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Mark runs the Mini MBA in Marketing and Brand Management. He’s a columnist for Marketing Week. Prior to that he was a consultant for LVMH and a stack of brands you’d know. And Prof at the world’s top business schools. He’s not short of opinions either.
In this episode we discuss:
- What’s the Mini MBA about and where did the idea come from
- What’s the difference between the brand management and marketing MBA courses
- What common mistakes marketers make and how do you fix them?
- Brand purpose… is it EVER useful?
- WTF is humaning all about (read Andi’s take on this shambles)
- Why can’t marketers do pricing?
- What the Mini MBA teaches us about pricing
- Sum up the DTC revolution in one word
- Will Tesla be the biggest thing in the car world or is it overhyped?
- What’s driving Netflix’s push to stop password sharing
- Mark’s views on Byron Sharp
- Why move from the remotest place in England to the remotest place in Australia
Mark Ritson
Mark has a PhD in Marketing and spent 25 years working as a marketing professor at London Business School, University of Minnesota, Melbourne Business School, MIT Sloan and SMU, winning a shit ton of prizes along the way.
He’s worked as a global brand consultant for clients that include Baxter, Loewe, McKinsey, Subaru, Donna Karan, Westpac, Shiseido, Flight Centre, Johnson & Johnson, De Beers, Sephora, Benefit, Amgen, Ericsson, Jurlique, Cloudy Bay and WD40.
For thirteen years he was the in-house brand consultant for LVMH – the world’s largest luxury group – working in Paris with senior executives from brands like Louis Vuitton, Dom Perignon and Hennessy.
He’s written for Marketing Week for over 20 years, winning Columnist of the Year at the PPA Press Awards, the highest award for magazine journalism in the UK, four times and the British Society of Magazine Editors Business Columnist of the Year twice.
He’s had work published in the Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Advertising and the Journal of Consumer Research.
His co-authored pricing research was cited by George Akerlof during his 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. These days he focuses on the Mini MBA in Marketing courses which is open to any marketer, 100% online and run twice a year.
Important Links
Mini MBA https://mba.marketingweek.com/
Book Recommendations
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters by Richard Rumelt
Digital Marketing Strategy Course
My Digital Marketing Strategy Course in partnership with the University of Vaasa in Finland is available now via Teachable for just €249.It’s perfect for small business owners, entrepreneurs and those who want to get a better understanding of what marketing strategy is and how to embed that strategy across an organisation.Sign up for the programme here: https://univaasa.teachable.com/p/digital-marketing-strategy
Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you don’t get the podcast emailed to you (and a monthly newsletter) you can sign up for it on the Eximo Marketing website.
Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating.
Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing.
Episode Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
[00:00:05.680] – Andi J
Eyup and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I’m the host of the show and the strategy director at Eximo Marketing. We’re a small consultancy based in Belfast and Liverpool, or if you’re in Belfast, we’re just down the road in Bangor by the Coast. Today is a great episode, an exciting episode for me. About seven or eight years ago, I worked at another agency in Belfast, and we used to have some protection connected learning time where we were going with blogs or stay on top of current trends, and we’d share that with everybody else in the team. What became apparent to me after a while was we were a bit homogenous. We were all reading the same blogs from the same people in the same places, and it was getting a bit boring, but also dangerous largely narrow in our field of view. So I said, let’s go and find two or three other people who we should read and share that with the group next week. One of the people I discovered during that process was a columnist for Marketing Week called Mark Ritson. I appreciated the the insight of his work, which was bringing some real big consultancy and some work with big companies and breaking that down, looking at it through the lens of some current marketing affairs.
[00:01:09.750] – Andi J
There was a lean to academia as well. He’s a PhD and a marketing professor. So that really built on a lot of the foundations of my MSc in marketing, but also it speaks to the fact that I do believe education is important for marketers. But mainly the thing I really enjoyed was his interesting use of language and some world-class swearing that perforates through all of his columns. Interesting anecdotes, mainly about his smoking of substances when he was a youngster or his excessive drinking in his earlier days, but all of it bringing it to life. You’ll know if you’ve listened before that I think business to business marketing isn’t B2B. The B2B stands for boring to boring, not business to business. So the fact that Mark brings personality to his column as well as great insight was fantastic and really interesting. So when I sat five years later or six years later and started a podcast. I made a list of people I wanted on there. One of the people was Mark Ritson, and it’s finally happened. I managed to track down Mark. I did the mini MBA, which we talk about, and managed to track him down via that to say, Look, why don’t you come on the podcast, Mark?
[00:02:18.580] – Andi J
Come on. It’ll be a great chat. You can come on and swear as much as you like and see where we get to. So if you’re interested in marketing, if you’re interested in swearing, and if you’re interested in Mark Ritson’s views on a wide range of marketing subjects, you should put your earphones in, turn it up a little bit, and dive into this podcast. Let me know what you think. I’m at Andi Jarvis on Twitter. That’s A-N-D-I, just to be awkward, J-A-R-V-I-S. Or you’ll find me on LinkedIn, Andi Jarvis. It’s there as well. Love to hear what you think of the episode. Here it comes. Hey, up, Mark, and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. Thank you for joining.
[00:02:53.910] – Speaker 1
My pleasure, Andi. My pleasure. Greetings from Australia.
[00:02:57.280] – Andi J
And greeting from Liverpool today. So let’s get straight into this. I’ve got a full list of questions. I couldn’t work out whether I was going to try and ask you three questions and go deep on them or 33 questions and run through everything. So we’ll just see where we get to. Give us, first of all, just a brief introduction. There may be some people out there who still don’t know who Mark Ritson is. So give us a very brief 30-second introduction to you and then we’ll go from there.
[00:03:22.730] – Speaker 1
Well, probably three careers, I guess, in the last nearly 30 years, I suppose. I started out really as a marketing professor A PhD in marketing and then a marketing professor, teaching marketing and brand management at places like London Business School, MIT, Melbourne Business School. Throughout that time, and especially at the end, though, I was really doing more and more brand consulting, working with very large companies like LVMH, and Baxter, and so on, doing proper big global consulting projects for long periods of time, which was great fun. Then the last career, perhaps, really in mini MBA. So six years ago, I took my MBA teaching and we launched a company that allows marketers to do high-end MBA-level training in marketing and brand management without having to do the rest of the MBA, which they may not want to do. And that’s been great. It’s a very large business now, and that’s pretty much full-time what I do now. Much to my surprise, it turned into a proper job. And so I’ve got a team of seven or eight who work on it, it’s a lot of work.
