Marketing science for the real world with Koen Pauwels

So in every country I worked with, including Amazon, right. There is no sustainable competitive advantage and it's kind of futile to constantly kind of, you know, wait your resources till you find one.

Hey everyone. Today we're talking with Professor Koen Powells. Coincidentally, he's also Belgium. But most of all, he's a super fascinating marketing scientist because he blends what practitioners do with theory in a very hands on way. It's a super fascinating conversation. So buckle up and let's talk branding. So before we dive in, some exciting news. You might remember my episode on Challenger positioning with Faisal Siddiqui from Creative Business Company. Actually, it was one of the most downloaded episodes of last season. So we decided to partner up and they're sponsoring this podcast, but more on that later. Yes, I'm super excited to have you on. I think a lot of people might have heard of you, Koen. But for the people that don't know anything about Professor Koen Powels, could you quickly introduce yourself?

Yes, of course. So I'm originally from Belgium, as you can still hear from my name and my accent. I had a very classic kind of education, Latin sciences in my high school and commercial engineering in Belgium. And then I discovered marketing. So I did my master's in marketing in the French speaking part of Belgium. Nouvelle enough on the Jean Jacques Lambin, which was one of the big marketing guys back in the 70s. So that also betrays how old I am. And in 97, after about four years in Belgium in the company, I went to UCLA to do my Ph.D. and so that's long term marketing effectiveness. So my specialization is calculating for companies, you know, what is the net effect of their marketing actions. So if you do a product innovation or you change your pricing, you go to the online or the offline channel, you change promotion, how do consumers react, competitors, and now what is ultimately the overall long term effect. I then joined the Tech School of Business as an assistant professor of marketing, taught branding there with Kevin Keller for instance, which was fantastic, got tenure and then I packed up my bags and moved to Istanbul for eight years. So that was a startup university. I was the third faculty member, which we grew to a university of about 8,000 people. And then in 2017 I came back to the States to Boston for Northeastern University where I'm the associate dean of research now. And in between I also had a really fun experience at Amazon Ads as a principal research scientist in New York. So that's briefly my, my career, let's.

Say one of the biggest challenges in my own career has always been to convince business leaders that brand is one of the most important assets in their company. And even though dozens of studies have shown that getting the right strategic positioning can get you a 5x performance on your ads, sometimes convincing executives to prioritize their brand strategy can be challenging. That's why this episode is sponsored by Creative Business Company, a strategic consultancy on a mission to make brand more accountable and more effective. They take the lessons they've learned from over a decade of experience of working with brands such as Morningstar, Shell and Formula E and adapt them to smaller, fast growing, growing companies to help them get more attention, convert leads and drive sales. So if you're trying to get budget for brand, create messaging that converts or lower your cost of acquisition, check out creativebusinesscompany.com for ideas, evidence and tools that will help you make an impact. That's quite impressive. And I mean, I was a bit surprised actually to see that you were Belgium. I was always thinking, why are all the good marketing scientists in Australia? Australia or somewhere else. But no, we have a top Belgian marketing scientist. So that's a great discovery. Made my day. Maybe Koen. I have like, I think there's a couple of like big debates that you've been involved in that obviously we want to talk about. But maybe before we do that, I wanted to take a step back and just like ask you, first off, why do you think there's a big discrepancy often between what the academics are saying and then practitioners? Because all of these debates about differentiation and segmentation often come down to people in the field not seeing or not connecting with maybe what, for example, Ehrenberg Bass is saying, like, I don't know if you have any idea where that comes from and how to deal with it, but that's my first question for you.

I'm going to be very controversial on your podcast. I hope that's a good thing.

That's why you're here.

