the monogram, which is about 150 years old, and Murakami is like the pop artist, you know, And I think the brief from Marc Jacobs was, you know, Takeshi, come in and fuck around with the monogram with your creative genius. And he made it all neon pink and blue on a white background. And there were people in Paris like, having a stroke when they saw it. You know, incredibly successful collection. But also, it's that beautiful example of when your brand is big and old and dusty. Two things have happened. You need to Refresh. You also usually have old, distinctive brand assets that you can now play with. And the two things go together and there's this magic trick where it still looks like the brand.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

But it's fresh and new.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

So you're sort of tipping your hat to heritage, but you're also being creative and modern at the same time. And when that happens, you just feel that lovely sense of, oh, that's, it's perfect. Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

And it can work.

[Mark Ritson]

So I mean, it works quick.

[Byron Sharp]

I mean, for the consumer, they can get it. And I, I have these slides where I flash some ads that are really using distinctive assets in a playful way than that. And I deliberately flash the, the ad for less than two seconds. And you, and you can hear people laugh in the audience.

[Mark Ritson]

Interesting.

[Byron Sharp]

And I go, I use this to knock the attention people who say, you know, you gotta have it like that

[Mark Ritson]

within your last two seconds, your brain

[Byron Sharp]

process it and you had a physiological reaction. So I know that that went in.

[Mark Ritson]

Very good. Yeah, very good.

[John Dawes]

Back to your point. That's 40 years of brand building to get.

[Mark Ritson]

But also it's, it's quick for the consumer. It's also quick commercially. Like when clients ask me, what's the one thing we can do? I'm like, make your stuff more, more distinctive. Because it will have an instantaneous impact not just on the consumer's attention, but it'll hit the sales as well. It's an easy trick to play. It isn't a long term mission.

[Byron Sharp]

I mean, you have fantastic creativity. There's a barilla one where the spaghetti pasta goes like this. It obviously looks like fireworks and Happy New Year.

[Mark Ritson]

Brilliant way to do it.

[Byron Sharp]

It's like a joke, it's like a visual joke which you get.

[Mark Ritson]

No, it's, it's, it's old and existing stuff done in a new way and it's the perfect place you want to play.

[John Dawes]

And I mean the, the genius with that and others like this is that you get your physical availability off the back of it. You go to retailers and go, oh, we're going to change our packaging for the first time in 40 years. You know, do this stunt and then you get all the displays in store.

[Mark Ritson]

But the caution, of course is we, again, you've got to be working on a brand that has that old palette well established because there's, there's no trick if they don't know the original and then not do it all the bloody time to the point where we always

[John Dawes]

ceases to become that.

[Mark Ritson]

You still have to reinforce. And of course Every marketer wants to change stuff. So you've really got to introduce that concept very carefully into a client because otherwise, like, yeah, we'll change it. We want to change this and this year's one.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

What should we do next?

[Byron Sharp]

Why are you doing that? Well, it's our birthday.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah. Anniversaries are my favorite. Right. If you want to look at product orientation. A lot of companies are now getting to be 100 years old, I think. All right. It's our anniversary next year. We're 100 years old. We have to celebrate it. It's like, like why nobody cares, you know, Qantas is 100 years old. And. And what does that do for me? Does it mean you have older planes? You know what I mean? You know, we'll fly on the original. You. You celebrated in your office. But don't waste your advertising telling me you're 100. I actually don't care. It means what's the benefit of that fact? I should.

[Byron Sharp]

I should save me a couple because. Because we did this last year for the year best being 20 years old. But I suppose we had a story to say to people. We. We're actually 20 years old.

[Mark Ritson]

If it fits an existing strategic objective.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

I remember Burberry having their. I think it must have been 150th and it was the quietest anniversary of all time. And that's the CEO at the time. Why. Why aren't you making more of a deal of it? And she said, look, we're pretty. We're pretty dusty at the moment. The last thing we need is 150th anniversary. Keep it quiet, actually, as if you come across.

[John Dawes]

This was a Grand Prix award winning bit of creative last year that. The Stellar Artois probability. Did you read about this? So the. What they did is they looked at kind of classic paintings from kind of France and Belgium and they actually work using, you know, using history and AI. They worked out the probability that it was actually Stellar Artois in the painting

[Mark Ritson]

because it's a very old.

