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Abra manager, hello, how are you all? Welcome to session four QA. We're getting to the pointy end of the course. I'm down in Tasmania, where it is very cold. I might have to put my cardigan on because I am so cold down here in my little studio. I trust you're well and all is good. Uh interesting part of the course now, yeah. So, objectives, I hope you enjoyed that. That was fun to do. Um, but with the serious message, you know, going on behind it. Um and then, of course, brand architecture, which you know it sits among the more important of the modules, I think, for obvious reasons. So let's get into our questions. I want to do them tight. That's true. Let's aim for 30-ish minutes this week. Um, and see how we do, and then talk about what's ahead next. Uh Yum Hu. Sorry, you my uh my specs are useless. You hi Mark. When defining a brand objective, how do we determine the actual target number? For example, based on the research findings, I may identify that increasing consideration should be a key objective, but I find it difficult to decide what a realistic target should be. Are there any benchmarks or factors? Look, a lot of it comes with experience. Um, there is one report. Tracksuit have a really cool report. If you visit their website, they have benchmark data by category showing good, average, and poor in terms of awareness, consideration jumps from a range of unnamed average clients. So there is such a thing. Whether it gives you any more insight, it's normally a conversation with the agency, it's normally your past experience. Um, but there is the benchmarks do exist, they're a tracksuit if you want to have a look. Pooya, absolutely loving the course. As a creative that owns a boutique agency, it's nice to see the other side of the picture and support our clients better. In fact, I think it seems to be enhancing the way I can creatively approach a brand. Great. I was just going through your QA after the fourth module, and you mentioned the possibility of opening a segmentation module. This would be interesting to do. We've done it. We've done it, Puya. Tune in. We put it, everyone asked for it, and we don't cover it on this course. So I gave you a free 10% of the of the mini MBA marketing, and then my CEO Tim shouted at me for doing it. Um so it's sitting, uh it's sitting back in one of the modules uh as an extra link. I don't think we've taken it away yet. So it is there, and you should have read it, you should have watched it by now. It's quite big, so you might want to leave it till later. Frederico, I understand that brands like Jag and Burberry failed because they tried to reposition instead of revitalize. Well, that's my interpretation. Abandoning their DNA rather than updating it. But brands like Tiffany seem to have succeeded by pushing much further away from their heritage and even alienating loyal customers. I disagree, but carry on. So, where exactly is the line between successful revitalization and destructive repositioning? And is variable actually category-specific? No, no, Frederico, I think you know, your example of Tiffany, I I hold up as a really good, bold revitalization. And the reason I say that is just because consumers complain, uh, loyal consumers complain, it's not a signal we've got something wrong. It might be, but not necessarily in my experience, particularly where the brand's been left to get very dusty, it's gonna happen. I mean, you can argue that part of the Jaguar thing, a bunch of big old fat men complaining about it, wasn't necessarily a negative signal. A, because we need a new market, but B, because the big old fat men, if they produce something amazing down the track, will definitely come back, having had their little moment. That that's not a signal to look for. I think if you look at Tiffany, um what you see is a dusty brand that was that was really well developed and and put back on its track. Tiffany was a mass premium retailer. Um, it wasn't necessarily jewelry to begin with, so there's a bit more action there when you dig into its history. Um and yeah, I I I think it's just a prime example of a very radical revitalization. I think as long as you've paid respect to the DNA and you've used the distinctive brand codes, um, which Tiffany have, if you have a look, right? They played around with them, but they still they still got them. I think I think it's in good shape. So the line that you're looking for is do we are we still ultimately going back before we go forwards? We can go as forwards, as radical as we like, but is this the vision of the brand in a modern way, or have we, you know, have we stretched it too far, or have we not actually really understood what the brand was, what was as it's at its core? I mean, in the case of Jaguar, it's an interesting one. It all is not lost yet. I mean, it's still very murky what's going to happen there. The two things that I think suggest they were, well, they did it badly. And I I had this terribly uncomfortable meeting with the boss of Jaguar at Cannes last year. I got separated from my from from my gang, and I had no phone. I can't think I was, I think I was quite drunk. I had no phone, I was at some shit event, and then this bloke came up to me, he was the boss of Jaguar, and um he sort of wanted to chat about it. And I was like, God, if I could just get get out of here, I would, you know, I'd pay anyone anyway, yeah. So we had this long, slightly drunken chat about it. And as I said to him, I said, you know, I want you to win, you know, you want Jag to win. But um A, um, you you you gotta use your your brand codes when you're going through those major upheavals. Inventing a new set of codes was very amateur, and second, as we're now beginning to see, you know, Jag's been out of the market for what, two years, one year. It's got another year or so of doing nothing. It's it's a gigantic empty hole. What they should have done is gone back to making 10 custom-made, retro-made, you know, uh cars that that were the epitome of the electric future and and sell them each for a million quid. And that way you keep in the news, but also you've got this sort of premium oat collection to restart the brand. