How, how easy was it, uh, to find five things you actually agreed on?

Oh, really easy.

Yeah [laughs].

I mean, uh, no, 'cause I mean, I sort of challenge people when they say, "Oh, you and Ritson, like, disagree." And I'm like, "Well, he might have used to disagree on a number of things, but can you tell me w- what he actually disagrees [laughs] with us on today?" And, uh, I, I think the only thing which I think I raised, and I think Mark would, like, hope that, um, it ...

I mean, he'd admit it's mental and physical availability are the, the, the theory works.

That is the biggest, those are the biggest drivers-

... doing lots of things, but what are you, I guess, what are you most excited about researching or finding out next?

Uh, I don't know.

do you have any hypotheses as to why it was that marketing was not more scientific, um, or stayed on scientific for so long? Or why do you feel like it, do you have any, any instincts or, or have you, are you, have you looked at why, why wasn't Phil Kotler more science-based or why weren't the folks of his era more science-based? Was there some bottleneck preventing them, uh, from being more scientific? Did they have not have access to the, the, the research or the, um, the tools and processes to be more science-based? Or do you feel like there was just something that went wrong very early on and they kind of went down the wrong path?

Academia is very competitive, quite vicious, particularly in North American schools.

Incredible pressure to be new, new, new.

Even if the new isn't that new, it's just the old wine and new bottles coming.

Today, if you're at an advertising festival like I was, they don't talk about engagement much anymore, but they talk about intention instead.

It's the same thing.

Yeah, there's incredible pressure for that.

How do, how are you any different this time? Or it's like, did you, were you kind of conscious of that you're going into a field where it's often presented itself as scientific, even when it's not.

I mean, what one thing, if I could just ask you for one thing, should marketers do in order to build confidence? And maybe I'll ask a supplementary: What shouldn't they do, or where are they going wrong? I'll start with you on this one, Byron, if I could.

Right.

Well, they should stop trying to pretend they're amateur CFOs, and you're stealing terms like ROI and things like that, which just make the CFO think the marketers are jerks.

[laughs] But that is put forward as a solution, but it, it's a silly one.

No, they should explain to the C- CFOs understand about investments for the future.

It's their bread and butter.

The job of the marketer is to explain to the CFO what they're trying to achieve and put forward some appropriate metrics to be measured on, not promises of huge leaps in market share and sales, which they've been doing over and over and over and failing to achieve.

And so I think we just have to be really careful in this efficiency drive that we're not losing that essence of the, the downtime sometimes that we need to kind of d- have the big thoughts and have the important ideas that come forward.

It's a brand.

So anyway, so distinctiveness.

So distinctiveness, um, and this coming to mind is, is the thing.

Now, my bullshit stat has always been it's 70 to 80% of the job, yeah? I still maintain that there should be a, a quotient on top of that which is about differentiation.

Now, there's a caveat there, though.

I think Michael Porter was very wrong when he talked about differentiation.

He conflates being different with being unique.

It's just they've named, when they've said it's a brand building campaign

Yeah.

And, and, and so we're not celebrating...

It's never been about celebrating the best advertising campaigns.

It's about celebrating amazing creativity in advertising campaigns or hopefully we're gonna get back to that.

And it, but, and, and so that's not really classic Ehrenberg-Bass th- I mean, hardly anyone makes presentations here about evidence and, and about how marketing works really.

[laughs] That's not n- uh, which is why we haven't really been a big feature.

Oh, nice

... because, uh, yeah, which is part of the huge benefit.

You need a koala maybe or a wombat.

Yeah.

[laughs] But then the thing is you have to get it into people's heads.

But on that, yes, if, if I launched an Australian insurance company or whatever, yes, using something that people already associated with Australia would probably be quite sensible.

And there was a, there, there was a...

It's a...

Actually, it's an interesting story.

Uh, what can you put into a number? How can you measure a brand? What is, what is the, what are the measurements we can use?

So thank you, Byron.

We have a lot of companies sponsor the Institute, which is lovely of them, and that allows us to keep on making discoveries and, you know, provides food for our PhDs and things.

But they want to do that because they're trying to transform their marketing to become a bit more evidence-based.

I was talking to a retailer the other day and I said, it's lovely, you know, you make, you make, do these presentations, you know, it's a bit like the bank example.

You make presentations to supermarket chains and show them that the 50% of baskets are six items or less.

And you get this like, what, really? Really? I mean, we're so geared up for the heavy baskets.

You go, well, they're not the norm.