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I'm in the MBA. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. You are in the right place. Here we are. QA session one. The end of week two. I hope it's gone well. This is obviously where we answer your well, we, I answer all your questions. So a few words about the QA and then we'll kick on. We've got some great questions to answer. So we do this every other week. So when you're doing weeks one or week two, you might have a question about the course or about the content or something is going on at work or anything. You jump onto the tile, you type in the question, kind of when you can see here. And then every two weeks, I sit down uh to start a Friday morning in Australia and I answer all the questions. And then what we do is we take the file and we put it back into the tile where you'd ask the questions, and it sits there for the rest of the course. So although this appears 12 o'clock London time on a Friday, it's not live. You don't need it to, you don't need to be there on time. That's just when it's available from. Access it whenever you want, either in video format or in the audio version. We've also put a link to as well. Okay. Um ask anything you like. Try and keep it on the topics of the two weeks if you can. You don't have to. Keep the questions short. Um, I love answering them, but we've got lots to get through as you'll see. And I always want to do it in less than an hour so it stays interesting. We've put you in a cohort, your cohort C, just because I like to keep, I don't want you listening to four, it's going to be for me five hours today of recording. I don't want you listening to five hours to get to your questions. So we've broken you into cohorts. Doesn't make any difference. It just means you'll you you get about an just under an hour's worth of QA. Um, if there's anything particular I want to follow up with, I'll do that in our LinkedIn group uh on the Monday after this QA. And if you're not part of the LinkedIn group yet, please do join. It's where we do all the sort of back and forth and everything else. Only other thing to say is just be careful if you're going to say something pointy about your company or your role. Everyone's watching this, so you know, you keep it relatively private, is my advice. You don't have to mention the company itself, just say my company. Yeah, it's good advice. Right, I think that's it. Let's get on with some good questions. Uh, let's start with Ben. Mark, what's your view on playing the long game by supporting a sales orientation whilst building the internal credibility to shift towards a marker orientation? This has always been my approach with success, but struggling to make a more impactful shift because of the strong growth being experienced in a founder-led business. Do you have any advice? Yeah, look, I we're gonna get this a lot, Ben, right? So I think it's a mistake of my module one this year. Um, I I want to make it clear, I don't want I do want you to be able to make your companies market-oriented like Jeff Bezos did. I just don't think you'll be able to do it 99% of the time. The the product orientation and the sales orientation, which to some degree are good things, are too strong. So my challenge to you guys as as mini MBAs is one, you personally, you need to work on your market orientation, maintain it because sometimes we drift. Yeah. And two, make the marketing team you're part of market-oriented because they have to be. And most of the time they're not. They're um they're product driven or they're advertising oriented, they're not market-oriented enough. That would be my focus. Now, when it comes to the rest of the organization, when you get to a moment where the company's gonna launch a new product or do some discounting or setting new prices or has a new idea for an ad campaign, you then show them what market orientation can do by turning up with data and expertise and generally rocking their world. That's what I want you to do. If if it was possible to pull a Bezos and make the company more market oriented, it would be great. But my experience with people like you guys, and my own experience is it's not. And we don't need to fight the tide. Yeah. So that question will come up a bit, I think. You know, how do I make the company more market-oriented? The answer is just by showing them what marketing can do, by being the change that you want them to execute. Don't try and change them. It's it's it's too big a challenge, yeah. So I like your thinking, yeah. Sales orientation ain't a bad thing, particularly when marketing can support it and you can do the marketing part. I think that's the right way to go. Stephanie Ling, what would be a practical way that a marketing leader could start a conversation with their CMO or VPs to discuss improvements or a cultural shift towards market orientation? I just left an organization where that would have been helpful. I I don't think it's an abstract conversation, Steph, to my just to my point there. I think it's showing them data rhetorically that shows that what they're doing is wrong, and then making the point that the reason we're not seeing this is we're not market-oriented enough. The proof has to be in the pudding, if you see what I mean. Mia, most examples used in this module come from B2C. How does this translate to B2B businesses and what would be what would a real world example look like? So, Mia, there's no difference between B2B and B2C in my world. Um, you're right, there's probably more examples in module one of B2C. There are some B2B, to be fair, but um, and we will keep that balance, but I don't believe in the difference between B2C and B2B. Let me explain. Um, first of all, if if you were good, Mia, and I'm sure you are, and you were working in B2B, and a B2C company asked me for someone that was good at targeting and positioning, and you were good at targeting and positioning, I would volunteer your name. And your skills in B2B would not worry me one dot. So that first of all proves the point that there isn't much in it, right? Second, the minute anyone says, and it's a good question, don't get me wrong, oh, this all comes from B2C, like it's the same, right? But then there's B2B, right? Let's be clear about B2C. Yeah, it's completely different. I might be selling insurance, trombones, cars, microcomputers, uh, water cream, microphones, coffee, pizzas, you know, banking, uh, on and on, movies. They're all completely different. They