[00:04:35.460] – Andi J
So that’s me. I’ll give it the big sell for you. As one of the alumni of the mini MBA, I really enjoyed it and got a pile out of it. Just in terms of some of the thinking behind it, some of the structure. I probably was a little bit unprepared for the rhythm of the work a little bit and maybe needed to get myself in that mental space. But in terms of the learning and the teaching, I thought it was top draw. I’ve got an MSc in marketing, and it took me on, took me a level further.
[00:05:04.640] – Speaker 1
That’s wonderful, Andi. Did you find the learning got easier as the course went on? So week six, week seven, you were getting into more of a rhythm?
[00:05:13.070] – Andi J
Yes, I did. It also coincided, I think week nine coincided with my busiest billing month in five years as well, though. So it was a little bit of, I think the Americans call it drinking from the fire hydrant. Is that right? Yeah.
[00:05:27.340] – Speaker 1
Not an ideal timing, but It’s funny. If I talk to 100 people that have done them in the MBA, all of them have a similar story because they’re all busy, quite senior people. They’re either having babies or about to have babies or having a career challenge or life It goes on. You know what I mean? I’ve learned this. It’s the one thing we learned about the course as time went on, making it as convenient as possible. So getting rid of readings and putting podcasts into the resources, for example, was the way to go. You know what I mean? Everything ended up being on demand because everyone’s so busy, they can’t attend pre-scheduled time. So we’ve learned exactly your point that people are so busy, you have to allow them wiggle room.
[00:06:14.460] – Andi J
And you’ve got the… I think the brand management had just launched. I think you maybe run it once or twice when I did the mini MBA marketing. So for people listening and thinking, well, is it the mini MBA or is it the brand management one? What’s the top level differentiation between the courses?
[00:06:30.730] – Speaker 1
Well, it comes back to the MBA, Andi. So when I taught at business school, I taught… A good MBA is two years long. First year is core courses. So you do a marketing core course, which is the red one, but you do finance, operations, strategy, and everything else. Then in the second year of your MBA, you choose electives and everything else. And that’s where brand management was what I used to teach as one of the many electives you could do. So what we say is, if you haven’t been to a top business school or done a really applied top WAC qualification in marketing, come and do the marketing course. You can always do brand later. But if you’re a brand manager or you’ve got an MBA from Yale or Harvard or LBS or somewhere, come straight into brand. And that’s how we’ve done it. And two-thirds the people that do marketing go on and do the brand management course later. And obviously, we like it that way.
[00:07:33.220] – Andi J
I found, and this isn’t a criticism, I think it’s exactly as it’s supposed to be. I consult and brand management isn’t really what I do. When I looked at the curriculum, having finished the mini and loved it, I looked at the curriculum and I was like, This isn’t for me. Spot on. It’s a marketing course, right? You’re supposed to have people who want it and people who don’t want it.
[00:07:51.750] – Speaker 1
You got it, Andi. And that’s what we want, right? But we get tonnes of brand managers who go, I don’t need the marketing course. There isn’t much in the ways of good training in brand management. So we’re trying desperately, and I think quite successfully, to become almost a global standard. We’ve got a lot of famous companies, their brand manager has come through us now. But you’re absolutely right. It’s stuff like brand architecture. If you’re not working in brand management or consulting in that area, it’s not really as relevant.
[00:08:23.240] – Andi J
It feels like something I am going to do at some point, just because I like learning, I like growing, I find it interesting. But it’ll be one of those. It’ll be a bit like my pottery class down at the local college. Yeah, I’m sure. Highest standard, obviously, but it’ll be in that.
[00:08:35.120] – Speaker 1
No, I know what you mean. Yeah, I mean, and that’s the way it should be. And the marketing course is great because anyone with a marketing background that works in marketing is going to like it. It’s a different beast, the brand course. It’s for those that manage brands, literally.
[00:08:51.020] – Andi J
There’s a bit of a thing moving in the education industry. You started in bricks and mortar teaching, and you mentioned some points in the mini MBA. I believe you call him Galloping Scott Galloway. I enjoy Scott. I mean, Scott’s got an opinion on everything. You don’t always have to agree with him, but Scott’s quite adamant that the education model is broken, and he’s gone down with his profgy sprints and the strategy sprints and things in a similar model. Is this something that you see is going to keep developing and developing with people with a bit of profile in the industry going, Hold on a minute, I can change this to a course and develop it and move from there?
[00:09:27.880] – Speaker 1
I think so. I mean, it fits a lot of trends, right? You’ve got to remember, Scott is a product of the American system. I mean, I spend 10 years teaching in America, but I’m really a product of the British and Australian system is more than the American system. The American system is much more broken. The average MBA is going to be paying a lot more money in America, and their student debt is going to be a quarter of a million bucks by the time they do their undergrad and everything else. And there’s not a sense that they’re often getting a good product for that. So Scott’s much more anti traditional universities than I am, which I think is appropriate, but I don’t feel that way. I feel like there is a place for traditional education and traditional MBAs. I think that’s great. I just don’t think that… I think two things. There aren’t many marketers going to go and spend two years and 100 grand being trained at that level, unfortunately. So my point was to try and make it more accessible. And we have to be honest, the big problem with most business school professors who teach marketing and I’d say brand management is they’ve never managed a fucking brand.
[00:10:34.130] – Speaker 1
And that doesn’t work anymore.
[00:10:37.410] – Andi J
It’s a floor in the fun, right?
[00:10:38.050] – Speaker 1
It really is. So we’re trapped between two extremes here. We’ve got the Gary Vee’s and the Neil Patel’s who are openly dismissive of all education. But we’ve also got, to be fair to them for a second, we’ve also got academics in marketing who aren’t fit for purpose. So that’s the tussle we’re in right now. And to To be honest with you, I don’t care, Andi. I’m not as ambitious. I don’t have the vision of Scott in the sense that I don’t care. I’m more prosaic. I’m from Cumbria, for God’s sake. So I don’t know what the future holds. I know we’ve trained 20,000 marketers in marketing that otherwise wouldn’t have got a proper good training, and that’s what floats my boat. I know that it’s very interesting. We ask people at the end, what other qualifications have you done in marketing? And how did it compare to mini MBA? And we almost know, but I don’t think anyone has ever said, I think maybe like 0. 2% have said something was better than mini MBA. Almost everyone says this is better than anything else, the other training I’ve had. But anyone that’s done a marketing degree or master’s or qualification, I don’t think we’ve ever not been superior.