[Byron Sharp]

Is it really that old?

[Mark Ritson]

It's. It's 500 years. It might be one of the oldest. It's 500 years. They go back 500 easy.

[John Dawes]

So they were tracing back where the brewery was, where the painter wasn't it. Yeah, the whole thing. Right. So they had all these different painters and they worked out that they had the probability, statistical probability, that that was actually Estelle de Artoire in that. In that painting. And brilliant way to anchor yourself in terms of history if you want to

[Mark Ritson]

give Yourself an injection.

[John Dawes]

Yeah. If you need remind people that we've been here for a while.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. I'm a bit of a history buff so I love it when brands like go into their past. I had colleague who pointed out that Ford has like fabulous heritage.

[Mark Ritson]

Yes.

[Byron Sharp]

And I mean, yeah, but in Australia it's just another.

[Mark Ritson]

We can have the Aussie Ford which is a little bit, you know, more superficial. But I mean you'd have loved my stuff. And back in the day when we were with, particularly with lvmh, we go into the archive as kind of the first step and partly for the what we would have called at the time brand codes, distinctive brand assets. We would find these things.

[Byron Sharp]

Yes.

[Mark Ritson]

And it was this magical moment where like le bras arm for Hennessy, you know, which is guy holding like a big port color thing, whatever. You would see it everywhere and you'd realize, oh, 100 years ago these guys knew what they were doing. You know what I mean? They were doing it better than a lot of the contemporary guys. We've just got a. Of go back and look. There was a lovely moment on Krug.

[Byron Sharp]

We were.

[Mark Ritson]

Every luxury brand that doesn't know itself uses black and gold because they're just like, well, seluks, you know. And we were really struggling with. Is there a color? And Johan Krug, the founder, there's a book in the. Literally in the meson in the library because again he was German, you know, he wasn't French, he wasn't champenoire and he. There was a book and he literally laid out the instructions for my. The inheritors of the house of Krug. And you had These sort of 150 pages this guy laying out. So this is what you do. And one of the things he said is we have this dark cherry book, the dark cherry I've picked that is the color of Krug. And Maggie, the president at the time was like almost weeping because she's like, he's literally telling us from 150 years ago, this is our color.

[Byron Sharp]

Yes.

[Mark Ritson]

And she sent me a, she sent me a photo and she was personally, she's the president. She was painting the gate, gates of the, of the maison in this dark cherry and, and it's now since gone everywhere. But we got it from history. You know, I mean there's that magical moment where you go, these are great brands and these are connective moments back to the founders. It's, you know, it's God's work when you, when that. When that sort of stuff.

[Byron Sharp]

I mean luxury rents have to have some sort of story, people have to, yes, almost justify themselves why they paid that much money.

[Mark Ritson]

They definitely do.

[Byron Sharp]

But, but I would say it's like a, you know, top restaurant. Yes, the food has to taste good, but it has to be entertaining to explain it for us to play that much.

[Mark Ritson]

But I found, you know, we, you know, there's, there's a lot of nonsense spoken about luxury, like what is luxury? And one of the things we, we did lean on Nberg Bass to some degree even there because I, I stopped believing there was such a thing as luxury brand management. Cap Ferrier has a lovely book which I entirely disagree with about how it's different. It's the same, just more, you know, it's more concentrated, it's heightened and, but the principal laws of brand management are the same. And I think most of the senior guys I work with at LVMH would agree, you know, it's, there isn't something different. There's more of certain things. Heritage and distinctiveness, actually. And if you really wanted to look at an exemplar of good brand management and how brands grow or work, luxury is a good place to go, actually. You see a lot of principles there that you can take.

[Byron Sharp]

You know, a lot of luxury brands are still family owned or there's a link or French pension fund. So. Yeah, so they're quite, quite willing to be disciplined and long term.

[Mark Ritson]

Yes.

[John Dawes]

That's the key thing, isn't it? Because they take your long term decisions.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, they're like, well, we have for 150 years. We're planning for another 150.

[Mark Ritson]

I think your distinctiveness point as well, because there's the second most important person in the luxury house isn't the cfo, it's the creative director. They're far more attuned to distinctive brand assets than most organizations are. Because you've got someone that has that sensitivity to taste and looks. I've seen that happen, you know, when you have a Galliano walking around Dior. They know the language of the house and how it needs to look. There's, you know, it's, it's, it's much stronger.