Yeah. So let me first start with the non controversial part. Right. So I've been concerned with this gap between academia and practice and marketing from, you know, the moment that I entered academia. And so number one is academia is to blame. That's the first kind of hypothesis. So back in the 50s and the 60s, as you know, also from the time from Philip Kotler and so forth, marketing, academia was very much involved with practice. And you still see that in places including like Germany, Right. Where the first thing, what a practitioner does when there's a problem that's too complex is to call up the professor in the alma mater and say, hey, I trust you to give a practical solution to my problem and are to refer me to somebody who can. So most of my early consultancy were my German colleagues who got a phone call about marketing ROI and say, hey, you should talk to Kun Powitz. So I think kind of in some places that's still very much alive. However, in the 50s and 60s in the States, there was this big forge report that says that marketing academia was not taken seriously by other academics. So I mean, economics psychology. So there was just a push to become much more, let's call it academic, right? To school the PhD students much more into the foundational disciplines and to make us respected by professors in economic psychology. And we were hugely successful, but in the process we kind of lost that touch with practice, I would say. And so yes, to publish in the top marketing journal nowadays, you have to drop virtually all your examples and all of the, the stuff that makes it easy for practitioners, I guess, to read. So that's kind of one statement that a lot of academics, they don't get rewarded for seeing things that are useful for practice. They get rewarded for getting top publications and being seen as respected by their peers. However, when I talked about this to my dean at Tuck, which was a fantastic guy, he was an accounting professor. And so I did so much from the beginning to be more approachable to practitioners. I wrote a blog where I summarize things in a page. I have my website now where all of my hundred plus publications are available for free and then organized by the four P's and everything. So I try to do everything I can to be more useful to practice. And he's like, kun, that's completely correct. And here's the controversial part. But he's like, it's also the practitioner's fault. And I'm like, explain. And he's like, look, I'm on so many boards and I see marketing departments and he's like, the big problem that you have in marketing is that, let's say, finance, right? In finance, my faculty or science scientists and the people who try to beat Wall street are also scientists because they have to model things precisely. And like, look at the airtime. So there's no gap there. My strategy professors are glorified consultants. They are not scientists whatsoever. So of course they can talk to strategy counterparts in company. He's like, it's only in marketing where you academics, you know, think like scientists and most practitioners do not. And so I would say now it comes from both sides, right? So there is the fact that Academics have to, you know, address more problems that practitioners are actually dealing with. Ehrenberg Baza is a fantastic example that we can talk more about later. But it also means that practitioners once in a while have to understand that this has been figured out by academics 30, 40 years ago and that there's some value in at least kind of looking at the Harvard Business Review articles of leading academics on the topic. So I think it comes from both sides, as we say in the Low Countries.

Very interesting. Yeah. I mean, for me personally, it was also a journey where like I started out mostly like just branding practitioner. And then I read about, like, I read how brands grow and it was like, what the hell is this? Like, totally different world and theory that doesn't make sense from what I've been seeing. But then gradually you start like seeing how it applies and where it applies, and then you start seeing the bigger picture. But for a lot of people, like when you talk about these principles, they get offended or they're fanboying. But it's like, there's definitely schools in marketing and of course in branding. So it's interesting and maybe to just dive into the latest big one on segmentation, targeting positioning versus market based theory, which was, I think, one of the interesting debates where you also had an important role in maybe just let's zoom out a bit. You mentioned Kotler already. Like, what is this STP thing for people that don't know it yet? And then what was the opposite perspective on it and what was your take on it? Three steps.

