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A History of Marketing

Andrew Mitrak
A History of Marketing
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  • Reflections and Lessons from the first months of ‘A History of Marketing’
    A History of Marketing / Episode 17This week we're mixing up the usual format. I've been publishing this podcast for a few months now, so I thought this would be a good time to reflect on the conversations I've had so far, talk about what I've learned, and share a behind-the-scenes look at how the podcast is going. Spoiler alert: I think it's going great.I recruited my friend Scott Morris, Creative Director at Waka Seattle to interview me about the podcast.Scott is an incredibly talented documentary filmmaker who always asks thoughtful questions. He provided me with incredibly helpful advice and feedback as I put “A History of Marketing” together.I gave Scott some of the top questions I've heard from listeners, but otherwise let him drive the conversation. Now, here’s Scott Morris interviewing me.The Origins of “A History of Marketing”Scott Morris: I see this as serving as a proxy for your audience. So I'm going to ask you some questions about the podcast: how it started, how it's going, and then where it's going to go from here. So diving right in, let's go back to the beginning. A History of Marketing. Where did you get this idea? What's the origin story?Andrew Mitrak: The podcast idea came all at once, but a lot of things were percolating in the background. I released a trailer, about a three-minute intro to the podcast, and it's a pretty honest trailer. It really tells my journey from the start, and of course, it's three minutes, so it's an abbreviated journey, but it tells most of the important parts of the story.At some point, it hit me that I'm a marketer, and I've spent a dozen or more years doing this professionally, and I know very little about how it started. Meanwhile, I'm very interested in history. I read—most of the books I read are non-fiction or history books—and I feel like I have a grasp of a lot of other disciplines, the history of those disciplines. I know a little bit about psychology and economics and computer history and art history and music history, but I didn't know anything about marketing history. And that suddenly hit me as odd. And I'm like, I better go look for books on marketing history.And I really didn't find any. There are some books, and I don't mean to diminish the work that's out there, but they tend to be very academic-oriented journal articles. There's a book called The History of Marketing Thought. Or they're siloed. They're histories of advertising, of certain elements of public relations, and biographies of individual marketers or advertisers or entrepreneurs. But there wasn't anything that was like a history of marketing. And similarly, there was no podcast dedicated to it either, or even a blog really dedicated to it. There were blog posts or podcast episodes that touched on marketing history, but nothing that really dived into this particular topic.And being somebody who's interested in storytelling, interested in marketing, I thought this was a gap. And it was one of those moments where I thought, “This doesn't exist in the world, why don't I try to fill it?” And that's the start of the show.Scott Morris: In the process of building up the interviews and starting the editing process and really building what you felt like was going to be this podcast, what's been the toughest part?Andrew Mitrak: It's been surprisingly easy, all things considered. You are aware of this, most listeners probably are not, is that I have a video background. I had produced podcasts at a prior company that I was at. And so I know all the tools. I was a student in college, I was a journalist, I was a documentary filmmaker, and a lot of those skills translate pretty well to podcasting. I also am pretty good at cold emailing, and sending emails to guests was a fun little challenge. So a lot of that came easily. I'm not the best at any one of these things, but I think that I have a lot of the skills, when combined together, that make me pretty good at this so far.I'd say the thing that I disliked the most about it—that to me it's hard because it's hard to do things when you're not having as much fun—is sometimes it's things that I've signed myself up for, like doing a YouTube short. I have a lot of joy in editing the full episode. I'm in the zone when I'm in Premiere and editing everything together, and I feel good about releasing the long-form stuff. But there are things that I'm like, well, every episode, every platform seems to want these short little snippets and these bite-sized things, and let me go ahead and do those as well. And I don't find as much joy in them. I see them as a little more of a chore.So there are things like that that I'm like, it's my own doing. I could choose not to do it, but the things that don't get me excited about it, they feel the hardest to me. And also, I always edit the short last, so I've gotten the whole episode done, I've gotten it all transcribed, I've got everything published, and then I do this little short, and it seems like one extra thing to do. So maybe I'll stop doing that because it's really by my own choosing that I do it.Surprising responses to the podcastScott Morris: Nice. Well, I have some ideas for that for you. So, let's talk about that afterward. You got to do those shorts, man. Once the episode started airing and you were starting to get feedback and listeners and subscribers, what was the thing that was