[Byron Sharp]

And they're respectful to the heritage.

[Mark Ritson]

They are.

[John Dawes]

They are now talking of things that matter or maybe not matter. You covered purpose.

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, yes.

[John Dawes]

In your conversation or the nonsense of purpose. So where do you stand on purpose, Byron?

[Byron Sharp]

Oh, well, you know, and the role it has. I was always skeptical and a little bit uneasy about the idea of taking shareholders money and spending it on favorite charity. I mean, that is actually Unethical. I know people what it's doing good for the world. I'm like, well, according to you, yeah,

[Mark Ritson]

your idea, your definition.

[Byron Sharp]

So I was a little bit queasy on that. But you know, it's a classic brand image thing and we know that brand equity is largely mental and physical availability. So how much can this thing be doing? And then we had a researcher, Tori, and she was really keen on purpose. And so. Oh, Tori, that's good. We've got a team that has skepticism and advocacy. Let's go collect the data. Because, I mean, I think our job as the investment studies to say, okay, look, you're having this debate in industry, what are the empirical claims that people are making? And let's go get some evidence for them.

[Mark Ritson]

I think it's misconstrued by the industry because they don't understand falsificationism. I mean, I think they don't appreciate that there's, it's not negative. You know what I mean? Like what you're trying to do, you're tentatively holding a theory you can't disprove. That's how, that's how we move forward. You can't.

[Byron Sharp]

There was also a special crowd, of course, and someone asked why, why now? Is it sort of starting to erode? And I mean, I think there were a lot of people who were skeptical before, but they're scared that if they spoke up they were going to be called a Nazi or something. Yeah, you don't want to save dolphins.

[Mark Ritson]

To be fair to me and you. So we've all, we've been consistent on this point. Right.

[Byron Sharp]

But you must have lots of people

[Mark Ritson]

saying to you, yeah, there's something wrong with you. Very personal messages from people saying, you know, you must be a terrible human being not to support this. There was kind of a fascism in the sort of the protection of this liberal do goodery that was actually quite dark and sinister. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's not, it's not brave to stand up for these things if you're not allowed not to stand up for them. Right. But look, the main point was again, let's come back to Sarah Carter's famous post it note. Yes, nobody gives a shit and they've got 400 brands on their brain if, you know, across a year, nobody cares what, you know, what your coffee brand thinks about any of these issues. You're not that important. Get back in your lane and don't waste your, the opportunity cost of talking about all this nonsense is enormous to you because meanwhile you are Driving your distinctiveness. If there is an attribute that is relevant to the consumer that you're not talking about, that's the cost of, of this stuff. And then of course we had all these people selling purpose or built their careers on purpose who were rationalizing it and justifying it with incredibly, incredibly poor data.

[Byron Sharp]

Right.

[John Dawes]

Well that's the trap, isn't it? When it's like, you know, you ask the consumer, you know, do you care about saving the dolphins, to use your example? Well, of course they're going to say that. Right. Who doesn't?

[Byron Sharp]

I'm not.

[John Dawes]

Is that why you're buying a toothpaste? Maybe not.

[Mark Ritson]

The Kantar data is very important. So Kantar did a very special thing. They, they showed all of that. If I send out an attractive young man or woman to ask people, you got to, of course, it's very important to me. Yes. And then they just reversed it and took a bunch of consumers and said, right, let's go through the six things you have literally just bought. Tell me why. And it, the purpose stuff never came up again. It was literally less than a percentile of the explanatory reasons verbatim.

[Byron Sharp]

We already knew this for green environmental brands, that it was the. And so some of the purpose stuff was even more obscure that people would even. Whereas you could usually spot at least the green brand. Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And they all looked alike. I mean all these purpose statements were incredibly. The advertising. Yeah. The whole thing really bland. And we should be clear, John. I mean I can't speak for Byron have a socio cultural purpose, but do it because you believe in these things.

[John Dawes]

Now I will put a little defense in because I, because you have to. Well, well I, I heard Peter Field, because Peter Field does some analysis in the IPA database.

[Byron Sharp]

Yes.

[Mark Ritson]

Byron's good on this.

