Mark Ritson: How to Grow a Company From Nothing

The Reality of Small Brands vs. Big Brand Advantages

Mark Ritson: Well, what do you do? Let’s start with a preamble. So the most important thing to realize first of all is small brands mostly stay small. So everyone wants to know about small brands. And if you look at a conference of marketers or a virtual conference, most of them work for smaller brands and there’s lots of them. And I get asked this question or a version of this question all the time. Okay, what about a small brand though, where we can’t afford to do this, we can’t afford to do that. And the first thing I say, and I don’t mean to be a prick, but the first thing I say is, you know, well, you can’t afford to have multiple channels, you can’t afford to have excess share of voice, you can’t afford to have big mental availability. You know what’s going to happen? You’re going to stay fucking small. And the problem is you’ve Been reading all of this David versus Goliath bullshit about how David’s going to be nimble and do karate and beat up Goliath. That’s not how capitalism works. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. The D2C thing is just horseshit. What happens is Goliath smashes the fuck out of David and goes home. And so look, the first thing to say is the odds are massively against us. Right. If you look at that work that was done by data to decisions about seven or eight years ago, being a big brand is the biggest single advantage you can have for effectiveness, right? And 18, not just like it’s the number one. It’s 18 times multiplier on your dollar you spend. So for every dollar a small little brand spends, the big brand spending the same dollar, not spending more has an 18 times multiple because they’re already big. That’s super fucking unfair, right? So first of all, there’s no way I’m working for you, not even if you pay my rate there, Louis, because I know it’s fucking pointless. Right? First of all, second of all, the brand game doesn’t really get going for about four or five years. So in terms of working with brand, I’ve worked with relatively young brands when they were 7, 8, 10 years old. Yeah. So I work with Sephora, for example, the big cosmetics chain. And we have a little, a wonderful program called Incubator where we take the two hottest, fastest growing little brands and, you know, growing fast, and we work on them and we help them and we, you know, we incubate them. But even those brands, they still need four or five years already before we can really get into brand strategy. The first three or four years are about finding your way, getting some loyalty, understanding the path. You know, there’s not a lot of brand strategy work can be done in years one to five. All you would say to anyone with a new brand is, don’t create more than one brand. Don’t. Don’t be a fuckwit. Yeah, that’s literally. That would be my consulting advice in an envelope to everyone with less than, you know, 5 million euros in revenue and less than five years. Don’t create two brands or you’re an idiot. First of all, that would be the one thing I’d say now let’s get that out of the way. I have actually done this because my own work, you know, mini mba, which is my own brand, I became a founder late in life, right. And had to do this exactly as you describe for a small unknown brand that we started three and a half years ago, right? And we’ll break in euros. We’ll break. We should break. We’ll get close to 10 million euros of revenue this year, right from a standing start. So to your question, how did we do that? And absolutely right. I thought long and hard about it. What did I learn from all the big brands to try and do this in a small way? I knew that we needed to do long and short. First of all, I believe in that and I applied it to my own business. And I also believe if you do good long, you can’t do good short. They don’t exist.

Louis: So can you, can you. I know what you mean, but let’s describe it. Let’s describe what you mean by the long and the short of it or the short and long of it.

The Long and Short Marketing Strategy

Mark Ritson: About 15 years ago, a couple of relatively old advertising planners, and they were old then, so now they’re very old, called Lesbinette. And Peter Field, who’d been studying the effectiveness awards in the uk, came up with a theory called the long and the short of it, in which they showed with pretty good data and elegant data that actually there are two different paths to growth. There’s the short performance marketing path we’re all aware of. Spend some money, get a return, buy Bing sales. And there’s a longer, more incremental path which is more brand building. The long of it. They also showed that in different industries you want a different mix of those two things. The general rule, let’s say for FMCG consumer brands, is about 60% long, 40% short. And the reason you want that is very simply you’ll make more money. And that’s the bit that everyone misses. If you look at four years, if you do 60% long brand building, emotional top of funnel stuff and 40% short, over the four years in total, you’ll make more money. If, however you look at it from a point of view of 12 months, you’ll put all your money in performance marketing. It’s got a better proven roi. And then when year two comes along, you’ll do it again. Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day. And actually after four years you’ll have made much less money than if you did the 6040 from the start.

Louis: Okay, thanks for describing this. So before, before we go on, just, I want to summarize a few things. So you mentioned two other stuff we’ll talk about in the next few minutes. You mentioned shadow voice and you mentioned mental availability. Those are two important concepts in brand that we’ll talk about later, but you kind of contradicted yourself, which is I’m happy about, because first you said, I’m not going to work with you because you’re too fucking small. Less than five years, less than 5 million, but yet you’re proceeding to give me an example of something that I was looking after, which is you starting something now before you go on into what you’ve done and perhaps mistakes you’ve made and not only the stuff that worked. You have an unfair advantage, an advantage that you worked your ass off to build, let’s be clear. But you have a notoriety, credibility, a huge fucking network, people that trust you. Right. So you didn’t start from scratch, per se. But having said that, let’s try to kind of extract the lessons and what the mistakes perhaps that you’ve made doing this, launching this brand and trying to see whether people listening who don’t have the network that you have, the credibility can still get something out of it.

Mark Ritson: Yeah, look, and even that, you’re absolutely right. Look, accidentally we’ve got that advantage of being a known entity already. But I think that was part of the strategy in the sense that, you know, you pick something that I’m really, I’m really proud of, Mini mba, because it was a strategic creation. So being a brand consultant was an accidental product of being a branding professor. Right. You become a branding professor because that’s where your research goes. A few companies call you. Before you know it, you’re doing brand consulting. It’s not strategic, it’s mostly gravity. Right. Mini MBA was a creation of how do I make money in a scalable way when I have a young family? Sorry, I’ve got dogs here.

Louis: The dog just loves. Hates brands or loves it, I don’t

Mark Ritson: know, really loves the brand talk. I think that I really did think hard about, you know, what kind of leverage that I have that will enable me to make money. Okay, that’s the first point. I think you have to start with what you’ve got. Right. You don’t start from a carte blanche, as you say. It is a carte blanche, but it also, there’s core stuff you can draw on. The 60, 40 thing’s interesting because that was one thing that I didn’t just advise clients on. I believe, believed in it. And I said, how can you start a business that maintains 60, 40? And the thing we did that was smart, I think, is I said, I’m Mr. Long, I’ll do the top of funnel stuff. I’m doing it right now with you. Right. You’re not paying me for this, as far as I know. And I like you, so I do it anyway. But why? What’s in it for me? And the answer is, this is the long. It’s top of funnel. It’s reaching people that don’t know who I am or what mini MBA is. And if I do this about, I don’t know, 300 times a year, which I do, we will. We will get somewhere and we will create, you know, that. Which I can then leverage down below. Now, the down below I’m shit at. I’m not a performance marketer. So then I got myself a good performance marketer, Sam, who runs a pretty tight game with LinkedIn and Facebook and, you know, pixels and all that shit that I don’t really understand. And we work together very nicely in the sense that, you know, he. What he. What he thinks I’m doing, He’s like, fuck, I don’t really get what you do. Yeah, okay, do a talk on that. Whatever. Here’s my numbers man. Right? And I’m like, yeah, pixels and stuff, blah, blah, blah. Look at how many people are listening to Louis podcast. You see what I mean? And I think that’s a lesson. I’ve never met an agency, never mind a marketer, that can do the long and the short. Well, I’ve met people that can do them both badly. So I think you want long and short people. And that was absolutely deliberate from the start. Right, okay. We needed that.

Louis: Let’s backtrack a bit because there’s something important here that you mentioned briefly, but we need to deep dive into this. You looked at the advantages that you have, right? So when creating this. So obviously your credibility, the fact that you’ve been working on ourselves for years and years and years, showing up every day, writing articles and whatnot, is a huge asset. So even I think even an idiot, even someone who’s not good at the long and the short of it, can say, you know what? Let’s use this credibility. What do you advise then? People who aren’t at this stage, who obviously don’t have your profile, how do you advise them to look into potential advantages that they have them personally or maybe people they know or you know?

Mark Ritson: Yeah.

Louis: What’s the process there?

Finding Your Unique Market Position

Mark Ritson: I tell you the exact moment I worked it out, and it’ll help other people work their moment out. So it comes back to dogs again. So I’m busy walking the dogs four or five years ago in the fields, and I remember having this moment of very, very extreme clarity, which was I’m the only person that can do this because there are lots of people running online courses, but they don’t have the credibility or 25 years of teaching at top business schools to get away with it. So they’re going to run pokey digital training courses, right, and probably give them away for free. On the other side, you’ve got a whole bunch of professors, very talented professors in some cases, but their universities will never allow them to run a rogue mini MBA type subject, right, which will cannibalize what the business school is offering so they won’t be allowed to do it. And then there’s me in the middle who’s an adjunct professor now because I can’t be bothered doing the full time job, who has the chops but also has the freedom. And I can tell you, right, that was the exact moment I said, right, I’m definitely going to do this right. I think for your listeners, the thing is find something that no one else can do. And that sounds old school advice. It doesn’t mean that in theory other people can’t do it. It just means they can’t do it as easily or as well as you. And there are more things in you. There are more niches, I think, than people really understand. And I think that was the key moment. The other key moment was working out Marketing Week, who I write for. I had about 600,000 unique visitors a month and I worked out literally on the back of a cigarette packet while drinking a very large amount of red wine at a bar called Jimmy Watson’s that if I could get a 1% conversion rate off those 600,000 people that were visiting each month, I’d make enough money to pretty much retire. And that was also, it turns out, not a bad estimate of how it all played out. So yeah, I think that’s the put it this way, I think most people need to interrogate their background and work out what is it I can do that most other people can’t do and can I make money from this? Now, having said that, I’m not an entrepreneur and I’ve never really been comfortable with entrepreneurs. Now I think it’s more the market, the way we did it with marketing that counts. Do you know what I mean? I think the entrepreneurial thing is great, but it’s the marketing thing that’s interesting. So I say to small marketers, look, first of all, it’s going to be tough. Use your niche, use your creativity and have a backup plan. And then yet long and short is just as important for you guys and do Something that no one else can do the same as you and I. They’re the main things. And the other one is small brands can take risks where big brands can’t. You can say, fuck. You can say, we don’t want to work with these guys. You can, you know, do something a bit differently. Never underestimate how hard that is in a big company to do anything like that. It quickly evaporates. Right? So you do have that chance to take risks, which, you know, I don’t believe in. You know, a lot of marketers say, oh, bravery is important in marketing. No, it’s not. You know, if you’re a fireman or a nurse, it’s important. But there’s no such thing as a brave marketer. Right? What a fucking. The minute we say that outside of a marketing circle, bravery. Bravery is very important to marketers. We just sound like total. Do you know what I mean? Like, with the least brave. But, yeah, taking risks and pushing it a bit within the context of marketing. Super important. Yeah, for small brands. So, yeah, if we were working together, Lou, I’d say, yeah, take some chances. Long and short from the start, interrogate what you can do well, and then play up the role of the founder. So again, I mean, I’ve done that with mini mba, but I saw firsthand when I worked with LVMH on the history of all the great brands, the original story was the story of the founder, and then it became the brand. But for the. And people forget that over time. Once upon. Once upon a time, Louis Vuitton was a man that visited rich people and designed their travel boxes. You know what I mean? He was literally a man, and his reputation was the start of the brand. Tian Dior was a man that became famous among certain women in Paris in 1947, before he became a perfume name. Do you know what I mean? We forget that with time, but the first, again, five to 10 years of a brand’s life normally rides on the personality of the founder. You know what I mean? And then it starts to get corporate. And I think that we use that to our advantage too. And I would recommend that for your setup as well.

Louis: Thank you. So let me think about this a bit, because you said a few minutes ago, I am the only one that can do this, or at least as well. And to me, that’s kind of textbook definition of radical differentiation in a sense, like the only one in the world that does that. Right. And that’s what you want to get into. Right? That’s kind of the. When you’re I mean, I don’t want to put words into your mouth that you didn’t say or, like thoughts that you didn’t think about or that you don’t agree. But to me, if I deconstruct it, it sounds like you would advise to really find this sweet spot of I am the only one that does X for this niche, right? And start with that and then building up on that. Am I? Am I right?