don't look like each other at all. So bundling together and going, you sell B2C, and they don't sell B2C, they sell through Tesco and through uh cinema studios and through prescriptors and bars, and and there's B2B there anyway, right? So my point is free yourself from this. How is it going to be different in B2B? The answer is it's gonna be completely the same in B2B. It's not gonna be the same as what it's like selling ice cream as your business, but ice cream isn't the same as selling walk cream or trombones or movies or software, yeah. They're all different. So just get rid of that terminology because it gets in the way. There are elements of B2B, you know, the importance of the sales team, the buying committee, we'll cover those, but they're not giant and they shouldn't preclude you from a big job in B2C or from the need to ask for specific examples. There'll be plenty of B2B in the course, probably not enough for your tastes, because for the same reason someone that works in, you know, uh fast food is like, oh, there aren't enough examples of fast food restaurants. Well, there aren't, but all of this is relevant, I promise you. There's nothing in the market orientation module that wasn't absolutely relevant to B2B and B2C the same. I promise you. I'm not trying to be lazy, that's the truth. I swear to you, Vouter. After reading Marking Myopia, I wonder if you have examples of some current brands or companies undeservingly being praised for their approach that are just riding the wave of industry category growth, that are treating the consumer and marketing as stepchildren. I presume oil companies have not changed. Um, yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I'll tell you my best example of this, Wouter, which you will like. Um, I did a thing with a big Dutch firm that does a uh it's its 10-year anniversary uh last month, and it was like the drivers of growth, and it has been analyzing like what what are the drivers of growth? And my job at their conference was to talk about the top 10 drivers of growth, and I sort of took all of theirs, except for the number one, and the number one driver of growth I picked was category, like which category you're in has more impact than anything else you do, right? And they'd never include it in their list, so I was kind of proud of that because it was like I got one that you haven't even thought of, and it's the most important one. So I think you're right. I think at the end of the day, the category is the driver of of so much of this. And and I'll tell you who gets that private equity. Private equity when they make an acquisition is 90% interested in the category, 10% interested in the brand, because they've worked that out. If if you're the fifth brand in a good category, it's better being the first brand in a shitty category, right? So, in that sense, I think, yeah, you your thinking is true, and categorical industry growth is where it's all at. What's a good example of a company? I mean, yeah, I mean, Nokia to some degree was riding that wave of it wasn't a particularly good company, and Apple showed it up eventually, but it was riding the wave of everybody needed to buy for the first time a mobile phone, and Nokia got there first, and they were in that giant category wave until it got competitive. I'd probably pick on them. Laura, you mentioned your surprise when the Louis Vuitton admissed the mark with viewers at the cinema. How did you then raise the conversation with the team? And what steps did you take in this instance? I took no steps at all, Laura. I was not involved in the advertising team. Um, I stayed well and truly out of it, and I'm sure to this day they are convinced it was a smash of a campaign. Some battles you don't fight, yeah. Um, it was more my personal lesson in that case. I was not, you know, involved in Mr. Antoine Arnaud ran that team, and I was not involved in it, and I did not want to get involved in it, so I kept my own counsel. Carly Tolbon, I find Levitt's concept of defining your business more broadly through a customer lens very interesting as both an employee of a large business in a defined category, and as I'm planning to set up my own small business, but how broad is too broad? Do we risk extended beyond our current core capability specialism or inertia if we define the business too broadly? Or is it more that we should use this as a clue to how consumers view us? No, no, no, no, no, no, you're right the first time. I think there are two definitions, Carly, that you have to make. And you have to explicitly make them, but I can't tell you what they are, and there is no perfect answer, but there needs to be an answer for you. The first question is is Levitt's question. What business are you actually in? And again, you've you've you've phrased it beautifully. It can be too broad, in which case it's you know, and it can be too narrow, in which case my OPA is gonna be a risk. So, what business are we in, right? Is a really important question, and you have to define that. And then the other kind of longitudinal question is who is the market, the mass market for that business? Yeah. I'm not saying we're always gonna go after them, I'm not saying in the market right now, but if I was gonna segment the total market, what is the box that I'm gonna slice? Yeah. Again, I I can't tell you that. And it in and there are different answers to the question, but you need to slice, you need to define that box as well as the other box. This is the business we're in, and these are the customers that are in our market. And those two questions I think have to come from you guys, and they're not as easy as they sound. So so but I think you've you've defined that Levit question very well. Next week, when we do segmentation, we'll talk about which which market, what what is the market and how big is it? Snigda. My question is specifically related to competitive intelligence. In my experience, I've been I've seen secondary research work best on analyzing competitor info. Do you think primary research works for competitors? Kind of. If yes, do you think it's ethical to collect competitor data through primary? Oh, yeah, it's ethical, man. Yeah, screw that. I'm not worried about ethics. I think my point would be I I don't disagree with your point here, Sningda. Um, first of all, yeah, good competitive intelligence, um, CI stuff, good secondary data. I like competitive, but otherwise, I agree with you for not an ethical reason. I don't like it when companies