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Ah. Mini MBA, how are you? I've missed you. How's life? You okay? I'm in a slightly weird place today, as usual. I'm actually in Sydney, but I had meetings this morning and I couldn't get back to my place in time to film this. So I'm in WeWork in a in a room. So I'm a little bit more echo echoey than normal. I've got my big microphone, but the room's shit, so I better close the door. Hang on. So no one else can hear it. It's better. Okay. So we're almost at reading week. We're through strategy. Um we're moving with pace now. So you probably are still going through positioning and objectives, but at the end of this week, or you can go a little bit later if you want, we've done with the strategic part, phase two. So a few questions this week, not too many, which is great. Um the the the reading week ahead is basically a week off. Platform stays open, we're all around, but there's no new module gonna drop on Monday. I want you to do three things have a week off, uh, catch up on stuff you missed, uh, or you know, um go back and look at some of the stuff that you know you want to you want to review again. Just chillax, right? And then we'll we'll pick it back up with tactics in a week's time. Anyway, we've got a handful of good questions. 30 minutes today, which is nice. Um uh let's get moving. Oh, hang on. No, let's not get moving because I should have done my my due diligence a bit better. We're too we're too small. Can you see that? Yeah, that's good.

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Sarah Morrison. Hey Sarah, how can a brand evolve itself from a confined product benefit-centric positioning into the broader three C's model with the aim to future-proof and stretch into new categories while still leveraging existing brand equity and remaining authentic to our core DNA? More importantly, how can we ensure our right to play in these new categories and for customers to believe in us? Research tells us we can stretch, but are perceived to be quite differentiated to the rest of the market. Do we lean into our differentiation or try to conform to more trusted category codes? In theory, the simplicity of one brand is appealing, but in reality, this is where we often get into layers upon layers of wheels, maps, and trees. Yeah, don't do that. So look, we'll talk about it in product uh a little bit more about diversification. I have to be honest with you, Sarah, and I'm not selling, you you need to come back and do mini MBA and brand management where we do brand extension and architecture in a lot of detail. Yeah. But generally, um don't believe you have to cater to the category codes in order to extend your brand. Quite the opposite, yeah. There's a there's a proven approach to brand extension. And the good news, and there's a big difference between brand extension and line extension as well. We're going to talk about in the product module. So why don't we wait and see and then maybe give me a more specific set of challenges once you've seen that? It's the the most important thing to realize is if if you do a brand extension and you jump into a different category, the chance of that working is a lot less, but there's no damage if you screw up. If BMW start making balloons and they make shit balloons, there's no impact on the car perceptions. The danger of line extension, where BMW make a premium BMW 8 series, if it's a shit 8 series, it's more likely to work, but if it's crap, it's there's more damage to the to the product and the brand perceptions. That for me is one of the big lessons. Also, there's a massive resource drain when you do brand extension, to some degree line extension too, that means your core business starts to suffer. But look, we're going to cover it in the product module. So let's get back to it there. I think you'll find it useful. Sarah, when there are multiple customer layers to consider, retailers and consumers, how should a strategy be oriented to satisfy both? The assigned reading suggests that from a brand perspective, differentiated consumer segments reduce the risk of product cannibalization within the brand's portfolio. However, a retailer focused on growing the overall category may view this differently, particularly if it competes with the same shelf space. Oh, and she said this was meant for prior weeks. That's okay. Um the the short answer is you need to cover both, Sarah. But be very careful listening to retailers. I know they're your ultimate customer, I know you have to keep them happy, I know they're a giant pain in the ass. Giving the customer, the retailer, what they want is a surefire route to short-term happiness and long-term failure. Yeah. I I can count on 12 hands the number of clients I've worked for that only took their coordinates from the retailer. And there's a couple of problems with that. The retailer's telling you what they want and what they need. There are other retailers in other markets, and they're pigeonholing you in a position, and other suppliers might be given other remits. So the standard answer is particularly important. You need both. Yes, you need to know what the retailer wants, but you also have to know the big picture of the total market