Mark Ritson: 100%. And maybe for the bigger brands, it becomes less important, right? I mean, so we get onto the two Ds, like, so this story is a fantastically important one for marketers. So we go back 25 years. Differentiate or Die is published, literally. Differentiate or Die, right? If you don’t do differentiation, you’re totally fucked. Okay? And by the way, that isn’t just a book title. That’s how it was taught. It was done, it was explained, everything. If you’re old enough to remember the the 80s, that’s how we played the game. Here comes Ehrenberg Bass in their black uniforms. And what they say is, listen, no, no, no. Differentiation. No, no, no. It’s what you want to do is be distinctive. So differentiation, again, technically, is how I’m perceived different from my competitor. Distinctiveness. Wipe the competitors from the board. That’s not the point. Distinctiveness is literally, do I stand out? Do I come to mind? Do I look like myself? Am I present in your consciousness? And all we’ve seen with Ehrenberg Bass is a swing from one extreme to another. So now, if you go to a conference, you’ve seen this, Louis, differentiation. People go, oh, that doesn’t exist anymore. There’s no such thing as differentiation. That’s bullshit. You certainly can have differentiation. It’s just not unique. It never was. But you can certainly be more of things than other people and therefore different relative to the competition. And I think that’s a great place to start when you’re a small brand, right? Be different, or at least have a story that’s different. Then, don’t get me wrong, I still think more of the challenge is distinctiveness. I believe what Ehrenberg Bass has done is exactly right. Most of the challenge is then coming to mind, being there all the time. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me. Don’t forget it’s me, by the way, it’s me. Now, the reason companies haven’t done that is, is they think everybody knows it’s you because they work there every day. Louis sat there going, fuck everyone. Knows my podcast. I mean, I, you know, it’s practically every day. It’s there and it’s there, you know, it’s a tiny little blip on the horizon of most of your listeners.

Louis: So fucking dare you, Mark.

Mark Ritson: The more you realize that, the more you realize, yeah, put your hand in the air, take your clothes off, man. Make him notice you stand out. Make it, hey, it’s me. Once they know it’s you, you can maybe add a little sprinkle of differentiation. And so, yeah, I think the star of a brand should still be what can I do different from or more or different or alternative from everyone else. But that doesn’t then stop the idea of distinctiveness. And then, hey, me over here. Me, me, me. Being still the core challenge.

Louis: I was hoping you would answer this because it seems like there is this ongoing battle between the two concepts. And it’s funny to see from the sideline, but like anything, it can’t be either or, it’s both. And when you’re starting a company, to me, radical differentiation, like making sure that you’re the only one doing that in the world, is super important to start with. And then it dilutes, it gets less and less important as you build distinctiveness, mental availability as people remember you is what you want. And sometimes you don’t have to have anything different about your product. But that doesn’t excite me that much anymore. When you’re a big company because you have big ass budgets and you can really ride on the market share wave that you have created for yourself, the double jeopardy low as well, and making sure that people come back to you, they’re slightly more loyal, et cetera, et cetera. But what is super exciting about the first phase is this, this idea of radical differentiation. And I’m just going to challenge you on something briefly. I want to know what you think. There’s this book by Yongme Moon. The book is called different and she argues, she talks about augmentation by addition or augmentation by diversification, I think, which is basically doing something slightly better, slightly cheaper, which is what you’re describing a bit. So do you. And she makes the point that this is shit, that you shouldn’t do that. If you want to radically stand out and truly be different, you can’t just do slightly better, slightly cheaper, slightly more. Do you agree with that or do you feel like there’s more to it?

Mark Ritson: I’m with you, Louis, on the Bothism point. I did the Ogilvy lecture this year for the Marketing Society in the uk And I made it about bothism. And I used differentiation and distinctiveness as one example, in the sense that neither is wrong or right. And in fact, when you put them together, they’re better than either one. Separately and in the same way, to your question, I think augmenting a product and being simply better, to use Paddy Barwise’s phrase, is a brilliant way to do things, but why not be differentiated and then be simply better as well? I think the point that a lot of people miss the nuance they miss is I learned a long time ago, I worked with a very smart team at a bank who had been given the goal of increasing Net Promoter score. And I believe in Net promoter, right? Not completely, but I think it’s a great metric. And they discovered, and they’re very smart, boys and girls, they discovered the best way to increase Net promoter was telling customers they are increasing Net Promoter. So of all the strategies they tried, you say, we’re a bank that’s dead keen on increasing our net Promoter score. And in fact, we’ve already increased satisfaction levels by this much. NPS goes like that. In the same way, I think one of the keys to differentiation is telling people, I’m super fucking differentiated from anyone else. Do you see what I mean? Like what I’ve just done on this podcast without getting too meta, is to go, I’m the only one that could do this. Even though that’s probably. That’s definitely not true, right? I think differentiation, and this is where Steve Jobs was just the best bullshitter in the world. People do a disservice to Steve Jobs because they take him too literally. Steve Jobs just told lies, man, and just bullshitted his head off to the amazing advantage of Apple. Do you know what I mean? Lying and exaggerating a part and parcel of our game. So, yeah, I think that augmentation is good. So is telling people you’re differentiated. And ideally, you should do all of it at the same time. There’s no trade off here. You know what I mean? Between these different things, we’re completely different from anything else that’s out there. And also we’ve augmented it to make it even better than before. You know what I mean? Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Louis: So you said four years ago, five years ago, you thought about creating the mini mba, right? Was it then you were at a pub, you realized, shit, I could make a ton of money from this by teaching people and just basically by ranting, like you are doing right now, in a very comprehensive way.

Mark Ritson: Not quite, Louis. So my ranting, which I’m definitely doing here, people are quite surprised. I was a proper professor. Right? So when I teach.

Louis: I’m glad you’re mentioning this.

Mark Ritson: I’m not like this. There’s ranting me, top of funnel ranting me.

Louis: I know, teasing you, mate.

Mark Ritson: Slightly different, but yeah, basically what you’re saying is true, but I’m not like this when I’m in the classroom, right?

Louis: No, no, but let’s remember you said that’s the best quote of the podcast so far. I was a real professor, you know. I know you were, I know you were. Anyway, so you found the opportunity and you understood that from your perspective, the intersection of a few things were incredibly powerful. You were a professor, but you were able to do stuff on the site. You had this credibility, you had a huge audience on Marketing Week, this intersection made something super interesting. So that was still in your head. Right, so what happened next? What did you do?

Creating Mini MBA: From Idea to Launch

Mark Ritson: Well, it’s a very good question. It took about a year of not giving a fuck first. So I had my first child, I’ve been married a long time, almost not gonna have kids. And then we had them and then my first kid came along and it was like it was needs must because, you know, I did two weeks, a month on a plane, you know, working for clients and it was suddenly not going to be possible to do that. So this idea I’d had but not really done anything about suddenly became an imperative because my wife was going to chop my balls off if I got on planes anymore with a, with a, you know, three month old baby. You know, there are men that get away with that, but I’m not one of them. My wife show, you know, she’s like, you know, I. Good. Men celebrate having dominant, powerful, superior women in their lives. And mine, yeah, I mean, fuck, I’m not attracted to women that aren’t better than me, you know. So yeah, she just basically went, what are we going to do about this? Because you can’t travel anymore and you have expensive tastes. So yeah, that. So then that’s what drives it out, you know, and so then we, so then. But the big challenge for me is I lost, I don’t know, 500 grand worth of consulting because I didn’t travel. And I, you know, we made the First Class and we filmed it and green screened it and all of that. And then it’s an interesting one because you really don’t know. I’ve never made anything right. I’m always advising everyone else. So I produced something and then I, it was only really at the end of the process, I was like, oh shit, this might not be any good. Do you know what I mean? That thought hits you and the only thing you’ve got then is your research. I did pretty good qual research, no quant at the start and I did one piece of quant which was pricing. We did a bit of pricing research which was invaluable. And I’ve got to tell everyone on this podcast. So I’ve done a lot of pricing work indirectly and directly. I did McKinsey work once on conjoint pricing. So I’m not a pricing expert, but I’ve got pretty good practical experiences of it. And the one thing I remember about pricing that always impressed me was the Van Westendorp pricing model, which is this crazy Dutch guy who’s long dead created this four open ended question matrix which allows you, you can learn about it on Wikipedia. Van Westendorp pricing model. Four open ended questions. And it gives you a pricing frame. Now if you talk to a bunch of pricing nazis, they’re going to tell you, oh no, it’s not good because of this reason and this reason, listen, it costs virtually no money and it made me about, I don’t know, 2 million euros. Because it said, no, no, you think you should price it here, but actually you could price it over here and you’d lose almost no sales. And it worked out to be exactly right.

Van Westendorp Pricing Strategy

Louis: Sorry to cut you, but I know obviously you can search on Wikipedia right now, but if you remember, not necessarily the four open ended questions, but the one one of the four, what’s the four?

Mark Ritson: I can tell you all the functions. Okay, so what you do is you find. We actually did one class. I did it with a small bunch of target customers. And then after we got the first class of 250, I said to them, right, you’ve already signed up at whatever price it was. But think back to when you were about to sign up for the course, were you not going to change your price? Let me ask you four questions. It was not scientific at all, but they’d already come through the funnel, right? And I said to them, right, at what price would the Mini MBA have been so cheap? You’d have thought, yeah, it wouldn’t be any good. And they literally type in the price, right? At what price would it have been low enough that you’d have thought, that’s good value. At what price would it have been so expensive? You just said, I can’t afford that, it’s not worth it and at what price would it have been expensive? But you’d have thought, but I’m still going to look at it, even though that’s a little pricey. And you literally put the percentage scores on the four axes and it gives you a hole. It gives you a hole which is where you can price it. And that’s what I did. And it worked. But I knew it was going to work because it’s always worked in the past. Now you can spend literally a million dollars on Conjoint and get a percentage point more accurate than Van Westendorp or you can do it for free. And I think Van Westendorp is what I teach it now on the Mini mba and I show them the data from the previous class to make the point and listen, of all the things, pricing, I mean, again, let’s talk about online training. The first thing every muppet does that wants to do digital online training. Because they look at their operating model and they go, oh, there’s no costs to give it away free. So they go like, okay, this training’s free. So anyone who’s senior will never do it. And anyone that’s junior does it and goes, it’s fucking worthless. Do you know what I mean? You’ve just, you’ve already killed your baby before it’s born, right? Nothing can be good and cheap ever. So, you know, holding the line on price, but holding the right line, absolutely key to make money. And by the way, while ride it, Louis, the big one for me, the biggest one of all, Revenue, not fucking important, profit, everything. So I was lucky enough to work for Gilles Hennessy, the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of Richard Hennessy, who founded Hennessy. And Gilles was one of the toughest, most brilliant, fantastic business people I’ve ever had the honor of working for. And one of his best things was to. And he was, he was just fucking a killer. He was a fucking killer, right? And one of the things he was great at was just killing you with all kinds of stuff. And one of the things I did once, fooler, I boasted to him in a meeting that Benefit Cosmetics, which is a sister brand of Hennessy, had done a really good year of revenue. I’m not going to tell you the figure. Let’s say it was, I don’t know, 100 million euro. Whatever I say, oh, look, Benefit, I’ve just done 100 million of revenue. We can’t believe it, how successful they’ve been. And he went, what was the profit out of that revenue. And I went, I don’t know. And he went, stop talking about it then. And he’s right. He’s fucking right. The whole D to C argument, direct to consumer bullshit in Forbes and fucking Business Week. That Gilles point. Yeah, that’s great. Or you’ve just done 30 million euros in a D2C business revenue. What was your profit? Oh, you lost 15 million? Yeah. Come back when you can make a profit. I can take this mug that I bought from yeti that cost $12, and I can sell it for 50 cents, right. And make a 50 cent revenue. There’s no skill in that. But buying this mug for $12 and selling it for 20 bucks, that’s hard. And I know this sounds basic. It isn’t basic because most marketers don’t know the difference between the two things.

