 Welcome Ian and Latya Zah to the podcast. We're really happy to have you both on board today to talk about the science of marketing. I thought we could start with just a quick self-introduction for our listeners and give them a sense of who you are, what you do, and a bit of your background. Those would like to say hi to the audience, which are listening to us on the various podcast platforms or watching us on YouTube. And I would like to add that we're delighted to be here with you today. Thanks for questioning us, Jake. My name is Latya Zahra Ivanov and I'm a marketing consultant. And I focus on strategy, research and communications. I also have an academic background prior to doing this. I did a PhD in marketing at the European University of Germany in Frankfurt, other Germany. And prior to the PhD I worked in social media marketing and search engine marketing in the Berlin startup sector. OK, I'll go. So I'm Ian Pritchard. I'm the reason it's funny lighting is nighttime here. So I'm in Melbourne, Australia. So I'm an advertising planner by trade. Also, Walter, the three books, the waste one, which just came out. I'll maybe get to plug it at the end. But yeah. And so myself and Latya Zahra, I guess we sort of met, you know, what he didn't explain his PhD that he wrote. Although it was, you know, connected to marketing science, it was also heavily exploring the applied evolutionary psychology, which is big passion of mine. I think that, you know, that's how we sort of connected with those two things, marketing science and human science and, you know, putting them together. So yeah, I've been in the business about, you know, too long really to mention I'll give away my age. But yeah, that's introduction. Fantastic. Thank you. And I thought we could sort of kick off with a kind of a general question, but one that kind of comes up and is hotly debated is sort of the myths surrounding marketing and kind of in European latches, what are some of those common myths that so many people seem to get wrong about this topic? They're there to manage. I believe we can do a whole separate episode around this topic. But I will measure two or three things and we'll begin with something that's, I believe no one else talks about. And it is dear to my heart. And it's the very notion that some people are arguing for staying small as a brand is for not growing for staying niche. And the fact that you don't need to grow your brand. That's something that's out there and people that are have significant stance and are represent the face of marketing like said, Godin, for example, David, that you should be looking for your minimal viable. Yes, I don't want to misspoke him. So he defines it as the smallest number of people that can sustain you in your work. And I believe that this sets set you up as a company no matter the sector that you're working for failure or and it sets you up for unreasonable expectations from your customers. So he's not the only author. There are other authors that would say that you need only the thousand true fans to exist as a company. But this is very deleterious thinking can lead to better results and by better results. I mean to your company going bankrupt in a short period of time we're in marketing and what we should be doing is growing revenue and thereby growing market share because this helps the companies to in their chances to survive. It's a probabilistic game. The marketing is a game of numbers and the more customers you have the higher your chances are for them to become repeat customers and to ensure your revenue in a given period. So this would be one that I would start with. And I think, you know, the Seth, the Seth Godin thing I think, you know, when he came out with that sort of statement, you know, I think he was he was sort of talking to people like authors or musicians or, you know, one person operations, you know, and it probably does make sense, you know, a little bit to that. But the problem is people picked up the wrong end of the stick and thought that this was some big statement about marketing in general, you know, when really, you know, it wasn't so slight defense of Seth Godin there. It's or, you know, things become a myth because because, you know, that, you know, lots of people start to believe it and apply it in the wrong, in the wrong situations. That's very, very true. Yeah, I think it was actually possibly even Kevin Kelly who came up with the thousand tree fans. He's a kind of web web web guy. I think you're right. Actually, yeah, Silicon Valley. Yeah, I agree with you guys. But what's what's more and this is something that has came up with in my work with younger companies, especially the ones that are in the tech sector or a bit bit sector for for that matter, out of companies believe that it's only from the tactical mix. It's only product that they should focus on. And this could be sometimes to do a detriment of other tactical areas like messaging, for example, and it's a paramount important that if you happen to have a good product that you tell your customers about it and create demand for it because the saying that a great product will sell itself. That's not true. And maybe related to this third point and probably this would come up later again in this discussion is the work of field ten been on the long and the short too many companies for past decade or so we have been focusing on the short. This means for the recent just explained on short term conversions and not working on building up demand because if you think about the revenue and how it's structured when it comes from it's there to these two variables that you can work on you should have the customers or potential customers as many as them as possible and you have to try to convert as many as them as possible and by the multiplication of those two variables you end up with your sales result too many companies are focusing only on short term results and planning converting customers and the thing with this kind of thinking is that it does not add up so it does not increase your revenue for the next period. So you might have some some some courage in this period but they as long as your stop doing your short term activity to disappear and here I would like to give the word to to my colleague Ian because I believe it this this idea about companies forgetting the man generation and the focusing solely on the mouth of humans is at the heart of his book. Where did all go wrong? So Ian where did all go wrong? I was funny you know it's when I wrote that that was 2017 I already thought maybe maybe I was a bit late to the party you know because it was definitely a discussion was going to do that but it's kind of you know five years six years later when it stopped it's not mine's changed it's not got any better you know so it starts look more like prophecy you know but yeah one thing that I'm particularly skeptical about just now which is the current flavor of