[Byron Sharp]

Now the, and Peter came out, he came out swinging. Well, it was almost like he anticipated criticism, which he was because it was shocking research.

[Mark Ritson]

But what was your take on that?

[John Dawes]

Okay. On the headline level. So basically he found what you'd expect to see, which is purpose versus non purpose. You get about 30 or 40% underperformance with purpose overall on average.

[Byron Sharp]

Purpose.

[Mark Ritson]

The headline was purpose campaigns do not work as well on average, to be fair.

[John Dawes]

And he came out, out saying that. Totally.

[Mark Ritson]

He did.

[John Dawes]

And then he said when you dig under it, what you find is in certain situations where the brand was created for the purpose.

[Byron Sharp]

No, he just found that some of them obviously.

[John Dawes]

Yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

Mark did this really well of saying like, okay, but you know, the best goal scorers are right Footed. Oh, ah, but there is a, there is one left footed who scored lots of goals. Yeah. Okay.

[Mark Ritson]

We just look at him. Yeah, because that's, I mean I did ask, look, Peter's one of my heroes. But yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't good because what he showed was, yeah, normally non purpose campaigns are much better, but if you take the very best purpose

[Byron Sharp]

campaigns, it's not bad.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, actually they're a little bit better. But you're comparing it to the whole set of non purpose. Right. And I, and I actually asked Peter, I said, if you take the best set of non purpose campaigns, they're even better still. Yeah. How do they compare? Oh no, they're much better than the best purpose campaign campaigns. And, and we get this point. We were trying to prove a hypothesis that we've clearly disproved because the ideology. And we got a round of applause on Monday, right, when we both said, look, we think purpose is overdone. Big round of applause.

[Byron Sharp]

So people, it's good that people feel safe to do that now.

[Mark Ritson]

But I said to them, I said to them on the Monday, I said, yeah, great, thanks very much. Round of applause. You were all here five years ago and I said, don't forget that some other nonsense will come and you'll all be like this again. The, the wisdom of crowds. And I mean, look, I'm blowing our horns here a little bit, but that's why you need miserable old middle aged professors like us, because we, we are genuine. We genuinely don't care. Right. We don't care about being unpopular and we may be wrong sometimes, but you need us there because everyone else is,

[John Dawes]

you know, but, but digging in a state of more than what, what it also told you is that the role of purpose was basically to make hiring better. You know, it would basically.

[Byron Sharp]

Maybe that wasn't in the day rather. But yeah, of course

[John Dawes]

what it shows is with the purpose campaigns, you saw this increase in kind of employee engagement.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, sure, that's a different thing.

[John Dawes]

Agreed. You also saw customers want to do business with people that do the right thing. But so you saw that benefit as well.

[Byron Sharp]

So I'm sure these benefits could be there, but no one has done serious research to see whether that is enough to pay off and be worthwhile.

[Mark Ritson]

I talked to a philosopher, which I don't do very often in a pub once about this

[Byron Sharp]

place to talk to

[Mark Ritson]

a philosopher, a pissed philosopher is always the greatest source of insight to me. So I told him the story and he said, oh, there's an immediate problem with all of this, which I don't think anyone got, except for this philosopher. And he said, look, if you're saying the reason you're following this purpose agenda is it makes you more money money, then you've instantly completely ruined your argument. Because if I can show you that imprisoning women or destroying the planet will make you more money, your logic says that's what you'll do instead. And I'm like, yeah, that's true. We choose to do these things because we believe in them. The minute you say it's being driven by a prophet, then it's clearly not purpose. That started me off with the. My favorite line, hypocrisy. Yeah. The purpose of purpose is purpose.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

And the minute you put dollars onto it, it's not purpose, it's some other thing. And then I think everyone was happy then to prove that it doesn't really give you the money, it does now.

[John Dawes]

You closed your presentation, Mark, with your famous description of Byron as the Dark Lord of penetration.

[Mark Ritson]

Oh, yes.

[John Dawes]

Which I thought was funny.