spend loads of money studying their competitors. It's not that interesting or relevant at the end of the day. I like it when we study competitors through the eyes of the customer, and therefore they're not competitors, they're just the other alternatives along with us. I like that data. I don't like this big, like, oh, what are the competitors doing? And let's study there. You know, what my customer thinks of them and me in context is where I'm at. So I would I'm not worried about ethics, I'm more interested in in the overall view of the market. And I think that is, yeah, absolutely crucial in cases like this. Ah, my screen is is not moving. Talk amongst ah, there we go. It came back, it came back. Interesting. Got it right. Uh Babajid, uh, in many in most organizations, marketing sits downstream of decisions already made by product and leadership. Yeah. How do you build genuine market orientation when you don't have the organizational authority to act on what the market is telling you? Well, you you do, you do, Babajid. We're gonna talk about this more in the course. The the days of us being able to create a product from marketing are long gone, pricing long gone, you know, those decisions, as you say, are taken upstream. But once they've been taken, we still have enormous opportunities with touch points, with existing product improvement research, with jobs to be done. Stuff I'm gonna teach you later in the course. So don't give up. Um, I would say 95% of the time the product has already been created in Switzerland and we have to then market it. That's fine. I'll show you what we can do. So my point is you still have authority, just not complete control. Two, you say marketing begins with humility. I do, uh, which I agree with. Good. That's a humble agreement. And I'm an advocate for empathy in marketing, but in practice, clients pay for conviction. How do you hold both? Ah, that's a different thing. I think I'm a good example, I'm not always a good example. I think with consumers, I am a very humble listener. And having done a lot of listening with clients, I'm a real prick. Because I've got the data from the market, I think I'm able to say to the clients, and the clients use usually not always like it, you've got this totally wrong, or this isn't the way it's going, it's going this way. Yeah. Because I've already got absolute certainty. I'm it's funny, I'm working at the moment on a case study about Barbie. It's a long story. You'll find out about it eventually. And at one point, this amazing woman that launches Barbie, because Barbie's all about, like, you know, we don't need any more mothers and prams and baby dolls. Young girls in the 1950s want to play with future versions of themselves, you know, doctors and you know, executives and just generally attractive women that aren't pushing a pram. And it's really interesting, no one believes her and tells her she's stupid. And she hires Ernest Dichter, who's the father of modern consumer psychology, who's this crazy Viennese psychologist who invented focus groups. And Dichter is exactly what you're talking about. He sits there with these little seven-year-old girls and Barbies and literally sits on the floor and listens to them, uh, telling him what they think. And then he comes in and basically goes, This is exactly what they want. Yeah. And that's the mix. The mix is humility with consumers, learn from consumers, and then authority and strength be built on that with organizations. Number three, if 56% of customers don't believe companies are as customer-centric as they claim, what's the one thing I can do tomorrow without budget or leadership to start closing that gap? You can just listen to them. Um, there's a really good argument that simply by doing a piece of research on your consumers and throwing away the results, I wouldn't, but you could. Consumers think you're a much better organization than you really are. Yeah? So just doing research actually is part of the solution to being perceived to be not market-oriented. Consumers like to tell you what you did right and what you did wrong. We're gonna do a big exit survey on you, and I will, by the way, listen to everything you tell me, and I will change the product as a result. But even if I just threw away those results, you would think a lot better of me because I've asked you at the end, what could I do to make this better? Jess, how do we ensure research insights actually translate into business decisions? Backward market research. Go back and look at it, it's even better than I portray it to be. Backward market research. That's why I put it in there. Go and listen to Mark and James go backward. Listen to Andreas and in the podcast. That's it. It does it. It does it. Uh, John, you mentioned that it's harder to run a conjoint if you have many different competitors offering different experiences or services. Yeah. This applies to the organization I work for. Are there any alternative methodologies you'd recommend that help us to reveal derived drivers of behavior? Uh the one thing you can do, John, and forgive me because it's a long time since I did it, you can create an ideal brand. And so what you do is you say there's a way of using conjoints. Like if you talk to Sawtooth or someone, they they can create an ideal brand, which is kind of an amalgam, which tells you kind of the overall of what to do. But having said that, look, conjoint will still work for you. It'll just be less uh directional, but still give you tons of insight if you keep it at the general level for like, you know, abstract option A versus B. It just it's just a little bit harder to translate. It's still a very worthy exercise. Kelly, this is less of a question and more of a challenge. Okay, okay. That the that being the sticky note of people don't care. All right, yeah, yeah. A bit of pushback. Good, good, good. You were right to give the example of toothpaste. And generally, toothpaste is attributed as a product that wins loyalty on a promotion and then becomes a staple. I think the comment doesn't give enough autonomy to people who really care about the choices they make. If you think about food and drink as an industry, people can be passionate and obsessive about what they buy. Absolutely. People will all lie to Pepsi in the face of coke, others will say only Coke is the one true cola. I get the point you're making, which is the consumer can be apathetic, but our job as marketers is to create that desire or tap into it. Disagree. Lovely