the month is attention metrics so I don't know if you've been following that you know there's a few firms have popped up you know sort of using eye tracking software yeah and think and then calling it and call it calling it measuring attention you know which you know anyone anyone with a basic understanding of human psychology would know that just because eyeballs are looking at something doesn't mean to say there's any attention going on so I think you know it's starting from a pretty faulty premise and then they run with it and there's all kinds of there's all kinds of strange assertions being made like for instance you need to look at something for 2.5 seconds for it to be encoded to memory which is just complete nonsense there you know there's absolutely no evidence to support that claim at all you know and I've talked to neuroscientists and I've talked you know people who measure these things and they're all gone what are you talking about so you know I think that's something current that is become quite popular that is grounded in just you know fanciful kind of things that so sound good you know I think you know there's definitely what I would agree with them is that there's some media vehicles are better quality than others you know obviously example I'll always give what I'm talking about this is and you'll remember this like in London couple of years ago and KFC run out of chicken you know they could have emailed all of their mailing list and apologize but they didn't they took out a full page ad needing standard because people are quite good intuitive media planners and you know and they know that that was expensive you know so there's a the message could be trusted a little bit you know because of that so that's the example of using the quality media as a kind of costly signaling type type of thing so yeah so there's some you know the attention metrics thing you know there's based on some half truths and but the whole eye tracking thing is just this just sort of nonsense you know so I think that's that's like a current myth you know that I think you know more people and you know I'm not the only one that's skeptical you know so we need some more voices you know to keep that thing in check you know not and not to sort of you know you don't want to sort of you know make it personal or anything it's not to do with that you know and you know I think it's coming from they're well intentioned you know because obviously you know there's so much poor quality media particularly are not lying that something is just don't think that that's it you know I think that they're measuring something and calling it attention but it's not really attention attention happens in the mind you know not in the eyeballs a quick addition I a criticism and I completely agree with you I just wanted to add something to this when it comes to the technologically a that measurement of marketing effectiveness the same I would state is true for the forums that use facial encoding and facial metrics to claim that they're measuring emotion in advertising so whether you squint your eyes or or you have a smile and they would call it okay this is happy and has this is or the more or whatever yeah but again you know with that you know it's kind of there's a half truth to it you know it's as long as you think that kind of Western expressions of the motion or universal right now emotions are universal ever you know everyone feels sadness or elation or fear but it may be expressed a different way it's the same as it's like language you know you don't say things but we talk different languages you know and so there's a different visual language for emotions you know I mean I think watch this I said the star when you say like what the biggest myth is how it's hard to know when to stop really because this is you know we're also when it good job we're here I think it's probably a general kind of observation about the the topic isn't it that there's that there are a lot of new ideas that are introduced that don't have much substance behind them and heads you guys having that evidence based approach because there is a lot of talk about all these different technologies but most of them don't don't hold water and maybe that's why there's some criticism of the profession I suppose I was gonna say you get everyone gets carried away with with I mean the other thing that's currently is the whole sort of rich and versus sharp debate you know on distinctiveness versus differentiation which is just a non topic you know it's kind of they're just different words kind of for the same thing and you know do we need to really need to waste time on those kind of Samantha yeah no I mean that's actually a good good question to ask is that I think we're talking specifically about the differentiation versus distinctiveness debate and I suppose first first of all to explain to anyone listening you might not understand what those two things are and why perhaps it's a bit of a false dichotomy yeah yeah it's surely a false dichotomy and I would be happy to provide some some meat to to to the whole concept and so distinctiveness is basically about the question do the customers know that it's you that this kind of that this communication or advertisement or whatever is coming from you can they rightly identify the source let me repeat this do they know it's you which is the starting point and if they can't then you've already lost the game and differentiation counts at a second step which is about the question what are your values and what do you stand for compared to other competing competing brands in the category so these two are important but you first have to nail down distinctiveness so that people know that it's your brand and it's not somebody else's brand because there's nothing worse than running a huge campaign on an expensive bit on TV be it in on the radio or a full-page magazine ad where the consumer who is consuming this kind of content would not be able to recognize that it's your brand and what can happen is that maybe they can identify the category correctness so maybe you're doing advertising for the whole category which is not always better if you're the category leader anyway so they will naturally come come to you but sometimes if you're if you're not the category leader sometimes what happens with consumers is they might believe that the advertisement is for your biggest competitor in the field and mistakenly remember it as this advertisement for your competitor and I'd like to give always an example it's also happens to people sometimes you meet somebody or see somebody and you would not be able to recognize if this is the same person the next time you see them or you could mistake them for somebody or so this is distinctiveness you have to know yeah consumers have to know that in the funding in the German financial world there are two guys that are really prominent on YouTube the one is Dr. Andres