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Ah, Mini MBA, how are you? Welcome to Session 5. The computer is right in front of me, so I don't even miss spokes. Uh we're almost at the pointy end of the course. So in this session, we got a nice half an hour of questions. Then I'm gonna talk you through what's gonna happen starting next week because things start to get interesting uh at that point. Yeah. I'm in London. I came in yesterday morning. I am very jet-lagged and I'm also hungover, uh, which is uh, I think the winning combination for performance. That's how I like to roll. This evening I will begin my drive through France to meet Professor Byron Sharp in his uh boudoir in Nice, and then uh on from there to Cannes for three or four days of uh marketing nonsense, and then uh I'll be going to Switzerland to work for a client. Uh my wife's not speaking to me because I'm away for two weeks uh in the middle of summer and it's cold in Australia, and our heating has stopped working, so yeah, generally very good, very good, all going really to plan right now. I started smoking cigarettes again last night. Smart, really smart. Yeah, everything's going great. Performance stuff for me really is. You would think at like 56 you would sort of get it. Oh, and by the way, look at this. Wait, wait, wait, watch this. Ready? Andy Burnham, the future prime minister of the United Kingdom. I was a bit Keir Star, I'm a bit in between Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham. Yeah, it's not a good thing. Anyway, let's move on. You've got some good questions this week, and let's start with Rebecca. With the zero brand budget approach, zero-based budget, Rebecca, but carry on. Zero brand budget would be interesting. What happens if you have multiple agencies you're briefing and they're all they all will be contributing towards your smart objectives? How do the agencies come back with an accurate budget required, but when their combined efforts will help to achieve the objectives? Does this come back to the funnel and taking specific objectives for each level of the funnel? No, not necessarily. I mean, the point is if the agencies are gonna work, if you've if you want multiple agencies to work together on your campaign, they should start by working together on the budget, or it's not gonna work. Do you see what I mean? So I don't think it's problematic. I think actually it's a good thing because if there's a problem with them actually being able to come together in order to put the plan together, there's gonna be a problem down the track as well. And you can act accordingly. Rebecca, do you have more information on media mixed modeling and how we can actually take this concept and use it in practice? Are there companies that specialize in this by pulling data? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are many. So one of the things I'm doing in Cannes, Rebecca, is I'm doing this. We did we use multi uh uh, we use triple M econometrics um on mini MBA this year and did a lot of analysis. And I'm gonna present what we learned in a session, and then what I will do over the summer is do that as a virtual seminar as well. But there are tons of companies offering econometrics, and we'll do a session on it with me and Henry from the company that I work with. And I'll tell you more about them. They're a good company, but there are many options out there. Uh, Kirsty, I'd love your thoughts on how much the more is more channel approach applies when we think about owned media. Hmm. As well as being curious about how much studies focused on paid channels, I worry for my clients about the graveyard effect of setting up a Facebook page or blooming TikTok account and then not being able to feed the beast. People find a practically empty page a few months or years down the line. So I so I often say no to more organic channels, even if I'd be very open to more paid channels. Does that make sense? It does, because I think what it's very good, Kirsty. One of the costs of this is opportunity costs. If you're gonna have a successful, I mean in my case, I you know I spent half my life on LinkedIn posting shit. Um, it doesn't cost anything, but it would be a significant part of our overall marketing, communications, and um the opportunity cost of me doing that is massive, yeah. And and and so I think you're absolutely right to highlight it. Um it just doesn't come with a financial figure. God, I tell you, Starbucks makes a bad cup of coffee sometimes. Like I'm all about the brand and stuff, but honestly, I just went down, I live on Shad Thames. It's a good story for you, you know. So when I came back from America, I'm very interesting, this would be 1999. I'd lived in America for nearly 10 years, and uh to come back to your own country and see it again with fresh eyes is a really amazing experience. And I was gonna be working at London Business School, which is on the Jubilee line, newly extended. So all I did for a couple of days, because I was getting smart, was take the Jubilee line out each stop and see, because I want to change tubes, man, on my commutes. So I just went and looked at, you know, each area and I got to London Bridge, walked down towards Towerbridge and got to Shad Thames and went, This