most surprising to you? Was there anything that generally in terms of the folks who had been listening or specifically anyone that had reached out, left a comment or a post about one of the episodes?Andrew Mitrak: The most surprising and delightful thing is the response from international marketers. And it helps you realize how big the world is, how interconnected we are, how the internet can help you reach anybody.We're both here in Seattle, Washington, and I have a bias towards thinking about our local community or thinking about the United States or the English-speaking world. But when I look at the Substack subscribers, only like 29% are from the US. And the next biggest is Brazil and India and a lot of countries where English is not the dominant language there. But folks from all over the world will share a really nice note about how they are enjoying the show or share some LinkedIn post about this interesting conversation they found. And I search the show name and I come across and I'm like, "Oh wow, this person in Sweden liked it. That's so cool."You see the numbers of how many hours cumulatively that have been listened to, and even though it's still a relatively small niche podcast, it does break your brain to think about, "Wow, a lot of people have actually heard this and reacted to it and reached out about it." So that's been super fun.Scott Morris: How do you view engagement with that audience and how do you think about connecting with them? Is that something that's been on your mind?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, a theme for me personally, producing the show, is questioning whether I'm doing it for me or whether I'm doing it for listeners.Selfishly, a lot of me reaching out to people is because of my own curiosity. It's because of my own interest in talking to some of the guests, doing things because I want to have a conversation or learn about a certain topic. And that's what makes the show fun to do is that it's not me trying to optimize for engagement or optimize for listenership or optimize for what some other audience wants. It's just me doing what I want to do, having the conversations I want to have, meeting the people that I want to meet.But then people respond and they have feedback and they've dedicated their time to it. Everything has been super positive so far and everything's been very encouraging. So because I haven't really seen any negative feedback per se from listeners or things that would lead me to do anything differently than what I'm currently doing, I'm following my own interests for the most part. And whenever I receive a note or an email or anything, of course, I respond and am really grateful for it. It keeps me super motivated.Starting with Philip KotlerScott Morris: When thinking about your own curiosity, right? And cold emailing. I know that reaching out to Philip Kotler was a pivotal moment in your decision in terms of whether to do this podcast or what it would look like. When you got that email back from him agreeing to the interview, what was that like?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, doing the podcast, I had this idea for A History of Marketing, but the question is, how does it become real? How do you actually do it? Because I've had a lot of ideas. I've probably shared a bunch of ideas with you of fun projects to do and documentaries to do or domains that I purchased and then never actually set up as a website.And then this became real because when I was looking up which guest to talk to, Philip Kotler, who is sometimes called the father of modern marketing, he wrote my marketing management textbook that I used in grad school to learn about marketing. He is a legend. And I'm like, "Wow, he has to be one of the first guests."So I purchased his autobiography. I think it's called My Adventures in Marketing, and read it. And the autobiography had his email address in there. And so I sent him an email. And since listeners have asked about this before—how did you get Philip Kotler?—I'm just going to read the exact email that I sent. And it's called "Podcast Interview: A History of Marketing" is the subject line.I sent that to him at the start of November, and he responded within a day. You could tell there are things I said; I kind of made this podcast feel official as if I'd actually recorded one before. But it's a very transparent, truthful email. And I think partly the reason he probably agreed to do it, if I had to surmise, is that I clearly had done my research on him, read his book. If I was in his shoes and I'm looking at a podcast called A History of Marketing, why wouldn't I want to be a part of that, right? It's almost elevating marketing to a historical status.So not only did he agree to do the interview, which was a huge win—that would have been gracious enough—he right afterwards emailed the people who would be my next several guests on the show: David Aaker, Jag Sheth, V. Kumar. And they then emailed folks who I should talk to as the next guest after that. And that really spurred a lot of the guest booking, especially for the first 12 episodes or so. Phil Kotler and his network really helped launch the show.Scott Morris: Well, sticking to that email that's going to go down in history now, it's going to go in the PR museum. You chose a very specific amount of time for what you were asking for. I wonder if you could talk about why did you choose 45 minutes?Andrew Mitrak: I always ask for 45 minutes because it tells somebody that is longer than a half hour, and usually if they agree to 45 minutes, they'll also agree to an hour. And also, it's not too big of a commitment. Also, I'm not Joe Rogan or whatever doing three or four-hour podcasts or something like that. I have a life, and so do the guests.Marketing history is still being writtenScott Morris: We talked about some of the surprises that you found from audience members. What's something that's surprised you in terms of the content that you all have covered in these episodes?