[00:11:56.480] – Speaker 1
Do you know what I mean in that terms? So that should scare the universities Because when you’re charging what they’re charging, which in the UK might be 25, 30 grand for a one year full-time, give up either all your evenings or all your days. And we can offer a 12 week course that’s better and that’s remotely accessed for a grand and a bit. Yeah, there’s a disruption. There’s an interesting moment where a business school I used to work with when COVID hit was thinking, well, why don’t we just use Ritson’s mini MBA brand our brand elective and fill the gap. And we had an opening conversation. But the problem with that conversation is they’re charging about four and a half, 5,000 US dollars per elective. And it’s very clear that I charge in US dollars, 2,000 bucks. And even though it’s infinitely better than what they offer their people, their students, their cost model makes… They’d have to charge it at five grand, which makes no sense. So you reveal the structures and the infrastructure problems that these big schools have. And I think there’s a problem coming. Yeah, there’s a problem coming, but I don’t care about it.
[00:13:07.230] – Speaker 1
I mean, I’m happy if we’ve got a place in the world, that’s all I care about.
[00:13:11.840] – Andi J
And making the training more accessible is something that you’re passionate about, I think, in terms of you read your social media feed and it comes up, I would say, almost daily, if not every other day, someone banging on that you don’t need marketing training to be in marketing. And what’s your view on People are here to listen to you. You tell us what you think on that.
[00:13:33.830] – Speaker 1
Well, I have a very simple approach to this, Andi. Being trained in marketing makes you better at marketing. The end. And all this cock from all these idiots who are like, Yeah, but literally, they’ll say it. And I don’t bring it up right now. Obviously, I’m selling marketing education. So it often looks like, oh, you need to be trained in marketing. I’m always, to your point, I’m always responding to some bozo who’s not only questioning marketing training, they’re openly, aggressively suggesting it’s bad for you. I mean, this is where we are. People are proud of not being trained in marketing. I did a degree in computer science. And look at me now, I’m in marketing. You don’t need a degree. And it’s like, that’s great. But if you had a training in marketing, a good one, you’d be even better. So that’s my general take on it. The stats are pretty scary. About 50% of marketers, at least in the UK, have no real training Training in marketing. And separate research tells us that about 50% of marketers don’t think you need any training in marketing. They’re probably the same person, but all I know is, I think it’s 95% of the people that finish them in the MBA in marketing say it’s made them immediately a more effective marketer.
[00:14:49.880] – Speaker 1
Our marketers, as you know, are pretty senior. So the point is, yeah, good training in marketing, not just my training, but all good training, makes you better at marketing. Why wouldn’t consider it more? What’s happening is we’re spinning as marketers into a world where myth and lies and exaggeration run the discipline. And that’s directly because people aren’t getting trained in the basics. I despair at people. I mean, the classic example is the Four P’s. It was written in 1960. It was enshrined as a very basic tenet of marketing. The Thousands of marketers have written some cock piece about it being five piece, six piece, nine cues and a T, 44 P’s. There’s actually a paper on that. None of these people, and I’ve read all of these things, actually understand the original point of the four P’s. Their ignorance isn’t just, I don’t really understand it. It turns into the four P’s are wrong because I don’t understand it. It’s nine Qs instead. Do you know what I mean? So it’s one of 100 examples of people that weren’t trained in marketing properly. And it’s not rocket science going on and then just creating the industry in front of their own eyes.
[00:16:08.040] – Speaker 1
Do you know what I mean? And it’s bullshit.
[00:16:11.300] – Andi J
I think from my point of view, I always say, I know or I think I can tell when I drop into a company as a consultant working with a marketing Department, who’s got marketing training and who hasn’t? Because you can just tell by the questions they ask and the way they approach it. And there is this piece where you’ve got, say, Facebook ads managers or performance marketers, a term I hate, but anyway, let’s stick with it, who have maybe self-taught or learned various and come through working in agency life. And to them, their view of marketing is narrow. They didn’t need training to get there. So they believe that that’s what marketing is and you don’t need to do that. But it’s almost as if as a discipline that half the people in marketing don’t actually understand what marketing means as a term, therefore don’t believe you need any training in it because they just have their blinkers on for their little bit of the discipline. And that’s what they think marketing is. That seems to be the problem that we’re trying to fight against.
[00:17:02.550] – Speaker 1
That’s exactly the problem, Andi. And what happens is a couple of things happen, right? So I invented these silly words for exactly what you’re talking about. So first, I call it tactification, which is those 50 % of marketers you’re talking about think that marketing is just tactics. It’s what you do to customers. And they miss the strategy piece and the diagnosis piece because they used to be consumers and all they ever saw was advertising and promotions and e-commerce. They didn’t see the other bits of the iceberg, so they don’t know they exist because they never been trained. And even within tactification, back to the four P’s, tactics are many different things. It’s distribution and products. It’s really just the communications piece. So I call that communication. Most of these people, when they talk about marketing, are just talking about comms, are just digital comms, which if you run the numbers on a proper analysis of our discipline, it’s about 4 or five % of the total challenge of marketing is digital comms. It doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it probably occupies 60, 70 % of marketing discussions, and it’s 4 or five % of the actual discipline.
[00:18:11.920] – Speaker 1
So, yeah, we’ve got a big problem. I mean, I say that, but then, again, I’m very prosaic about it. It doesn’t really cause me any problems. People always tell me, Don’t you get frustrated at the state of marketing? I’m like, No, it’s not curing cancer. It’s a competitive capitalist pursuit. If you’ve got morons that don’t understand marketing properly, running marketing, and you’re working in a company with trained marketers who do, you are going to going to smash them all things being equal. And that’s a lovely situation to be in. Why do my courses do well? One of the reasons is the people that do them get better jobs and do better in those jobs against people that don’t have training. You know what I mean? I don’t want to change that. I want the people I work with to be smarter and better than the people I don’t work with. The end.
[00:19:03.340] – Andi J
Perfect. Keep it that way. Well, I have fairly strong opinions on some things as well. I shouted this out at one point in a conference. I was like, digital marketing strategy does not exist. And then had a bit of a debate on it. And the fact that if you put the word digital before marketing strategy, I think you’ve said you’re presupposing the answer before you really know what the question is. And have a fair debate about this type of thing. You, I think, take it maybe a step further. And the digital prefix is something that you really don’t like when it comes to marketing jobs.