is the most beautiful street I've ever seen. So I bought a flat there, which I still which I'm in right now, which overlooks the River Thames. It's two-bedroom, and I have to tell you, it's just the most beautiful thing. It's just lovely. My kids come here in the summer. I come here a lot with work and have to stay in a hotel. My dad comes down from the north of England, stays with me here. Got a little wine fridge. I can sit on my ass and watch the boats go up and down the Thames while drinking really nice European wine. I tell ya, I tell you, can't beat the old town, man. You know, on a good day, like a morning like this is just fantastic. Anyway, what were we talking about? We're talking about Matt Griffiths. Matt, can you share some guidance on how brand tracking could be set up for SME and B2B brands? After brand management course, I reached out a track suit for info. Postal review, it seemed very consumer-based and how they survey and track. Yeah, yeah, I think track suit are almost exclusively B2C. I understand we don't work in high purchase frequency industry and our brand isn't large enough to compare and track. Our target segments, even on a firm basis, are professional, smaller number, and hard to reach. I've looked at SOS as an alternative on or Sheriff Search as an alternate on Google. This also gave some underwhelming metrics. There was product types, attributes, or service outcomes, search terms, but but our brand, ours and our competitors were pretty much untrackable. I'd love some way to track to see how my funnel objectives are working. Yeah, I run into the metric visibility wall. I fall into default inquiries. It might be the only way, Matt. It might be that you have to take something like MPS as a gestalt metric and all of and your internal data on on you know leads and stuff, and you just might have to fly blind. I think you've done everything you can to find it. That's that the synthetic data is the only other route, but even that has a black spot in terms of I don't think it's there yet on tracking. Uh, it's good for deep dive research. Synthetic is the only other option to look into. We can try and do an intro to Evidenza, given you've tried everything else, and see what they would come up with. Laura, we're a new business with a portfolio tension. Our most distinctive differentiated products have thin margins, while our more commoditized substitutes are far more profitable. How does that work? The obvious move is to cut the low margin core products, but without them, we're very similar to the competitors in the market. The business is considering a halo model, lead with the differentiated products to attract and then convert them to the higher margin substitutes. Is this a viable strategy? No, no, it's a very good strategy. As you say, you've just got to be careful that would suit you guys. Is there a customer story that can be told? But I like the way you're thinking, and I think you've just got to now ground it in the in the in the consumer's motivation. Katie Russo, I have a question about conducting price research for a product that's already been in the market for a long time. For context, I'm looking at a B2B product that operates like a complex membership model. I'm currently debating two things. Is it safe to ask active members what they think of the current price? Or is it better to only ask people on their way out? Neither I would suggest, right? That they're Yeah. Yeah, I think you can ask both of those groups about value. Yeah. My concern with surveying active users is it will see doubt about the value they're getting. Yeah, and they're gonna they're gonna push it down because they think they can get the price down, right? Second, would you still ask the same four Van Vestendorp questions during quant research with target segments if they can easily look up the current price? Yeah, yeah. No one does that. Honestly, don't worry about that. I'm curious if their ability to look up the price would anchor their response. No, no, no. That don't worry about that, but Katie. Just do Van Vestendorp on potential customers and use that as your guidance. William, you could do something on the existing users in terms of is it value? Is it good value? And just measure that. Rather than asking them about price because they're paying it, is it good value would be the question on a liked scale. William, in this case, I have two questions. How do we defend our pricing strategy in a hyper-transparent digital world? We've seen D2C brands popping up, claiming to cut out the middlemen to offer lower prices while maintaining margins. While they often underestimate the hidden massive acquisition costs of building sales from scratch, although retail still dominates, consumer behaviour is shifting even more across generations. What is your view on this landscape? Is the D2C pricing advantage a sustainable threat or a margin-killing illusion? Uh, it can be either, but I think it's a lot more of the latter. I think what you see with D2C is an initial I mean, the problem with D2C is that these are great business models until they have to actually make profit. And to your point, William, that's partly because they've they've done their pricing poorly and not factored in a whole bunch of