Louis: So let’s unpack what you said. There’s so much interesting stuff. The first thing is to go a bit meta about it. What you described with your wife and what happened is a classic to me like, job to be done moment where you thought about this alt mba, mini mba, excuse me, mini MBA for a year was in the back of your mind, was just a job in your mind was a potential idea turned into a job to be done when your wife told you, listen, you have to stop fucking traveling. You’ll have kids now, you have to stay with me. And that’s when the catalyst, the trigger, and that’s when you started to work on it full time. The other thing that you described, that I want to spend a bit more time on this, you were not a creator until then. Like you were, quote, unquote, in a easy situation where you were advising others, right?

Mark Ritson: Cold blooded. Cold blooded, yeah. Consultants. Cold blooded. Empty vessels.

Louis: So you put yourself out there, in a sense. So correct me if I’m wrong, the steps you took were you created the curriculum and recorded the course first, and then you had 250 people taking it. Correct.

Mark Ritson: There’s one more step. So, yeah, you’re almost there. So the one other thing I had as a marketing professor was once I had the idea, then my wife said, I’ll chop your balls off if you don’t work anymore, if you go away anymore. And then what I had was qualitative research. So what I did was I went to my MBA students who were the kind of MBAs that I thought, if they weren’t doing an MBA, what would they, you know, they were. They were in my mind as being the guys I would go for, late 20s to mid-30s, wanted to do marketing, but, you know, not necessarily the most confident people, but very, very smart. And so I went to. I sought out those guys specifically. And when you teach, you know, three or four classes a year, you teach three or 400 people. So there were about probably a dozen people I sat down with over a beer or a wine or just said, can I have a coffee with you? And I said, right, I’ve got an idea of doing this thing. And I described the basic mini mba. And I said, imagine you aren’t doing your mba. Would that be interesting? What would be interesting about it and what wouldn’t be, and what would it cost? So I did that about a dozen times. And I’m proof testing and I’m also learning and I’m doing some price. So there’s a real little bit of qual there early on that really did kind of prove that I was right, but also set me in a different way. And then, absolutely, we create the syllabus, we get a whole ton of feedback, and then we, you know, we test and learn. We test and learn.

Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt

Louis: And you mentioned something which is super interesting coming from you is the fear with the big F. You know, what if it’s shit, right? So you had this fear when. When you recorded it and you were about to put it to live to those 250 people to see. When was it that you.

Mark Ritson: Yeah, I mean, I was filming it in a studio in Melbourne on a little street called Smith street, in this tiny little green screen, smaller than this place. I’m talking to you today. And I always remember coming out and it was a long day of filming, and I’d come out at the end of the day, and I always had this weird feeling like, oh, that’s. There’s something. There’s something twinkly going on here. I came out thinking, oh, I don’t know what this is, but there’s something unusual. I go and have a beer before I flew home, and I’d be like, oh, there’s something we. I could feel it every time. But then as we get closer and closer to launch, I’m thinking to myself, I might just be clinically mad at this point. There is a moment where, you know. You know enough that there’s a very thin line between cracking it and being just completely deluded. You know what I mean? There’s. At this point, there’s no way to know, right? There’s no way to know. And I know there’s no way to know, but it doesn’t help. And, yeah, I was Very worried because you lose at two different levels, right? I’ve lost 600 grand of opportunity cost money. I could have been just working for big brands while I’ve been doing all this shit. And I also lose because I’ve made a class that isn’t very good. And I also lose because I’m meant to be able to market something and build brands and I can’t fucking do it, you know, so I’m not very good. So on all those levels, I started to shit my pants probably about a month in. But at this point, the other thing, Louis, which is different from your game with the podcast, is then there comes this fascinating moment between Video Mark and Real Mark. And that’s the best bit. So the best bit is I’d spent 25 years as a luxury working class man. And what I mean by that is I’m completely working class. All my ancestors were coal miners. We have absolutely no money of any kind, right? And so I know what being. I went to the worst school in England, literally the worst school in England. So I know working class. Working class is me. And although I was getting paid 20 grand a day, it sounds weird, I was still working class because you literally got paid by the day. Do you know what I mean? And so you had to get up and fly to fucking, I don’t know, Bond or Stockholm or somewhere and then earn 20 grand. But you had to earn it. And then suddenly I discovered Video Mark, Virtual Mark, who was once. You built him and he did your class, he was way better than you. He was on time, he was prepared, he was reliable, he was always ready to go and he was scalable. And as the years passed, he was younger than you as well, and fitter and, you know, and so what happened was over time is I learned to suddenly go, well, but Digital Mark does that. I don’t do that anymore. Do you know what I mean? That’s a fascinating moment. Like on the brand course we run now, digitalmark even. I mean, I watched the class this year. We haven’t edited anything this year that’s different from last year. And I watched the class and I have to be honest with you, I really thought it was fucking fantastic because I watched myself and I hate myself. I’m not one of these guys that looks at myself and goes, ooh, you know, I really, I’ve never watched myself on Interview ever. But I watched the modules and I was like, this is good. I even emailed the team, they were laughing at me in London and I said, I gotta tell you this Program’s fantastic. You know, suddenly you get this thing where your entity is, is working for you, but he’s not you anymore. Do you know what I mean? I find that very postmodern and very interesting. And he keeps working. It’s not like your podcast. So right now, today, where are we now? Yeah, right Now I’m teaching 2,000 students right today. And, you know, I have no idea what I’m teaching them. I know I’m doing a really good job and we know we’re going to be doing, you know, high ratings, but it’s not me anymore, it’s virtual me. And I find that whole thing very trippy, but extremely arousing. Having had to earn money by the day and suddenly have scalability. It’s astonishing, right? It’s astonishing, yeah.

The Virtual Mark vs. Real Mark Phenomenon

Louis: Whether or not it was like 20 grand a day or 10 quid a day, the same concept applies. You sold your time. Even if you sold your time at a premium, you don’t sell your time anymore. It’s infinity at this stage, almost infinitely.

Mark Ritson: And it’s. The key word is scalable. Louis Scalability was always the thing I wanted, right? Once you got scalability, man, it’s a different game. And that’s an important word, scalability.

Louis: So I want to unpack two things. First, this avatar, this distinction between you, the real you, and the video you. I think there’s a good concept about it where when you’re scared of something, when people are scared of like standing out and giving their opinions and whatever, I don’t remember who said that or the book that talks about it, but basically create an avatar of yourself, someone who’s not you, who’s like, fucking bullshit Louis or whatever, and just separate the two. And you let this person do the fucking work. Prevents you from thinking about it too much. But the other thing is, you said you basically shat yourself. Not for real. I mean, I hope so. I hope not. A month in. So was it a month after the course started that you started to get scared or.

Mark Ritson: The course is three months long, right? So it’s about five hours a week for 12 weeks. What I worried about was the evaluations, right? So when I’ve taught in business school for 20 odd years, you know, you. All you worry about is your evaluations at the end. And there’s some famous stories of professors, marketing professors, getting fired because they, you know, they alter their evaluations so any professor is inbuilt into us. We don’t really worry about class. As we get towards the end of the class, you Start worrying, well, oh, maybe it’s not very good, particularly when it’s a new class. Right. And it’s not as good as I think it is. And that’s when you get worried. Yeah. Because virtual Mark was teaching now, and real Mark was sitting there shitting himself going, fuck, I hope this is good, because it might not be. And that was a genuine moment of fear. But, yeah, our evals were great. Everyone was happy. The class was. It was 250 people. So the only thing was, is that it. And I remember flying home when the second course was just starting from England with my dad, with me actually flying back, and I got off the plane in Australia, and he said, what are you doing? I said, I’ve got to see what our numbers are. Because I didn’t really care about the first class, and I didn’t really care about the second class, but I wanted to know what the delta was, because that was the moment where if it starts that, you know, you’ve done 250, then you get 100, then you get 40, and it’s over. Or it goes as it did. It went 250, 500, and suddenly you’ve got that trajectory. Right? And that’s the moment where you go, okay, this is. It’s not just the first class liked it. It’s that we’ve picked up more people for the second class.

Louis: That’s a good sign, huh?

Mark Ritson: Yeah. And that. Your point earlier, there’s no limit on the class size. LinkedIn will tell me that there’s literally no limit on the number of people we can target. So the minute I get that trajectory, I start going, oh, okay, here we go.

Louis: So I just want to go back to this moment, and the reason why I’m pressing on it is because I know if you’re listening to this podcast right now and you’re a marketer and you want to create stuff, there is this fear. And I just want to go down into that kind of rabbit hole with you, Mark, because people will perceive you as successful. Yeah, you’ve done a lot of stuff, and who wouldn’t necessarily be scared? But you were just. Tell me.

Mark Ritson: Shitting it, Louis.

Louis: Tell me more about it. Before we move on to other subjects. I want to know how long. What was the feeling? Did you lose sleep? Did you argue with your wife more? Did you start drinking more? Did you start. Did you start drinking less? Like, what was. What was it like, that moment?

Mark Ritson: I created a model that didn’t have a financial risk. Right. I mean, there was a big financial hit in the sense that I was not earning a lot of money. But it wasn’t as if we dumped the mortgage to make a manufacturing plant and there was, you know, big fixed cost. I wouldn’t have done it. I just couldn’t. I mean, first of all, let’s be clear. This is a child’s approach to business compared to. And I had a proper income from teaching and writing. That was more than enough. So it’s not as. I can’t even imagine that other level where you put everything on the line. Fuck that. Right? So this isn’t even a real scary story. It was more the idea that you would look like a complete fucking idiot and you would have wasted about a year and a half of your life. And by the way, nobody, except about a handful of people who were, you know, in my family circle, thought it would work. So marketing week, you know, who are, you know, my partners in this and the publishing company, they wanted nothing to. I had to push them very hard to do this. They were really not interested. I had to make them take half the profits, which is now looking like a really fun. Now there’s plenty of people thought it

Louis: was a good idea, good deal.

Mark Ritson: Yeah. But no, they were like, yeah, okay, that thing you wanted to do, what is that again? So, yeah, you really did feel like you, you know, are you mad because you’re, you know, there is a thin line, as I said to you, between delusion and actually having a really good idea. And I’m not quite sure the line even exists. Right. So, yeah, there was definitely that feeling that I’m going to waste my time. I’ve been to a studio filming myself. I can’t build brands, I can’t market anything. My online class sucks. I look like a bit of a tit. You launch it, right? So it’s out there. Like, Mark’s got a mini MBA product. What is that? So you promote it half thinking, if this doesn’t work, I’m going to look like a total tit. So, yeah, all of the above. And I think that fear isn’t even a real fear. I wouldn’t have lost anything other than look like a cock if it hadn’t have worked. But still, it was still pretty hardcore. Yeah, I admit it was pretty hardcore. But the other thing is, don’t underestimate being a professor. What we do when we start off in our careers is we get up in front of like 70 or 80 managers and tell them how to do it better, right? And then we go and consult. Like, I fly to Switzerland and Tell chocolate executives how to sell chocolate better than they’ve been doing for the last 25 years. So we’re already pretty used to shitting our pants. Anyone that doesn’t shit themselves, then I get to hotels in Hong Kong or wherever in my consulting life. And the night before, until relatively recently, until the night before, you’d still be shitting your pants about is this fucking nonsense. They’re going to just laugh at me when I get there. Do you know what I mean? So it does toughen you up for that. You do kind of push through now.

Louis: I’m glad you’re mentioning it and thanks for being so transparent because there is a feeling from people like that. The people who’ve made it, they are not scared anymore and whatever, and everything is relative. Like, yeah, I’m glad you mentioned the fact that it wasn’t like you put your house on the line or anything like that. But it’s all relative to you. Like it’s 0 to 100. And it’s not because you get richer and whatnot that you don’t feel this 100 level fear. It’s just relative to you as a person. And some people are happier than you being fucking, you know, having nothing in their name. It’s all related, right?