Thank you. So stp, segmentation, targeting positioning is very much the dominant theory taught in MBA classes and marketing courses nowadays. So in that sense, Ehrenberg Baza Institute is, is fully in their right to say, hey, here are some blind spots. And here it's why it's problematic that this is kind of the only main theory that people see in these very expensive classes. So it starts from saying, hey, look, consumers are different. So that's segmentation, right? And they share things within a group. And then the next step with targeting is that based on your company objectives, you should specifically target certain segments. And that's the controversial part. It's not the segmentation, it's the targeting part. Right? So the kind of things that I teach is like, hey, you know, suppose you have a brand new product, you may want to check out who's desperately in need for the product, right? So a typical case study is like, hey, you have something on your phone that you can track people who desperately needs it, right back in the Days with video calling, a desperate need for that kind of technology were war journalists back in Afghanistan, Right? So the fact that the video quality was not very good was absolutely inconsequential compared to the benefit of being able to carry it in the mountains and so forth. So targeting would be like, try to find, like, you know, sell nuts to squirrels at Saint Godin would say, try to find people who desperately need it. First do that one. And then, you know, marketers have gone much beyond that to develop Personas of people and so forth. Right. And then positioning is really saying, well, for that or for these target segments, because you can have multiple target segments with different marketing kind of mix approaches. What is the core reason to buy? So Kevin Keller puts that out, some points of parity and points of difference. So if you are currently using this technology, the first thing I have to convince you is that my new technology is at least as good on key things than your old technology. That's points of parity and difference is like, you know, how. What is your unique differentiator? Right. So why should I now switch? What makes me better than your current solution? So this is kind of segmentation, targeting, positioning, as, for instance, you know, I've been teaching it for a while. And so Ehrenberg Bus, you know, comes with, well, this is not a good idea, or at least not how it's currently used in practice. Right. Which is always a difference there because it leads to people, marketeers kind of making way too much of a very specific, narrow target, developing Personas. Like, I want to sell to somebody who, you know, looks in his 30s with a goatee and who does podcast and marketing. And then basically forgetting that so many other people that maybe as a marketer you don't know about have a use for my technology. And so by very narrow targeting, I'm way too restricted in the growth potential of my brand. And I want to add this whole kind of customer acquisition versus customer retention and how brands grow that. Right? So another stream of marketing also very much focused on you should retain your customers. Probably Reichelt in the 90s was the most influential there, saying, hey, you know, it costs, what is it, nine times more or seven times more or five times more to get a new customer than to retain an old one. So you should focus mostly on retaining customers. Whereas how brands grow says, no. What we see in brands that grow over time is that they excel not so much in customer retention because, you know, it's a leaky bucket, right? You know, excel in getting new souls for their brand and how do you do that? You do that by very broadcasting of your benefits, reminding the light buyers to buy in your category, being associated with category entry points and so forth. So I think that's really the discussion there.

Yeah, I mean again like there it's really interesting for me, I think both like perspectives have a lot of value because indeed as a small company often you have to pick your battles and it makes sense like from a business standpoint to maybe start somewhere where there's the least friction with customers that have a specific need. But, but then on the other hand, as you scale up, you start to reach more segments and this theory becomes maybe a bit less relevant. And I think that is already maybe an interesting observation that I often have. And a lot of people maybe bring this as a caveat to let's say a lot of the laws that Ernberg Bass Institute is proposing is that it's mostly due to size. And I don't think it's true in many cases, but intuitively it does feel right. Like as a small company you have to make these choices and as a big company you have to make other choices. But again, like, very curious about your POV here.