costs that are still there. So I think it's mostly the latter. Number two, I'd like to hear your thoughts on how high pricing how high pricing alters product perception. While I fully agree with the theory mentioned in module eight, do you think cognitive dissonance is also at play here? Yeah, not just perception. We all know luxury brands with massive markups are instantly perceived as high quality, but isn't a lot of that consumer perception post-purchase rationalization? I see it all around me, and if I'm honest, I'm just as guilty. How much of price-driven quality perception is a genuine brand equity, and how much is consumers tricking themselves to justify their actions? It doesn't matter, William. It's working, it doesn't matter. But you're right, it's happening. Um, a higher price connotes improved quality, and actually the research is clear, makes people think they're getting a better product, right? It it actually satisfies them more if it's more expensive. Is that down to brand or price perception? It doesn't matter, it's happening. Rebecca, is there a guide on all the different metrics that can be used and measured and which we should be considering for long and short? No. It's still gonna come down to you working backwards, and that's that's the right way. Amy Rule went mental with the questions. Okay, Amy, go. I'm coming at this from a slightly different angle as a marketing and communications officer at a state secondary school in England. All right, if you're if you're working at a state secondary school, we'll give you the extra paragraphs, Ames. Go. It's been useful to play the mini MBA in a sector where we have a clear product, but no direct price mechanism, a geographically constrained catchment area, a declining cohort of secondary age children over the next five years, and limited control over many of the elements. Our primary objective is increasing student applications, so prospective parents are our key growth audience. However, they typically form perceptions indirectly through current parents, student staff, and the wider community, alongside historical reputation that does not always reflect reality. I know this, yeah. We know that brand perception is shaped through a distributed set of signals. This is something I appreciate is true of many markets, but in education it feels amplified because the product is co-produced by a large internal community, and feedback loops are highly social, emotional, and slow to correct. We've built a strategy that I will strive to improve using knowledge from this course, focused on creating touch points for prospective families. But the challenge comes down to where marketing adds the most value, influencing prospective parents directly, amplifying positive experience within the community, or improving consistency of communication and behavior across the wider organization. How do you prioritize between these when they all matter? They do all matter, but I'd say to you that you're gonna have to work out which one matters the most and make a choice. And it looks from what you've said in your excellent question that it's about targeting and reaching uh prospective parents directly before the process begins. Do you know what I mean? It's the 95-5 rule, you've got to find the 95 and start working on them. Because the targeting process, yeah, the 95-5 rule applies here. You're going after the 95 and you're trying to say to them, look, this is what the school is. When you're ready for it, this is what the school will deliver. And you can correct some of those maybe false assumptions. Helen Robinson, I have a couple of questions. Uh these are challenges I experience frequently in my agency role. When talking about excess share of voice, you mentioned the challenges in understanding competitor spend. I suspect this has only become more of an issue since the module was initially created with further money being placed in environments like TikTok and connected TV. What is your view on the best and most accurate source of competitor media spend data? So when I spoke to Les Binett about this, he reassured me that as long as you can get some of the data, it's pretty it it's it's good proxy data for the whole thing. But the short answer now, Helen, is I think one of the areas where I can confidently tell you that AI is able to do a much better job on research is in this area of excess share of voice. It's designed for it, right? Feed it four or five papers on XS Share of Voice, show it the chart you want it to build. It will go out and do a full recce, challenge it that are these data is this data correct? You'll get it much better than anything we could have produced prior to AI. That's the way to do it now. I've done it a couple of times, and you know, it's not perfect, it's a lot less imperfect than trying to manually work it out. Two, you mentioned a number of different options for budget setting, but the one I experience most frequently is clients reviewing the budget spent last year and briefing us with a similar figure again. It's probably the one we should have mentioned, right? The objective in this brief is typically to deliver your on-year growth with a defined target. How can I support my clients in better budget setting given the lack of