Mark Ritson: Most of the people I’ve worked with that are more. Way more successful and famous than me are much more nervous about it, right? So it’s usually the ones that aren’t feeling the nerves that are shithouse. There are some exceptions, right? But generally speaking, those that don’t get nervous are usually pretty bad. You need the nerves to be good, right? I spent a long time working in fashion, even though it doesn’t look like it. And Lagerfeld was. Karl Lagerfeld was the man, right? And one of the hundred things Lagerfeld said that I thought was fantastic was that, you know, someone said to him, are you nervous about the show this year? Because, you know, there’s this and there’s that. And he said, of course I’m nervous. He said, but we must dominate these things. We must dominate them. And he’s right. That’s the thing. It’s not that you don’t feel it. It’s that if you’re the Kaiser or if you’re good, you go, oh, there it is, right? I’m shitting myself. This is fun. You know what I mean? Now we can. Now I’m shitting myself. Laugh at yourself. I’m really shitting my pants. This is now going to be fun, right? You know what I mean? You’re going to be dead. Yeah, enjoy the fear. The fear is better than the triumphalism later on of it. Working or not working is far less interesting if you understand the fact you’ll be dead soon. The idea that you feel you shit your pants and you laugh at yourself shitting your pants is fantastic, right? It’s fantastic.

Louis: You also said something in passing that I was quite interesting, that almost no one believed in this. And I think it’s. It’s a lesson because in retrospect, this is what I love about good fucking ideas that are risky enough where you shit your pants and you’re scared about it is in retrospect, everyone’s like, oh, yeah, of course it works. Fuck off. That’s not, you know, I’ll tell you

Mark Ritson: a better one than that. It’s perfectly in line with what you’re saying. So my columns have been, you know, not always correct, right? But sometimes they’ve been very correct, right? And don’t get me wrong, occasionally, I mean, I was. Let me give you one that was wrong. I was always convinced Facebook was going to be broke in five years, right? And it was completely wrong. But many of them have been very prescient. I called Apple winning The smartphone wars 10 years, five years before it happened, right before the launch of the iPhone, or even better, I wrote an article about Nokia going, nokia are fucked up. And my editor refused to publish it because it was nonsensical. And I said, no, no, no, there’s too many executives saying too many stupid things. They’re fucked here, right? What’s interesting, take that Nokia article, right? It was bang on the money. We just did a retrospective of my last 10 years of articles and we got. The people I wrote about came back and said whether it was right or not. And usually I wasn’t too bad, right? The point is, nobody remembers. I was the only guy, I think, saying social media. So when the Oreo had the famous tweet, right? I wrote an article the next day saying it’s horseshit. The numbers don’t add up, right? Social media doesn’t replace traditional tv, and I got slated for it at the time. And then later on when it turned out to be true, and the people from Oreo said, oh, it was fucking bullshit. Nobody remembers that or you don’t get credit later. People just remember you being wrong even though you were fucking right. You know what I mean? When I wrote the Nokia column, I got a bunch of shit from a bunch of people going, you’re a fucking idiot. From the Nokia Fan club. And then when Nokia promptly went fucking crazily bad about a year later, nobody remembered my article. So you don’t get credit later for being right at the time. It’s a really important point, really important. You’re always going to look like a fucking idiot even if you’re right.

Louis: So when you’re wrong, it’s on you. When you’re right, it’s obvious in retrospect, like it’s not you, it’s just it was meant to happen. But that, that’s a very good lesson.

Mark Ritson: The only thing that, that makes that worthwhile is there’s a very good line that not enough marketers use, which is I work with a couple of times with private equity guys, right, And I really enjoyed it. Complete fucking space aliens, right? Fucking weirdos, right? Fucking weird fuckers. Completely soulless, really exciting, great people to drink with and look at the world completely like, like they look at the world from a category point of view. They love guys like me because I have some like, ability to spot brands. But they’re like, we don’t care. We know this is the category we need to be in now. Which brand should we pick? You tell us, we’ll buy it, right? Lovely times with them. But the thing with those private equity boys through and through and through is that they have this, I don’t know, how do I describe it, this ability just not, not to actually really care how it plays out, you know what I mean? Like they really, they’re already, they’re all, they’ve already won. They’ve got the exit before they go in. So they’ve already won it, you know, already. I think that’s a concept we miss in marketing, right? What’s your exit before you go in? If you’ve got the exit planned, you’ve already won, you know what I mean? But we really don’t look at it long term like that in market.

Louis: No, long term is a fucking curse word. It’s a bad word.

Mark Ritson: The other thing they used to say was, how can we make money from this knowledge, you know what I mean? The only reason it makes sense to have some forethought and marketers don’t think this way is right. I would convince them of something in a bar and they would say, right, okay, I can see the plate. Entry, exit. How can we make money from this knowledge? You know what I mean? It’s a really interesting, albeit capitalist point, right? If you really are sure of the knowledge, no one’s going to give a shit that you were right later. Unless you make money from it early.

Louis: So before we go back to the history of the mini mba, there are those people who are paid to recognize the sex of chickens, even though they don’t fucking know how they can recognize it. Right? They don’t know. They can’t explicitly say this is a male or female. They just know looking at it. And they can train people, other people by telling them, this is. This is female, this is male. I don’t fucking know why, but this is it.

Mark Ritson: Right? This is a new area of knowledge for me. But you’ve got me. Keep going. Yes, I’m enjoying this.

Louis: So the connection I’m trying to make

Mark Ritson: is the other one’s a hen. Is that why I keep chickens? I can do what you’re talking about, but it’s because I’m.

Louis: I’m. I’m butchering it like I always do. It’s not chickens, it’s another species of birds where you can’t fucking recognize whether it’s a male or female. And some people just know, but they can’t explain why. And the connection I’m going to make with you is, is it a bit the same for you and brands? Is it when you say you have this gift to recognize brands?

Mark Ritson: Oh, no, no, no. That’s a very good question, but it’s a very important point. The last thing you ever do is trust what you fucking think. So what you do is you go and look at the data. So I tell you, it’s a good story, actually. When we created the branding course, I divide up brand management into diagnosis, strategy and tactics. We talked a bit about it on the last podcast. When I try and I use podcasts rather than readings on the course because no one’s reading anything anymore. So podcasts, people do, and they love them. I could not find a podcast on doing diagnosis of a brand and doing research literally anywhere. So I had to go on a podcast and do one on diagnosis to fill the gap. I mean, this is. Everyone wants to talk about fucking using TikTok, but this question you’re asking me, which is, well, how do you know? It’s like, well, you look at the history, you do your qual, you talk to loyalists, you do quant if you can, and you talk to some retailers and you put all that together, you can spot it a mile away. A mile away. But it’s not me walking in going, you know, ooh, I can spot that. I feel like that chicken has a big dick and that one has a pussy. Right, well, let’s assume what they do I don’t know. You’re telling me.

Louis: It’s much more subtle. They also paid people to do that during the Second World War, to spot enemy planes versus Allied planes from the sky, even though you couldn’t fucking decipher from the two. Some people were able to know without knowing why.

Mark Ritson: They just, they don’t know how they know. But no, no, definitely not. I mean, in fact, if I get that feeling, I would push back heavily against it because I think that, that, that’s dangerous, right? I think you can have a, you know, you can have a feeling about something, but then you go and check. You know, there are. I’ll tell you, there are certain things you look for. You look for a strong founder. You look for a category that’s got potential, obviously, you look for notoriety and salience. And then you particularly, you look for loyalists that are passionate about the brand, that come from a very enclosed, very high level group of people that it’s very rare in, particularly with premium brands. There wasn’t a group of people who discovered the brand first among their friends, who were very influential later in a very organic way. There’s certain things you look for, right? But mostly what you’re looking for is. I mean, I work with Tatcha, right? So Tatcha is a famous brand in cosmetics because Unilever just bought it for a billion dollars. And I worked with the founder of Tatcha and the CEO, who are both very, very smart. And I think they always knew it was going to be a winner. And I was always very skeptical until I saw three things. I saw the product. I know nothing about cosmetics, but the way they were doing it was something special. I saw what Sephora, who were their main retailer, said about them, which was, these guys are the future. That’s a retailer. Always trust your retailers. They’re always miserable. But if they say that, you go, whoop. And then the loyalists I saw were. There was lots of them and they were completely. And there was nothing else in their book like it. And when you put those three things together, plus this cool founder and a smart, savvy CEO who’s been around the traps before. I’ve worked with him before. And you go, yeah, these guys are set. Now, I couldn’t have told you it was going to be a billion dollar acquisition, but, yeah, you knew pretty early on it was going to be something else. But you always check, Louis, you always check because, you know, everyone has a favorite wife or a favorite husband. And then you have to check, you

Louis: know, so as you said, we’ve talked about diagnosis, the strategy, the tactics on the previous podcast. If you’re listening to this right now, I haven’t listened to the first conversation between Mark and myself. Absolutely listen to it. So we’re not going to deep dive into it again, but I want to go back to the story of the mini MBA and going back to the initial question to close the loop a bit. How would you do it? If we were to work together on a new company and you first said, listen, it’s if unless you are over 5 million, 5 years plus, it’s just, it’s not going to work. But yet you proceeded to kind of answer the question after a while. So going back to this initial question where you said, I looked at my kind of the strength, the unique ability, the unfair advantage I have in the business. And then I did the long. You know, I still do the long and the short of it. So spending time on podcasts is one thing. What other long stuff do you do?

Mark Ritson: I mean, it is mostly me, so, I mean, I’ll give you a good example. So for 20 years, I got paid pretty well to write for marketing magazines, right? So. Or newspapers. And it did pay me pretty well. And I was always very negative about people that wrote for magazines that didn’t get paid. You know, I was like, fuck, you’re fucking worthless. You know, And I was making quite a lot of money from it. And the problem I got was with. With paywalls. So although I realize why you want to pay Wall, it doesn’t make sense for me to be behind it. You know what I mean? And in the end, with Marketing Week, I love Marketing Week. I want to write for Marketing Week forever. It does the job for me. But the problem was, I mean, there was a big debate about brand purpose about, I don’t know, two months ago. And all my stuff’s behind a paywall now. So you got to pay, you know, €500 a year to read it. And there was this big debate about brand purpose that I was, I think, part of the early discussion. I was, you know, in there early, and I. People were asking me for my column, but I couldn’t send it to them because it’s behind a paywall. And that made me realize, you know, why am I doing this? I mean, I can make. And I’m making these figures up, right, Because I shouldn’t reveal actual money. But let’s say it’s €100,000 a year to write columns. Is that really why I’m doing this? Because if that’s why I’m doing it. I can make far more doing other things with my time. The reason I’m doing this is to be top of funnel. So what I should do is talk to marketing week and say, put me in front of the paywall and don’t pay me anymore because I’m not really doing this for the money. I’m doing it because, because of, you know, how it feeds the machine of mini mba. And that’s exactly the conversation we had. And my editor’s very good and he was, you know, we talked about it and we got to that conclusion, you know, without us falling out or anything, because I understand why he wants a paywall. It just doesn’t suit me. So that’s a good example of a top of funnel decision, right? Turned out 100 grand hypothetically, in favor of doing stuff for free in order to drive, you know, more salience and awareness. And I think that’s a, it’s a good example of, you know, podcasts, talks, articles. LinkedIn is my, you know, LinkedIn is my metier in the sense that I love LinkedIn and it’s always been useful for me. And you know, I think I average about 100,000 views of my posts eventually. And you know, I know they’re not all views, but you know, I’ve got good evidence to suggest 25 to 30,000 of them are properly read, usually by often the same people, but not always. I’ve only got to convert a percent of those guys, right? I mean, I’ll give you a good stat about at this point. You know, you get on LinkedIn, you get your rolling 90 day average of who’s looked at your profile, right? And that means they’ve actually, you know, clicked on, looked at you. My average is probably it hovers between 20 and 30,000 views over 90 days, right? So if we take the 30,000 views, what does that translate into? That means that every nine days I’m getting 3,000 views. So I’m getting 300, 200, 300 views a day, right? All we have to do is make sure those people are the right kind of people, which they are, and mini MBA will prosper. Do you know what I mean? That LinkedIn for me is top of funnel. It’s certainly got bottom of funnel potential, but it doesn’t really for us. LinkedIn is amazing top of funnel opportunity and I think more small businesses should realize that.

Louis: So to go back to the paywall, I was checking some articles of you today and some of them are still under the paywall. Is it yeah, the old one. Okay, so since when do you have those articles free for everyone to see?