to balance that out. And that's why, unfortunately, when when we talk about being market-oriented, it's everyone down the line that you have to be oriented around. Lucy Walker. I'm part of a small marketing team within a smaller business. How can we approach segmentation in a way that is still effective but also realistic and manageable from a cost and time perspective? Are there certain segmentation methods or stages you prioritize first or simpler ways to manage meaningful customer segments? Look, there's two things here: the segmentation process and the segmentation itself. The segmentation itself has to be built on the market. It doesn't matter if you're small or not, right? It's it's it's you know, you could be a midget. If you're climbing a mountain, the map is of the mountain. So don't make any compromises on your segmentation because of your size. The compromises will come when you do targeting. But the process you do it by, because you don't have access to unlimited data, will by definition be trickier. I tell you, the meaningful actionable grid will work well enough for you guys. The other option you've got is to do it in even more basic ways on really simple, meaningful, actionable variables in a very broad way. My point is though, you know, try to have a really good map. And when we get to targeting, that's when your smallness kicks in. It's not in segmentation, right? It's it's targeting where this should play a role. Market segmentation is about the marker. Maria, what are your thoughts on repositioning a B2B brand? Do you have any reading material to recommend? It's no different, Maria, than repositioning anything else. Um what have I got that would be useful for you? If you reach out to me privately on LinkedIn, I'll send you some private stuff. That sounds faintly dodgy, but you know what I mean. I've got gear I can maybe give you on stuff I've done. And you can tell what the company is and the sector in private, and I can be more specific. How about that? Emma. I mean, generally, yeah, my point is again, unfortunately, repositioning is more a topic for the mini MBA of brand management. We do cover it a little bit, but not much. Um be careful. Here's my one general piece of advice, Maria, to everyone. We say repositioning, nine times out of ten, we don't mean repositioning. Repositioning is very rarely the right thing to do because we're talking about changing the actual position of a usually successful company. We normally mean revitalization, which means let's just re-articulate the positioning and then let's revisit a more modern approach to it. That's a more subtle, usually more effective, respectful approach. So be careful. So many times you get marketers go into a quite successful brand, go, right, we've got to change the position. Slow down. There's a reason the brand's been successful. Let's just make sure it isn't just a matter of articulating it in a cleaner way and revisiting how to execute it better. That's what revitalization means. But reach out, we'll talk. Emma, with a B2B software product, do you think consumers truly care about distinctiveness when making a choice? Or should all the positioning be focused on the product itself? Absolutely they do, Emma. So nobody cares about distinctiveness. It's not a concept you care about. Distinctiveness is a reptile brain concept. And what I mean by that is it's a system one structural thing. If your soft B2B software product comes to mind first in your B2B decision maker's head, it's 70 to 80% likely to be the one that they buy. Not because they care about it, but because the brain is already playing familiarity tricks on the decision makers. Yeah? So do not fall for this engineering software tech bro bullshit. It's all about the product. Bullshit, it's about the product. There are 25,000 B2B software products in your category, and three of them get considered, and one of them is already favored to win because of its distinctiveness. Do not underestimate that fact, and do not listen to computer engineers who, with the exception of doing computer stuff, are idiots. You can quote me. Kyle Wilson. I'm currently managing three brands. Lucky, lucky man. Well, one master and two endorsed. Okay. Which we're bringing into one single platform moving forward. I've started to work on diagnosis and will move to strategy. While I understand the concepts, I'm a bit of a loss for what documentation should be produced and what it should look like for both phases. Can you help, please? And are there any examples or templates? Beer or 12 on me. You know how to win me over, Mr. Wilson. Uh so what are you doing? So you're bringing them into one single platform. So what you're doing is what's called brand phasing. Um there's a uh there's a gentle way to do this, which is like the Unilever uh Heartmark ice cream approach. And there's the the the abrupt, violent way to do it, which is HSB-C, which is overnight, I'm just going to kill 12 brands and make them all HSBC. It really depends on where you're phased. Again, it's a very detailed topic, Kyle. It's more out of the brand management literature. If you reach out, I will service you privately, and then you can send me my beer. May Lee, could you explain the difference