clear business objectives shared? I think that's where back to your other question, excess share of voice is useful. You don't need a but uh uh objective to do that. You can just show them there's no way you're gonna get growth with this kind of spend. Look at the look at the excess share of voice model you've got here. Yeah? That it's very useful for that. I know I asked you this at the start of the course, Miss McMahon, and I've forgotten it. So, Miss McMahon. I work in B2B marketing for a telecommunications arm of a wider massive Yof. IF AFE, EFA, EFA! I got it, I got it, I got there, EFA, it came to me. So IFA's working in B2B marketing for a telcos arm of a wider massive energy company. So cut through even internally is tricky. We're a telco wholesale, hence very niche in terms of where we sit internally and externally in the wider telco market, which is my challenge, as essentially our infrastructure is the key initial ingredient that allows the entire telco system to function. The majority of my role is focused on what we covered in module nine, marketing comms. So managing budgets, briefing agencies, channel makes metrics wear out. And I'm not involved in pricing or product development. I feel I would have benefited more if module nine was a bit more in-depth. I found the agency briefing part very useful, as that is a large part of my role. Both briefing internal advertising teams and external advertising teams, as well as internal direct marketing teams. What's your view on briefing internal teams for them to translate your brief into an agency brief? I feel this adds a layer of unnecessary work and messaging can get lost in translation. For sure. Um you brief direct. You don't need a hall of mirrors, for sure. You don't need someone else briefing the brief. Second, I'm finding that my senior stakeholders think they can do marketing themselves by simply throwing something into AI co-pilot and spitting out copy or strategy. And I find this to be very undermining. They are mainly engineers who often view marketing as fluff, that women do. It is fine, fine balance to tread, as I have a lot less junior than them on paper. But in reality, perform a managerial role. This could this this course is helping to build my confidence and articulate strategy directions. Finally, sorry for the rant, but within the wider marketing team I'm part of, the brand I represent is the least recognized and often forgotten one. How do you suggest addressing my intel and chance to elevate my brand? Thank you. Love the course, really building my confidence. Ah, it's great off. Um look, it does sound a bit spicy there, right? In the sense that they're kind of they're using AI to do like crap stuff. And that whole wholesale infrastructure does limit your external value. Um I uh the only thing I can give you is my pet advice, which is you know, using the voice of the consumer to elevate things and give give everyone a better perspective is right. But the context sounds hard, I have to be honest with you there. You know, it sounds tough. Marie, as a fractional marketing director brought in for two to three days a week, how do you apply a rigorous diagnosis before strategy approach when you're under pressure from the client to show output quickly? How do you sell the thinking time? There's no easy way to do it, Marie, but you've got to first of all you can do a lot of it in advance. But second, you know, you second, I think you've got to have you've got to you've got to have that in place and then then get to strategy, yeah. Um I I don't think, you know, I don't think you can justify it, even though it's essential. So you're basically getting on with it in advance of when they start asking the questions about strategy. I had a conversation with someone about this exact point yesterday. She's developed, she's just come in to do a major bit of strategy for a very big company. And I'm like, get on with the research now, because in December they'll start asking you the questions, and you need to have all of this done. Marie, just rereading all my module notes, and there are lots of tools that have been covered in the course that I'm looking forward to applying. Good. Morton scales, segmentation, custom funnels, benefit ladder. It's a lot. What would you expect to see in a marketing plan that demonstrates you've done the diagnostic work but at the same time keeps the document tight? Hyperlinks. We're going to build a marketing plan for the exam, Marie. Hyperlinks are the way to go. It's a great question because often marketing plans don't finish because the market is just banging on about the research that nobody cares about. One page to summarize what research was done to support the plan, and then hyperlinks, should a question come up, that take you to the back of the deck to show the findings and then take you back to where you came from. You cannot, I cannot tell you how many marketing plans are ruined by marketers going, now let me share with you my research. When the finance team and the MD sit through shit that they have no interest in at all. One page for research, hyperlinks at the back. Michelle McKenna. Manage to call my many questions down to one. At what point do you decide a strategy is wrong versus just poorly