point. Disagree. Here's my point. I'll give you your Pepsi consumer. So somewhere out there is a woman that's obsessed with Pepsi, yeah? And she goes on about it and on about it, and she cares about Pepsi. Yeah. And the other 2,826 brands that she consumes this year, you don't care about that much at all. So the odds that you're managing the brand that she cares about is one in 2,896, yeah. You can keep pushing back, Kel, and I'm happy for you to do it. It won't help you as a marketer, yeah. Your job partly is to tap into that desire, but it's mostly not. It's mostly to make your brand more salient, it's to make it come to mind faster, uh quicker, more readily, because that's what will drive your sale. Not thinking there's some inherent desire for your products that you need to understand and tap into. It 70% of the driver of purchase, we now know this, right? B2B and B2C is does the brand come to mind first? If you're buying, you know, toothpaste or you're buying, you know, corporate banking, the first brand you think of, later on when we look at your purchase, 70-80% of the time the brand that you buy will be that one that you thought of first. So your main job, 70, 80% of the time, is just making it there first. Yeah. Now, I don't I don't disagree completely with what you're saying, but what I'm saying to you is accept your brand is fundamentally not that important. Don't start getting into loyalist stuff, and you know, it's a good insight, but at the end of the day, our brands are far less well thought of or even thought of than we imagined, and good marketing starts there. You'll see as we go through the program. I hope that that's the case. We'll see. We'll see. Amy Adams. Reading the dangers of RD section in marketing myopia was like leading every frustration I've had on a daily basis. Isn't that cool, right? That reading's from what, 1961? What are we talking about now? 70 years? Um, is that right? 40, yeah, 25, uh 65 years, still bang on the money. What would your advice be for marketers working in those engineering, product oriented companies where marketing is treated as an afterthought rather than a Strategic function. If you understand the theory, but you know internal politics and company culture, they're unlikely to change. How do we still apply good marketing? Well, it's back to my earlier point, Amy. You're not going to change these guys. You're not, and you know it. But what you are able to do is go, okay, guys, you've got this product, okay? Let me take it, let me prototype it, let me test it. Okay. Okay, you've got a price. Let me run some Van Dessen Dorb. Let me do some conjoint. Let me have a look at it. Okay, sales are down. Before we change the product, let me look at the touch points. Let me look at jobs to be done. So my point is you bring the marketing and you don't change them, but you change the decisions and maybe a little bit change them. That's where I see I think the sweet spot being possible. Roccio, could you bring some of the most interesting purpose organizational orientation brands and share papers resources to dive into those? No, I'm not going to do that. I don't think they're that important. I mean, look, there's two to focus on the cliched two. There's Ben and Jerry's, who are a giant pain in the ass uh for Unilever and are now off on their own journey. You can study Ben and Jerry's, it was a fascinating operation. And there's Patagonia, which has walked the walk and set the precedent for everyone else. They're the two, Rossi. But I am not that interested in purpose. It's not because it doesn't work, it's such a tiny minority of cases, and it's so distracting from the main marketing function. I refuse to do it, even though I love you, right? So, but they're the two I would hunt down. You want to look at two things, you want to look at Ben and Jerry's, and you want to look at our friends at Patagonia. Sophie, Sophie Rowe, in Theodore Levitz, you can call him Ted, he's a friend now. In Ted Levitz Marketing Myopia paper from the best moustache I've ever seen, like this great moustache, good-looking fella, straight out of the 1960s. He looks like one of the cops from Serpico, you know. In Theodore Levit's paper from 1960, he states that marketing is a stepchild with regards to management's view of marketing's role in their organization. Recognizes existing as having to be taken care of, but not worth very much real thought or attention. Today, do you think marketing is still viewed as a stepchild? Oh yeah. Uh uh as Apple and Amazon changed the perspective. No, no, no, no. We're we're very much the third wheel, yeah. You need a product and you need a customer to be a business. Yeah. We think marketing really helps that, but the reality is you don't need that third wheel to be a business. If you had just the product and marketing, that doesn't work. If you had just marketing and customers, that doesn't work. Do you see what I mean? We're always going to be on the externals. That's fine. That's fine. That's where we are. Doesn't mean we can't have a massive impact nonetheless. We're not the center of the universe, is what Levitt is telling us. And he's right, still right. Yao Zong. I would like to get your take on how you see organizations that are seemingly market-oriented, but yet have separate reporting lines within the organization, from working levels to the very top executives. Um, one common observation is that CMOs are increasingly tasked to look at driving sales growth, often without having sufficient oversight or influence on key areas such as product, pricing, and place. This such situation is often framed as having an organization structure that requires common consensus, but it feels as if it adds red tape to the decision making. Yeah, look, it's true, but I you're gonna find, Yao Zong, that the only way you can have an impact is by getting into that consensus with data and marketing expertise. I don't think marketers will ever be in charge of pricing anywhere, but I think they should be involved in that decision-making process. Same with uh distribution, same with product. But you have to be trained in it, which is what we're doing here, and you have to have the data and the and the input ready to go. So, yeah, it's true that it's complex, but in that complexity is your opportunity to get involved and bring marketing into the process. So I think it's gonna be good. I think it's gonna be good. Kali, would you always advocate for a backward market research approach? How do you employ the approach without pre-judging? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so yeah, I would generally, if you're gonna do a big bit of if it's a recurring tracking bit of research, you just get on with it. You're measuring what you measured last time. But a big piece of research, my consulting career was always, by the time I was doing it, always backwards. Uh, it just makes it better. Everyone thinks you're gonna pre-judge the the data, you're not gonna do it. And if you look at the Mark and James go backwards example, Carly, James had already a pretty clear vision of how he was gonna position his new diabetes pump. The backwards market research destroyed in about three hours. That's because of two things. One, you um you you you've got the qualitative. So we're not starting with any kind of question, we're starting with the qual, right? Before even we get to the backwards research, we're just gonna listen to customers. And second, we're not saying, you know, how much do you like the idea of the pump making you free? No one's doing that. What we're saying is here's a list of 10 attributes that came out of the qual. Now let's correlate them with preference and see how they play. That's all we're doing. We're not going any any further down the track than that. It's gonna give you the answers, right? Qual keeps you straight, and then the data keeps you straight. And then the pre-testing that happens afterwards keeps you straight. So it's a good worry, but one you don't need to have. It's really that good. Nijat, I've been working in marketing for many years and have built solid knowledge and experience in the field. Good for you. Let's say I join a company as a marketing manager. However, after starting the role, I realize the company is highly sales-oriented and views marketing purely as promotion, mainly running ads for discounted products. In this situation, what should a marketing manager do? Should they accept the reality and align with management expectations, even if it reduces marketing to short-term promotional activity, or should they push back and try to shift the organization? Shift. Now, you're making a more realistic case here, Nijad. I don't think you can change the whole organization. But the but your point here is very specific. The marketing team itself is not market-oriented, right? They're sales-oriented, and that's leading them to do short-term stuff, uh, sales promotion stuff. So you're going to use your data, your expertise, not even to push back, but say, okay, we're going to do this sales promotion. Let me show you what it's going to cost us over the next 12 months in terms of lost profit versus us not doing that sales promotion and running a non-price-based promotion. So you're just going to lay before them other options that your expertise gives them and you're going to move them. And I think in a company that you describe like this, marketing is more valuable than ever because without you, they're not doing it. So, yeah, push back within the marketing function, maybe the rest of the organization will never change. But that's okay because you're there. Jennifer, using Levitz Marketing Myopia reading, if we define the business by the consumer need, not the product, what business would you say Campari is really in? How would you go about getting consumer input on this topic? I I don't think you can. I think generally consumer data feeds the process, Jen. But at the end of the day, I think you, you know, as we said earlier, you have to define the business of Campari. Yeah. And what a beautiful business it is, first of all, right? I think you have to go broader than just being in the spirits or drinks business, but not going so broad that you're, you know, entertainment, right? My point is that definition in each country for Kampari, this is our mass market, before we start slicing it. And that other definition of this is the business we're in has massive implications. Now, I can't tell you what it is. You guys as a team have to define those two things, and there's no perfect answer. But without those two definitions, I really think companies struggle for all the reasons we've talked about. So I think one of your jobs is to go, this is how I choose to define it. It may not be right, I define it this way, and this is how we will operate under my leadership. Yeah. I think that's the right way to do it. And I think, you know, as as one of the questions said earlier, uh, we're using Levit's knowledge, it's kind of don't go too broad, it becomes floppy, but don't stay too narrowed around, you know, uh beautiful apetitivos. There's something in between, yeah? And and and that and that's the territory you choose to define. And there's a little bit of strategy and definition in that as well as market-facing knowledge. Yeah, it's tricky. Dwayne, what's your view on creating customer personas to engage the broader business? I love it. It's great. Um, we'll talk about it in module three and module four. The difference here, Dwayne, jumping ahead a little bit, is as long I don't care if you call them personas, I don't care if you call them uh buying committee uh personas, uh profiles, portraits, they have to be built from data. So from module two's data into segmentation, we create portraits, personas of a target segment. I like that. And we're going to talk about how to do it. Dwayne again, it's crystal clear how valuable the role of research is. Yeah. However, as the political, environmental, and economic landscape changes, customer needs might pivot overnight. Yeah, yeah, that's why we do more research. How do you continue to make sure you're meeting customer needs without pure research fatigue and analysis paralysis? Appreciate there's a balance, sticking to a plan versus ripping everything up, but you also need to show you're dynamic and adapting to what customers need from you. Right. So, first of all, there's no argument against research from what you're saying. You're making the point to keep doing research and keep monitoring the market. That's the first point. The second point is we will talk about this. I like an annual plan because that's the rhythm of the company. It's set by the finance team and we'll stick with it. Annual quarterly planning. Yeah. Your marketing plan should be one year ahead. Yeah. Three-year marketing plans, you've got to do them someone for products and stuff, but they just turn into rubbish after year two and three. It's just extrapolation. So a