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, so I went in not knowing a whole lot about marketing history. There's this really silly throwaway joke from The Simpsons where Marge is thinking about how to make money and get a job or something like that. And she's like, "Oh, I'll be a piano teacher." And Lisa's like, "But Mom, you don't play piano." And Marge says, "I just have to stay one lesson ahead of the kid." And I kind of feel like Marge.I know more than the average listener or even the average marketer. I've done some research, and especially now, I have really spent, I don't know, six months or so generally researching it. But I'm also not an expert. I'm not so deep in it that I'm doing really, really, really niche things. So all of that to say, I've learned a lot from the guests on the episode themselves.The most surprising thing is that the history is not written in stone. There's relatively little of the historical record as it is, but even what exists is kind of debated over. I published that interview with Philip Kotler, and he talks about the early 1900s as the start of marketing.And then I got some inbound from really smart professors who were like, "Phil Kotler, obviously smart, accomplished person, but I'm going to disagree with him there. Actually, I think it started earlier than that."Or I think that the idea that marketing emerged as a field of economics, I'm going to dispute that and say it actually emerged much earlier, and there are things. I published this interview with Giana Eckhardt about how there were branding elements in Imperial-era China a thousand years before the 1900s. And Giana was one of those people who reached out to me where she had seen the Phil Kotler one. She's like, "Thanks for doing this. This is great. I want to add a unique perspective that hasn't been shared where I'm going to introduce some of my own research to this that'll kind of contradict some of what was shared before." And I think that's great. That's wonderful.It also, this is part of why—we didn't talk about the naming of the show—but the name of the show is A History of Marketing, not The History of Marketing. I don't pretend to get everything right. I don't pretend to not have my own biases. I don't pretend to try to cover everything out there. And even the people who I interview, they might contradict each other or introduce new information. And I think that's a really exciting thing. So if you had asked me at the start, would I be talking about branding practices in Imperial-era China, I would have laughed at the idea that that was happening. So, all sorts of surprises across the board.Selecting Marketing Legends and “Primary Sources” as GuestsScott Morris: Speaking specifically about the guests that you've had so far, a lot of the folks that you've talked to have been more towards the end of their career or maybe even retired. And so it's created this opportunity for this great career retrospective that your interview ends up being for them. But I'm curious if you are thinking about interviewing folks more mid-career and what kind of more modern types of campaigns or other things are interesting for you as you look forward?Andrew Mitrak: I think starting off, I thought, "Well, Phil Kotler, the father of modern marketing" Really sharp as you can hear the interview, but he is 93 years old. And he is somebody who may not have the capacity to do that forever. We're all mortal. And some of the guests are primary sources. Phil Kotler literally wrote the book, experienced a lot of this and a lot of change firsthand, was an active member in some of the changes in marketing, many of the changes in marketing. Same goes for Dave Aaker, Jag Sheth, V. Kumar, George Day—folks who had a big impact of lived lives. And I figured, prioritize them and start by going to the primary sources as much as I am able to, and then work my way forward.Covering recent marketing historyAndrew Mitrak: And what's good about the podcast is that marketing history sounds like a niche, but where do you cut off the line of history? There's a lot to cover. I barely have really focused on the internet era, the first banner ads. There was this banner ad that I used to see all over—maybe it was on Netscape Navigator or something like that—of Punch the Monkey.And it was this banner ad where there's this annoying little monkey that danced around, and you moved your cursor, and your cursor controlled a glove, and then you'd punch the monkey. And of course, the thing is, it wanted you to click on the banner. It didn't matter whether you actually hit the monkey or not.And I'd like to meet the people behind these little ads that are really gimmicks, because there basically is this life cycle of an ad or a tactic where something gets launched, and then it works, and then people catch on, and maybe a bunch of other marketers and advertisers do it. And then so people see it everywhere, and then it stops working, and then you have to find something else. There are so many little stories of the Punch the Monkey type ad or early viral ads, how much web has changed, e-commerce, the marketing funnel. There are all sorts of history that's really more