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, he didn't agree with me. Um, so yeah, it's a look, it's a fine line, and ultimately the customer gets to decide with their with their pocketbook, yeah. I can't there's something wrong with my specs. I can't read Maria there very clearly. I think my prescription's off or something. Anyway. Hi Mark, I'm enrolled in Catherine Tucker's pricing class. Catherine Tucker, you say, where conjoint is favoured over Van Vestendorp due to biases. You mentioned Mini MBA uses Van Vestendorp. Why this preference? I'm designing a qual-in-quant survey for B2B IT software with pricing questions. What would you recommend? Oh, look, I don't think there's much so, first of all, Catherine Tucker is a genius, and I would Catherine's the pricing professor at MIT who I love dearly. Um, and I would I would certainly point to Catherine's pricing knowledge over mine every day of the week. Van Vestendorp is a is a is a less accurate uh measure than conjoint most of the time. The only time Van Vestendorp, I think, gets the gets the nudge is when it is being used for things that can't be separated out or new products that are still conceptual. It's very hard to do a conjoint at that point. Not impossible, but very hard. In our case with Mini MBA, we did it at the start when it was like, imagine it was this and this and this, what would you pay? What would be too much? What would be too little? And I think it did the job. And the point about Vanvestendop is the competition isn't usually conjoint. The competition on the table is doing nothing or looking at your costs. Yeah. So in that sense, it's superior. But yeah, if you've got a mature uh um product that can be compartmentalized, absolutely, I think conjoint wins. It's more expensive and it takes longer as well. So in your case, yeah, if you can get away with a conjoint, do the conjoint. If you can't, Van Vestendorp isn't wrong, it's just got a much greater variance within it, but still a hundred thousand times better than setting the price based on you know what you think might work. Well done for doing Catherine's course. I can't read these things. Chamoo, sorry, Chamu, something in the black font or something. If I get your name wrong today, it's because my specs have gone wonky. In the tech space, when acquisitions happen, the equity of the brand acquired and some of the good talent almost evaporates too soon. From your experience, is there a way to unpack and extract the good elements, codes, positioning, and use that without tampering with the acquirer's brand? It's tricky, right? Um I certainly had that job at LVMH, funnily enough. So when we bought a luxury brand like I don't know, Fresh, LVMH would send me in and I would work with the founders, and we'd kind of like understand the DNA and and sort of essentially create a bridge because we knew the founders wouldn't stick around or wouldn't be as involved as they had been. So I think the key to it is is when you've got your golden handcuffs on the founders, spend time with them, not to understand what they are, what they recommend we do, but understand what's the what's the nuts of the brand, using them as the as the data rather than as the strategy, I think is probably the right approach. And that at least gives you, while you've got them, a chance to do that proper historical analysis. Natalie, what is the approach to gathering insights when building brand plans as a global team in service of our marketing partners? Let me read that again. What is the approach to gathering insights when building brand plans as a global team in the service of our market partners? That's a very elusive question, Natalie Phillips. I'm not sure I could answer it, but I fear I ask me again, either privately with more uh inappropriate detail or in the next QA. I can't quite what is the approach to gathering insights when building brand plans as a global team in service of our market partners? I think I know what you mean. Let me have a go, and then if it's no good, Nat, you can have a go at me. Um I think you've got two jobs, right? You in in the global team, what you need to be doing is doing a massive annual quantitative study, which joins together the markets into a big, fat, juicy uh data set, but which can also be sliced out and sent back to the markets with a bow on it saying essentially, you know, this is this is data from your market that we've collected along with your input. Here's a survey from us. We've also used it to build this global survey. That also means that I would allow the the local teams to do more of the qualitative work, to do more of the inductive work, to do more of the experimental work, and do their own insights as well. That that I'd say is the best mix I've seen uh over the years. Uh Angela, apologies for bundling four questions into one. Okay, all right, all right, all right. So you're catching up. That's no problem. Let's get on to the questions, though, Ange. Uh where do your questions start? I'm in a tailor mode travel business where we're trialing an incentive. X pounds off a future trip, if booked within a defined window to drive repeat bookings. It feels like a classic step towards communication, yet successfully judged purely on short-term booking uplift. Is that the wrong lens? And if so, what would you measure instead to demonstrate that this type of mechanic may erode long-term brand value despite delivering short-term