Mark Ritson: Two weeks ago, but I have. Yeah, two strategies. Two. Two new strategies, Louis. So we’re. First of all, we’re doing a retrospective for the Festival of Marketing where all the columns that people have complained about and commented on are now going to be free. We got Byron Sharp tonight to comment on my article about him. So that was great. That was really. It’s a really good session. It’s going up Festival of Market, and then we’re doing something for Christmas where we’re basically making them all available for free. So we will get close to, you know, get them back out there, but from now on, they’ll be free for the next 10 years. They’ll be free because that’s what they meant. That, you know, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? I could just write a blog like a teenager, or I could be a journalist and get the hundred thousand euros, hypothetically. Or I’m trying to get a bit in the middle, do you know what I mean? Like, I’m not doing it for money anymore, but I still want it to be a magazine article, not a, hey, look at me, I’m blogging. And by the way, that’s something important, Louis, that I’m always impressed with about you. So many people in our industry talk about our industry to the point where you’re like, fuck. Like, so many columnists. Talk about the columnist who wrote about the other columnist. Talking about the columnist like, you fucking losers, you know, you fucking losers. Nobody cares. We’re plumbers, we’re electricians. Write about the work. With all this work going on, and you want to write about, you know, oh, X said this and Y thinks that. But I think that it’s like, oh, my God, so many columnists, you know what I mean? They just do talk about the work. The work is interesting. Do you know what I mean? The. The rest of it isn’t interesting at all. It’s like. And I think that’s been a big opportunity is I occasionally slip into it and then I pull myself out of it.

Louis: That’s one of the best quotes of the episode. Again, writing a blog like a teenager. And you did. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, you don’t know what Mark did, but he basically did a bit of a gesture. So what’s the difference then between a blogger. Is it the fact that they talk about themselves and it’s just kind of a circle jerk? Is it what you mean by the blogging like a teenager.

Mark Ritson: Yeah. I mean, all these blogs, talking about other people. So first of all, there’s no point doing Twitter or LinkedIn unless you’ve monetized it. First of all, I think a lot of people don’t get that, right? If I didn’t have mini MBA or originally a column to promote, I wouldn’t do anything on Twitter or LinkedIn. What’s the fucking point, right? So I’d keep in touch with my colleagues and so forth, but I wouldn’t be putting things on there, right? So I think a lot of people have this kind of postmodern view of social media where they do the social media thing and there’s no fucking point to it. You know what I mean? Like, it’s. The whole point is it’s top of funnel, you know, Otherwise, what’s the point of it, you know? Oh, and I see these people on Twitter, you know, they talk about their kids and they talk about what they’re eating, and it’s like, Jesus, you’re gonna. You’re gonna. You’re gonna have problems there down the track, you know what I mean? The best one was recently there was a guy who tweeted, I no longer. I no longer use LinkedIn and I no longer go on Facebook, and I choose no longer to go on Instagram. And I said to him on Twitter, I said, why the fuck are you tweeting this? Then you fucking lose. And they got all this fucking, oh, he’s a good guy and he’s just making up. I’m like, fuck you. You’re making this fucking statement on social media. Like you’re not into social media. You’re a fucking loser. You know what I mean? Get a. Get a grip. You know what I mean? Get a grip. Sorry, I shouldn’t say who’s a nice guy? But come on, you know what I mean?

Louis: Your dog agrees.

Mark Ritson: He’s like him as well.

Louis: So you will agree with that, with what I’m gonna say LinkedIn might go away. I mean, it’s very unlikely. But maybe in five fucking years they’re gonna die or they’re gonna be bought out again or something like the channel itself doesn’t matter. Why do you think, for you, it’s a channel to be right now? What are the elements that make it an interesting thing so that people can spot the next one to be on if they need to be or replace it or whatnot? Why is it so interesting right now?

LinkedIn as B2B Top of Funnel Strategy

Mark Ritson: It’s unique because. And I know the LinkedIn guys pretty well, right? So I’VE worked with them a little bit over the years in New York and it’s a good story, actually. My argument to LinkedIn has always been, so when LinkedIn came along, they looked at Facebook and Twitter and everything else and they said, right, well, you’ve got TV and cinema and outdoor. Top of funnel B to C, bottom of funnel, digital media more targeted. That’s where you do digital stuff. So here comes LinkedIn B2B. And LinkedIn says, well, we’re kind of like the Digital Media for B2B, so we’re bottom of funnel. Except they never were, in my opinion. Right. They’re not a performance marketing tool. In B2B. The bottom of funnel is the salesforce. That’s who activates. Right. It’s not, you know, it’s one of the fundamental differences. The salesforce goes out and does the performance. Right. But you think about top of funnel for B2B. What have you got? CNN and golf tournaments. There’s nothing there. Right. So I think strategically, LinkedIn missed their biggest opportunity and are now rectifying it. It’s B2B, top of funnel, stuff that hands over sales, leads to the salesforce. And that’s why I think it’s such a winner for me and for mini mba, because we’ve been able to use it organically. But also increasingly, for example, the brand course we’ve got. And I’m not going to. I’m trying to sell it via your podcast, Louis. Heaven forbid. It’s better than anything else that’s being taught at the top business schools, never mind online courses. You go and do a Harvard Business School, do the MBA elective in brand, then come and do my mini mba. Let’s talk, baby. Right? We got a net promoter score, plus 18. Right. I’ve got MBAs from top schools who do the course and they’ll tell you. Anyway, my point is we have this course, but now we have, ironically, a marketing problem, which is we’ve got a great course in brand management and we know there are brand managers with no training. We just have to link the two together and what do you know? We can go out to every brand manager in the world with brand in their title and we can target them with pretty decent content that will start the top of Funnel process going and will lead to other things. I think that’s a fantastic opportunity for us. Right. And it’s not cheap, but it’s also not the most expensive approach either. So I really think LinkedIn’s got it for now and we can talk about TikTok replacing Facebook, which is apparently a real thing. I still think LinkedIn’s got. Here’s another one for your. Like, what I would say is LinkedIn is going to survive the tunnel. And what I mean by that is, when you get to my age, I’m 50, right? When you get to my age, what you realize is you’ve got a bit of experience, so you can start to call it, you know what I mean? You start not, not perfectly, but you really start to see the, the vectors, you know what I mean? You can see where things are playing. Bit more wisdom, not, not too much, but just a bit more. And therefore you can spot what’s going to happen. But Also, if you’re 50, unless you make some horrible errors by the time you’re 60, you’re out. Anyone who’s working past 60 is a fucking freak, in my opinion, or hasn’t earned enough money, right? So my point is, at 50, you can see the tunnel and predict it quite well in some cases. But you can also see that some things are beyond the tunnel. I know LinkedIn is going to be the dominant engine for B2B for the next 10 years and after that, who gives a fuck? Literally, who cares, man? Because it won’t be of any use to me. You see what I mean? That’s the weird thing about your 50s, I think, is you start to be able to spot things, but also that beyond those things, you don’t care. That’s a new one on me. In my 40s, I wasn’t thinking that way. So I start my 50s, I’m like, yeah, okay, who cares, man? And I’ve seen that on all the managers I’ve worked with. This kind of like, that’s what’s going on. They’re going, oh yeah, yeah, I can see what’s happening here. You guys are all fucked. But I’m that dee da di da going to be gone before that happens.

Louis: And yeah, LinkedIn has this amazing organic reach which is very good for top of the funnel, right? You don’t have to pay to play, you can literally just post shit and LinkedIn with Surface it to the right people. I’m always amazed by the power of posting something. Not having that many quote unquote reactions, but then having fucking people like when you call them remembering it or just saying, oh, I saw your post on LinkedIn. It is really something that is quite interesting nowadays. There is something interesting I want to ask you because obviously none of the questions I’m asking you are prepared because I’m just listening to you. But you said in your 50s, this is how you think. I’m 31, right. So I don’t want to make it, you know, make you feel bad or anything. That’s not the point.

Mark Ritson: Away. I feel bad, Louie. I feel better. But be a thought again, what a great year 31 is. If you’ve got it right. 31 is among the best years, mate. If you’re not. You haven’t got any kids yet, have you, Louie?

Louis: No, not yet, no.

Mark Ritson: Just take your time, get drunk, have as much sex as possible. This is my advice to 31 year olds. Not being patronizing. I’m just saying that’s what you should drink more, have sex.

Louis: How are you, how are you thinking in your 30s then? Marketing.

Mark Ritson: Yeah. Look, I was on the academic train and I was, you know, it’s all very well being a bit of a rebel now, but I was in the middle of a tenure clock, so 31, I was, I’d moved back to London Business school from the States. I was on my second professorship. I was still tenure track. I was assistant professor lbs. I was, you know, I was just starting to get. I tell you what, 31 was probably the year I decided to focus on brand because it was clearly more substantive than comms and no one else was doing it. So I was really kind of making that my niche and I was enjoying London and having a bit of money. And it’s dead interesting because I’ve been in Minnesota for. My first job was Minnesota for four and a half years. Great city. Could not get laid. And at 30, you turned 30 in Minneapolis. It’s like being 70. All my friends were divorced. They’re all 30 and divorced. Everyone gets married when they’re 18 in Minnesota, right? So all the guys I was hanging out with were all divorced hockey players, you know, and so we got on a Saturday night. But it was kind of fucking depressing, right? And I, I got it in my head at 30, 31, I was really over the hill, there was something wrong with me. And I got back to London and I was like a dog with two dicks because it was like 31 was like young, super young. Do you know what I mean? I was like, what was I thinking? So I was in, I really had a good time, I think. And LBs was, was great. So yeah, I think 30s are, I would say 30s are the time to really go into things. 40s are the time to consolidate. And then 50s are very enjoyable in my game. I mean, being a professor in your 30s is horrible because everybody just Assumes you’re too young, you know, whereas 50, it’s great because everyone, you know, you’re the right age to do the job. I mean, for 25 years, I was the wrong age to do the job that I was doing. I mean, literally, they, you know, you say professor and they expect you to be 50.

Louis: That’s another unfair advantage that you have. Your gray hair.

Mark Ritson: Yeah, great, man. And now the irony is, man, I’d say when I started teaching in Minnesota, I was 26 years old. Just turned, not even. And I’d done my PhD earlier, I knew nothing. And I was trying to look older. I wore my specs because back then, you know, I could wear contacts. I wanted to look older. And now I’m just like fucking appalled by how old I look. And it’s like, back then I wanted to be as old as possible. It’s fascinating. Life. Life goes full circle.

Louis: You know, you mentioned earlier on that you have no problem calling people out on LinkedIn and whatnot, which I always enjoy. When I see a notification from your LinkedIn, I know you’re going to say something on the comments. You’re going to fucking bollock someone. And it’s always funny to see the other people commenting because I know what you’re doing. You’re doing it for the fucking. For the laugh yourself, but also so that other respond and more people see it. And I see your game a bit, you know, but you do it, you know, it’s a pleasure for you to do it. I can see that. You don’t need to think hard about it. When did you feel confidence about doing it? Like, and I don’t mean LinkedIn, forgetting the channel. I don’t give a shit about that.