[00:19:37.660] – Speaker 1
I don’t. I mean, first of all, you’re right. So that’s an easier argument, though. It’ll go down equally badly with most bad marketers. So, yeah, you can’t have a digital marketing strategy. There’s a long debate whether you can even have marketing strategy. That’s a different story. But strategy is just strategy. So strategy is answering the non-t tactical, the pre-t tactical questions of who we’re targeting of what we’re positioning, of what our objectives are. It’s only then that we get to tactics of which there are digital things, maybe. The broader point, though, that I believe in, and it’s taken us… I’ve been saying this for about 10 years and we’re nowhere near getting to it, is At some point, we will realise as a discipline that calling something digital is like me saying that I have an electrical phone. Everyone, everything now is digital, and it has been for a while. In the UK, More radio is downloaded than broadcast now. News media is a digital business. Outdoor advertising is a digital business. There isn’t any non-digital stuff. And so by that token, this D-prefix means nothing. It just means marketing. And the more we create these silos, the more we underperform, in my opinion.
[00:20:56.630] – Speaker 1
The basic tenets of communication theory are very simple. The more I blend different channels and media together, the more that diverse campaign, on average, will be more effective. Diversity is great. Again, I find it fascinating. We’re an industry that says, Oh, no, a diverse marketing department with people of different ethnicities and races and orientations will, by and large, perform better than a bunch of white old men. And I absolutely subscribe to that general philosophy. But if we applied that same diverse principle to the things we’re doing, to the communication tools, oh, no, no, I’m a digital marketer. A, what the fuck does that mean? And B, why would you constrain yourselves to half the tools when diversity would take? It’s like I’m saying I only hire white people. Why? Adding more to the mix makes it better. Do you know what I mean? It’s the principle of all things, right? As a capitalist, I have to say that, right? The reason you want diversity in a marketing department or in your media mix isn’t because it’s politically correct. It’s because it will be better. Do you know what I mean?
[00:22:06.120] – Andi J
So I want to dive in on that. I’ll come back to diversity in another way later, but I want to dive in on what you said about diversifying what you’re going to do. And there’s another word that I don’t think you made this one up, although you did make it probably more famous, Baufism. Someone made it up about me. It’s one of those things.
[00:22:26.370] – Speaker 1
I’d love it if there was a word in the English language for a lie lie that becomes true. You know what I mean? There’s nothing… I’ve looked at this fellow. I found myself many times. When I was a kid, I told everyone I was from America. When I was like, I can remember doing it as a kid for some bizarre reason. And then ended up living in America for 12 years. You know what I mean? A lie that becomes true. And that happened with Bophism. I wrote an article, I don’t know what it was about, maybe about two different types of targeting and how you want to do both. And somebody in the comment section said, This will later on become known as the start of the Bofism movement. And I read it and I thought, Oh, yeah, I really like that. So then I talked about it and we made it the start of the Bofism movement. So yeah, the Bofism movement basically says that in almost all the marketing discussions where someone takes a polar approach to someone else, the answer is the two different arguments together would be superior to either one on their own.
[00:23:25.150] – Speaker 1
Digital traditional, the answer is the two together. Facebook’s data I’ll show you this, that TV and Facebook together is better than just TV or just Facebook, for example. The long and the short, the most important word in the long and the short is and. It’s not about long, it’s about combining the two together. Do you know what I mean? Creativity and planning. There’s all this nonsense about planners versus creatives. Well, you need fucking both, obviously. Do you know what I mean? Sales and marketing. So yeah, in almost every discussion, universities versus digital online You know what I mean? There’s a role for both. Bothism really plays out strongly in marketing. And we tend to fight these battles. It’ll be so much easier if we just went, Oh, YouTube versus TV. Actually, if you put them both in a campaign, it’s going to work better.
[00:24:15.410] – Andi J
Yeah. Amen to that. It’s a central tenet of a presentation I’m giving fairly soon is bothism. I was like, Yeah, it’s a catchy word for it. And I think that’s why it’s caught on because it just really captures that concept.
[00:24:26.280] – Speaker 1
Yeah, and it comes up a lot, right? So once you know about it And you find yourself going, well, which of it is? You go, hang on, it’s probably both of them. And it always, always turns out to be the case, right? And it’s not just that the two do equally apply. That’s not what both of them means. The two are literally better together than either one apart. That’s a powerful idea.
[00:24:46.540] – Andi J
Yeah, put it together. No, absolutely. I want to talk about another powerful idea, and one that I’m going to say every marketer I’ve met, including me here with my hand up on this, is shit at, and that’s pricing. Oh, yeah. I am truly, utterly warful at pricing. And I will say that, and I will happily say I am doing my best to be better, but I’m warful at it. Is there another area of marketing that marketers are shit at than pricing?
[00:25:15.750] – Speaker 1
Probably not. I think probably strategy as well and separating out strategy generally is probably the other big weakness. But in terms of, I would say the most damaging thing is pricing, because I totally agree with you. Most marketers are useless at pricing, literally don’t know where to start. But also when you get to learn about pricing and understand a bit better, you begin to appreciate how incredibly fucking important it is for the whole lifeblood of the business. You know what I mean? You fuck up your ad campaign, you certainly hurt your marketing, but you can survive. I mean, most companies have. You fuck up your pricing, it can be a mortal wound for the organisation. And I think that’s part of the ignorance of pricing is not realising just what impact it has on the success of the firm. So, yeah, I think it’s incredibly common. And we measure which of the modules in the mini MBA Most enjoyed, I think is how we measure it now, which was your favourite. And pricing wins, which surprises a lot of people because it sounds very dry, and it probably is a dry module, but it blows the gaskets.
[00:26:26.690] – Speaker 1
And my goal with that one was always take someone maybe such as yourself who came in going, I don’t know much about pricing, and get them out a week later with, I pretty much know what I’m doing now. And the key to it is there’s three things with pricing. There’s the price setting, the mechanism by which we do pricing. Pricing and price aren’t the same thing. So how do we work out the price? Then there’s the price itself that we decide upon, and then there’s the manner in which we communicate it and present it to the market. Those three are very, very distinct, and all three have to be lined up to get it right.