recent history that I think will be fascinating to dive into. But to start, I wanted to go to some of the earlier generations and hear from the primary sources as much as I could.Working Towards a “Marketing Mix” of Guest VoicesScott Morris: Looking back at this first block of episodes, how do you feel about them now? What do you feel like is the story that you're kind of telling with this first block, and then where you kind of want to go?Andrew Mitrak: You can hear in the Kotler email, I say I interview professors, authors, CMOs. And I think this first block especially was a little more biased towards professors. That's mostly who we've talked about so far. And while there were great authors—I was really, I really enjoyed the interview with Larry Tye about Edward Bernays. Really enjoyed Shelley Spector, the curator of this museum that also touched on PR. Mark Tungate, I thought that was a really fun one on covering advertising history through the ages. Obviously Guy Kawasaki and Sergio Zyman who had great stories about Apple and their own careers and Coca-Cola.So I'd like to get more of a mix. I feel like it's probably been 70-ish percent professors, and then the remainder being divided between authors and more practitioners. I'd like to develop a mix where I'm hearing from everybody because I'm really interested in seeing the intersection of where academic ideas meet the real world, how marketers can learn from academia and research that's being done, and on the flip side, how marketing theory can be enhanced by case studies that are from the real world or real-world marketing campaigns. That mix is something I'd like to keep developing.Frankly, interviewing professors is a little easier because you know exactly what their research is, it's all published. Usually, professors have their email on their website, and so it's easier to get in touch with professors. But I want to be mindful and I don't want to over-anchor on academics, and I want to bring in more biographers and authors and historians and other marketing practitioners themselves.Going back to me being selfish about it, I see them as me getting mentorship from these folks. I have so much to learn. And getting the excuse to sit down with somebody like Sergio Zyman, the first CMO of Coca-Cola, or Guy Kawasaki, somebody whose marketing books I've read and have influenced me, and hearing from them firsthand, it's so inspiring. I'm so grateful for it. It's one of the beneficial growth hacks of having a podcast is all these people get to talk to me. And I want to learn from more of them as well—professors as well, but also some of the marketing practitioners and authors out there.Scott Morris: That's one thing that's really stuck out to me that you, a claim that you made in your trailer that turned out to be true, which is that a lot of these folks are really good storytellers. Guy Kawasaki and Larry Tye and Sergio Zyman, these are some really not great stories in a history of marketing, but great American or even broader stories that are being told. You guys have covered the 1984 Apple ad or New Coke or bacon as a breakfast food.Future marketing campaigns to cover on the podcastScott Morris: For you personally, what are the kind of ad campaigns or marketing campaigns that you kind of have most been affected by or influenced by?Andrew Mitrak: I don't know if I've been affected or influenced by it yet, but one campaign that I've become a really big fan of over this show and I want to keep exploring more is the Pepsi Challenge. I haven't booked this person yet. I'm trying to get him on, so if anybody listening happens to know him, his name is John Sculley. He's best known as being the CEO of Apple. He was played by Jeff Daniels in the Steve Jobs movie that Aaron Sorkin wrote. He has this incredible career, but before Apple, he spent a decade or more at Pepsi. And Pepsi was like 10% market share to Coke—a total underdog. It was like Coke was everything, and then it was Pepsi and the other guys. And then all of a sudden, Pepsi became pretty close to a 50-50 competitor, or maybe 40-60 or 45-55 to Coke. But in the 70s and then in the 80s, they were this juggernaut.As a storyteller, I love the story of an underdog. As somebody who spent a lot of my career in a startup, you're always an underdog when you're a startup. And hearing how they took on the big guys who totally outspent them—they did the Pepsi Challenge.And what is the Pepsi Challenge? It's kind of the truth. It's using a taste test, biasing the taste test to favor Pepsi, because if you take a sip of Pepsi versus a sip of Coke, you're more likely to prefer the sweeter of the two. It might be different if you drink a whole can or a whole pack, but they designed a test where it favors their product.They filmed participants, almost like an early version of reality TV, reacting to it. They reported on the accurate results: most Americans or most consumers prefer Pepsi in a blind taste test to Coke. And they do that, they do the Pepsi generation, they do a bunch of underdog campaigns. They're not even mean-spirited at Coke; they're just like, "Hey, most people prefer Pepsi, time to give it a try."And it has everything. It has, in classical rhetoric, ethos, pathos, and logos, right? Ethos is sort of, "Oh, I trust that because other people are doing it, or it's like some authority." And you see other people, most Americans, liking Pepsi. You see the pathos, the emotion of it. There's an ad where a grandma is like, "I've been drinking Coke my whole life. I guess I do like Pepsi more." And there's this emotional element