Building Confidence to Call Out Bullshit

Mark Ritson: But no, I tell you exactly when it was when I paid off my mortgage. It changes. It changes someone. Not to be necessarily rich, but not to have a mortgage anymore. You suddenly feel like, oh, fuck it. Like, if I had a mortgage, I’d still be like, oh, yeah, brand, purpose, it’s important. And oil companies are good because I might need to make money from that down the track. And I think that the freedom of not having a debt on your house, even though you, you know, you’re not rolling in money, liberates you to be like, oh, you know what? I can’t be bothered anymore. Fuck this. I mean, I couldn’t stand the worthiness when it started with social media because it was just horseshit, right? It really was horseshit. And I didn’t know if I was wrong or right at the time. But it was like it just didn’t stack up to me. And I remember thinking at the time, this would be 2010ish. I’ll start giving talks about this and if I’m wrong, somebody will point out I’m wrong. Do you know what I mean? And nobody did. And the more I went on, the more I’m thinking, hang on a minute. By now somebody should have told me I’m wrong. And nobody is. But that started with, I don’t have significant debt on my property anymore. I own my own home. And again, I’m very working class. That liberty came from that. Before that, I just didn’t say anything. And suddenly it was like, and you’re right, people like it. I try not to be personal. I try to be about the, you know, what you said is stupid. You’re not stupid. I’m very care. I try to be very careful and say, you’re not stupid. But what you said was stupid. There was a nice chap in I think it was in Sri Lanka who posted that strategy was an emotional connection. And I said, and I commented on his tweet. I said, look, I’m sure you’re my exact words, I’m sure you’re a really, really decent fellow, but what you’ve just said there is horseshit. You should read more and stop tweeting. And like 10 wankers then went, oh, that’s not fair. He’s only ever, he’s only got six connections. Look at you picking on the little fella from Sri Lanka. And it’s like, dudes, you’re the racist, patronizing motherfuckers here. If the fella from Sri Lanka says something stupid, I’m gonna fucking tell him it’s stupid. And I hope he would do the same thing to me. All you worthy with you. Oh, he’s only got six followers and he’s from Sri Lanka. Go easy on him. No, let’s all, let’s have a proper, let’s have a debate and have a beer afterwards. And I think one of the things that’s missing, Louis, is in academia we have this image of being all, you know, lovey dovey. I went to research talks for years where two professors would bang the shit out of each other and then go out for dinner afterwards quite happily. And I think, you know, the homoerotic thing with me and Byron Sharp, I absolutely think he’s terrific. I just disagree with half the things he says and vice versa. Right? And we can enjoy it. It’s not that important. Do you know what I Mean, you can hammer someone’s ideas and still think a lot of them, unless you, Unless you’re an idiot, you know, and there

Louis: are countries, I think, where people are more used to that. I mean, I, I know that in France. Yeah, that’s kind of a spot, you

Mark Ritson: know, the Dutch love it, right? The French, you have to, you have to put some butter on top of it in France. Do you know what I mean?

Louis: Yeah. She sandwich and all this.

Mark Ritson: Whereas the Dutch, just like, you know, Germans as well. Germans are great. Germans love calling it out. I like the. I like the French more than anyone else because I love the way at some point they have to reveal the fact that they’ve been clever. But the Irish are better than the French because the Irish will leave you thinking you’ve someone over even though they fucked you all along. Whereas the French, they get. They really do a great. And then at some point they have to go, do you see just there? I love that. But that’s the vulnerability I love about the French. They can’t resist, you know, so you

Louis: felt free when you didn’t have your mortgage anymore. And that came from the history, your context and the family and whatnot. Do you regret that if you were to advise young Ritson again with his face, shitty glasses.

Mark Ritson: No, no, no. I think one of the problems I have with this find your purpose bullshit is it’s coming out of Richard Branson’s mouth and a whole series of other billionaires. Yeah, sure, you go and find your fucking purpose. You’ve got a billion dollars. Here’s the purpose of most working men and women all over the world. Yeah. And I’m talking about, you know, middle class, French, German people, not. Not just, you know, people that are struggling. Your purpose is to, you know, pay your mortgage off and get a decent pension and bring up your kids in a way that works. That’s what purpose is for most people. And I get really tired of people that have seven figure salaries telling people that don’t. You should find your purpose. You know what, that’s fucking dangerous talk. The purpose is do a job that doesn’t make you too unhappy and pay off all your debts. And that’s very, again, very working class. But it doesn’t stop it from being right. And I think that’s another problem with this purpose nonsense. It misses the fact that for most people, life isn’t a struggle, but it’s not, you know, what am I going to. What’s my ultimate calling in life? You know, that’s not how it plays for most People. It certainly wasn’t how it played for me. Right. Or most of us. Right. We don’t have that luxury.

Louis: But don’t you think that by being more straightforward and less bullshitty and calling things as they are, even when you have a mortgage, don’t you think that’s one of the basis of kind of good marketing, in a sense where you pick an enemy, you have a fucking point of view, you at least say things slightly differently?

Mark Ritson: No, it became strategic, Louis. It became strategic at a certain point. When I saw it working, so I saw that people would. I mean, like any brand, what you discover is a client said to me, you know, the reason we love you is because you tell us the truth and you don’t bullshit us. And I had really had no idea that was the case. And so what happens, of course, is, as I’ve seen with brands a hundred times over, what starts as an accident becomes a core competence, and then it becomes embedded through strategy again. Take Sephora. The reason Sephora has so many different small brands is when it was acquired by lvmh, a lot of the big suppliers, starting with Chanel, didn’t want to supply them for a while because they were owned by one of their major competitors. So they had to fill the shelves with any old, small brand for a little while. And that became a wonderful part of Sephora’s DNA, this incredible range of big and small, new and old, and they realized it at some point. But you mustn’t underestimate the. And I’ve seen that literally a hundred times, a brand does something by chance or because it has to, and it becomes something very attractive. And then they realize it and then they enshrine it. And I think that’s, you know, I’m a good example of that in a small way. I lost my temper a few times, and I’m from a background which is very northern and straight English, you know, call it what it is. And when I did that, I went, oh, hang on. People really like that and no one else does it, or very few people do it. And what’s. I’ll tell you the best thing, Louis, which you’ll really like, is when I do these conferences now, people are so. You know, there’s a great column which is about Gary Hamill. Have you ever read that column of mine? You’d love it. So I give a talk with Gary Hamill, who’s a famous strategy professor, and I start off, and then Gary Hamill takes over after me, and no one remembers me or even notices me, even Though my talk’s way better than Gary Hamill’s, because Gary Hamill is Gary Hamill. And everyone in the audience has come to see Gary Hamill, and I’m like, fuck, what is he doing that I’m not doing? And the answer is, he’s being paid to be Gary Hamill, and I’m being paid to give a speech on branding and open up for Gary Hamill. And it’s at that point I go, right, not doing this anymore. I’m gonna. You know, I’ve gotta do. I’ve gotta make myself what I teach, right? To some degree.

Louis: So that surprises me then, that you answered saying, I mean, it’s not that you have regrets. You can’t just go back in the past. That’s not what I mean. But it’s. It’s surprising then to me that you wouldn’t advise your young self to. To take more risk and be less bullshitty or, you know, being a bit more. I don’t want to use the C

Mark Ritson: word, but function, it’s a function of time, I think. I think it would be false to do it right. I think the joy of it is it happened when it happened for a reason. If I. If I went back in time and advised myself to be like that earlier, it would be fake. Do you know what I mean? I think that’s really important. You can’t fake it. You can, you know, you can exaggerate it a bit, but, you know, it has to be born of. You know, when I say to someone, I think you’re full of shit or something. I’m not doing it for effect. I’m mostly doing it because I think they’re full of shit. Do you know what I mean? And people can smell it a mile away. Do you know what I mean? But what I was going to tell you is what’s great now is now that I’ve got to. I’m not as famous as Gary Hamill, but I’ve got to that place where occasionally I get hired to give a talk because they want me to give a talk, right, in my style. The conference organizers will always say to me, we want you to be provocative, and we want you to. To push it. And I say, are you sure? Because when people say that to me normally, and I do that afterwards, they really didn’t like it, and they go, no, we want you to be that. And every time afterwards, we’re like, that was a bit strong. That was a bit inappropriate. And I’m like, you. You told me to do it. I’ve gone, you know what I mean? I checked twice and that now you’re ready to go. Well, we went, you know what I mean? And then afterwards, after a while, they’re happy because, you know, rather than eight people and a dog watching it, we got a decent audience. That’s the other part. You’ve got to give people something that’s new and interesting or no one’s going to bother, you know what I mean? Like, fuck the number of conference sessions that are just dog shit boring. It’s stunning, you know what I mean? It’s stunning. It’s not even that hard to be good at these conferences. You’ve just got to be like normal. And there was a great one in Prague, right? My favorite one was in Prague a couple of years ago. They do this massive conference, about three and a half thousand people with the Czechs and the Slovenians. Slovaks. Slovaks, not the Slovenians. I always get them wrong. We get pissed off. The conference was just full of brilliant audience members and shit speakers. And I was the last guy on. And I said to these guys, I said, it’s been pretty bad, hasn’t it? And I said, right, let’s go and talk about brands. And then I said, afterwards, we’ll go and get shit faced in the bar. And I said, I won’t be able to stay, you know, there’s 3,000 of you and there’s, there’s only me. But I said, I’ll stay out for a couple of hours until I pass out. Let’s get hammered afterwards, all right? And everyone just went, yeah, because they’d had like nine hours of like, here’s how you do brand, purpose and you know, 80, 20, 60, 40, you know, is it about creativity or is it science? It’s just, you know, talk about the work. Do you know what I mean? Here’s some good work now let’s have a beer, do you know what I mean? It’s not that hard really, especially if you’re with Czechs who really like a beer and talking about market.

Louis: So what still is not 100% clear to me is what, what to say to you listening right now to this podcast who’s struggling to understand, okay, do I need to wait until it becomes natural and I pay off my mortgage to say what I think if it comes to me naturally right now, like, because to give my, to give my example, just briefly, I’m not fucking playing a game here. I’m literally just myself. I just asked the question I want to ask. I created this podcast for myself. I’m not faking it. Right?

Mark Ritson: At all. Yeah.

Louis: So what’s your. This is like. I’m not too sure what advice we could give them then.

Mark Ritson: It’s bigger. I’m with you now. Back up past the honesty and calling it in a straightforward way. That’s not what people should do, Right? That’s what I did in my little place. If you look at what I believe brands are, they are a synthesis of two or three things wrapped together, right? And one of my things is, I don’t know, no bullshit, whatever it might be, right? That’s one of my genes in the brand, not in me, but in the brand. It doesn’t mean that your listeners should be going, right, so when should I have that no bullshit thing? That’s not what we’re saying. What we’re saying is over time, through accident and through birth and through weird stuff and synchronicity. You may have got two or three things which are marketable in a certain category at a certain time. Those three or four things aren’t necessarily. Probably, definitely not what I’ve got. What you’ve got is something else. Work out what they are mostly by listening to other people because you won’t be aware of them and then you can solidify and use them as a base. But one of my biggest insights, and it sounds so obvious, is there’s no such thing as brands in general. Whenever you see brand small B, plural S, you’ve made a mistake. The whole point of a brand is it’s capital B, no S. There’s nothing you can generically learn from me about what to stand for. Right, to your excellent questions. You can learn about process and so forth, but where you end up should be in a completely different place from me and hopefully somewhere even more lucrative and better, right? So the danger here is you listen to someone like me saying, look, what I is this, this and this, I think, and that’s what’s worked. You’ll be something else. You need to be something else, right? And it’s a different combination. And that sounds real obvious, but it really turns out very hard for people to grasp. Finding the special genes and then driving it the way you need to drive it. Very, very tricky, you know what I mean?

Louis: It is incredibly difficult.

Mark Ritson: There are no train tracks. And you see it with brand managers. Brand managers often switch from one brand to another and they can’t manage the process of changing what they do because they don’t get that this brand is a totally different brand than the previous one they worked on. There’s only about 20% of marketers, in my experience, step back, do the diagnosis, get a new set of coordinates, blah, blah, blah. It’s a real skill to be able to drop one thing and move to another. And that’s the point here. The process and your questions are getting at that. I think that’s great. But the outcome and the product and all of that needs to be completely, completely. It should be smooth. All the things that I’m not, you know, could be smooth and gushing and, you know, elegant. You know, I mean, that might be it. And that’s the point. You’ve got to look hard at what A, what you’ve got, B, what will work and, you know, and wrap it up together. And it’s particularly important because what we’ve been saying throughout this podcast, I think, is for those first four or five years, the brand doesn’t stand on its own two feet. The founder holds it up, and at some point, the founder becomes the brand, right? And then the brand will take off. And that’s cool. But until that happens, you’ve got to carry it. And I think that you have to be that. Authenticity is important, but can also be a little bit gamed and focused as well.

Louis: So you need to your point earlier about accidents and just things happening and serum PDT and all of that. You just have to be willing to test shit and just throw things at the world and see what sticks, see what doesn’t, and make mistakes. Realizing that’s a nice lesson. Double down on it.

Mark Ritson: The only one that against is this making the mistakes thing has become a bit of a meme.

Louis: Right.