back in the other one is Dr. Gerkomar and once they appeared in a video together and one of the top comments below the video was by a guy saying that I always thought that these two guys are the same person and although they do not look like each other and they both of them have different funds that you can invest in if you can't tell the one from the other and it's hard to invest in the proper fund that you wish to invest in and the second concept that we mentioned is differentiation and we in our work like to talk about relative differentiation means relative to your competitors and here it is important to note that no brands own a single attribute for example in the UK we have the outground of supermarkets that's considered to be cheap or more economically affordable but it does not own the cheap attribute it's only cheaper compared to its competitors so this calls a little bit against prior ideas that folks like Grocer Reeves have established like the USP's there's nothing unique about and the values that your brand possess in the minds of consumers this rightly belongs to the midst so in the minds of consumers different brands in different categories could share attributes but some brands could be the more of some attributes than others so one bank could be I don't know more safer than others or in a certain smartphone manufacturer could be a little bit more innovative than another one but that basically wraps it up when it comes to you that's not really differentiation a bank is a bank right and all banks are the same because they all provide credit cards they all provide insurance products they all provide mortgages whatever and it's table stage to be a bank that's what you have to do so they're completely undifferentiated in that respect some might be a more premium service than others and some one's a red bank one's the yellow bank one's the blue bank so is that distinctiveness but you don't want to be so differentiated in your category that you don't look like you're actually in the category that's not how people buy but this is differentiation when we look at the tactical plane here you're referring to product but they could indeed provide the same products but they could defer in their messaging and thereby in the associations that are built in the minds of the consumers with regards to those banks for instance and I was reading in one of your post-latches the other weekend there was a discussion about something that I actually hadn't ever heard of before, embarrassingly but it is really interesting and it's called category entry points can you kind of explain what exactly those are and why they're important Thanks for the question, Jake surely this is also something or a topic or a notion that's been heavily pushed out by Byron Sharpe and the folks at the Aaron Burr Bust Institute so category entry points the way they define them are reasons or occasions for consumers to buy a product or in other words these are the thoughts that buyers have when they transition into buying from the category so think about questions like consumers buy the category when and how do they buy the category how do they want to feel when they buy the category and with what other products is the purchase related and with whom do you buy it from the category just to give some examples like if it kind of builds on you know there's this sort of 5Ws framework which sort of precedes that I can't remember what the origins of that but it's like why, where, when, what and it kind of builds on that right so you got those but then as Latchesaw said you've got with whom, with what how does it feel you know the idea I think with Aaron Burr Bust obviously because they're not the philosophy there is not big on overly targeting particular groups or whatever you know it's like targeting the whole market but what you can target are those usage situations and you can be quite specific when you're targeting around them you know because the idea is then you can be targeted but you don't sacrifice reach the framework was developed for different purposes but we argued that it's pretty much available for targeting with the idea being that and for segmentation which is the first part prior to the targeting effort so indeed you can and you should target all segments in the category but you can use the category entry points framework to segmentize the category or in other words to divide what appears to be a heterogeneous marketing to smaller homogeneous groups so for instance if we talk about the question of how do they want to feel if we go back to our example from the bank if you're buying an investment product you know that we would like to have certain amount of certainty and safety but there's variance in there so some people could be more risk tolerant than some people as risk tolerant it's and a kind of segmentation exercise takes place rightly prior to the purchase of such a product where the bank works we will give you a survey to answer questions regarding your risk tolerance whether it's a fake approach or not it's a metaphor another story but then you will be putting a category or in a segment for instance where you'll be together with other consumers that are more risk-averse, less risk-averse or reseeking and you will be recommended a different product or slightly different product so the whole idea of the bank is that the whole market is covered everybody gets their different kind of product or different kind of messaging or different price for that matter I guess the question here is why is market segmentation helpful for the short term conversion bit but not so for the long term brand building yeah there's a pretty simple straight forward answer to this question Jake because long term brand building benefits from growth audience targeting that's what the research by Decent Peter is showing and when you think about it it makes perfect sense because a brand could not mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people inherently it does because that's everybody has a different brain than mine but a brand is something that should gather people around it and it should represent some kind of common and shared knowledge some segmentate you know some people that say don't segment at all there's other people that go way over the top with like a hundred segments with like these esoteric kind of names for people so I think there's a sort of middle way which is segment as much as is necessary and try and keep it to as few as you can make one of the firms that I've been working with who make legal software AI legal software and there's two segments you know which is they have corporate legal professionals inside companies and law firms and those are the segments as few as as you can get away with and there are good reasons for this first of all as I said the brand the overall experience should be the same for all segments even those two that you mentioned should have the same basic