between segmentation and subcategories? Sure. I understand that targeting a subcategory is the act of choosing where to play, and segmentation looks at the whole market. No. But couldn't you feasibly segment by subcategories? No. So, okay, May, common question. The thing you're missing is that segmentation is about customers. Subcategories are about products. You can never have a subcategory of customers, and more commonly, you can never have a segmentation of products. That's incorrect. Yeah? So a subcategory is the Greek yogurt category. That's a subcategory. There's yogurt, and then there's Greek yogurt. A segment is uh happy lifestyle yoga lovers. Yeah. There's everyone that buys yoga, and there's a smaller group that buy yogurt. Customers, products. That's it. That's what you miss. Ollie, I'm really enjoying this course. Thank you. The Solar article on fast versus smart refers to fast goals rather than objectives. Yeah, I've just I just picked it this year because I thought, you know what, we'll try all it may not survive, but I thought we'll do it anyway. Yeah. I understand a goal to be the end state, whereas an objective is how you get there. Is it just me, or is there confusion and incorrect use of priorities, goals, objectives in corporate speech? Yeah, it's totally inconsistent. And Ollie says they use the words interchangeably. Um, yeah, look, it's inconsistent and it doesn't matter. Priorities, uh, there's another one. Imperatives, goals, and objectives. Uh uh bundle them together because there's no uniformity over these things. And and every each company will treat them differently. Sometimes you'll see objectives and then goals, you know. Uh I wouldn't worry about it. The point is, you the what do we really need you to remember here? You need a statement, even Don Sol will accept this, right? You need a statement. You need four or five statements, which are forward-facing statements of what you're going to achieve that are specific about what you're going to do, right? The how will come later, but this is we're looking for four or five statements of focus. That's really what we're talking about. And the words, the words don't matter. Try doing it when English isn't your first language, it gets even worse, right? Lucy Walker, I'd love to take more of a two-speed targeting approach and balance long-term brand building with short-term sales activation. But we operate in a highly competitive price-led market with limited budget. The focus shifts towards short-term activity. Although we try to educate internally on the importance of balancing both commercial pressure and tight budgets, make it difficult to secure investment for longer-term brand activity. It's fundamentally stupid, Lucy, but carry on. What advice would you give to marketers and smaller businesses trying to balance both approaches when short-term sales performance is the main business priority? Yeah, I mean, this is the question. We've talked about it before. I wrote that column, The Question in Marketing Week, where I talked to CMOs who had balanced it properly. Have a look for that. Mark Ritz and the question, Marketing Week. It's a good column. Um fundamentally, and this is not aimed at you, Lucy, it's aimed at your company. It's stupid. I think you have to be hard on these guys because they're Muppets, yeah. We call it the long of it, not because it takes a long time to work, because it lasts for a long time. And it sets up the short, right? Um I tell you what, so rather than me going to more detail, Luce, I I've changed the reading for module nine, and I've I've used the walk report, yeah, which is their new report on balancing long and shorten communications. Can we hold your excellent challenge? Because I want to talk about the Doom Loop and all of that that they've covered in uh the it's called the multiplier effect. You can get it early if you want, just search for walk, the multiplier effect. I'm gonna serve it to you in in module nine. That's got all the data and that has all the answers. Just hold it to there, it's gonna come. I've got you. Philip Stemple. I have a question that is not about the core info of the module, but it stood out. In the DAIR case study, one of the learnings was that more channels could incrementally increase ROI. This is generally true. I was under the assumption that reach is better than frequency. That's not a good assumption. I'd rather reach the whole target audience once than reach half of them twice. That's not necessarily true. The learning in the video seems to say the opposite. What am I not getting? So the Ehrenberg Bath's over-egging of their omelets applies here as well, right? Generally speaking, I think we've moved, and Ehrenberg Bass have been correct to do this from this model that says you need to reach a consumer, you know, three or five times per period to have an effect, to you're better off going for broader penetration and reaching them just once. Now, technically that's good. The rebalancing is good. The issue is it's too simplistic and binary. The reality is over a time period, at some point you have to touch them again. You know, and all budgets being real, you sometimes can't reach 100% of the market, and you may be better