gains? Well, yeah, look, it's it's a bit worse than that. So what you want to ideally, what you want to show is that, you know, and and this may not be the case, not all promotions are bad, just almost all of them. Um, you want to be sure that the people that were buying it, first of all, wouldn't have bought it anyway, and you're just giving them more money on top. That's the first thing. So it's not really driving the sales you think it's driving, it's just giving margin away. Second, as you say, you want to check that the people that bought it with that special offer are more likely to come back and also don't perceive the brand differently. Um they'd be my two big ones. The first one's a real concern. Don't miss that one out. So you what you're what you're essentially trying to do is you're trying to have a look and see if essentially is this really just icing on a cake that you that you already had, if that makes sense. The best way to do that is experiment and run a region without the offer. And if you can do that, because then you're able to measure are the repeat purchase rates any lower when we didn't offer this? Um, obviously the margin will be higher. And are the brand perceptions any different? So if you can carve off a corner of the business where you don't do it, that will offer you a really nice insight into the whole caboodle. Next question on segmentation. Uh, I'm trying to on thank you for the extra segmentation video. I'm trying to reconcile how segmentation travels from strategy into execution. Uh-huh. The answer is targeting. In practice, should segmentation remain broadly consistent because brand, paid media, and CRM? And CRM simply add more granularity, or do you see meaningful divergence in how we oh, this is interesting for short-term activation? Gotcha. Yeah. So there's two ways. This is a good question, actually, Ange. So you've got your segmentation of the market is kind of like the whole market. Then within that, you've got a subset who've bought from you, and that subset can then also have a CRM segmentation on top of it. And that CRM segmentation is different from the broader group. That's how I always looked at it. With with Louis Vuitton, for example, we had a big segmentation of the market. Once they bought from us and they went onto our database, we used an RFM recency frequency value system to slice them into more CRM segments and activate that. So it's a it's a it's a segment within a segment, if if that makes sense. It sounds more complicated than it is, but that's the right way to do it. I'm certain of that. On reach versus frequency, in the Binett and Field discussion, there's a strong argument for prioritizing reach, trading frequency for scale. In reality, most campaigns still optimize towards higher frequency on narrow audiences. Are we collectively overcorrecting uh the bigger growth lever, or is there a more nuanced, balanced uh balance you'd advocate for in practice? No, no, I think that's right. Um it's extremes on both sides, honestly, Ange. What you've got is the Ehrenberg-bass influence, which is you want to reach everybody once, which from a purist point of view might be correct. But first of all, you can't reach everyone once because effective reach is different from a reach of one. You have to reach them four times to reach them once sometimes. And also there's the issue of it fading at some point, you know, that frequency isn't layering on top, it's layering back on something that's disappeared. On the other side, though, you're absolutely right. There's a tendency for most of the platforms and media to prioritize frequency because they run out of audience, so they want to sell you more, more, more repetition. I certainly feel like that's overdone. And when you try and instill an idea that I want an effective frequency of one, they really don't ever give you what you want. And they're like, Oh no, no, but you really want three or four. And you're like, no, no, I really don't. So I think on both sides you're being pulled, and the balance, as it always has been, is somewhere between the two. Final one. In the MPS map session, Frips emphasizes the great Jeff Frips, emphasizes the role uh of both points of parity and difference. Given your view that differentiation is often relative rather than unique, should strong positioning codify both, or is there a risk that overdefying parity simply drags brands back towards sameness? Thanks in advance. No, no, I love your question, Zaj. Um yeah, yeah, look, I think you, you know, I I totally agree. There's a point of parity sometimes that you need in there that qualifies you or nullifies competition. It's an expensive point. So it has to be more valuable than being better than someone else, right? Or better at something else. If you're gonna mention you've got a PhD, for example, in your bio, you've got to be it's not a differentiator, you know. What you're saying is, like everyone else, I've got a PhD in marketing, right? That's still a costly bullet point because you could have mentioned something else that was more unique about you. See what I mean? So I think you've got to be cautious, but it should be in there as one of the bullets potentially in your gun. That's all I would, you know, it's like category entry points, point of parity, point of relative differentiation, emotional association. Go through the three C's, but choose. Don't keep adding is the key point. Tina, a brand losing two out of four product categories requires repositioning because it changes from being a generalist to a specialist brand. How to tackle this? How to start? I don't necessarily agree. Losing two out of four product categories just might mean that you just need a position in the two categories that are left. Depends how big the categories are and how fast they're growing, right? Um, I I'm not sure