executed? And what evidence would you look for? That's that's a very good question. Um I don't know the answer. Um That's a very good question. I think you have to start with execution, right? I think if you feel like the execution is for whatever reason not good enough, you have to assume it's that and your strategy is good. If the alternative is no, we've we've really I mean we had we had some we did something in America this year, right? And my my marketing director said we're gonna have we want to make this perfect with the partner we're working with so that if it doesn't work, it isn't the it isn't the tactics that have let us down. There's something deeper, problematic, yeah? That's the right attitude. If tactics, if the tactical execution feels like it has done what it was meant to do, something's wrong with the strategy. If, however, you think the tactical thing has fallen short, the strategy might be fine. That's the best I can do from an excellent question. Emma Dixon, in one of your articles, you say that if a company isn't profitable, oh something's wrong with it. Okay, okay. This is I love I I've always thought about this. The actual quote comes from Alan Malley Emma, who once ran, he used to be the CEO of Ford. And when he took over, he got a lot of grief. And I wrote when I was not well known at all, I wrote an article saying how I thought he was doing such a good job. And he rang me up in my office in Australia to say how much he thought of my article and my support. And I'm like, okay. Was like, okay, just got off the phone. He talked to me for an hour, CEO of Ford. And that was Alan's quote. When he walked into Ford, everyone was justifying all this stuff about, you know, well, we do this and we do that, but that doesn't need to be profitable. And he bet he's from Ohio, Alan. And he was like, it's my opinion that if a business isn't profitable, there's something wrong with it. And I I I love it. Anyway, you're gonna have a problem with it. Everyone go, go, go, go. I understand that in a commercial context, but I work for a not-for-profit. Oh, well, that's different. Yeah. Membership organization with public sector funding, where success is measured through value, sector savings. My role is heavily and activation focused, communicating large product and agreement portfolios. In this kind of environment, profitability and pricing don't map neatly onto the commercial model. Of course they you they can't, right? So I'm interested in how you translate the principle for an organization like ours. Does the long and short still apply? Yeah. Or does the balance shift? And given that my role is so activation led, is that inherent to this kind of organization, or does brand building still have a meaningful place? No, no. Brand building is still gonna help you achieve behavior change. It's just not, to your point, gonna link to profit. It's gonna link to whatever the organizational goals are. But make no mistake, the brand of the organization and its activation are still gonna be required in the right balance to make whatever non-profit objectives you've got come true. Court, how do you track and document everything through this whole process? A big spreadsheet, slide decks, online folder, in any special way that you consistently refer back to regularly as you go through the process. I I prefer it's everyone does it differently, Court. I would suggest the best route is an annual track where you essentially have your strategy and execute and a plan, and at the end of the year, the track, the tracking document becomes that one point of reference. And finally, Elizabeth Schwab. I work in a highly commoditized CPG category. Now there you go, Elizabeth. You've already called it highly commoditized. All right, keep going, but you know, it's like if I call my dog an idiot, she's an idiot. You know what I mean? It's possibly not a good example. Uh where pricing dynamics have an outsized influence on purchase decisions. Okay, not coffee or chocolate. Okay. Our leadership buys into short-term performance marketing with its immediate measurable results, but remain skeptical of long-term brand building. Okay, not very bright then. I've tried using market mix modeling to demonstrate the long-term contribution. Good for you. But because that category is so volatile, the findings are often dismissed as backward-looking, God, and insufficiently responsive to current market conditions. How do you build internal bind for long-term brand investment? That's the big question, right? Okay, okay, okay. The best solution is the 95-5 rule, Elizabeth. You've done a lot already, well done. Try this. In my experience, it's simple enough to work. Do a bit of research to show what the total market size population is. Do another bit of research to show at any point in time how many of these people are in market. And it will be, what do you know, somewhere around 95% out, 5% in. Then present that to the to the team and explain to them that that thing we talked about way off at the start of the course, that if I can get the 95% to think about me, about this and this and salience, I'm going to get 70 or 80% of them when they come into the market. We've already got them. And it's much better than going after them when they come into market where 78% of the time they're already preloaded for someone else. Yeah. That's the I mean, I don't want to do a disservice to your senior team, but they sound pretty dumb, right? I mean, it is dumb, right? Um so being able to show them a more basic picture and explain why, and if you you understand how it works, right? Then you transpose the long and the short onto it. So you go, here's 95, here's five, in your market with your data. Now that's why we need all your performance stuff, guys, because that's where all the money is right now. Those guys, those guys, there we go. That's why we need targeted products activating, bottom of funnel conversion. 