So I have published several papers in the last years about some blind spots to Aaronberg Boss. Right. So just like Aaron Boss bot is completely correct, pointing out some of the blind spots to dominant practices in the, in the 80s and the 90s and theories also, you know, because it now has become the dominant theory itself for lots of companies. It's a, it's, you know, you also see the blind spots of, of them. And so it's true. So these empirical generalizations are derived from lots of data sets, but they're virtually all data sets from fast moving consumer goods in developed countries. So I have this wonderful paper with Oliver Kohl from Austria that talks about, hey, if you also look at developing countries and also you look at beyond fast moving consumer goods and you look at small brands, to your point, you see different things and different choices there. And so one of the interesting things that I find is so Ehrenberg did his research in the 50s and he basically said, hey, small brands have these kind of characteristics. You know, very few people buy them, low penetration and the people who buy them buy them less often. So this is double jeopardy. Whereas big brands, you know, they have a lot of penetration and the people who buy them buy them often. So that is this double jeopardy thing. And I completely agree with that one. But then of course the big question I always had is how do you go from Small to big. And you have to make very tough choices. Right. You know, you talk about mental and physical availability, right. So yes, I mean, it's good for you if a lot of consumers know about you, you and if all of the retailers carry your, your small brand. But if you have limited resources at any given moment in time, which one should you focus on more? And so ultimately, and this is also in my dissertation proposed. Right. I would love to get, for small brands, get to a kind of a thermostat setting so that, that at any given point, based on metrics such as, you know, mental availability or awareness, if you prepare in consideration and penetration, you can say, well, if these are your metrics, under a certain threshold, you should focus more on X. And then if you get that, let's say, mental availability over a certain threshold now you can go to retailers as a small brand and say, look at the mental availability that I've built up and that will increase your chances to get more physical availability. And so I would love to kind of work together towards that aim. And I think over the last 20, 25 years, we have kind of filled in pieces of that, you know, ideal thing that, you know, we have in mind. But we haven't quite gotten yet to the situation that we can say, hey, you know, if this is your situation, I know exactly what you need to do. It depends on your industry. It depends on your brand goals. And so that's, you know, that's why I still do customized work for clients too.

Yeah. Because in fact, like, if, if it would all be as simple as just read this one book, the Red Book, and you're done. You know, market, I guess that would be easier, but it's definitely not the case.

I will say marketing is the hardest function in any company. Right. I mean, you mean get getting people to, to, to buy you for more money than it cost your company to make something. Right. This is, you know, standard Peter Drucker. And then of course, everything you do in marketing, it has to be appreciated by consumers. You know, the effect depends on how competitors react. It's. So it is way harder than finance, than operations, you know, because there's so much uncertainty. And I think. And it's all about human behavior, which is fascinating, but also means that, yes, you have to read more than one book to make up your own mind.

Absolutely. And I guess that's also where a lot of like the different schools come from. Like a lot of people that are originating more from branding. And as you've been very close to Keller, you Know that, like, in those areas, people love to talk about personality and story and differentiation and archetypes. And a lot of this, this stuff is like, immediately swept off the table by people like Byron Sharp. Because of course, when you look at it in aggregate, at scale, these things do not matter. But in reality in the field, sometimes they give brands a certain edge that maybe makes them distinctive or differentiated. And maybe. Let's talk about that one as well. Again, like all the hot takes, I know you're here to bring some nuance to it, but maybe just give us your, like, gut feeling reaction to whenever this debate pops up. Again, distinctiveness versus differentiation.