that's that's necessarily true, first of all, Tina. So I my my opening gambit to you is be careful you need to reposition here. Because I would suggest that if you have lost two out of the four categories but kept two of them, you should be drilling back into the two categories to say, well, what is working here? And whatever that is, let's keep doing it. I wouldn't be rushing to the repositioning button. And Tina says, I'm working on the positioning of a brand in America in a segment driven by private label. Lucky you. It is also difficult to display our brand assets at retailers such as Home Depot. I wonder why. Because they want us to play their own brand game. The brand is more of a manufacturer brand. Does it still make sense to start research with fans of the products? How to get our assets through in store. Now, study on Tina. You you've got a big sandwich there, you've got a bit of diagnosis, and you jump into tactics. Put the tactics down. I don't know. But yes, starting with fans and data and history is is where you need to go. Don't go jumping into tactics. I know we're covering it next week. Go back to your diagnosis, start there, get to your strategy, follow the process in sequence, is my advice. Frederico, distinctiveness and differentiation should work together like Kit Kat combining codes with focusing associations around breaks. But in categories where codes become category property very quickly, like FinTech, how should marketers prioritize investment between building distinctive assets versus strengthening differentiation? What stage does distinctiveness stop being enough on its own? Look, I would argue it's it's always it's always in need of some meaningful differentiation as well. Playing the BOFIS card. And I'd always I don't I'd often argue that you never want to stop, you know, if you're in a category, you're listening fintech, luxury EVs, or ready to drink alcohol, where the codes have become category property, push harder on your codes. Yeah. Don't give in. Don't give in. You still need distinctiveness. It's too much of an advantage. So I'm not allowing you, as much as I'm a fan of differentiation, to say, look, we're in a general category, distinctiveness doesn't work. We'll just have to focus on differentiation. That's a terrible decision. Push harder on distinctiveness and still try and build your differentiation approach. And Frederick Federico says, I work in spirits. Yes. And I have a question about differentiation in this category. Functional, it is minimal, especially in mature whiskey tequila categories, where most brands claim heritage, craftsmanship, and quality. Yeah, but hang on, Frederico. I love your questions, but it depends. I mean, I can't think of a of a of a spirits brand that that wouldn't have heritage, craftsmanship, and quality. But if I put Hennessy up next to uh uh what would I choose? What would I choose? Add bag whiskey. I'm I'm ticking those boxes, but they're completely different. You see what I mean? They're they're pockets filled with different balls. You know, to use a metaphor that I want to escape from quickly. So, in a category like bourbon, do you think long-term growth is driven more by distinctive codes and memory structures? Look at you, Frederico. In the previous question, you were trying to argue against distinctiveness for differentiation, and now you're going for differentiation against distinctiveness. I love your approach. It's very, very good. What could a brand like Jim Beam actually prioritize, protecting most over the next decade? It's positioning his priorities. At those codes. And I love your attempt to sort of get a list of priorities. It's all of them, Fred. It's all of them. I'm telling you, man, you know, you need you need to find a path to distinctiveness. And at the same time, you need to find a differentiation relative that you can bang on about. And the product's important. See what I mean? So I'm I'm not letting you off the hook. I love everything you're doing, Fed. It's fantastic, but I'm saying yes, yes, and also yes. Pauline, when choosing a target segment, is the recommended decision framework a two-axis trade-off between attractiveness, size of price growth, profitability, and ability to win? And if so, how do you weight these two dimensions against each other when they point in different directions? Um, it's not just that. There can be strategic fit, there can be lifetime value, there can be spillover effects. These are two of the main ones, but there's other stuff too. And I think what you have to do is you have to map out the financial scenario of how much money they make and how much they cost to attract. And the money, no surprise, ultimately becomes the answer. The one exception to that is strategic fit. Like I've gone, we've gone after dialysis at home patients more heavily because treatment at home was one of the company I was working for's big corporate pushes. But that's an exception, yeah. So yeah, play it out with money is the advice. And Pauline says the purchase funnel questionnaire was designed with the funnel stages already in mind. But in practice, if we don't yet know what the funnel looks like, designing the questionnaire that that way risks confirming assumed stages. True. How do you recommend stretching the diagnostic quall phase to let the funnel emerge from consumer behavior rather than imposing it? At what point would you bring CEPs into it? And finally, when working on the objectives, would you recommend reviewing the funnel built at the category level, the target segment level, or both? These are great questions, Pauline. Thank God I know what I'm doing, or I won't be able to answer them. Okay. So you have to build the funnel prior to your quantitative questionnaire. It's one of those that needs, if you want a custom funnel, you can, as you say, you