one-year marketing plan is the way to go. Within that one year period, things aren't going to change that much, okay? But within it, there's a little room for tactical agility, but not strategic agility. And we'll explain what these things mean later on. But in a nutshell, do it one year at a time. It's flexible enough, but not more than one year at a time, which it gets a little bit too inflexible. Okay. That's how I'd handle it. And research all the time to feed and keep involved in the process. Consumers don't change quite as much as people think. And once you do research, you discover that far more. Natalie, I once heard the line befriend sales to win them over. Yeah, keep your enemy close. So my question is: what's your top tip for getting sales and business development to respect the marketing field so that you can get buying from your market orientation research data? Well, first of all, it's true. I remember when I used to work with a big medical company, when we did the marketing plans, I could always spot the good marketers because the sales team came in the back to watch them present their plan and support them. That was always a great sign. I think when you build a segmentation, which we'll talk about next week, one of the best inputs and tests of the segmentation is have the sales team in the room and say, right, I've got to segment the whole market, guys. I'm I'm not an expert, you guys are. Can I show you what I've got and can you tell me if this rings true? And they should be able to name each of the segments and give you examples. And then when they give you tweaks and changes, make the tweaks and changes. And gradually you're pulling them in. If you show them the segmentation and targeting, you've already lost. If they've built it for you and then advised you on targeting, they will then execute it in the field. So for me, it's that process of segmentation and targeting is the way to go. I'll give you a good example that's sort of linked to that. One of my one of my ancient experiences. I once worked for De Beers, and we were doing a big brand positioning job, and we all met in London. And I was, you know, we did like a three-day session that I led on how are we going to position De Beers going forward. And the CEO said, Listen, I want this to be, he'd give a lovely speech to the executive team from around the world. I want this to be about us deciding as a group how we want to play. And just before he left, he turned to me and said, No, just a second. And he gave me a little bit of paper, and on it was what he wanted the positioning to be when the team had finished, three days later. He said, That's what I want it to come out as. Good luck. That's how it came out, funnily enough. Um, my point is you you you know, you can genuinely bring the sales team in, but just bringing them in also engages them in a way that telling them never will. Kurt, as someone on the agency side of things and primarily working with B2B SM Sme SMBs, we talk about speed to value a lot. Ah, I hate speed to value. Carry on. Our clients are often product or sales-oriented businesses and look at marketing's role as supporting sales, especially when our monthly costs will always be tied to pipeline revenue impact. How have you best seen agencies follow these critical practices from module one and two while balancing the need to prove costs and value early in the relationship, in addition to being one step removed from in-house aspects like deeper knowledge, access to the clients, and resistance to change from outside entities? Thank you in advance. Yeah, good questions, Court. Look, first of all, you can't sell module one and module two. You can sell the mini MBA's total impact because it'll be huge. These companies at the moment, right? Um they're missing out on huge amounts of money, both revenue and profit, because their marketing is very poor, as you know, Court. So you can't sell them on one and two without three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten. So do the whole thing, is my first point. Um second, one of the things you're gonna have to do is slow them down, right? Speed to value is one of the dumbest things in business. Yeah, it's too short term, it's missing the big picture. Yeah, if the world was gonna end, a lot of these you know, SMBs operate on the same principle, quarter by quarter. If the world is gonna end, if you know uh if Mr. Putin has his way and the world is blown up by December, then what they're doing makes perfect sense. But I don't think it is, and I think there are other years and other quarters further out, and and what that means is they're currently losing money because of their focus on ROI and speed, which is a remarkable thing when you think about it. So getting them to slow down court and then get in to see the value of the full picture is going to be your challenge. And there's a lot more to come, but you couldn't sell them on module one and two because they don't have value until they play out in modules three, four, five, six, seven, nine, and ten. Okay, but we will get there as you'll see. Jack. In marketing myopa, the railroad and oil industries are used as case studies where market orientation was lacking. Say they did decide to shift to market orientation. Do you think those industries would have needed to meaningfully change their products, or could they have kept their existing products and marketed them in a different way? It's a great question to which I don't have an answer. Um, there's a good rejoinder, though, from your point, Jack. If you look at Kodak, if Kodak had defined themselves as photography and included digital photography within it, there's a very strong argument that they still would have been screwed. Because even though they would have then been like, oh my god, everything's going to go digital, they just wouldn't have been able to do it with the skills that they've got. I don't think traditional market research firms will be able to do synthetic research because the skills of doing human research have got nothing to do with the programming skills of driving synthetic research. You see what I mean? So even if, you know, the big research companies define themselves as insight, and even if they accept synthetic data is clearly something we should do, which I think they do, they're gonna struggle without massive amounts of transformation to pull it off. So I think you raise an excellent point. I I think Levitt is still right. I just don't know whether