[Mark Ritson]

Well, also his response was good. So it was very good. So if you're not aware of this. So I've been very naughtily referring to, to, to Byron as the Dark Lord of penetration for about 10 years now. It still entertains me whenever I write it. Right. And as people will ask me questions and they'll say, but what? But the Dark Lord wouldn't agree with you. Right. And everyone's, what are you talking about? And it's just become, you know, the dark. Is that. And I always, like us, Byron will occasionally come onto social media and sort of spank someone. And I always imagine him coming up from the depths, like someone has summoned me with that nonsense. And he comes up and he goes, that's nonsense. We proved that in 1976. And he sort of submerges himself back with a ripple barrier. Ripple on top of the leg. So I got to ask Byron, I said, well, you know, you've never, as you have done with other topics, sent me a short one line email saying, I do not appreciate you calling me the Dark Lord. So I just inferred it was all right. Which it turns out it was.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. But also I will send you those notes if I think you, if you've strayed into. He's not denying it, speculation rather than something. But I'm like, you're allowed to call me the whatever. You know, you're allowed to call me whatever you'd like.

[Mark Ritson]

It's not factually incorrect.

[John Dawes]

So that being the case, Byron, what Do you call Mark?

[Byron Sharp]

I don't have a name from Mark. But this is your name. We talked about this in the, in the car over and. Oh, I was, I, I, yeah, I sang. And I think you were slightly offended when I said you were like one of the best business journalists on the planet. And you thought it was sort of a backhanded, like, you're not.

[Mark Ritson]

I really liked it. I really liked it. But it was a way.

[Byron Sharp]

No, no. Can I fill in the thing because, Because I've always had the view that, I mean, you could say journalism is not great, great, but business journalism, it's just, we don't have investigative journalism. We do not have journalists who understand business and can do insightful engineering. We, we have. So it's, you know, at least you get it in politics, maybe a bit, but in business you get things like so and so's released their annual report today. Wow. Yeah, like, wow. Yeah, yeah. Whereas your columns are that, like, because, because you didn't go through journalism school, you came from a business school.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, yeah, it's true. And I think one of the things, hardly any one of the things people misunderstand about academics is when we do talks, which we've both done at universities, with each other in the audience and many others, someone presents their work and in the room as a show of respect, everyone from the university tries to rip their data apart and then afterwards we go for a beer and it's, it's not like they all think academia is very soft. It's much harder than business. And you go after each other because you're trying to apply rigor. And if I can't find a flaw in Byron's data, I accept that it may be true. Right. And I think when we take that level of discourse into the business, everyone's, oh, my goodness.

[Byron Sharp]

I know sometimes people are like, you're being mean, but I'm pointing out an era. Isn't that that good?

[Mark Ritson]

Isn't that what you want? You know, but no, I remember him saying it to me at Time, and I always, I did smile. He said, oh, Mark's, you know, one of the best. You know, there's nothing wrong with Mark. He's a fine journalist. And I thought, yeah, that's fine. Giving me a.

[Byron Sharp]

No, it wasn't. I said, you like that? I think, I mean, I can't. If someone said to me, who's the best business journalist on the planet? I. I say, I suppose there's possibly someone in finance or something's pretty good. But, you know, for me, It's Mark Ritson. And. And that's why. And that's why people read you. Right. Because.

[Mark Ritson]

And I think to be fair, get. I've always been very lucky that people conflate me writing about marketing with my skills for marketing, which are actually two very different things. But I'm quite happy for them to be conflated.

[Byron Sharp]

You know, you built the Mini MBA as a. As a. As a brand.

[Mark Ritson]

There was a real moment there, right, where, Where I thought, if it doesn't work, not only will it be a waste of time, but I'll look like an absolute fraud. There's a double loss there. Right, right. So thank God it did work.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah.

[Mark Ritson]

Because otherwise it's like you. If you. If you'd. And we should met. If you're happier, we should make mention this. He re. I mean, I'm not even. I'm an ex professor, you know, I'm not. I've never been a real professor of any standing. But if you look at what Byron does, he doesn't. May have made millions of quid for my thing. He doesn't.

[John Dawes]

Right.

[Mark Ritson]

I mean, he, he's paid a professor's salary. The money they make goes back to the institute and pays for Ph.D. students.

[Byron Sharp]

Yes.

[Mark Ritson]

And.

[Byron Sharp]

Oh, and this is why I get snarky when you. When there's a slight ripoff crowd. I mean, there's people. Yeah. When we did the.

[Mark Ritson]

Making money from it. Yeah, yeah.