Well, so I think that Byron and the people at Nuremberg boss really showed nicely that it's hard to create and keep differentiation of your brand. It's hard. Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to do it, and that doesn't mean that there's huge payoffs for brands that accomplish it, right? So if I go to Kevin Keller's framework, because a lot of marketing every year is, you know, old wine and new bags, right? So, so he talks about this, points of parity and points of difference, and that every time when you have a point of difference, your competition tries to, to negate that point of difference. So if you say, as a cell phone company, I have better coverage than your competitor, if it's important to consumers, right, Will try to, you know, communicate or actually change their product to get better coverage. So it's very hard to do that. And so I always got very much along with my strategy colleague at Doug, Richard Daveni. He wrote a book called Hypercompetition. And so his strategy colleagues were always talking about the sustainable competitive advantage. And he's like, there is none. And he's completely right. So in every country I worked with, including Amazon, right, there is no sustainable competitive advantage. And it's kind of futile to constantly kind of, you know, wait your resources till you find what you know, you run faster than your competitors on something, so you can start with something earlier that is important to some consumers. And thanks to your wonderful market research, you may be able to pinpoint and execute on that before your competition can, which is very important, I think. And then you're down the learning curve faster. But you keep. You have to keep on running. If you stand still, then your competition will catch up, right? So differentiation is possible. And so I show again in this paper with Oliver Coyle that if you look at differentiation, penetration and customer satisfaction, specifically for small brands, differentiation actually gives huge benefit across the world. So it does have a benefit, but it is really hard to achieve. And I think some people, and I think Aaron Burgbaugh is right to complain about it, may paint way too much of a rosy picture to the people who give them the money, whether it's the CEO or a venture capitalist about, hey, our brand is so differentiated and our customers are so loyal. If we just do this, they will never switch. And so I think, you know, Aaron Barbaras is correct in saying, hey, you know, it's really tough to continue to achieve. So at the same time, distinctiveness, right? So distinctiveness is not that your brand is seen as better or unique at something, but simply that it's more easily recognized and comes more easy to mind. So typical is McDonald's the golden arches. Right? That's absolutely no real differentiation in having golden arches for a fast food company, but it's really distinctive. So they can put it in lots of their commercials and they can be very subtle. They don't have to give you lots of text or information. You constantly get reminded about them. And so, yes, I completely agree that that's something that is also important to think about. Right? So, for instance, distinctiveness is a key argument against the new CMO that comes in and say, we have to change our own marketing. And you were like, no. So even though our marketing may not have gotten like, Cannes Awards, we have created distinctive assets. So if the new McDonald CMO said we should drop the golden arches, then the argument is not, oh no, nobody will come to us anymore because they won't like our food anymore or whatever or service. The argument is like, we've built this up all the time. It's not differentiation, but it's distinctive. And we will lose a lot of mental availability if we drop. And so I think both differentiation and distinctiveness, they have their own separate impact. Ideally, you should do both, but I think distinctiveness is something that is typically easier to achieve. I mean, you have to guard against it, but it doesn't cost you a lot of money. Whereas indeed, going for one or two points of differentiation can be relatively costly and relatively uncertain to achieve. But the payoffs are also huge when you achieve.

I created this podcast to help myself and others understand the power of brand building without all of the bs. So here's three no BS guides from my friends at Creative Business Company that you can download for free to drive impact. The Brand Investment blueprint outlines the exact process they use to convince skeptical executives to invest in brand building projects and campaigns, how challengers can position for growth explains how brands can find and leverage their hidden advantage to create brand marketing that sells. And last my how to Build a Big Brand on a Small Budget explores how to outsmart and overtake market leaders with more cost effective marketing. Go to creativebusinesscompany.com staff to download your free guides today. That's creativebusinesscompany.com Stef to download your free guides today. Back to the podcast. Yeah, interesting. It reminded me like a lot of the companies I work for often talk about building moats, which is like somewhat a similar concept. And on the one hand it is something to strive for, but on the other hand being real about that moat being quite easily jumped over is a hard balance to find. I guess it is.

And I would say and so the other fundamental difference between let's say Kevin Keller and Byron Sharp is the very old psychological distinction between behavioralist and intentionalist. Right? So if you look at Aaron Berg boss, it's all built on consumer behavior. They model behavior and they believe that what consumers think and feel about you is not that important. So, so whereas, you know, a lot of people in marketing believe that no, if you want to change people's behavior, you first have to change their mindset. And I have wonderful examples of both ways. And so this whole kind of causality which comes first is actually something that my method is very good at distinguishing. But I think that's, that's important to remember. So if you're in a category and so higher involvement goods are perfect examples and services, if you're in a category that hey, you do have to change people's minds and you have to be in that consideration set before they even would give you any attention, then you have to build that mindset. Great example is Amazon. So Amazon was famous for not advertising before, right? I mean Jeff Bezos says advertising is the price you pay for the mediocre product. And then they got into devices, Echo Alexa and he realized I have to advertise. There's just no way that somebody will buy a device over another one without first getting awareness and consideration. So I think that's important. So what you have though, when you want to create what is called loyalty, I think in the old days, 80s and 90s, people thought way too much about attitudinal loyalty. So I love your brand. It's sensual and mysterious and I just can't imagine dating somebody else. And I think what Iran Magbas really correctly says is that no loyalty is mostly behavioral. And if you want to create it, think about making it easy for people to rebuy you. So a very hot topic right now is subscriptions. So subscriptions make it very easy for you to just reorder or even AI reorders for you. And so you don't have to think about it. And unless the brand really, really screws up, you're going to remain loyal. Does that mean that you're in love with the brand or engaged the brand like Heineken measures? Probably not, but this is how you kind of take the behavioralist perspective to loyalty, which is very relatively cost effective and works a lot.