Mark Ritson: When I was teaching at mit, it was really big at mit. Make mistakes. It’s great to make mistakes. And when I did this Ogilvy talk this year for the Marketing Society, one of their questions was, tell us about the big mistakes you’ve made. And I haven’t made any. Like, no, I mean, I’ve made some small ones. And I thought I could make something up about getting something wrong, which would be like, it would make me look humble and it would like, people go, oh, he’s learned a lot there. And I thought, now fuck it. I’m just gonna say I haven’t made any big mistakes. I never intended to. So I didn’t, and I don’t intend to in the future. And that mistakes thing, I’m not saying it’s unavoidable. What I’m saying is that kind of pornography where we say, oh, I want to make mistakes so I can learn. Yeah, great. In A fucking theoretical universe. But when there’s money and time involved, I’d much prefer not to make any fucking mistakes and learn from my successes, right? And that’s super uncool and super untrendy. But I think the point is it’s better not to really make mistakes and. Or if you are making them, stop making them real quick and not go, oh, I learned from this big mistake, you know, that changed my life. Yeah, okay, but bear just to get it fucking right and learn from the research as much as possible. Do you know what I mean? I think that’s key. So I’d say, yeah, you need to test and learn, embrace serendipity. But the big skill I would suggest most people need is you need to know when the big fucking moment is upon you. A lot of people don’t know. I’ll give you one of my favorite examples. They did an article years ago about people that had survived massive accidents, right? Lone survivors. Fascinating article. They all told the same story. So there was a guy, for example. We had a terrible tragedy in the uk, the Zeebrugge tragedy. So a ferry going across overnight from England to Zeebrugge to Bruges, it sank. The car ferry loaded up with water, it sank. Like 100 people died. And the one guy that survived was, like, walking around the ferry and the ferry was listing, and he said, look, this is fucking crazy. This is fucking, you know, this fucker’s going down, right? And his car’s there with all his possessions and everyone’s having a beer. And he said. And what. He says that, he said that you don’t get the dramatic music like you get on the movies. So if that was happening, you know, in the movie version of the Zbrugger disaster, you’d start to hear the dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum. And he said there was just people laughing and joking, but he thought. He said, look, it’s fucking going down. So he got a ring and he jumped into the North Sea. And even when he jumped in the North Sea, I can remember him saying, I think I’m having a breakdown because I’ve just fucking. I’ve just jumped into the fucking sea. You know, he was telling people. People were like, you’re fucking mad. So he jumped in the sea, sure. The fucking ferry went down, right? And he was one of the few guys to survive. And I think that that concept of being able to see big moments, when they come, when Everyone else isn’t noticing them is definitely something I’ve been conscious of. You know, like when I went to Wharton on a postdoc, I remember thinking, oh, no, this is fucking it. Now. If I screw this up, I won’t get another chance. But if I knock this one out of the park in the next next year, it’ll be the making of me. And looking back on it 30 years later, that’s absolutely the case. Right. If I hadn’t have been 25 years later, if I hadn’t have made that Wharton postdoc work, I wouldn’t got to Minnesota, I wouldn’t have got to LBs, you know, and, you know, I haven’t always been successful. Don’t take it the wrong way, but I’ve spotted moment, but I haven’t failed much. And I’ve certainly spotted moments where, right, we’re going to triple down on this fucker. Because if I don’t, this one will pass me by like a ship in the night. And I think that’s a key one for your people is spot the. You know, you’re going to get six or seven moments. You will get some failures, and how you handle them defines you as a person, yada, yada, yada. But there’s going to be six or seven opportunities that everybody gets dealt that if you spot them, you’re going to go, oh, fuck, hang on, this is one. This is one of those. I think that’s a real skill, you [102:14] Louis: know the question I’m going to ask you how [102:18] Guest: we’re back to duck penises and duck pussies at this point, right? Yeah. This is back in Men spotting airplanes in the sky. Yeah. You get a tingling. You get a tingling in the loins that goes, oh, hang on a minute. Like the guy on the ferry. This is something else here. There’s something else going on. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, you’re right. We finally got back to your original chicken sexing metaphor slash strange thing. Yeah, yeah, you’re right. That’s the moment, you know, you’ve got. Yeah. You feel like, hang on a minute. This is it. You feel it. You do feel that. That’s fair. [102:55] Louis: Like butterfly in a stomach type thing. Like, it’s. It’s. To me, I’m not talking about big moments necessarily, but when I know there is something out there that could be interesting. I’m scared, first of all, and I have this butterfly in my stomach before publishing it or before doing it, and it feels like, you know, shit. But then if it’s much better Once you took the decision to fucking do it. [103:17] Guest: Yeah. [103:17] Louis: And it’s. [103:18] Guest: It’s definitely the work you do while you’re on it. So it’s not just going, this is a big moment I’ve got. I’m nervous. It’s also being fine enough at the Runway to go, not only is this a big moment, I’m nervous, but I’m going to put five times the effort in because I. You see what I mean? That when I got LVMH and I didn’t want lvmh, I mean, I took the Eurostar down to Paris that first time and they were late picking me up from Garden or Station, I remember thinking, bastards, if they don’t come in five minutes, I’m just going to fucking go home because I don’t want the gig. I don’t even know why I’m here. I’ll go. And then they turned up. But then I went, oh, hang on. Yeah, this is massive. I’ll quadruple down in these first early stages of it. You know what I mean? It’s not just being nervous, it’s being like, right, fuck everything else. This is the one. I’ll take an example. [104:09] Louis: You have this energy. [104:10] Guest: This energy. And when I did a video case about the Tide campaign that won the super bowl advertising thing last year, and it was a Saatchi North America campaign briefed in by Procter and Gamble, and the thing that Procter and Gamble did was Saatchi, they briefed them very well. Saatchi came back with three different creative options. And Saatchi said, that one, the first one, it’s a tie, dad, you know that’s the one. The other two, burn them. That’s the one. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s being able to spot and then double, triple down on that one and just get everything else out the way and not waste your resources on it. That’s a rare skill. I think that if you get it right those four or five times, it pays you back. And if you don’t, you miss them. And you never realize you missed them. [104:59] Louis: You know what I think in these moments when you have, like, three ads to pick from and you just pick the one and it works out. What it feels like sometimes is just the fact of actually believing in it and tripling down on it, giving all of your energy and saying no to the rest is actually what matters the most. And, yeah, you might say creativity as a bit blah, blah, blah, but, you know, even a not so good idea that you fucking Triple down on is better than a very good idea that you do almost fuck all on. [105:25] Guest: I think that’s right. But then there’s a third level. So just committing to something makes it better. You’re absolutely right. But then there’s that extra level I’m talking about which is committing to it and it’s a giant fucking thing if you keep going down, you know what I mean? That’s the extra. I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think there’s that extra bit which is we’re talking in a lifetime. These four or five things come along that you should spot three or four of them and go, this is crazy, but this is the one I should do. I think that is the thing. That’s your chicken sexing moment. But it’s not just going, oh, I can spot this. It’s then going. And I’m going to put the reason I use the example of the guy in the ferry is because he jumped in, you know what I mean? Like fucking he jumped in. And I think that’s the moment where you go, right, I’m going to not just think this is important, but I’m going to act on it and go hard. And I think that at least we’re talking about a moment that happens every five or ten years or something, right? If you’re lucky. I believe in that. And I also believe that when you do get punched in the balls by life, the Americans are right. I mean I do love Americans for a lot of the things they believe. They’re the moments that define you as a man or a woman, right? Not the victory, not this stuff we’re talking about where you make the most of your opportunities. How you handle those inevitable moments where you do get kicked in the balls and whether you can take it and whether you can, you know, almost enjoy it and go, right, this is, I mean I remember when I was in knee deep in two. We had two properties, we were, I was consulting like mad. We weren’t running short of money, but it was like, fuck, this is hard. And I took a job where I had to get up at 3am and fly to Sydney and do a really shitty job for a really quite shitty client and get home two days later. Miserable work, right? In a very uninteresting category. And I can remember getting up each morning and walking through the rain to get a taxi to the airport thinking this is ah, this is the bit where you find out if you’re a man or not. And I don’t mean that in a sexist way it could be a woman. But this is where you get to find out if you’ve got, you know, the stuff. Because this isn’t fucking easy. This is really hard to do this on such little sleep. But I’ll get to find out now if I’ve got, if I, you know, this test will prove to me that I’m, I’m made of the stuff I think I’m made of. You know what I mean? And I actually enjoyed that, like the Americans say you do. You should enjoy that feeling of, ah, this is the test. And if you feel that way, you can never really go wrong, right? Because the bigger the kicking the balls, the more you’re like, right, I’m going to prove you wrong. [108:03] Louis: And to your point about the ferry, it’s a nice analogy because when you jump, you can’t come back. Like you don’t have fucking wings or anything. You jump, you jump, that’s it. [108:13] Guest: Your whole life change. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, and you can control it a little bit with mini mba, you know, I was still give. I mean, I didn’t leave business school until it was very successful, right. There’s two years with mini MBA where I’m still teaching at business school. So I’m all for hedging bets if you can, but yeah, nothing’s going to be the same at some point. Yeah, absolutely right. But then, look, I tell you, you meet these guys that have built these incredible brands at a billion dollar level and what you learn from them is, you know, like Jean Christophe Babin, right? So Jean Christophe Babin was the CEO of TAG Heuer. He’s now the CEO of Bulgari. I learned so much from Babin because he’s first of all a sensationally nice person. Not nice in a like a book, like just fucking great guy. He’s got, I think he’s got five kids, a fantastic wife, he goes skiing every weekend. He’s never, you know, he’s built, rebuilt, TAG Heuer. He’s done a brilliant job on Bulgari. He likes having a beer. He go, you know, he likes buying Porsches. Not expensive ones, just likes Porsches. He’s just a fucking great guy. And what you get from these guys, these proper winners is, you know, stable, lovely to everyone is life’s short, man. And just go for it, because if you don’t, what’s the point? And there’s a, there’s a sense of that feeling that I get from a few people I’ve met and you just like, you get an Almost energy from them, right? Which is, if you don’t do it, man, what are you gonna do? You know, just get on with it. And if you fuck up, you’ll fuck up. But if you trust yourself a little bit and you’re a little bit knowledgeable, you’ll be all right. You’ll probably call it, you know what I mean? You got to back yourself. [109:57] Louis: You know, you mentioned the long side of it with LinkedIn podcasts removing the paywall. I don’t see you that much anywhere else. Or am I missing you? Do you do anything else? Top of the funnel? [110:11] Guest: Look, I’d say occasional talks in different countries where we can get a decent audience, which then goes online. I mean, we get about. What’s a good example? We should get between 5 and 10,000 views of a talk. Podcasts like this fine one here, you can do too many of them, but a few podcasts, always. Yours was great, by the way. So, you know, Alan Hart’s one has got good content too, but yours was the one that got. Continues to get cited, you know what I mean? Like the one we did fucking two years ago. It still does get like. We pick up sales off that every quarter of, you know, everyone. [110:49] Louis: I wonder where is. Where is my check? [110:51] Guest: Because it’s. [110:53] Louis: I sent you the. It’s coming. [110:55] Guest: It’s here with me. [110:56] Louis: Tell me more about. Tell me more about how. So you still hear people saying the episode two years ago, you’re still getting fucking sales from it. [111:03] Guest: I’m not making it up. We still get people saying, I heard your episode on Everyone hates Marketers. And then I signed up for mini mba and then this has been great. Blah, blah, blah. We get. I get that quite a lot. I mean, it doesn’t seem to be wearing out either. So you’ve obviously got a decent. It’s not just you’re an impact, but you. You’re getting, you know, syndication. People are still listening to it. You know what I mean? [111:27] Louis: Are we going to use the B word to describe. Everyone has marketers. Is it. Is it a brand yet? [111:33] Guest: No, no, I think. I mean, here’s your problem, right? And it’s not your fault the podcast industry is so back to my point about private equity boys, right? So the thing that blows my mind about private equity boys is they. They find a category where there’s lots of potential for margin and growth and then they look for a brand the exact opposite of what market is doing. You’ve got a great product here right in your podcast, but the podcast marketplace is clearly insanely. Insanely bad, right? So you’ve got Joe Rogan and then everyone else. See what I mean? That’s it. And the barriers to entry are low. Everyone starts apart. I. Never mind. Everyone hates marketers, right? Everyone