[00:27:07.310] – Andi J
And a lot of the conversations and research that you do, and I’ve gone on and read a lot more about pricing since then, is very consumer marketing facing. There is some stuff in there about B2B pricing, but a lot less. Gutfield, 90 to 10, it would be a guess.
[00:27:24.510] – Speaker 1
Easily, yeah. I’d say easily, yeah.
[00:27:26.200] – Andi J
So first, let’s keep focusing on consumer marketing for a moment Especially when you’ve got volume and throughput, there’s a lot more science you can put into that rather than just finger in the air, which is what a lot of pricing has done, I think, in a lot of places. But the communication element of it, I talked the other day on LinkedIn about shrinkflation, another awful word, but where companies are cutting costs by reducing the size of the packaging and then keeping the unit price to the consumer the same. That’s the end bit, the communication bit that you’re saying is important, that they’re failing in that point, would you That’s one of them anyways.
[00:28:02.350] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a good example. It’s usually a mistake. It’s a short term. You’re dodging the bullet, right? All the research on communicating a price increase, which is certainly going to be an agenda for most organisations this year, is to call it a price increase, to be open and explicit about the price increase, to tell people when the price increase is going to happen, and remind them of why the price increase is linked to the value of the product or service. Not to give it some, we’ve rationalised our prices. We’re doing a pricing review or shrinkflation. Don’t dodge that bullet. Go at it in an appropriate way. But that’s one of many different things. I mean, I’m not a big fan of behavioural economics. I’m not against it. I just think often it’s hand conjuring and trickery that counterintuitive and makes for a good conference presentation, but isn’t a lot of fucking use when it comes to actually doing stuff. But the exception to that is pricing. Framing pricing, anchoring pricing is crucial in that third phase of how do we present the price in a way that will make it appear to be acceptable and good value, bearing in mind that everything is subjective and consumers really have no clue, first of all, what anything costs, second, what the price is, and third, whether that price is good or bad value.
[00:29:23.250] – Speaker 1
In that murky world, using behavioural economics to frame how you present a price by saying you can have option A, option B, or option C, with the B option being the one you want to drive people to, is a fantastic way to communicate about price. But yeah, I think keeping people’s head in, how do we set a price? Never look at costs other than to tick the box, for example. If you start using cost plus pricing, you’re fucked from the beginning. If you look at competitors and only competitors, you’re fucked from the start. So price setting, the price itself yourself and then presenting the price, communicating about it, three entirely different areas that are super important to your point.
[00:30:09.330] – Andi J
And then in the B2B world, what advice, what top tips could we give B2B companies to look at pricing? Because sometimes some of that consumerism of, you’re looking at the way the price is measured and unit sales and things don’t really apply sometimes in B2B, sometimes where pricing is bespoke for every order that comes in or bigger ticket sales, that type of thing. How does that work?
[00:30:34.010] – Speaker 1
I mean, the main principles do apply, but you’re right, it’s different, right? So the first big lesson of B2B pricing is to try and avoid as much as you can the customization of price. It’s not easy to do because everyone expects it. And if you are going to customise, do it in a very granular manner. Because as we both know, there are multitudes of examples of companies that made their internal pricing processes, discounts, blue list pricing, customised pricing so complex that it ended up being actually not profitable for them to sell a product at that price, and they didn’t work it out for two years. To people who never worked in B2B, that will seem like an insane story, but it’s extraordinarily common. Not only is this product not actually profitable for us, it took us three years and PwC to work out we’re losing money every time we sell it. That’s where B2B pricing takes you if you don’t keep it very, very, very, very granular. And then I think the other main precept of it is, again, the impact of discounting in B2B is equally damaging, but for a different reason. So these days in B2B with procurement or just with savvy purchasing, offering a discount to one player is pretty much opening the door to all others.
[00:31:58.670] – Speaker 1
And you We can’t justify it. So I think maintaining a fundamental price level that you don’t go under for anyone is a crucial thing. Now, that’s tricky in B2B because clients will sometimes legitimately threaten But if you don’t lower that price, you won’t get the business. It can be very hard in B2B to accept that fact, but you have to realise as well across a whole year or three-year period, that putting up prices or maintaining high prices will lose sales. That’s going to happen. And when you see that happening in front of you, it can be very scary. The reality is, if you step back to the bigger picture, those lost sales that would have otherwise happened at a lower price point and lower profit across a year long period will be more than made up for by the retained sales at a higher profit point. I guess it comes at a different point. I think most marketers who don’t understand price are so stupid, and I don’t use that word lightly. They think, if I discount my price by 20%, I’ll lose 20% of my profits. They fundamentally don’t understand the math of gross margin discounting Cost of goods, et cetera.
[00:33:16.890] – Speaker 1
If you discount a product by 20, 30%, it’s almost certain, unless you’re doing something else really stupid, that you’re not going to make any profit. There are very few companies in most sectors that can knock 30% off the correct price and still be in any way, shape, or form profitable. So that gives you a sense, I think, of what happens.
[00:33:37.090] – Andi J
To come back to where we started about teaching in the mini MBA then, I’ve often thought that the one thing that’s missing in every marketing qualification I’ve ever looked at is a better understanding of either fundamental maths principles or that a bit more of economics coming into it. So we’ve had Mike Follet on who does- Mike is great. Yeah, and some of the analysis of Lumen, some of the analysis that they’re doing. J. P. Castlin has been on talking about some of the data and research that he does. He was talking about other things as well. Most marketing courses I’ve ever seen, in fact, everyone has never had anything about that hard core data analysis in there and understanding those principles. Is that missing from marketing training?
[00:34:20.890] – Speaker 1
I think it is. It’s not missing from a good MBA programme. It’s missing from marketing training because the people who are training you in marketing have no math capability at all. Most of them have geography degrees. The thing that an MBA programme does, which is very useful, is they do some form of… It’s called different things at Harvard. They used to call it basic business maths, Morton had whatever it was, business fundamentals, things like break-even analysis, which were basic applied maths, nothing too complex in business context. And you get that on an MBA course because to your point, it’s fundamental. Getting it through market is going to be very difficult to do. The way we did it on mini MBA, if you remember, is I just took the mini MBA pricing strategy and we just get it out and we go through it. And I also then show what would happen if we’d have discounted it, how much money we would have lost, which was, again, the big surprise is if we just run a 30% early bird special, it knocks 2. 5 million quid off the bottom line of the product, not off the the top line off the bottom line of the product.