[Byron Sharp]

When we did the. What? When. When brands go dark, you know, like when they switch off advertising and we'd publish that in a journal. No, sorry, We'd. We'd given it to sponsors three years before, but it was about to come out in a journal and I went, ah, there's going to be people who are going to pick this up and there's going to be people who get. Who over exaggerate this. Like.

[Mark Ritson]

Yeah, they miss. They don't understand it.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. And so, I mean, the only defense we have have is for us to put out some beautiful charts that people can steal the beautiful charts that are branded in Bass Institute. Because there's people who take our stuff, make money from it and they rebrand it up and they might suddenly put in a tiny, tiny font, six or so. One of our researchers is Ari and then he's Indonesian, his last name is unpronounced. They'll put that there. And like, who knows?

[John Dawes]

But.

[Mark Ritson]

But I think we've all got to remember that, right? He works as hard as I do, but I'm getting a very decent payback in a Variety of different ways from what I do. And he's not well.

[Byron Sharp]

So I want the power. I want the institute to get fame so that businesses still buy us in effect and that funds the next generation of marketing scientists.

[Mark Ritson]

He doesn't see. He's so stupid. He doesn't even get my, my point. He's like. I'm like, yeah, I know.

[John Dawes]

He's sure.

[Mark Ritson]

He doesn't even think about it. Well, we, we do get.

[Byron Sharp]

I mean we do, but a lot of money comes into the institute and, and so I mean we are just off the charts for any research income for any.

[Mark Ritson]

He still doesn't get the point.

[John Dawes]

Carry on all day. But I think he's.

[Byron Sharp]

I get to live in Australia.

[John Dawes]

Yeah, yeah, he's happy.

[Byron Sharp]

You. I mean I get to live in Adelaide. We grew down in cold Tasmania, one

[Mark Ritson]

of the few places that's, that's certainly more interesting than Tasmania. Adelaide. But, but yeah, when we, when we look back on this era, long gone, you know, I'm gonna certainly be a good footnote. You know, my columns will be remembered a little bit. A little bit. But Byron and his impact will be the singular. I mean it will be that you like this, but it'll be the Cutler of that era. It'll be Byron Sharp. There was the Cutler period and he likes to. And again he likes to deflect it to the Ehrenberg Bass Institute. You know, you can't get them for long with him. Well, actually to other people at the end the Institute. But it's Byron. I mean, Jenny's been is a very sizable, you know, influence.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah, I know there's other people.

[Mark Ritson]

There is. But yeah, you know, Andrew started this, but it's Byron that will have the impact and will be the one they remember. And in my career it doesn't take more than five minutes for someone to say, are you friends with Byron? You're in touch, you know what I mean? So he does. The dark Lord does cast a shadow over the. And people are fascinated with what. What a strange motherfucker you are. Right? Because. Because you are immune to this, you know, swirling vortex of horeshit. Right. You don't, you don't care.

[Byron Sharp]

Yeah. Too. I mean, I think it's one of the reasons I don't like both of them because it sounds so wishy washy and things I think, you know, I love. I think it's off brand. Your brand is, you know, you know, you know the, the kid who's going, hey, the Emperor's not wearing any clothes that, that's what the. That's the Ritz. And I love. I think that's what the Ritz in the world loves. Right? Yeah.

[John Dawes]

Week. Well, what a beautiful place to end. Yeah, you guys are agreeing on a

[Byron Sharp]

hell of a lot here. Champagne. Champagne helps.

[John Dawes]

I feel like it is doing apology well we spent. This is good though.

[Mark Ritson]

We've spent. We spent this week like we've had three things together. Right. We want to see each other now for another 10 years. So there's plenty of time for us to start beating the out of each other on LinkedIn.

[Byron Sharp]

We should do this in the U.S.

[Mark Ritson]

yeah, in 10 years time.

[John Dawes]

Let's do it in the U.S. next year.

[Mark Ritson]

I don't think they have any clue any of us.

[John Dawes]

Well because I don't know. Yeah, that's true. Actually it'd be good fun. Gentlemen, thank you. Honestly, thank you so much for doing this. So glad we got to do it. Great fun. Let's keep it up.

[Byron Sharp]

Great fun.

[John Dawes]

Thank you. So I hope you enjoy that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now by the way, I've got a new newsletter so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate. Appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOS. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not be happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.