50% of it right there. But there's 19 times more people not in the market, but about to come into market. And that's why the other 50% is top of funnel, emotional, salient, one or two key positioning things, uh, communication, so that when they go into the five, we already got them. That's the attack to try. It might not work, judging by this, but that's what I would try. But you're doing well, Elizabeth, to even try this. Okay, let me step back. You ready? So here we are, right? Here we are on the pool here. This is where you're currently watching me. Here's our final modules. If I scroll down to the final row, you're gonna see there are, lo and behold, three more three more tiles to go here. Yeah? So what are we looking at? Over there is the exam tile. On Monday morning, it will open. When you open it, there's all kinds of stuff there, including the exam, how to submit it, and me talking through how to do the exam. Okay, it's all there. You have two weeks to do the exam. You don't need two weeks, a couple of afternoons will do it, okay? But it's there for you to do whenever you want. You must submit by July 3rd, 5 p.m. UK time. Okay. As you're doing that exam, any questions you have, ask them on the LinkedIn group. I want to encourage you all to cheat and help each other. The reason I've created, I don't believe in exams. I always hated exams when I was a real professor. I don't believe someone with an A is better at marketing than someone with a B. It's bullshit, right? So why have I created an exam? This is a brilliant exam, even though I say so myself, for pulling the whole course together. And many of the questions you've just asked me are in the are in the exam. So do the exam. You will enjoy it, you will hate it, you will have a minor breakdown at some point. But my goodness, you will learn. Okay? And get on LinkedIn with your classmates and go, what are you doing about blah, blah, blah? Remember, they're just as dumb as you, though. So don't take their opinion above your own, but but have that discussion. I I want to encourage that discussion. And I will be in the discussion trying to help, not giving out answers, but trying trying to help. The whole exam is basically building a marketing plan for a fictional company. Yeah. I tweak it every time. It's great. It's particularly hard this time. Then what's going to happen is you're going to submit by July 3rd. We then need two weeks to grade these things. There's fucking hundreds of you. And then on July the 20th, on the same moment, I think it's 10 a.m. Is it 10 a.m.? I think it's 10 a.m. These two tiles on your platform will light up. Now, I should say the whole time your platform with all the course material is still live. It's going to stay live till the end of July. And then we're going to move you across to the alumni platform and it's all there again. You get it forever. So don't worry about that now. Focus on the exam, okay? On July the 20th, these two will open. This is the tile where you'll get your certificate of completion with a grade if you want to grade from your exam. So you'll find out how you did. And this will contain a final class with me. I'm going to go for your grades, look at the exam answer, uh, talk about future directions, other learnings, you know, wrap up the course properly. All right. So that's it. So get on with the exam on Monday. Don't you can catch up on the modules you're behind on at any point, right? Get on to the exam. Um, enjoy it. I will be on LinkedIn. You can always pose me a question and give me 12 to 24 hours to answer. Um, but I am there for you. Um and enjoy this exam. I mean, you know, it's a hard exam, it's a fun exam. You'll learn, that's the point. And and it's something I really want you to do it because it really brings the course to the right close. If you can manage the time, yeah. Just do it badly. There's no shame in doing it badly. Some shame in doing it badly, but not too much shame. Anyway, right, I'm gonna miss you. I'm gonna now get in a car and drive to France while drinking heavily uh uh large amounts of red wine. I'll give you, I'll give your very best to Byron. If I can get a picture of him in his dressing gown, I will share it on our LinkedIn group. Um I might, you know what I'm gonna do? I'll get a selfie of me and Byron in his hotel, right? Shirtless, um, and put it on the LinkedIn platform if you'll let me. He's awfully tough on things like that, right? So, anyway, have a good time. Enjoy the weather if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, and I'll see you in the exam room starting Monday.