off reaching a smaller proportion once, and then again over a repeat time period. That's the first point. Second point is what's certainly also true is when you are uh touched in an appropriate way by different media at different times with the same message, that impact of three different touches is better than getting three of the same in general. Okay. The the simplistic world of Erin Bergbass saying you just want to reach 100% of the market once, not 20% three times, is born of a world of theoretical correctness but not practicality. Yeah? And and every media agency will tell you the same thing. So just boil it down a little bit, Philip. It's not your fault. A lot of people are under this misapprehension. Uh, we will cover it in future modules. We cover it in the comms module in more detail. Xavier, greetings from Northamptonshire, UK. Oh, Xavier, sorry. I was looking after international marketing for a UK-based B2B company, and we've a strong culture and a fantastic marketing team. As we expand, however, central marketing support isn't growing at the same pace. We're swamped with ad hoc requests from individual countries. These requests help local performance, but risk pulling us away from our core annual objectives. What advice would you give on handling these requests without defaulting to do not disturb? I'm responsible for global objectives, and while local teams naturally focus on their own market results, I understand their perspective. I keep coming back to the idea that tactics without strategy is noise before defeat. Yeah, good question, Xavier. I think, you know, you're not going to be able to grow too quickly. I think your objective now is to put a local marketer in each country. That local marketer comes back into the global team for the all-important strategy stuff, then executes it in the country and also handles the tactical shit that otherwise will fill the pipe. I think without that, you'll end up becoming a services outfit. So getting someone who's more of an executor in each of the countries is probably the top priority. It's the only way, there's nothing you're doing wrong there. It's now a structural thing. May Lee, could you expand on two-speed positioning? Our business has a core competence in product. We are biggest and best in class, strongest offering on many dimensions. But when expanding into product two, our offer is totally different, nowhere near as strong, and actually we're unclear on our position. Yeah, okay. So you need an overall brand position. Now that's about two things. It's about the distinctive brand assets, and it's about a very broad one or two, three things that you position the brand on. Yeah. So these are my distinctive brand asset codes, and we are this, this, and this. That's the brand position. That's for the long of it. That's what you say to everyone. Yeah. Down below, there is a more product-based, segment-based activation. So even for product one, you might have two different ones for two different segments, yeah? And for product two, different activations. Okay. We, for example, at Mini MBA have a very simple positioning that I showed you for the brand. It gets a little bit more complex. Because then we'll go after digital marketers with a particular message. We'll go after B2B marketers with a different message. People who run marketing effectiveness with a different message. Not for the brand, but with a particular communication emphasis. Yeah? And that gives you a little bit more agility. That's all we're saying. Karina, your point in module five about sticking to brand codes resonated with me, as I've seen many brands make changes for the sake of change. Voila. What I'd love to better understand is how you distinguish unnecessary changes from legitimate cases. I don't think there are any legitimate cases, Karina. I'm older and even more cynical than you. I think I just say, as you saw me do in the module, my line to every brand has always been the same for the last 10 years. If your distinctive brand assets and brands are less than 40 years old, don't touch them. The end. It's not worth it. It's not worth it. Most of the time the answer is keep them the same. Don't change them, don't update them, just keep reinforcing them. And in about 35, 40 years, maybe we can start playing. It's that simple. Rushing, I'm enjoying the course. From your experience, what tends to be the biggest positioning mistake subscription on media businesses make in competitive markets where products and content can appear fairly similar? And what separates useful marketing objectives from objectives that look good on paper but rarely influence decision making? Oh look, we've covered them already, Rushin. Having too many objectives is the big sin, and not having a benchmark and a goal is the second. For subscription and media businesses, probably the other one is relying on too much price promotion to deliver the objective rather than just being bolder and holding the line on price. Talia, are your glasses part of the mini MBA code? Well, it's a very interesting question. So I have the same specs, so they are consistent. They are from Montclair. They're actually skiing some. I have a huge head. I mean, people think they've been. Heads. I'm