can put in a generic funnel. If you're going to do custom funnel work, you want to do it, I you can do it qualitatively, um, but you need that in place before. So that's the first answer. If you bring category entry points into your funnel, it kind of blows the funnel up. Because if you think about category entry points, they kind of cover uh everything down to purchase. It doesn't stop the principles we've talked about working, but your funnel becomes essentially there are four or five different funnels, and each one's a different category entry point with a different number, and that leads to how many people buying and rebuying and so on. So it's it would be a very custom funnel at that point if you bring CEPs into it. And then with objectives, I uh my preference is that usually object you can build the funnel stages at the category level, it doesn't change that much. It can, but you don't have to change it. Um, what changes is the target segment uh conversion rates. So I always would say the the standard approach is you've got a category funnel with specific steps that you could put a competitor on, just like you could put yourself on and look at their numbers. But then the the number the hundred at the top is always the target segment, right? And and and the numbers for each segment will be will be somewhat different in conversion and size. Does that make sense? Good questions, Pauline again. On the brand DNA, does it always need to be rooted in something authentically true from the brand's history, or are there situations where you'd recommend constructing an association for scratch? If so, at what point does building an aspirational territory risk undermining what the brand can credibly own? If you can credibly do it, lie is not my personal advice, but my DNA advice. I I'm doing this podcast series, I'm not I'm not meant to talk about it till January. I've been working on it for three years. It's it's amazing. Like I'm I may be having a breakdown. I hate marketing podcasts, you know. I've got to be honest with you. I think they're so boring. They're all the same, two blokes talking to each other, often asking the same questions, right? And I I go on these things and I'm like, you know. Um, so for three years I've been making a podcast which is called Mark Ridson's 101 Greatest Marketing Case Studies. It's nearly done, and it's like it's a drama. It's dramas, you know. Mean doing the voices. It's gonna be it comes out in January. Don't tell anyone, it's it's top secret, right? I've sold it for millions and millions of dollars, but I might not take the money. That's another story. A very large podcast company's offered me a very large amount of money, but I don't want them mixing about in my stuff. That's a different story, anyway. Two of them that I've worked on, Don Perignon, obviously, uh and Hagandas are both perfect examples of making a load of shit up, or what the French call mythology. Hagendas is the best one. Ruben Mattis is a Brooklyn Jew, right? First generation Brooklyn Jew. And um, there's a big hole in the market at the top of the ice cream business for a premium ice cream brand, and no one's got it. So he goes, right, I'm building it, and I'm gonna make it Scandinavian because I love the Danes, I loved how they looked after the Jews during World War II. This is what he actually said. So I'm gonna I'm gonna call it something Danish, and he just makes up the name Hagandath, which has got means nothing at all in Danish, and the Danes to this day don't really understand Hagandath for that reason. Um, put a little Danish flag on it and produced it out of out of the Bronx for about 35 years. And look where it is now. So my point is you can get away with it if you can credibly get away with it. I think it's always stronger to build from within. And ironically, the episode I've made about Hagandas is about their war with Ben and Jerry's, and Ben and Jerry's is the opp is is a is the real deal. Ben and Jerry really were activists. Ben and Jerry's basically found their DNA by fighting Hagendas in this war in the 1980s. So it can be organic, but often it's not, like with Hagandas. Don Perignon's invented by a British PR agent called Lawrence Venn in like 1928. I've spent about a thousand hours trying to find out if Lawrence Venn was gay or not. I just find him not because it matters, but because he's just such a spectacularly interesting character, and he didn't want anyone to know anything about him. But he looks suspiciously like one of these brilliant, beautiful uh gay men that sort of hid their gayness, you know, never married, you know, spent his time on the Riviera in the summers, came up with the idea of Don Perignon, was very close with the team in France for in Champ loved Champagne. It just sounds too good to be straight. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, so Lawrence Venn invented Don Perignon for an anniversary and off it went from there. So clearly it can be a success. Like my podcast, maybe. Ren, four brands with both e-commerce and brick and mortar. Do you create two separate funnels or combine them into one? E.g., browse, website, or store? If you separate the funnels in your brand tracker, do you segment your sample? It's a great question again, Ren. It really depends if these are different people. So first question is are these different segments or different steps in the buying path? If I forget the correct answer to this, but there is a good answer. If it's something which they could do either of at different times. So in your example, they could shopping store or they could go to the website, it goes into the buying path, into the funnel. If it's something inherent, like whether you buy XL or Medium, it becomes a segmentation variable. Yeah. Um, I think that answers your question. Yeah, but it's a very gray area. And