his examples succeed with his input. Complex. Katerina, with reference to the example of Amazon's consumer obsession, are there more recent examples of companies that truly put the consumer at the center while leading to a successful yet sustainable business model? Well, I don't think Amazon's a particularly old-fashioned example, Katerina. I mean, you know, I mean, okay. I mean, the business is 20 years old and its finest days are in the last couple of years, and it's still very market-oriented. But okay, okay, you want a more recent example of a market-oriented operation. Who would I give you right now? I would say to you at the moment, I am I'm very impressed with McDonald's. I think McDonald's are studying consumers in a way that is enabling them to go through this next transformation brilliantly. I think they're they're exemplary at the moment. Now, what comes of it we'll see, but the way they're listening at the moment, very interesting. Bradley Bang. It's hard not to be impressed by the sheer power of synthetic audiences and data. There's no question they will be forever change how market research is done. And as good as synthetic data is currently, the real astonishing part is how much better it will get and how quickly it will improve. Yep. The Will Smith Eating Pasta meme is a good parallel to this. This video that came out in, I don't know, this 22, 23 versus now, a night and day, the evolution of this meme is a barometer of AI's progress. What role, if any, do you think traditional market research will have in the future? Is there anything that synthetic audiences will not be able to replicate versus traditional market research? Right now, only skilled researchers can tease out the meaning behind what people say in a focus group. Uh, that adds a lot of contextual nuance. Is there space for this nuance? Will there even be a need for it? I don't know, Brad. I don't know. They're brilliantly put questions. I do think you're right to see it as a gigantic thing. The speed and the time, even if the accuracy is slightly off, and I don't think it is, make this a very different proposition. And the fact it can do qual and quant. If there's anything I would suggest to you right now that I don't see synthetic being ever able to do, it's shop alongs and ethnography for obvious reasons. So there's maybe something there. And and I know with my bothism hat on, there will always be a need for human and synthetic together. I just don't know why yet, because there always is. There's always a pattern of them coming together. But yeah, I I think it's a it's a revolution. And by the way, synthetic data isn't a revolution in research alone. Once we have unlimited synthetic data, which we pretty much do, it's gonna feed market planning. That's where the real revolution comes. If you talk to the evidenza guys, they're not that interested in synthetic data purely as a building block into being able to synthetically produce marketing plans which are phenomenally advanced. Not yet, but soon, using the synthetic data. So, yeah, it is a proper revolution that's coming. You still need to know what the hell it all means. So we still have a role here, don't worry, but it's changing for sure. Jess, how do we balance customer-centric strategies with short-term results and long-term brand growth? We will talk about it in module four. I don't want to go there yet, Jess, because it's a huge question. We're gonna talk long and short, module four. It's a big part of the program. It's coming, it's coming. Katherine, fascinating read on backward market research. That said, doesn't starting with a predefined outcome risk biasing both the method and the questions? No. First of all, qual, which is inductive. Second of all, we're we're we're setting up the questions, we're not setting up the answers. You would think there would be a problem. There really isn't. And and again, the Mark and the James example is a good one to listen to, Katherine. He literally sees the fallacy of his approach straight away. Charles, it would be great to get your pros and cons for synthetic data and what role you see it playing in a research architecture. I can see its value as a sense check or a starting point or a cost saver, but I struggle with the fundamental fact that at the end of the process you've spoken to the same number of customers as when you started. However, however well it can mimic what people might say, that feels philosophically important. Yeah. This is a particular concern when it comes to insight from customers, who it can be hard to get good representation for through other means. This is a use case agency site, but it's also an area where AI training data is notoriously poor. Be good to know what your thoughts have since you wrote the column. Yeah, it's getting better to the earlier point. You know, if you come back to the Levit reading, if we define what market research companies do, yeah, what business they're in, they're not in the business of doing primary human research on real people. That's not what they do, they provide consumer-based insight to clients. And the minute you see it that way, you can see that synthetics have to be a massive part of the future business. Um, as I say, I do think there's room for both. Um I do think I have to be honest with you, Charles, from what I've seen in the last three, four months, I think synthetic data isn't just cheaper uh and faster, I think it's more accurate. Um, if it's done properly by one of the big companies, um, I think it's more accurate. Um, I think asking consumers what they think and feel is a relatively good but not great way to understand what's driving them. And what I've seen with synthetic data already is the beginnings of something better. And if that's the case, you know, there'll always be room for human research, but it's gonna change. And um, yeah, man, it's and I I take everything you're saying, Charles. I mean, it it it is in some ways a barrier to the consumer because we're not talking to consumers, the the you know, but in the same way that I use AI for you know, for feedback and for discussions. Again, it's just me sitting in a room, you know, on a keyboard, but I'm having that feedback and I'm having that discussions. You know, I one of the things that transformed me, I mean, I'm I'm so into Claude, it's it's insane, right? Claude is my is my main man. I um I've been having because I, you know, I'm the face and brains of a relatively large business. I have to have a very big