understanding of the company what it stands for this way the long-term brand building efforts should be based on broad targeting so everybody who buys the category should be in there and sometimes as you said it is functional differences of some sort that will determine the level of segmentation that would be as we argued we suggest should be used for short term self-activation so in the case that you described then they might have a different approach when they speak to clients and a little maybe a little bit slightly changed the offering for those two segments and there is also another reason that you should try and do probably less segmentation than you would initially go for and that's the reason why is for every segment the idea behind segmentation is that you have to do some changes in your technical mix so it could be product, it could be the price it could be the distribution or the communication which inadvertently is related to more cost to the company so the more segments that you have the more resources you have to put in to augment the technical mix for this particular segment If you do your category entry points properly then the segmentation takes care of itself because it's self select because they know when Park were with whom that makes the segmentation happen without you having to do anything if you can get that right just to wrap it up there is a limited number of segments that can be exploited for profit sometimes if you go for too many segments it's unprofitable for the company it makes a lot of sense Ian I'm curious and intrigued by your books that you've written and published I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit about each of the books and maybe some of the listeners might be interested I won't fog the whole show but there's three now first one which is the one that people might have heard of because it was a surprise hit it was called where did it all go wrong and it was kind of come out in 2017 it's sort of peak of hyper targeted into that advertising and everything I was part of it there's a sort of little quite an old fashioned email mailing list called project VRM which I was part of so people like Doc Searls and Don Marty were on that and everything was sort of talking about it and I was influenced by that and it started off it was really just three or four articles that I'd written that seemed to knit together so I thought actually I could put those together they're right around it and I've got a book so I thought that would be it but then I sort of that was like surprisingly like sold heaps and so I thought I'd better do another one so the other one it was it's called shot by both sides and it was a bit like a sort of when you're kind of neither in one place or the other where I kind of felt like there was a lot of people who are misty eyed for the golden age of 70s advertising and wanted to go back to that so I got the other sort of digital zealots on the other side and I thought I don't feel part of either of those groups so so that was that one and the new ones called if there's a hell below we're all going to go which is after the curse may feel so that's sort of the final part of the trilogy really just sort of wrapping up all of my sort of thoughts on that there's a big piece on attention metrics and everything things so it's a niche a niche category you know it's not like Simon Sinek or something you don't buy those books to learn how to do something you buy them because you have some sort of deep perhaps hidden self loathing and there's someone else out there so yeah so it's just a bit of fun creative outlet I guess the new one is my favourite of all I've got the ghost of Dostoevsky is like the co-author so he's in there commenting on stuff as well so it's a way to see the movie of it that sounds great and that's out now is that right it's out now yeah on Amazon and then disarming bookstores fantastic and then on the topic of books we always like to wrap it up with some book recommendations I know I'm probably putting you on the spot but listeners often like to hear some of the recommendations from experts and I guess aside from your books Ian are there any sort of books on the topic we talked about in general today or not necessarily that any books you really write and recommend for people interested I'm impressed to recommend like one book I get coming back to what we talked about in the beginning one of the things I'm really interested in is this application of evolutionary psychology in marketing and there's a psychologist called Jeffrey Miller who wrote a book called Spent which is about the evolutionary sort of basis of consumption which is quite entertaining but very informative as well so that's the one that I recommend for people who want to get interested in that strand of you know market on my list that one and how about you that is there anything that springs to mind for you sure I'll join Ian's recommendation for Jeffrey's book for sure something intriguing and that is that Jeffrey is also known for his work on the evolutionary origins of humor and you can definitely find this in the book and his other articles and funnily enough my PhD part of it one of the articles that I wrote was on humor and its evolutionary origins and how men and women write to different types of humor so Jeffrey and I connect it over our common interesting humor and its evolutionary origins so yeah definitely check Jeffrey's book and when it comes to marketing there are books that have been already mentioned in this book and for those who haven't read Sharp do call it Byron Sharp How Browns Grow is the name of the book which is popular but I believe that more people could profit from it we've also mentioned the work of Peter Field and Benette that long and short it's a very short book that do find it's like a third page or so if memory serves me right this one is also a recommendation for the folks that are interested in marketing and when it comes to evolution and how people behave and what drives us I would also definitely recommend Behave by Robert Sapolsky it's a thick one very extensive but it's also very well researched and well written so yeah this would be by recommendations when it comes to the human side of things and for the listeners out there I do urge you to read something about human nature and the human condition if you're interested in marketing and advertising because the great advertisers have always known this it is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator skill by Bill Bernbach yeah no I mean I think that's very true isn't it like intuitively the best advertiser the ones that pick up on the human truths well thank you so much both of you for your recommendations and for being with us today I put all of the books and articles referenced in the show notes so people can go out and buy buy your books in yeah just a big thank you to you for your time always thanks for having us