[00:35:32.050] – Speaker 1
And when you break that out for marketers, they go, Oh, fuck. Yeah, I get it.
[00:35:35.600] – Andi J
Why am I doing that?
[00:35:37.200] – Speaker 1
And the answer is because you don’t realise what effect that’s having on fundamental profitability. And nobody really cares. If you’ve built a good product and you’ve positioned it correctly, your consumer will complain about the price, but they’ll ultimately pay it if you’ve done your work properly. Discounting price doesn’t do much. All it really does, according to the research, is it pulls people into purchase earlier, but then it gives you a big bullwip problem anyway down the track.
[00:36:05.460] – Andi J
Something else you talked about in the mini-MBM, just aware of the time, so moving through the subject here. Director consumer. We talked about- Total lot of bollocks.
[00:36:15.460] – Speaker 1
Yeah, absolute lot of fucking bollocks. Direct to consumer my ass. The only thing with that one, Andi, is I’m not one of these guys that’s precious about my stuff. Do you know what I mean? Because it’s like everyone chirps in eventually and that’s great. I was banged on about this about five years ago, saying what a lot of fucking bolics it was, right? And for those that haven’t joined this conversation yet, D2C is… Again, it made all these claims that this was the new future of business, and you didn’t need to have distributors, and all your communication would be digital first and all that. And it’s all bolics. What happens is they can’t get to profitability. You want to understand the WeWork problem? The WeWork problem is a function of a culture during the 2010 decade where not making a profit is a badge of honour. Spotify still hasn’t made a fucking profit. They’re giving €200 million euros to Barcelona to sponsor them. What they should do with keeping that for their bottom line. They’re not profitable. Netflix, not profitable. And it became almost a badge of honour that a good business didn’t make money.
[00:37:25.230] – Speaker 1
And of course, that applied to Dollar Shave Club and all these guys making no money at all, but It was very sexy and had a new business model. So I wrote about this, I don’t know, maybe it was five, I don’t know, whatever it was saying, look, it’s all fucking rubbish, right? And got various piles of shit thrown at me. Now it’s become the prevailing logic that D2C doesn’t, generally speaking, prove profitable. What it is, is either a great way to sell out to a traditional company that’s been scared shitless, that you’re going to be displaced, the Dollar Shave Club, which has made no profit ever and is now, I think, widely seen as a total disaster for Unilever, or an entry-level approach, which enables you then to get into wider distribution, do TV advertising, and maybe, very occasionally, make a profit. So, yeah, D2C is a great example of how our industry blows smoke up its own ass all the time.
[00:38:22.180] – Andi J
So I wanted to maybe chuck in a challenge to that. When I’ve looked at D2C, I’ve broken it down into three pots, right? So you’ve got the D2C natives, if you want to call them that, companies like Dollar Shave Club, we’re only ever going to do that. But it may be that you just don’t class these as D2C, or maybe I’m picking the wrong terminology. But when you look… So Dyson, for example, have been selling through retailers for years. And now if you look at their TV advertising in the UK, at least, Dyson product, look at how you use it, buy direct from the people who made it, and they put their own advertising on that.
[00:38:56.340] – Speaker 1
But I would say to you, Andi, that’s good omnichannel stuff. Do you know what That’s just a smart company going. We’ve gone from selling through Dixons and everyone else, and now we’re trying to move also into an omnichannel world where you can buy the same product at the same price with different experiences across as many channels as It’s possible, right? I love omnichannel. You’ve got to remember that the D2C stuff was the hubris of saying, We only do digital first comms. We only sell through our website. We wouldn’t bother with all of that mass distribution and selling in a… We don’t need to do that. We’re a mattress supplier, right? We cut all that cost out. They’re the examples where it was always patently rubbish. Do you know what I mean? And they did a celebration for my 10 years marketing week as a columnist. And 10 people I’d written about got to come back and say whether I was full of shit. I thought it was great. You know what I mean? And then I was able to say, do I accept their comment? And a terrific woman who run one of the UK’s D2C brands was asked to comment on the article I’d written about D2C and about how they don’t make any money.
[00:40:08.230] – Speaker 1
And it’s a lot of bollocks. And she made some very good points, blah, blah, blah, blah. And at the end, Russell, my editor said, So do you accept such and such as comments? And I went, No, because she’s the CEO of a company that’s been in business for eight years and hasn’t made any money. When she makes some money, she can come back and criticise what I said. But she hasn’t made any dough yet. You know what I mean? My cousin sells coffee up the road here on Tuesdays at the market. And I reckon what she does maybe, I don’t know, a hundred bucks profit. She’s a winner. She’s the queen compared to the D2C companies out there who are all unable to do the fundamental… Let us remember what the fundamental ultimate requirement of a business is. It is to make a profit, right? It is not to generate revenue. This is where everyone goes wrong, right? I can take my iPhone here. This is an iPhone 12. I could go and sell it this morning for a hundred bucks. There’s $100 of revenue, but it cost me a grand, right? Selling a phone that cost me a grand for 1,500 bucks and making a profit, that is the challenge of business, not making revenues.
[00:41:25.130] – Andi J
Anyone can sell tennis for a five, all right?
[00:41:28.280] – Speaker 1
That’s not that.
[00:41:30.310] – Andi J
I want to do a quick bounce. You’ve mentioned Netflix there, and I want to pull out Netflix and Tesla to talk about them briefly. Both companies I have, without any real science, declared will probably won’t exist in the same format in 10 years time. Netflix, I feel they’re in a fight that they don’t get any economies of scale. They grow the subscriber base. All they have to do is keep ploughing in for new content. And they’re fighting a war with Amazon who have more money than God, Disney who’ve been making content for a long time, and everybody else in the world who’s doing it. But you were at a piece recently about why they’re tackling people sharing passwords with mum and dad and uncle and all that thing. And you looked at it through another thing that’s been declared dead several times, the marketing funnel. Tell us about that.
[00:42:18.950] – Speaker 1
Well, the funnel has been around. It’s actually the oldest theory of marketing in one form or another. What would it be now? It’ll be 125 years old. And what you see, again, it’s a classic example of people don’t understand the funnel, but they start creating, the funnel is dead. Look at the rhomboid of consumer purchase. It’s like, for fuck’s sake, mate. The funnel is just a metaphor, first of all. So the common mistake everyone makes is they go, the funnel starts with awareness and then the funnel is whatever your market and your category looks like. So there’s a hundred possible… I mean, in my world of mini MBA, there’s a hundred marketers at the top of my funnel who are in my target segment. Let’s say this is a segment, the digital market is one of my target segments. There’s a hundred digital marketers at the top. How many of them have attended mini MBA and how many of them are promoters at the bottom on the net promoter score, for example? A hundred at the top in the UK, two at the bottom. Where do the rest of the fuckers go? How many of them You’ve heard of mini MBA?