Yeah, something that also comes up a lot as a challenge for people inside of companies. They're interested in this whole idea of building a brand, investing in long term. I guess you've seen that at Amazon as well, where there's this whole thing between activation, sales activation, brand building, these types of different marketing approaches where you have to balance them. But I think what a lot of people struggle with and is an interesting challenge is when you are a company growing out of that smaller scale where sales activation did all of the stuff for you, it worked. And then all of a sudden you're like having huge acquisition costs and you need to start doing this brand building. But there is a lot of internal resistance against that because it's a totally different way of marketing. So I'd love take on like if you have any ideas on how you can actually convince or if you should convince a board or stakeholders in a company to do more of that.

That'S exactly the, I call it the marketing growing pains and it's exactly what you describe. So for instance, at Amazon there's millions of sellers that don't advertise on Amazon because you don't have to be successful on advertise. There's also a lot of companies that don't sell on Amazon who advertise on Amazon. Right. So if you think about cars, financial services and so forth, they all advertise on Amazon domains to get the, you know, the awareness and the consideration and then you know that people buy elsewhere. But indeed. So I looked a lot, at which point as a seller should you start advertising? And you typically start with activation lower funnel. And then the next question that you refer to, at which point should you go beyond this and start more upper funnel which typically is harder to convince the board of. Right. And you can pinpoint and attribute things or things take a while to materialize. And so the one thing I always think about with the board and your CEO is the goals. So if the CEO is okay with you growing 5% per year, and you have some momentum, that's fine. But if your CEO says to you, hey, you have to go 20% next year, and then you're like, well, why on earth will these new consumers come from, right? Because, you know, I have shown, and Byron Shaw backs me up about this, it's very hard to make your customers that already love you buy more of you. I mean, there's a natural limit to how much you can convince, right? So you have to get new customers. And I'm like, okay, so where will you get that from? And then you can look at academic benchmarks, by the way, if you don't have the data yourself, and you're like, look, to sell 20% more next year, I have to get, let's say, 30% more people to consider me and 50% more people to get away from me, because, you know, it is a funnel, right? Not everybody. And so to do that, I have to do something I haven't done before. And so these are the kind of things that are reasonably cost effective, but that should be measured in a different way. So here is an awareness campaign that doesn't involve maybe us spending lots of money on the super bowl hat, right? But that is very well thought through. And here are the milestones that I have, metrics that tell me if I'm going in the right direction. And this is where these metrics come in. So if you have good metrics for awareness and consideration or for mental, physical availability, whatever your favorite terminology is, and you can basically link your marketing actions to the metric, and then in the long term link that metric to actually hard metrics like sales or donations, whatever your ultimate metric of your company is. And so I work with these criteria, then you can actually convince people that you're a good steward of the finances. Yes. You propose something big and new, which is a bit more risky, and finance people don't like risk, but you have a handle on kind of, you can pull campaigns very quickly if they don't score on that metric. And you can ultimately show that in the long term, that metric will translate to sales. So I have done that quantification for lots of companies and everybody, somebody comes to me with a new KPI, right? Whether it's viewing time on videos or engagement on social media. I'm like, well, you know, two questions. Does it respond to anything we can do? Right? Is it marketing responsive? And does it ultimately convert into sales? And so that's, you know, this is one of the reasons that academics can help you, right? In the Beginning you don't have data yourself, but there may be case studies of similar companies who did that, which is very convincing, by the way, to boys and CEOs. And there's also kind of checks and balances that you indicate that you have thought through what you want to accomplish and that you have like nice exit ramps if things don't go the way that you prompt.