to people realizing that they like it. And then there's the logic to it that most people prefer it. It's this ad that is new, it's an underdog, it works clearly for them. As somebody who's interested in how underdogs can use marketing to gain market share and to have that David versus Goliath type story, that's one campaign that I'm really interested in.Scott Morris: I mean, as you're talking about it, I have very fuzzy memories of the Pepsi Challenge, but not nearly that solid memory that you have. So, yeah, it was fascinating.Andrew Mitrak: One of the other things that sparked me in doing this podcast is I was referencing the Pepsi Challenge to a co-worker, and she had never heard of it. She had never heard of the Pepsi Challenge. And it did primarily run in the late 70s or the 70s and 80s, and I saw little elements of it in the 90s and maybe early 2000s. But I thought, "Wow, if marketers don't know about the Pepsi Challenge, we got to preserve this. We got to make marketers more aware of this. Marketing needs to be taught as a history just so you can learn about good ideas." So that was one of the other things among the things percolating that gave me the idea to pursue the podcast.Applying Lessons of History to Marketing TodayScott Morris: You are a marketer. You work as a Marketing Director for a large company. You've done this work for a long time.Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] I'm not a Director, you gave me a promotion. I was a director at startups…Scott Morris: Soon to be marketing director. Has working on this and the interviews that you've done changed your view of marketing?Andrew Mitrak: This is probably the most selfishly rewarding part is that speaking to these—many of them legends in marketing and people with great careers—is so inspiring, and it's absolutely changed how I work. There are a few ways how.First, a big theme throughout the podcast is that marketing strategy, when implemented well, is not limited to the marketing department. Really, marketing as a function should be the interface between the company and the market that it serves. And it's a two-way job. You should be communicating the company to the market that you serve. You should also be analyzing the market and taking in market feedback, and then feeding that to the company to influence what the company does, how it builds its products, how it prices.The first person that I spoke to was Philip Kotler, and Philip Kotler is famous for the 4Ps. He didn't invent the 4Ps, but he popularized them. And they're product, price, place, promotion. And it's something you learn about in a marketing textbook. And then what happens is you enter the marketing world, and you're basically just focused on one of those Ps, which is promotion. Right?Maybe there are certain elements of place as far as if you call internet advertising or channel advertising or promoting on a certain channel. But marketing so often is lumped in with promotion, and the product and the pricing of it even today is often owned by a different team within a company. And I think marketing just can perform this strategic function where you have to think beyond promotion. You really have to think more holistically about what you can do. And I find myself stepping out of my lane as a marketer to try to advocate for other things the company should be doing or communicating upward on where the market I serve is at, things we can be doing, other trends are there. And I just see that as my job as a marketer to communicate upward and outward throughout the company.The other one, at a more tactical level, is the interview with Robert Cialdini. I had read his book Influence way back when, and I read it again in advance of interviewing him a few months ago. And the way that he frames things, he has a language for stuff like the principle of reciprocity. Right? Now when I am running a campaign that means providing somebody an ebook about some services or something, I'm talking to my stakeholders about, "Hey, the reason we're doing this is the principle of reciprocity that when you give somebody something of value and you're not taking stuff from them, they like you more. They want to give something back. This is a sense of goodwill, and this is why you do these things. It's because of these psychological elements." I don't know if it works. I bet a lot of my colleagues just roll their eyes at me. But anyway, I'm using more and more of the language that these professionals use. I hope it makes me sound a little smarter...Both in terms of the scope of marketing and some of the really tactical language I use around campaigns, it's totally influenced. And also, just publishing the podcast itself, a lot of what goes behind the scenes, I get to learn a lot of tools, AI tools even that I don't use in my everyday job. And so as a tactical person, I'm doing something that I don't do in my day job every day, and I'm getting to learn new tools and work new muscles. And I use my company's products a lot when I produce the product. So I get to empathize with users as well. So all those things, I think, accrue to influencing how I am as a marketer.Scott Morris: That's so cool. And yeah, the episode with Robert Cialdini. I felt like if anyone hasn't listened to that, especially if you're a small business marketer or just marketing in general, it's like, yeah, I feel like I gave me a to-do list essentially is what I felt like, which was really exciting.