[00:43:31.250] – Speaker 1
How many of them have visited our website? How many of them have asked for more information? How many have signed up? How many have attended? Blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it looks like. By building the funnel custom to your business, by populating it with the actual numbers, internal and external, by looking at the conversion rates versus competitors, and you can get that data from your own research, you’re able to identify the blockages which become your strategic strategic objectives for marketing. So with digital marketing, for example, plenty of awareness about mini MBA, consideration among digital marketers is much lower than my other segments. So why is that? Well, I can go and look at the digital marketers who are aware of the programmes and do consider, and I can compare them, attitudinally and demographically, from those that are aware but would not consider my programme. And work out what is it that enables me to get these guys down that bridge and into the next You hear a lot of talk of full funnel, and that’s a bad term. All full funnel means is step back and look at the whole funnel, but then make choices about which step you’re going to focus on.
[00:44:43.830] – Speaker 1
It’s not target everything with a blanket bombing mission. That’s bad strategy. In the case of Netflix, to your point, because Netflix has a limited model and they’re starting to run into some real issues of profitability and growth, originally, they weren’t too bothered heard about people sharing their passwords so that other households could use it. They felt it was a good way to get a trial. And that was true when the funnel looked like this, right? Because these people sharing it were generating more awareness up here. As the funnel got fatter and actually stopped growing, one of the barriers to growth was when they looked at, well, why do people who think Netflix is great not sign up for Netflix? The number one reason was because I’m getting it for free from a brother-in-law. And when that happened, they went, right, that’s worth 150 million quid a year in the UK. So let’s go back up and communicate to everyone, you can’t do that anymore. And it’s a lovely, simple example of how the funnel drives objectives, which drives strategy.
[00:45:48.670] – Andi J
Brilliant. I’m going to have to skip Tesla unless we have time at the end. But I maybe do want to come back.
[00:45:52.970] – Speaker 1
What was your point on Tesla, though? Because I’m interested, Andi.
[00:45:55.170] – Andi J
Well, again, I think Tesla, you’ve made a point several times that they need to behave more a proper car manufacturer and get into advertising. I look at car sales figures of electric vehicles. Now the big boys have got into it, Volkswagen, Audi Group, for example, Toyota. And I just look at the Tesla model and look at their outlander share price and realise at some point people are going to wake up and go, they’re not selling enough cars. And it suddenly could just unravel really, really quickly when the grownups have moved in and started selling cars left, right, and centre.
[00:46:26.570] – Speaker 1
I think you’re right. I think it is a good fundamental business. However, I think… And the number of people that have emailed me this, I wrote… I mean, again, about maybe a year ago, I wrote this article saying they need to start advertising. Elon Musk doesn’t believe in advertising. And there’s all these tech boys, idiot tech boys, saying, You don’t need to advertise if you’re Tesla because you got so much profitability and revenue and all that. There are about, I would estimate, 30 very good reasons to advertise, of which driving short term sales is but one. Clearly, if the world was going to end by 2025, Tesla should not advertise. Clearly, right? They’re better off taking their money, their profitability. They’re doing pretty well all of a sudden. It’s good for them. And they’re helping to of the planet, and they should not advertise. But the world hopefully won’t end in 2025. And the big boys, to your point, are coming in. Tesla needs more. It needs future customers. It needs more brand equity, in my opinion. And for a tiny fraction of money, it could build that now because it takes a long time to build.
[00:47:35.440] – Speaker 1
It’s no good doing it when Porsche and Volkswagen and Ford are beating you.
[00:47:40.970] – Andi J
I think one of the things I read as well was that their profitability, if you strip out the government grants and the crypto trading disappears entirely. Now, government grants are going to everybody. But it’s an interesting point that those two lines would take them from profit to loss.
[00:47:57.910] – Speaker 1
It’s not as profitable. It is I mean, there’s something there to Musk’s point. I mean, Musk is a genius. And what we don’t talk about a lot with Musk is his real agenda is to save the world, right? Or at least as long as he can get to Mars. He wants to sell that low-end car at a very low price, the new Model T. And so he does have an agenda which is, to some degree, nonprofit-based. So, yeah, it’s interesting. Let’s see. It’s a very fascinating moment.
[00:48:28.910] – Andi J
Well, the other point I wanted to get to it to give you enough time to go into this, because I think I’m ready with the popcorn for this. Brand purpose. You said marketers didn’t understand pricing. Well, I asked you the question, do marketers understand pricing? The answer was no. Is there anything else that they can fuck up more than that? The answer was no. Is brand purpose running pricing close for something that we can cock up as a discipline?
[00:48:50.210] – Speaker 1
Well, yes or no. I mean, the bigger question is, is brand purpose something you want to bother with? So for me, where I lose, again, so I don’t want I want to be careful. There are companies, and I’ve said this all along, so everyone says, Oh, you’re walking this back. There are companies, organisations that are clearly purpose-driven. Obviously, it starts with the cliché of Patagonia and Ben and Jerry’s, but there are other examples where brand purpose is an incredibly important part of the business and a big part of their appeal. Equally, clearly, there are a whole bunch of businesses that are claiming brand purpose and that aren’t able to deliver on or customers don’t care. I like the idea, I brought an article about it recently. Brand purpose is a strategic choice in the sense that the minute someone turns up and says, as they often do, without purpose, your brand will fail, right? Bullshit. Bullshit. You can’t generalise at that level. At the same time, having a brand purpose doesn’t mean you will fail, by the way. It’s just that there has to be the nuance of strategic choice. For me, most brand purpose campaigns come from an elementary era of marketers who spend eight hours a day working on their brands thinking that anyone gives a shit about their brands.