it doesn't matter in the washout. Ren, I work at an ad agency. I've never worked with a client that provides a good brief. That's because 95% of them don't produce a good brief. Call me a coward if you must. Do you have advice how I can start incorporating all this amazing knowledge into my work with them? I have a few clients who may be open to allowing me to run a brand tracker, but ultimately, as part of the ad agency, how far do I push this? Yeah, it's a common advertising question, Ren. And I think the answer is, and you're already on it here, segment your clients. Yeah. I did a big session with Dentsu many years ago where I was like, look, you've got three kinds of clients. There's a group that are really good, yeah. DiAgio good. They don't need your help, don't swim upstream. There's a group who are shit and who know they are shit. Most retailers, right, want brand building help and they know they're shit at it. And then there's a third group who think they're good but they're shit, right? These two groups here don't swim upstream. That's gonna get rude now. Don't swim upstream. Yeah. But the group that are not good and want help, there's enough of them around for you, Ren, that you really can go, look, let's do some work on this. And they will love you forever. And they will make you their queen, and you will become the most valuable client, uh uh agency server of them all. So don't do it with everyone. I mean, I've had conversations with agencies when they've well, I normally leave when agencies arrive. You know, I've worked with the client, we've got our stuff ready. I've had actual like conversations in like in the reception room where where I know the agency guy's coming in, you know, and I've gone, you know, hey Dave, Dave, come here, you know, Dave Hope. Hey Dave, come here. These guys don't swim upstream. They know what they're doing, they're better than average, they'll brief you well. You'll see. Don't fucking swim, don't swim upstream. Right? And he's gone, okay, okay. See what I mean? That's me helping him out and helping my client out. But most of the conversation for the same reason you've never had a good brief. We they most clients need some help. Victoria, I'm working through the research and I purchased a code report from Sasha. Great move. If you haven't got Sasha's code report, you probably won't be able to get an A. Who has contradicted everything I was starting to understand. From the focus groups and interviews, there seemed to be positive sentiment towards Max, the nostalgia of the brand, black and white sophistication. But Sasha's report says to keep the green, ditch Max, sexiness sells, forget about using the stars. I'm conflicted. Do I listen to the consumer or the expert Sasha? Based on the rest of his report, I would hazard a guess he was behind the wanted campaign that was panned by critics. My gut is telling me Sasha is wrong. Have you ever conducted research that you dismissed? I think your tongue is in cheek, Victoria. Have you ever conducted research that you dismissed? Is that okay to do? And how do you handle it? My alternative response is to not dismiss Max. No, no, no. Max is an idiot, Victoria. So you've all got to buy uh oh sorry, not Max, isn't it? Sasha is an idiot. You've all got to buy Sasha's report just because it's so good. Uh I still can't read it without laughing. I've worked with people like that, mostly in France, who are idiots. Like literally idiots. One of them who is really the the uh a lot of look, I have more admiration for the French than any other nation. I adore them, I find the women fantastic, the men admirable. Um, but in branding and marketing, I've I have largely discovered them to be complete buffoons. And this one particular luxury, because they're they were attracted to LVM H like moths to flames, right? So we get these experts de jour coming in, and um, this one particular guy, the second day we uh the first day I'm like, you're an idiot, right? The second day he came in, he had different specs. So he had a pair of specs, and one of them was like oblong, and one of them was a circle. And I was just like, Yeah, man, look, you know, he was the basis for Sasha, so yeah, do ignore Sasha. But there are times you ignore research, it's usually when consumers are telling you what to do, because they don't know what you should do, right? They really don't. But if they're telling you what they do and don't like, don't ignore it. But if you get insight that, you know, what you should do is launch, you know, a big one. I I'm ready to discount that. That's the bit where it, you know, that doesn't work. But if it's them telling them what they think and feel, I don't think you can discount it. If that makes sense. Bathsheba. Absolutely loving the course so far and your delivery of it. Well, thanks, Bath. Would you be Bath then, Bath? Bathsheba. What's the I don't know? Bathsheba's such a great name, but I'm not sure what the abbreviation of it is. When I christened my daughter Roxanne, also a great name. I knew it would go to Roxy pretty quickly, unless she became a lawyer later, right? There aren't any lawyers called Roxy. Bathsheba, would it be would it be Batti? Would it be Batti? I don't know. I'm fine. I'm quite interested. I'm gonna look that up later. I'm gonna use 9,000 litres of water on AI to find out what your abbreviated name is. Batti. Anyway, uh, apologies for rolling in a few questions. Go, go, go. I work for a monopoly utility where customers cannot choose an alternate provider. Good. Instead of market share, long-term success depends on maintaining trust, social license to carry out a corporate strategy. Where would you place the balance in improving service delivery versus investing in brand building? Our leadership team struggle with the brand importance. Yeah, that's an interesting