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, if you are 30 minutes into this conversation with me and Scott right now, you should pause it. Go listen to the Robert Cialdini one.Marketing and Measuring ROIScott Morris: You also talk a lot with a number of folks. I think particularly Guy Kawasaki with the 1984 ad and how that was, essentially, there was a lot of pushback about that ad, trepidation essentially about whether they should do it. And then also how effective was it in terms of ROI on the millions of dollars that they spent in producing it. Now that you've gone through these interviews, how are you seeing that relationship between that kind of the art and commerce aspects of marketing and advertising?Andrew Mitrak: I think that's an interesting one because that 1984 one, it's come up a lot, often cited as one of, if not the greatest ad of all time. And among the, not negative comments, but some LinkedIn reply guy is like, "Actually, this ad didn't work because the Mac was a failed product line." And it's funny how these things can still be debated to this day. And I think that's great. I think it's really cool that history is a living thing, it's being reassessed, re-evaluated. It's why a podcast like this, I think, has a lot of interesting material to cover.Yeah, the relationship between art and commerce or another one for me is data and intuition. There's certainly a lot of the best marketers and campaigns seem to rely a lot on intuition. Somebody like Steve Jobs, I think he could be persuaded with data, but also clearly had a lot of intuition. Sergio Zyman and the Coca-Cola folks clearly used a lot of data, but they also did things with their intuition as well. I think that's an interesting idea too. The measurement and the ROI of marketing—marketing as an expense versus as an investment—on what time frame do you consider that investment? How important is measurability?I think they're all really, really interesting questions, and I think it's good that there's not one single definitive answer to saying, "Oh yeah, the answer is 1.25” And that's it and it's settled and now we're going to… It's not that. It's something where, hey, it is a little squishier, and that's what makes it fun. That's what makes it exciting. That's what gives it a lot of rich history and stories behind it.Favorite Moments from the Series (So Far…)Scott Morris: I don't want to ask you what is your favorite episode, but I am curious if you have a favorite moment or a favorite insight that you've gleaned from these marketing legends that you've interviewed thus far. Do you have a favorite thing that you've done?Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I definitely wouldn't pick a favorite episode. A favorite moment was actually with the Sergio Zyman one where a lot of my episodes are very cheerful, happy, conversational. And I am not asking really super hard gotcha questions, and it's a very easygoing conversation that hopefully is insightful and well-researched but has positive vibes. He's a little confrontational. He's a little jabby. That's his style. He likes to poke. He kind of was interrogating me about describing the taste of Coca-Cola.Sergio Zyman Clip:Sergio Zyman: Do you drink Coke? You drink Coke sometimes?Scott Morris (from Zyman episode clip): Yeah, of course. I've had a Coke. I don't drink it every day.Sergio Zyman: What does it taste like?Andrew Mitrak: Well, first you feel the bubbliness of it, the sweetness to it, and then there's a bite.Sergio Zyman: No, no, no. I didn't ask you how it feels. I ask you what does it taste like.Andrew Mitrak: It's hard to say other than it tastes like Coke. It's hard to describe other than a Coke tastes like a Coke.Sergio Zyman: Basically, a Coke has no taste memory.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.Sergio Zyman: If you go and you say what does Pepsi taste like, people will say sweeter than Coke.Andrew Mitrak: Coca-Cola is your baseline for comparing everything else.Andrew Mitrak: He kind of put me on the spot and I'm like, "Gosh, I have to describe this to the guy who was the CMO of Coke." And he's kind of, he's like interrupting me. And I actually like that a lot. I think a lot of good podcasts have some tension to them, have some sense of drama, that there is a dynamic between the host and the guest and always respectful and everything, but also that there's a little bit of tension there. And I think that came up. So that strikes me as something that I'd like to explore more of. I want to have a really positive relationship with the guests, but I'm thinking about how do you inject more drama, more tension into the guests without, while it's still being an overall positive and informative experience?Scott Morris: I did want to ask you actually, if you wanted to have another take of answering the question, what does Coke taste like? Now that you've had some time to think about it.Andrew Mitrak: Last weekend I was thinking about this question, and I actually had a Coca-Cola for the first time in, honestly, probably like 10 years for me. I don't drink much soda in general. I've had some Diet Cokes here or there, but I hadn't had a Coca-Cola Classic in a long time. I'd kind of like to answer it exactly the same. It is mostly about the initial bubbliness. If you leave it in your mouth long enough, it gets very caramelized and sweet to it.Scott Morris: [Interrupts] The taste, Andrew.Andrew Mitrak: Here's the thing, if I was to push back on him, the thing about taste is taste is a sensation that really does encompass every other sensation. The sense of touch—people will describe themselves as a texture eater, right? And if something smells a certain way, that has a really big impact on how you