[00:50:11.940] – Speaker 1
Therein lies the fundamental problem. It’s a good example with BrewDog. Brewdog in the UK has had lots of negative coverage. It’s treated its employees poorly. It’s been busted doing things. In marketing Twitter, everyone’s like, Oh, BrewDog’s horrible. And BrewDog is a A great example of failure. Is it? Fuck. Because to the average everyday working man or working woman, BrewDog is something that marketing Twitter don’t understand. It’s beer, motherfucker. It’s beer. And it’s quite a good beer, right? The end, right? No one gives a fuck. See what I mean? And so we tie ourselves up in these knots about, oh, if I don’t have… What does my carpet cleaner think about COVID? You know what I mean? Fucking nobody cares, man. Just go back to work.
[00:51:00.670] – Andi J
If I was to say one word to you and that word was humaning, what would your response be?
[00:51:06.550] – Speaker 1
Look, that was one of the more dumb examples of… I mean, I wonder what’s happened to it since.
[00:51:13.960] – Andi J
Hopefully, it’s disappeared up its own ass and died somewhere.
[00:51:16.640] – Speaker 1
That’s someone from Mondales, what happened? Yeah, so humaning is… Mondales is confectionery company saying, We don’t do marketing, we do humaning. Yeah, it’s what happens when marketers lose the plot because they forget that there’s nothing dishonourable about making a good product that makes people happy in terms of profit. That doesn’t have to be all. I’ll give you the best example. With Mini MBA, we You actually have purpose, right? So among other things, the brand purpose of Mini MBA was to give marketers better training in marketing and improve marketing. Now, that sits quite happily along making me a shed load of money as well, by the way. But there was partly there was a purpose there as well. We don’t advertise that. We don’t position on it because one of the first things our customers tell us when they finish the programme is, I don’t want anyone else to know about this course because I want to be the smart one in the meeting. And if they had the same course, I’d be no smarter than them. So you can see how a purpose sometimes isn’t the thing you want to position on because it’s exactly not what the customer wants to hear.
[00:52:25.860] – Speaker 1
If I tried to recruit Andi Jarvis with a message, our purpose to improve all marketers’ skills, you’d be like, Yeah, but what’s in it for me? Quite correctly. Do you know what I mean?
[00:52:37.980] – Andi J
Yeah, definitely. We’re coming towards the end, Mark. So I want two more questions for you. Number one, hopefully might be a quick fire one. You moved from Cumbria via various places to Tasmania. Do you just not like people? Is that what it is?
[00:52:51.670] – Speaker 1
Yeah, it’s a lot to that. It’s funny. Well, Tasmania has lots of… My place here, where I’m doing this from is in Hobart, and it’s on the Durban River, which is where all my family are from. You know what I mean? Originally from the Derwent, the original Durban, the proper one. Yeah, I explain it. My wife’s from it. It wasn’t my preference. There’s about, I don’t know, at least a million places I would have lived in if I had met my wife. You know what I mean? And none of them are in Tasmania. I love it. I love it. But yeah, it wasn’t like I woke up one morning and went, I want to move to Tasmania. And then I met a woman there. I met a woman in a bar I’m in London. And then the causality is important. Do you know what I mean?
[00:53:33.740] – Andi J
Absolutely. I don’t think anyone ever in the world has ever walked in and thought, I’m going to move to Tasmania by choice. There’s a few lunatics down here now.
[00:53:42.840] – Speaker 1
The worst bit is, Andi, it’s getting trendy. So where I live most of the time in the U. N. Valley is when we moved there about twelve years ago, even people in Sydney and Melbourne were like, You’re fucking crazy. I had no TV reception, literally, right? Never mind internet. They’re like, You’re fucking crazy, right? I’m like, My wife’s from there. We’re going back there. It’s become literally the sexiest part of Australia to live in now. And now, of course, everyone goes, Oh, yeah, you moved there because it’s cool. And I’m like, No, no, no, no. We were there before. We were just putting up with all the new people arriving with their Landrovers.
[00:54:18.310] – Andi J
Brilliant stuff. My last question for you then, Mark, if you could recommend one thing for people to read, marketers who are listening to this, whether it’s a column, not yours, because the link’s in the show notes, It’s not podcast, we’ll cover that another time. If you could recommend people read one book, would it be the Dark Lord, Byron Sharp’s book, or would it be something- No, it wouldn’t.
[00:54:38.100] – Speaker 1
Although it’s probably worth reading at some point. I still think Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy is probably the best thing to read, and it’s interesting as well and well written. That’s probably the best book. I think a factor in all this has to be, is it something you can actually read and be interested in? And in Romelt’s case, you really can.
[00:55:00.180] – Andi J
Yeah. I’m ashamed I didn’t get into interrogating you a bit more about Byron Sharp and some of the names you’ve called him Lovingly. I think the Dark Lord of Penetration, was it? I think you called him Lovingly.
[00:55:10.810] – Speaker 1
That’s accurate. No, I’ve got a lot of time for Byron. As you get older, what you discover, I’ve known Byron a long time. We’ve met off and on in various different places. But of course, as you get older, we’re almost the same age, I think he’s a year older than me, is, of course, these are the people you travel through the journey with. Do you know what I mean? So at some point you go, right, okay, well, whatever happens now in your 50s and 60s, the names, he’ll be asked about me and I’ll be asked about him. Do you know what I mean? And there’s worse people to be associated with given what he’s done. I know we got finished, but the thing I love about Byron, and it’s a story that I don’t think most people appreciate, is he’s really taking seeing the theories of Andrew Ehrenberg, his mentor, which were widely broadly dismissed 20, 30 years ago and has made them accepted. And I think that’s a brilliant thing. And it speaks to not only how good the theories are, but how hard he’s worked and how persuasive and clever he’s been along with his colleagues.
[00:56:22.580] – Speaker 1
And I think that’s nice. I think that’s in a world of… I’m not a fan of marketing science. I think it’s a lot of bollocks. You know what I mean? It’s like It’s like having a… I don’t know what’s the right word. A sexual trifle. Yeah, it’s an oxymoron for me for various complicated reasons. But I do like Rigger, and I think Ehrenberg-Bass is the home of rigour, and I think that’s great.
[00:56:46.010] – Andi J
Brilliant. Listen, Mark, thank you very much for your time for getting up-My pleasure. Early or whatever it is. I don’t know. The time zones scare me anyway. Thank you very much. And do click the link in the show notes. You’ll find everything about the Mini MBA and the Mini MBA and brand management. Absolutely worth your time. Please reach out to me if you want my view on it or give Mark a shout on LinkedIn where he seems to spend most of his life when he’s not teaching. Mark, thank you very much.
[00:57:09.990] – Speaker 1
Thanks, Andi. Take care, mate.