one. Look, I wouldn't split them. In the reality is, I mean, one of the things to work out is investing in brand building will improve the perceptions of service. You remember way back in like module one or two, we talked about this. One of the advantages of good brand building and stronger brand equity is just people think you're better. I think we talked about it in the class, but I remember I did a class years and years ago with the CMO of Virgin Mobile. She was fantastic. This was at London Business School, so this would be 20 years ago. She put up this great chat showing how the perceptions of Virgin Mobile were like so far ahead of whoever it was at the time. I think it was the German guys, T-Mobile. Like compl talking cheese. And at the end, which is interesting because we're using their network and it's the same product. And her point was it's just the effect of brand equity. And by the same token, don't underestimate that impact. Service quality versus brand building. I would say to you, same thing. Uh, also, what role do distinctive assets play and how much investment should be made in them, especially when we're doing so much digital work in a very cluttered, noisy category? How should brand brand strategy change for a monopoly? Look, two questions. First of all, yeah, distinct brand assets, you want to be distinctive and come to mind, whatever. Um, should brand strategy change for a monopoly? Not really very much. For the simple basis that if you're in a monopoly, you have to assume at some point it's gonna end, and you still want people to know who you are and what you do. So I would say not that much. There are obvious implications, but I don't think I don't think it diminishes the need to have a strong, well-run brand. You could argue less investment. I'll give you that for now. But the number of companies I've worked for that didn't invest in brand and then later on they wish they had makes the point too. Lily Hicks, hi Mark, longtime listener, second-time caller. I'm also a brand executive on a two-person brand team working at a university. How do you try and implement a codify and codify everything policy to a JSON creative team that wants to experiment perhaps a bit too much? And the heads in those roles have been at the university much longer than yourself. I find it gets a bit political. A bit political, Lily. Even when I'm trying to get posters to have the right amount of red in them. Anything to help with the politics would be appreciated. It's a honestly, Lil, of all the questions, I think I've lived in this sector a bit myself. There's no hope here. Don't even don't exhaust yourself fighting the battle. I know that's frustrating, but if you do your own good codified work, the only thing is politically you can't win. If you can produce uh asset production tools that already bake in your pant on, etc., you may do a little bit better. But those guys are, you know, this in your heart. Those guys are always going to come up with new shit, whatever you do. So go easy on yourself because the combination of academic executives who are largely idiots, as we know, and young, creatively driven digital people in a university, it's a it's an absolute, it's the opposite of where you want to be, you know, in terms of consistency. There are other advantages. Marciano, what is your advice on how to proceed with research and strategy when you've when you have one brand with multiple products for several use cases? One brand with multiple products. Okay. For example, I work for a company that sells earplugs, but they have earplugs for party music, but also for sleeping, driving a motorcycle, flying, work. Would you then do everything per product use case or not? Since it would be possible that most people could go for more than one use case. At this point, it feels to me that one person could be in more than one segment. Yeah, it's not a segmentation, right? Question. It's a question of uh subcategory size and competition. I would say. So there's an important case study, which is Neurofen. So Neurofen had exactly this question. They created about six different variants. One was for hangovers, one was for pre-menstrual, one was for uh migraine, and they they marketed them beautifully. The problem was it was the same tablet, and they got a massive fine for doing that. So the first point is if you're gonna do that, make minor adjustments to your earplugs because A, you can make them better, B, you can price them different, and C, you'll get in trouble if you don't. It it it would only be something to do, I think, if there can be a meaningful advantage. Otherwise, you create your earplug brand and you position it for the different uses, different category entry points, or you create an earplug brand with different sub brands, you know, earplug, air travel, make minute differences and position them differently. So you kind of half and half, or you go out and create the airplug as a separate brand. But that's very expensive and it would have to be worth it. So they're your three options. All things being equal, you want to sell the same product and brand to all three with different, slightly different positioning. Toma, second question. Everything in the mini MBA assumes a certain scale. Research agencies, data. But what if you're trying to apply these principles for a new small startup, say a friend's cafe or a family-run nursery? I think a good brand manager should be able to handle the basics. Uh, but how do you validate them without company funding behind you? You can't run quant research. Well, hang on. You can't interview loyalists, you know, because there aren't any. And the only person you've got is the founder. So, yeah, okay. So, first of all, I did a talk on small branding, which you can find on the marketing meetup by Googling Ritson, Might Be