actually taste it. If it looks a certain way, it'll actually really impact the taste. And I think he was being provocative there, but I would just push back on his idea that taste is only just what is the flavor in your mouth. It is—taste is actually a number of other things. And me describing the texture is a perfectly valid response to taste. So, if I was to defend myself, that's what I would say about it.Wrapping Up and Listener FeedbackScott Morris: Well, it made for a great moment. It really did. Well, thanks so much, Andrew. I mean, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's been really fun and insightful to learn more about the behind-the-scenes of A History of Marketing and what's been motivating you and what have been some of your favorite moments. Is there anything else you want to hit on before we close out?Andrew Mitrak: No, that was great. I'm laughing because you sound like me; you're clearly doing the same wrap-up thing that I always do. Any things you want to plug?Scott Morris: The thing I was to ask you is, where can we find your work online? Is there anything that you'd like to plug?Andrew Mitrak: No, this has been fun. Hopefully, it's been fun for listeners too. I think of a good podcast as having some education to it, some entertainment to it. Then there's also this idea of companionship to it, that there is, you form some relationship with the host. And I can tell it's happened with folks who have reached out to me and sent me nice notes. I'm hoping this does some of that, shows a little bit of what goes on, how I'm thinking about it. But also, I think the guests are the most interesting people. I just want to hear from them.So listeners, if you've made it this far, hopefully you liked it okay. But also just let me know, shoot me a note: [email protected]. I read all the emails. I respond to them. You can find me on LinkedIn and shoot me a note there. I really like hearing from listeners. And if you like more things like this, let me know. With the caveat that, like I said at the beginning, I'm doing this selfishly to learn from the best—the CMOs, the authors, the professors, and the guests themselves—and I want them to be front and center of the shows.Scott Morris: Do I get to promote anything or what?Andrew Mitrak: [Laughs] Yeah, do you have any things you'd like to plug?Scott Morris: People could to my website wakaseattle.com. I make videos for businesses like Pike Place Market, Bloodworks Northwest, and a lot of folks in the Pacific Northwest, but that's what I love doing. So if you want to go check it out there, you can also find me on LinkedIn.Andrew Mitrak: I'll post a link to wakaseattle.com and your LinkedIn in the blog. And Scott, you're selling yourself short. Scott is an incredibly talented filmmaker, documentary maker, video producer, all-around great person to work with who does really great videos for great brands. So if you are in the Seattle area or beyond and are interested in working with a really talented video producer or somebody to guest host your podcast, he's good at that as well.So with that, thanks so much, Scott. This has been a lot of fun.Scott Morris: Thanks, Andrew. Take care. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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  • T. Bettina Cornwell: The World of Sports Endorsements and Sponsorship-Linked Marketing
    A History of Marketing / Episode 16Tune into any major sporting event, and corporate sponsorship saturate the screen. Colossal logos sprawl across stadium rooftops. They adorn the smallest patch on a player's jersey. From pre-game shows to post-game analysis, from breakfast cereal to beer cans, from charitable causes to gambling apps, sponsorships are inseparable from sports.Sports and sponsorship are so interwoven, it’s easy to think it was always this way. But it’s a relatively new phenomenon. It doesn’t happen naturally either. Behind the scenes marketers, brands, teams, and athletes navigate complex sponsorship-linked marketing arrangements that aim to benefit all parties involved. My guest is T. Bettina Cornwell, a leading expert on sports and sponsorship. She is the Philip H. Knight Chair and Head of the Department of Marketing at the University of Oregon's Lundquist College of Business. Professor Cornwell literally wrote the book on the subject. It's called Sponsorship in Marketing and the 3rd edition of it comes out today. I read an earlier edition to prepare for our interview, and I really enjoyed it. So, if you like our conversation, I recommend checking it out.Our discussion was an absolute blast. We cover some of the best-known successes and revealing failures in the world of sports and sponsorship.Now, here it is – my conversation with Bettina Cornwell.Find more: marketinghistory.orgHosted by Andrew Mitrak This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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  • Gabriele Carboni: The Marketing Book Endorsed by Pope Francis, Italian History, and Impact Marketing