like an eight like an inch, whatever it is, eight foot, whatever it is. When you get a you know, seven and three-quarters, seven and foot. I'm an eight, right? So I have a huge head. So if I wear regular human being spectacles, they look like this on me. Like so the only I went, I once went into a Montclair shop somewhere in Switzerland where they were selling obviously skiing sunglasses, and I was like, oh, hang on. First they fit my head, but my field of vision is exceptional, right? So I did what all middle-aged men do when they find something beautiful. I bought like a hundred pairs. Literally all the pairs that were left in the world because they're not very common. They were expensive, but they weren't very common. And then I hoarded them and got them all put with different lenses in. So they do pat and I've had them for 15 years. So they do fit the distinctive asset toolbox. The issue was when Scott Galloway was doing his course, he had his specs as his distinctive asset. And we'd already started doing it, but suddenly he got his, and I'm like, eh, okay. So we've differed on it. I'd I'd welcome your point of view on whether I should make that. I'm not gonna ever get my eyes fixed. One of the things about being old is at some point wearing specs is great because if you get up in the morning and you're really fucking, you know, bags and fact, you know, you basically with these things covering up, I'd say 25% of your face, which is a good thing. So I I like them, I'm keeping them. Um I've also got a son that tries to poke me in the eye. So yeah, look, um, maybe you tell me. I'll I'm open, I'm open to suggestions. The only thing is I can't, I've got I've even got them with blue screen. I'm I'm short-sighted, I can't see beyond, you know, to 10 feet away. But for this, I can see it and I can't focus. So I've even got them with special lenses that I wear for when I've got the computer on. But anyway. Tell me. Yeah, you know, I'll I'll Talia, you we've talked about it for years. Talia, you get to decide post next time what you think, and I'll I'll go yes or no. You decide, and we'll we'll we'll make more of them or not. Right, two questions to go. Peter Powell. I'm not gonna say anything about DJs, Peter. Uh, can we make a case that purpose is forever and positioning is for the current market? Definitely not, no. Um, I'm trying not to see a difference between the two. Uh I I've long felt that all the jargon is confusing and the brand just needs one thing to direct it. Well, I'm with you. So it doesn't matter what we call that one thing. I'm with you. But I'm seeing that a difference can emerge between these two terms, positioning and purpose. Ideally, the two are the same, like Volvo, but there are cases when positioning needs to shift, yet the core purpose remains. Loving the course. Look, I like it's a nice, convenient framing. You've kind of let yourself off the hook there, Pete, because you're also saying it doesn't have to always be that way, but there are cases where the purpose endures and the positioning changes. I'd much prefer it, and I'll let you have it if you say, look, some brands have a purpose, every brand has a position. They're usually not the same, but both need to endure. Because I don't like positioning changing much either. So I'll give it to you on those bases. Finally, Mr. Nick Coper. What are ways to protect your distinctiveness when private label competitors or copycat brands adopt your codes, or when you, as a category leader, see set the codes for the entire category and not just your brand? It's a very common question, Nick. And the short answer is you don't do weirdly, you don't do much. You don't do much against private label because you can't. And you don't even do much against competitors because actually, in a weird way, they're reinforcing your brand. It cuts both ways. We're a good example, right? Mini MBA and the and the rosette and the red. Go and search for mini MBA and do an image search, right? There's loads of shonky shit all over the world now where they've copied us, and I don't care, right? Do people confuse us with them? Maybe. But you know, I I think more often than not, it reflects back to us and and the distinctiveness. You lose a bit of confusion, but you gain a bit of synergy, would be my take. So I think it more means just keep doing what you're doing with your distinctive brand assets and don't respond. It certainly shouldn't mean that you should tweak your distinctive brand assets because then you're weakening them in the face of copying. Do you see what I mean? Um, I think that's the right response. All right, great questions. Okay, so I now give you a week off. Use it for whatever purposes you want. When I was 19 at university, reading week meant two things. We played football all day until five o'clock, and then we went to the pub and we had beer for the rest of the day. Those are the happy days. So if you want, why don't you spend reading week playing soccer and drinking beer? That's what I would have done 35 years ago. Um, in this instance, catch up, have a week off, take a pause, we head into tactics in a week's time, and that means we start with product the most important P. See ya in a week's time.