Drunk, uh, small marketing or small branding marketing meetup. That's worth having a look at. Generally, though, I think, yeah, I mean, I'm giving you the full selection box, and then you you have to then, you know, scale it down. It isn't any different. The only thing you've said though, Thomas, and your point is I do think we're in a place now with synthetic research where you do have access to more quantitative research than ever before in history and qualitative too. And while it's a little bit wobbly, I think the synthetic data opens up that area very nicely. Um, other than that, yeah, you you have to, you know, you have to grow and scale it to do more of these things. But I think showing you the whole rainbow is the way to go. And I don't think there's anything different, yeah. Pauline, brand architecture, you framed that structure architecture follows strategy with brand positioning coming after. Yeah, pretty much. But positioning is itself a strategic choice. Where exactly does it sit in the sequence? And what do you mean by strategy at the stage if positioning hasn't been set yet? Okay, that's a good question. Here's my answer I think targeting always comes first because it sets off the other domino. So targeting is the start of strategy. I think second, positioning, objectives, and architecture can flow around each other. Yeah, targeting's coming in, those three fold back on each other until they lock into place, yeah. But you can certainly see how you can go positioning this objective. Oh, you know what? My positioning should be different, and I should have a new architecture. You see what I mean? So those three flow, but I would do targeting first, and I've been that's a practical answer based on past things I've done. Sophie, there's no place to communicate our custom funnel we've built, which are then referencing objectives. Does this matter? No, no, no. In the real world, you'd have a hyperlink back to the funnel. No one wants to look at a funnel unless they want to look at a funnel. We'll talk about using hyperlinks at the end of the course. Um, very important. Um, and in the exam, I mean, I'm, you know, I've given you the funnel, so I don't need to see them. I know, I know what they are, right? Um, in the real world, if you feel like you want to get your funnel out and do it in your brand plan, do it. Um, my point is it takes a lot of time and it's it's a means to an end, which is an objective. The point about hyperlinks is when you present, you're like, right, I've got four objectives, boong, bong, bong, bong. And someone says, Well, why are you going after consideration? You go, well, interesting. Click, click, off to the funnel. You see, here, here, right here, that's what I'm going for. Back to the funnel, click, click, click, back to your slide. If it comes up, but your enemy is time in a brand plan and sticking to the point with people who really aren't interested in funnels. How are we doing for time? I've gone over, I have 50 minutes. Sefika. Hi, Mark, thanks for the insights. I'd like to get your take on objective setting. If we have market research data for our target audience but can't convince the finance team to invest in awareness research, is it reasonable to assume that an established brand with significant market share doesn't have an awareness problem? No, no, no. Or is that a blind assumption? Yes, yes, yes. Given the pressure of marketing budgets, figuring out how to know it. So again, you it's not ideal, but use synthetic data visit via Chat GPT or Fable 5, as it's now called, for um Claude, um, and and create a survey. It it will not like it, but it will get you something that you can then use. Uh it's better than nothing. Again, Sefrika. Another question: when a new consumption occasion for our product grows, is it a real opportunity for a smaller emerging brand or is it a trap? Is it strategically wiser let the big players with more marketing budget develop this, or can a smaller brand carve out a niche? I assume that likely varies by category, but I'd love to hear your take. No, no, no. I would say a go for it. I mean, if you look at, I mean, I was told to you about my podcast, already go on about it. One of the other ones is Chabani, right? Chabani just buys a bankrupt yogurt factory and goes, right, how are we going to get any kind of scale here? Well, there's a small growing interest in Greek yogurt, we'll do that, right? Um, new emerging subcategories have two advantages for small brands. There's something you can niche yourself in, and the big brands don't want to niche themselves away from where the money currently is. And if you look at the history of disruption, that tends to be how it begins. So I'd say you you generally speaking, yeah, I would say pay attention to those new subcategories as a real opportunity where small brands have a chance. And we'll end with Alex. Hi, it's me again with my new market launch questions. In a real world, if I've just launched and have very limited data insights, how would you approach purchase funnel and setting of the objectives? I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I think you can set decent smart objectives that are based around launch, that are based around awareness from scratch, and I'd leave it at that until year two. Great questions. All right, we're into tactics next week. Um I'm I'm it's it's clearly not gonna be all the tactics of brand management because that would take 9,000 years. So it's it's designed to get you to think about how to execute. Yep, and it's a very important module. I'll be around on LinkedIn, jump in. We're getting closer now, so update yourself on Moon, just have a go with Moon and get ready for the simulation. We are gonna have fun in a couple of weeks' time with the simulation. All right, have a good weekend. I'll see you in class.