medical every year. CAT scan and lots of eight-hour medical. And every year I sit down with a GP afterwards, it tells me I'm a bit fat and I'm a blood pressure, blood pressure's a bit high, and blah, blah, blah. And every year we go, eh, okay. And it was only on a whim six months ago that I uploaded the seven or eight annual medicals into Claude. And I went, What do you reckon, Claude? And Claude went, Yeah, you're gonna lose about eight, nine years of your life. You're you're really quite ill. I have like an autoimmune disease that you wouldn't be able to tell. It's minor, but it now I'm in my 50s, it's getting bad. Claude was like, Yeah, you're gonna die early. Um, and what's more, your your quality of life's gonna go down. You know, I'm in my late 50s, right? And Claude said, and I and so we started this discussion on what I should do, and it changed my life. I have a stack, I have, you know, I have an exercise regime, I am a different man. I'm, you know, 30 kilos lighter than I used to be, and my blood pressure is down 40 points, and it's still going. And I'm I'm, you know, and he monitors my my my stuff and I love it, you know, I love what it's done. Now you can say that's just me in a room talking to myself, and I think that's that's exactly what it was, but it wasn't. And that's my point about this consumer research thing, yeah. It's not they aren't consumers, but they are because they're gonna change strategy, you know, particularly in B2B companies, better than anyone has ever seen. So for me, yeah, I I I I do think it's it's getting stronger, and and we all are gonna live through this transition together, and I think it's gonna be very interesting, very, very interesting and and threatening and exciting at the same time. We'll we'll talk, I'm sure we'll talk more about it. William, I'm loving the mini MBA so far. In module one, you mentioned Patagonia, yeah, as a gold standard for purpose, but you also hammer home that consumers don't give a shit message, and rightfully so. For those of us in passion industries, where the brand acts as a badge of identity and subculture, how do we navigate this paradox? Is Patagonia a black swan? Yeah, to some degree, that we should stop trying to emulate. Yeah, yeah. Um, or is there a legitimate middle ground between FMCG and purpose-driven love brands? No, no, William. Uh black swan's a good description. There's always gonna be a brand that each consumer cares about. Like I have a huge passion for minis, for example. I really like minis. I stop and watch them when they drive past me. Yeah. But I have 3,500 other brands that, you know, I consume and I don't give a shit about, right? High involvement, low involvement. It's clear to me in my experts state now that assuming consumers don't think that much about your brand or care is the right starting point for best marketing. Yeah. So assume it's true because it usually is, yeah? And and and start from there. Don't don't push back on this one. You can push back on everything else. Don't push back on if your brand disappeared tomorrow, no one would care. Most consumers wouldn't even notice. I don't care how much you think of it. And I love the fact you love it. Get get real, it's really important. Yeah. None of us are around for that long, and our brands are not that important. It's a brilliant place to start because then we get into salience and then we get into touch points, and then we get into, I think, better marketing, which we'll get to. William Riley, when performing a conjoint, how do you determine the appropriate sample size for administering this type of research? Is it the same? Yeah, it's the same. For quantitative research, the survey sample size is always the same. William Riley again. Do you have any recommendations, Mark, for how to deal with the desire to gather quant data but getting shut down by your company's legal team due to concerns of intellectual property generation? Any experience with this at your time at Baxter? Yeah, it's it can be legit, William. It often it's not. It's just bullshit, yeah. Um, so you've got a couple of options. Qualitative isn't going to solve it because it it that there are more legal problems with compliance in medical with qual than there are with quant, right? Um, I hate to sound like a broken clock, but yeah, I I think the um the world of synthetic data is uh is unfortunately the answer here. I had a meeting with the evidenza guys and a big medical client, and they were like, um, because they're used to this world. William lives in a world where everything takes literally nine months to approve, yeah. Just research, not products. Um, and they were talking about evidenza. Can we do this research on this rare uh rare state illness? And Pete, one of the partners at Evidenza, is like, yeah, we can do it. We're gonna have the results back in three days. And the marketing director was like, Oh no, no, no, listen, listen, you don't understand how medical works. We, you know, we need a compliance and all that. And he's like, they're not real, they're not real. We can just do this, and you could see her mind going, right? So, yeah, unfortunately, I'm not trying to sell everyone on synthetics, there are drawbacks. Um, it's still not as good as everybody thinks. It's expensive, it's not free, but yeah, synthetics. And let's end with Mr. Glenn Stevens. Hello, Glenn. Could there be a scenario, or have you ever taken secondary data from within the same company and turn it into primary data? Yeah. What taking secondary into primary? Yeah, you find a good study and it's out of date, or it's not about your brand, and you go, Yeah, let's replicate this questionnaire design, but let's put it into, yeah, absolutely. Secondary and qual are just often great ways to generate the the quant survey. Yeah, it's a great point. All right, brilliant questions. Well done, nice and tight, only 50 minutes. We made it. Uh, okay, we're off into the last part of diagnosis next week. Segmentation. It's an awesome module. Everyone loves it so far. Uh and then we'll move into strategy the week after we've targeting. Keep the questions coming. Get on the LinkedIn group if you need anything, and just make sure each week you get done. You don't have to do everything, get done. Okay, stay on course. We are winning. Yeah, this is gonna be awesome. Let's just get it done week after week, and together we are going on this journey. All right, have a great weekend.

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Bye.