has a podcast, right? And what’s interesting is everyone. And you’ve done it well, Louie, and you’ve done it for a long time. You’re very good at it. It’s not going to help you because the category sucks, right? But if you look at that whole thing, everybody wants to be like the host. Do you know what I mean? And you actually do it really well. Most people do it really badly, but they all have the same format and pretty much the same guests. See what I mean? So the category’s fucked before you begin, do you know what I mean? Like, literally, it’s fucked. And I don’t know, I mean, do you monetize it? What do you do with it then, Louis? What’s your plan? [112:55] Louis: So I’ve quit my job as of tomorrow. I’m going to work full time on it and I’m going to double down on. Not like the podcast is the channel, but everyone hates marketers as a. As a business, I think as. As legs towards helping people to fucking fight the bullshit. Get sales by, you know, radically standing out, which, which is funny because it’s never been engineered this way. I’d never thought about it this way, but naturally the guess I’m getting people I’m talking, the subjects we are approaching always kind of seem to gear towards this idea of like, the positioning, the standing out, the radical differentiation. I always kind of naturally just. And it’s just I realized this is what I want to do, this is what I need to do, and I’m going to develop it further. I want to do. I want to talk to people who are not marketers. I’m fucking sick of talking to marketers, to be honest. And I want to talk to. You mentioned. Fuck, I’m going to forget his name. Fashion Guy. Fuck yeah. I want to talk to people like that. I want to talk to artists and filmmakers and those people actually do marketing without calling it this way, because that’s the essence of it. Like this fucking taking risk, creating shit, seeing if it works, doing it better. [114:05] Guest: So I’ll give you good advice then live on your. On your. On your podcast. You ready? Here’s the whole thing, right? Everybody’s got the same fucking format, right? Everyone’s a fucking talk show host. And even when you’re good at it, which you are, there’s A limited amount of potential in that. What you should do is you should do case studies on marketing that last about 12 to 15 minutes, which is about the right length. Right. And you should make lots of them about these topics, because, again, I. I mean, I’ve listened to your episodes. I do like your stuff, but it’s all. It’s still as good as it is, similar to everyone else’s, and it depends on the guest. What you need to do is zoom into this topic and say to these fashion guys, take me through how you made a product. Or, you know, I mean, there’s. There’s room for that in this world. That’s what’s missing right now. You know what I mean? Like, I mean, I think who. You know, you, everyone else market is. Is. Is definitely in my list. Alan Hart’s podcast, I listen to, obviously, Galloway, but that’s about it. I’m with you. Marketing. Very boring and very repetitive. Right. Be far more interesting. Like, remember that thing recently where everyone sent out their top five books? Like their five marketing books? What the. You know, I mean, what the. What the blazing was that? Right? Here’s the five books that I like. It’s like the five marketing books, you losers. If. If the five. If the five books you want to boast about are, you know, how brands grow and, you know, from good to great, and me, you losers, the old man and the sea. Do you know what I mean? Like, Jesus Christ, put something decent in there. I’m with you. So I think a bit more. A broader view and more about the work is. Definitely would be. Oh, good. I mean, good luck, Louis. I think if anyone can do it, you can, but obviously you’re shitting yourself right now, which is great, you know, and that’s a good feeling. 31, shitting your pants. That’s about how you should be. How’s your mortgage starting? Oh, you’re a better man than me. You’re a better man than me. [116:17] Louis: But what’s the worst that can happen, you know, it fails. I found a new job. [116:22] Guest: Yeah. Yeah. Does your wife work? [116:25] Louis: Yes. [116:26] Guest: Okay, then. That’s why as long as she doesn’t leave you, you’ll be fine. [116:31] Louis: Yeah, I can go back to my folks. [116:34] Guest: Yeah, that sounds great. That would be, you know, 32, living with your parents, divorced. That sounds. [116:38] Louis: Everyone is doing it now. [116:40] Guest: Everyone. You’re a little too old. Yeah. No, no, look, seriously, I think it’s great. I mean, I’ll be honest. At 31. Yeah. You have to go for it. Yeah. You have to go for It. It moves pretty quick. Yeah, it moves pretty fucking quick. 30 to 40 is. Is the blink of an eye, man. It’s the blink of an eye. So if you don’t go now, you’ll never go. And the one certainty is you’ll regret it if you don’t. So, yeah, Godspeed. I think that’s great. I mean, it’s, you know, I did it much later in life, obviously, with my mini mba. It is a lovely feeling when it works. The only thing I’d say to you again is you end up just doing more work, though. I’ve managed through lockdown to be the busiest I’ve ever been because we have 3,000 students, do you know what I mean? So if you’re successful, it’s not like you go, oh, success. What happens is you go, it’s another mountain. [117:32] Louis: Yeah, there’s a fucking mountain to climb. And then there’s another one, and then there’s another one. [117:36] Guest: And I met the guy that had. I might have told this before, but the guy that founded Belvedere Vodka when he was creating Belvedere Vodka in Minneapolis and then when it was acquired by MOA Tennessee, 20 years apart. And it was a fascinating chance to get. Literally, they’re the two times I saw him when he was creating Belvedere and then when he was selling it for whatever it was, 300 million euro. And I asked him about that journey and he said, ah, look. He said, look, I had this idea and then I worked really hard and now here I am. And I don’t think there are many moments where you get to sit back and ruminate or look back on it. You just keep working and then you stop. Do you know what I mean? Again, capitalism is brutal in that respect. It isn’t poetry. Do you know what I mean? If you are successful, I just think there’s no such thing as an easy win. Do you know what I mean? Everybody works hard. I think that’s the other part that people often miss. In order to be successful and or make money, you have to work harder than other people and get up earlier. And I think that’s something that, again, doesn’t get said enough at the moment. You know what I mean? You need three extra hours a day [118:48] Louis: to go back to your case study idea. I mean, one of the. One of the key thing that I do differently than most is the fact that we spend a long time talking. Like, I see a lot of marketing podcasts talking about stuff for 15 minutes and then that’s it. I never want you to do that because you don’t go deep enough. And so this idea of doing case studies with like people, this is exactly what I had in mind, to be honest. But not 15 minutes, because I think you’re missing the, the details that actually make the whole fucking thing. And sometimes it takes two fucking hours to get there. [119:16] Guest: You know, if it’s a good enough story. Sure, yeah, I don’t disagree. It’s just, again, how many can you make? Two hours? I mean, I remember when I did Mini mba, for example, right? I worked with a wonderful woman called Dan, who was my, you know, she filmed me in the Green Screen Studio and we were like sort of two thirds of the way through and I said, fuck, Dan. I said, I’m exhausted. I don’t know about you. I said, I don’t know why I’m so tired. And she’s like, we’ve made nine hours of movie now, right? You know, there’s fucking three Gone with the Winds now. I’m not saying we’re making Gone with the Wind, but that’s a lot of content, right? That’s a lot of content. And in the same way you start making two hour podcasts, why do you think everyone does the podcast format, right? Because again, you’re good at it, but you can just sit and have a chat, do a little bit of prep, but then chat away. Two hours of a case study is a lot of fucking work, right? A lot of work. Now you might be up for it. I’ll tell you a good example. I did those little FE case studies, right, Remember last year and I did them and it was a real pain in the ass for me because I said to LinkedIn I was going to do it via LinkedIn learning, and then I found out it was just all shit. So then I found out LinkedIn said, you can have a 10 minute upload max. And I’m like, oh, I can’t do it. I can’t do these case studies. I was going to do 25 minutes. And then the discipline of producing it, literally if you look at them, they’re 9 minutes and 58 seconds, right? And by the way, there’s no take, right? If you look people, the guy from LinkedIn was like, how do you put the takes in there? I’m like, there’s no takes. He’s like, there’s no takes, there’s no takes. He said, well, how do you integrate the bullet points with what you’re saying? I said, I just stand and talk and then we drop in the bullet points later on Green screen. But the 10, 10 minute literally, right? It’s just me like this, blah, blah, blah, and then everything else is built later. But the 10 minute episode, I tell you, it’s a powerful thing from the consumer point of view. You know what I mean? I can see your joy of the long form, but I think long form content is 10 minutes now. You know what I mean? 15 minutes podcast. [121:25] Louis: Yeah, but so what I mean is more to extract the value. Sometimes it takes a long time, but then you can summarize it and distill it down to this core concept that you managed to get for an hour. Do you know, like, not everyone is as good as you are, where you’re fucking telling stories after stories that are entertaining. Sometimes I need to dig and dig and dig and dig and say how [121:46] Guest: and how and how you can ride with it, Louis. You’re good at that. That’s your strength. I mean, maybe what you have to do is do the case study for 20 minutes up front and then break it out to one of the heroes of the case who responds to the case study you’ve just told. And then you interrogate them in the Louis way. I’d listen to that. But you’ve got to choose brands that are kind of cool, you know what I mean? That are interesting even if I haven’t heard of them before. [122:11] Louis: Do you know I want to just double down on brands that are radically different in some ways. Right? [122:16] Guest: Yeah. [122:17] Louis: No one has ever. I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never seen any tear downs or case studies of, of that specifically. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen your stuff on Lidl and Gillette and whatever, but you touch a lot on campaigns and whatnot. But I don’t think I’ve seen anything about. No, that’s teaching radical differentiation. [122:36] Guest: No, no, look, I picked those case studies to tell. I started out with the concepts, so I started out with ESOV and then found a case to illustrate it. I didn’t start with the case. That would be interesting. That wasn’t my intent ever. Right. It was like, I want to teach people about eslv. I want to teach them about distinctiveness, I want to teach them about whatever. And then I went and found the FE cases that fit and tick those boxes. It was completely about helping people understand concepts. What you would do is pick the cases and see where they take you. Which is far more interesting in many ways, I think, but a little bit more random as well. Right? [123:16] Louis: So picking the case study, doing it me Looking at it for 20, 25 minutes, going at it full force and then potentially having the people who’ve been involved in it sitting it down further and say, oh, you haven’t thought about that? Or what you said there is bullshit. That kind of stuff. [123:30] Guest: Yeah. What it was, what it was actually like. Right. What it was actually like. I think that the combination of you telling the story with a little bit of analysis, but then them providing the color, that would be perfect. [123:43] Louis: Right. Well, I think it’s a nice way to finish that episode and get some consulting for free. Fuck. I feel very lucky right now. And it’s been 2 minutes for 2 hours and 5 minutes. Longest episode ever so far. [123:57] Guest: Will you edit or are you gonna go two hours? [124:01] Louis: Two hours, man. [124:02] Guest: Yeah, baby. That’s good, man. That’s good. I mean, if people go jogging and shit, it’d be dead interesting to see what you can. You have to tell me what the completion rate is. Right. We’ll get a decent number listing at the start, but I wonder how many get to the end. [124:15] Louis: Yeah. And then let’s look at the number of sales you’re getting again to the mini MBA for years to come. [124:21] Guest: I’m definitely mentioning a lot. If you have a pixel, you can give it to me and I’ll drop it into the performance marketing machine that I don’t understand. [124:31] Louis: Mark, I’m quite speechless. Thank you so much for spending that much time talking to me and sharing your insight. And I think people still listening right now got a ton of value. I’m expecting a lot of emails, a lot of LinkedIn message to you with the new venture. [124:46] Guest: It’s an auspicious moment. So I wonder how this year is, this year and next year is going to treat you. It’s fascinating. Most of your questions now have a different dimension because of course, it’s partly you’re working your own path. Right. So it’s fascinating. [125:01] Louis: Yeah, that’s very true. I do that kind of unconsciously. But thank you. And don’t worry, I’ll. I’ll reach out for a few, maybe one or two favors. [125:09] Guest: Yeah, my pleasure. Always, always. No problemo. Stay in touch, my friend. [125:42] Louis: And that’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com. thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out. Daily I say. And very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, shocking, entertaining content to help you stand the fuck out. It’s at everyone hates marketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just going to read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Way Mark, who just subscribed couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna Said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. [126:35] Guest: 2. [126:35] Louis: Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. [126:40] Guest: 4. [126:41] Louis: Quickly scheme yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content that’s coming from you. It feels really lovely. Candle said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonate. There’s so much out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant. [127:00] Guest: I hope you subscribe. [127:02] Louis: You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side. It.

Spotting Big Moments and Opportunities