Very interesting. I don't think we could go into a whole episode about KPIs and metrics, but there's plenty to talk about here. But I think I'd love more to your take on like the broader landscape as I find it very interesting. One of the things maybe that of course, is also very hyped. I don't think you have talked about it that much, or at least not that I have read, but there is a lot of technological change happening and marketers are very sensitive to that. Metaverse crypto. But AI, of course, in general, what evolutions do you think will have a real impact on marketing and how and which ones are maybe just another fluke.

I love this question. I think I'm known as a technology skeptic. And this is simply because, I mean, if there's two things that an academic can offer you as a practitioner is number one, we really look for truth. And, you know, some consultants also do. Some of them do not. We also want to come into your company, solve the problem and get out because we want to publish academic. We don't create more problems. The most important thing is that we have the luxury of 2020 hindsight. Right? We're supposed to know everything that's published in marketing over the last 40 years so we can put things in perspectives. So the metaverse is a very obvious example. So when I had my first PhD student, he absolutely wanted to analyze the metaverse because this was going to be the year of the Metaverse first. And I will, I will let you guess which year that was.

Oh my God. 19. 19. No, 21. I don't know.

Yeah, I think it was 2011. So that was going to be the year because all the technology was there. And he took me to places where I tested them all out and I'm like, well. And then he wanted to analyze it and he's like, oh, this is going to be fantastic. But I have no data to analyze what's going to happen. And I'm like, how about Second Life? I mean, Second Life was five, six years ago, and that was going to be the Metaverse thing. So can't you read about this one. So again, so 2022 was the big thing, right? I mean, even at Amazon, somebody proposed a thing big we should do the Metaverse. And I'm like, absolutely not. But I think as a marketer, we think about consumers, we think about applications, right? So a good friend of mine, a German professor, which is actually six years older than me, and this is why it's relevant whenever I'm like, no, it's not five years away, it's more than 20 years away. And here he's like, kun, you're too old. And I'm like, well, my 18 year old is currently studying game design in Northeastern, so has to try everything. My youngest is 14 and spends every living hour without school or homework on games. And we have the latest VR technology. Guess how much time a week they spend in virtual reality? They have all the time of the world, at most an hour a week, whereas I spend four hours a week. So as this old guy. And the reason is that for most of the applications, VR just doesn't add enough value to the customer to justify the additional hustle. So in the past it was always, oh, wait till the technology gets better. The technology is really good now, but there's only very few instances that it really help. So my oldest use this for a horror game because VR is really cool when you have, when you have jumping. And I have my Supernatural subscription that I do exercise when it's cold weather outside in the most gorgeous landscapes with the most gorgeous instructors to the music that I like. And then it adds for individual people to it. So I think that was a typical example of something that was just overhyped. And then there's a wonderful book about the metaverse and how it will change everything, which I read and which is absolutely fantastic. And it lights out. And I have this in the blog, the nine obstacles to the Metaverse, which are really severe. But then at the end the writer just says, oh, but this will all be overcome, so it's going to be there in five years. And I'm like, no. So you do have to be kind of, you know, have that perspective. Generative AI is a wonderful counterexample for several reasons, right? So number one, it completely changed what we expect the computer to do. So the two things we expect the computer to be good at is to be good at math and to not make up stuff. That's for marketers. Right now that's just a joke. So when I first tried ChatGPT back in, was it November 2022, and it made up stuff and it was bad at math. I'm like, okay, this is something really different. Right. And so the fact that it could create stuff or seemingly create stuff. Right. Was just really interesting to me. And so I've seen wonderful marketing applications on Gen AI. I'm speaking at the Microsoft Innovation Summit in March about that. And so I see that also that different companies think about different ways to use it. So that was something that I'm more bullish about, if you would say. But I think kind of, you know, it's all in the applications and where does it add value for the metaverse? I didn't see it adding enough value to enough people to justify the hype for Gen AI. Even though there's a hype there too, of course. Right. And a lot of the companies will go bankrupt. But I see enough application to say, hey, this is something that as a marketing academic and also as a practitioner, it's good to spend some time on.

Yeah, great. Fully aligned on that. I've been having a lot of fun with it and as you say, like, some of it is bs, but some of it has definitely been working for us, maybe to wrap it up because we're almost at the 40 minute mark. I think what you're really good at is dissecting different points of view in marketing from different scientists and bringing a clear view on it for practitioners. So maybe some final thoughts on people listening that are a bit lost between all of these debates and different academics. And you can go to Keller and Kotler and Ritson and Sharp and Poels, but any tips on how to navigate all of these opposing schools and different concepts? As a practitioner, I would say always.

Think about, hey, what if this sounds useful to me in my situation? And so naturally any academic will try to generalize. I always say, you know, the difference between a marketing academic and a practitioner because an academic thinks that whatever his studies is generalizable across all situations. We look for similarities where a practitioner always says, oh, this will never work here. So typical example, when I was teaching MBA students in Turkey, they're like, well, definitely don't teach us about stuff about the US because that will just not work here. Our consumers are different. And so I started teaching case studies from Turkey, but also from Latin America because they were like, oh, Latin American consumers are close enough to Turkish consumers, even though there's a world apart. Try to open your mind a bit and try to think beyond your very immediate situation. But also kind of say, okay, what, what this person is saying. They have studied other companies in other countries and other Countries. So only some of that will apply to my situation. And it's up to you, of course, to decide which that is. So. So I think I would say always keep that in mind. And also keep in mind. And you see that in marketing very well. Right. The. The only way that. That gurus or opponents get attention is by being controversial. That is just. I mean, when I review kind of advertisements, the one that are really kind of controversial and get lots of emotions going there, the ones that people still talk about, the one that are much better executed without upsetting anybody, when I show them in class, people are like, oh, that's fantastic. But I never heard about it. So there is a reason why white people who want to be influences kind of try to accentuate the conflict a bit more because it gets your attention. Right? So. So that's. It's good to step back and say, hey, there's something of value there, maybe one or two things. And this other theory also has one or two things that is. That is of value there. And I think that's important. I'll leave you with one example because I didn't give enough examples. So I looked at Not Coke, Coke Zero in Spain when it was introduced in 2005 is a great example. So that was actually very well done because virtually all the guys I know, including me, we switched from Diet Coke to Coke Zero. I don't know if you had the same thing. So that was really interesting, 100%. And I typically say, hey, the color view is you have to change people's minds before they buy. And I have lots of examples of that. But this is one I analyzed and sent to Byron Schopenhauer, because when you look at the metrics for Diet Coke, which is fascinating. So people for several months still say that they like Diet Coke and it was great to them, and after a few months, it suddenly jumped off. So this was an example that behavior drove mindset metrics. Because in the beginning you have just switched, but you still have Diet Coke in your pantry. So when somebody asks you what do you think about Diet Coke? You're like, hey, it's pretty cool. But then after a few months, since you haven't bought Diet Coke for a while, and it's the same taste and everything you like, if somebody asks you something, hey, wait a minute, you know, I haven't, so it must be bad. So are you saying, I don't know? And so I think kind of Ogilvy said that once, right? So people don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. And I think this is important to keep in mind. I have a wonderful paper to see how kind of these attitude metrics still work and in which situations where you have all of this free online behavioral metrics. But you do have to see in your situation, hey, what is the useful information I make decisions on and which metrics over time are just not useful to me and so I can basically start paying less attention to them.

Voila. That was really great, Kun. Thanks for coming on the show.

You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

All right, that was it for this episode. As always, if you want to stay up to date on the latest episodes, check out the show notes and find out more interesting stuff about brand strategy and brand building, visit letstalkbranding Substack. Com. That's letstockbranding Substack. Com.