    A History of Marketing / Episode 15This is not a current events podcast, but this episode is more timely than usual.I’m joined by Gabriele Carboni, a marketer, author, consultant based in Italy. I met Carboni through Philip Kotler. Together they co-authored the book, “Enlightened Management” which is about how Impact Marketing can have a positive impact for people and the planet.Gabriele Carboni is probably the only marketer to have a book endorsed by the late Pope Francis. The Vatican issued this comment on Carboni’s book, “Civil Economy.” (Translated from Italian) “His Holiness encourages every reader, every business leader and every person of good will to take inspiration from this work, to transform every professional environment into a place of growth, not only economic but human and spiritual.“I'm publishing this episode just a few days since we learned of the passing of Pope Francis. But I recorded this conversation with Gabriele Carboni in February, when Pope Francis was alive but had been in the news due to health issues.Carboni shares some great stories about meeting Pope Francis and earning an endorsement from the Pope. He also shares about what it’s like to write a book with Phil Kotler, and speaks to the rich legacy of the Italian Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Italian Humanism. We discuss how the ideas from these eras and schools of thought influenced marketing as a field and inspired Carboni to focus on impact marketing.A Marketing Collaboration with Philip KotlerAndrew Mitrak: Gabriele Carboni, welcome to A History of Marketing.Gabriele Carboni: Hi Andrew, thank you for having me.Andrew Mitrak: So we connected via an introduction from Philip Kotler and you recently co-authored a book with Phil. So let's start the conversation there. How did you first learn about Philip Kotler and when did you first meet him?Gabriele Carboni: I was already beginning my company, which is a marketing company, obviously, digital marketing company. Digital marketing was my hobby and then we started a company with two business partners.Because, of course, I was good at building websites, I was good at creating graphics, so the operational part I had. But I needed to understand the strategy better, so I bought a copy of Marketing Management. And then I read it. And then since I'm also a journalist, I was invited to Milan in 2017. Philip Kotler was speaking there. And this is a fun story because in Italy you need to be part of an association to be a journalist. It's not just you write and you are a journalist, you need to get trained and then to be part of an order, there is the order of the journalists. So you have your press badge.So I went to the event with my badge and I said, "I am a journalist, this is my badge." Of course, I was not known as a journalist, it's not even my job. But I was there with my badge and I said, "Look, I'm a journalist, I have the badge. Can I interview Philip Kotler?" And of course they said, "Of course you cannot, because you are we don't know you, you're not in our list. So go and listen to the speech, but you're not going to meet him."Then I said, "Okay, at least I get a free event with Philip Kotler, I'm going to listen." After the event, the event was very small, it was in a university in Milan. And I saw that there was a press room. Then I went to where there was a person on the door and I said, "Look, I'm a journalist, this is my badge. I want to interview Philip Kotler." And he said, "No, you're not on the list."I took a look inside the room and I saw a pregnant woman who happened to be the press manager, and I told her that my wife, which was true, was pregnant too. So they were both at the seventh month of pregnancy. And we started talking, I tried to be nice with her and since, I don't know, we connected somehow. She said, "Okay, after everyone, if we have like 30 seconds, you can have a picture with him and this is the max I can do."It happened that at the end of everything, he was drinking a coffee, eating something. I had my occasion, I had my photo with him and then we had half an hour to speak. So I happened to be the last, but I got all the time in the world and it was very nice because I gifted him my first book, which was in Italian, but he liked the approach. I tried to explain to him an idea I had at that time which then became this card deck which actually was awarded one of the three best marketing innovations in the world in 2019 and he gave me a lot of advice. And then I asked him to write the book together and he said, "No," because, of course, he didn't know me.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, you're pushing your luck a little bit there. You've already gotten in, you've gotten to meet him, you've gotten a half hour and right in the first meeting you've asked him to co-author a book.Gabriele Carboni: Exactly.So a year later, 2018, he came to Bologna, which is near where I live, so it was easier. Still with the journalist badge. At that time I was already known by the organization, so I got an interview and I asked him again to write a book together and he said, "No."Then in 2019, I made the card deck and again I went to visit him in Rome. It was the last time he went to Italy because after that there was COVID. And he said, "Oh, this card deck is very nice, we can do something together." And so we started to have an email exchange and we started to write something, he wrote a forward for a book on digital marketing I released. And then I went to Sarasota to visit him. And at last he said, "Okay, we are going to write a book together."Actually, in your interview with him, he was talking about a small and medium enterprises book and that is the book we have written together, which is this one, Enlightened Management. And now it's available in English since December last year and it's going to be translated into Italian in a few months. So it was pushing my luck as you say.Andrew Mitrak: I'm going to ask you about Enlightened Management and your work on small and mid-sized businesses. I want to ask, what is co-authoring a book with Philip Kotler like?Gabriele Carboni: I write very fast, so in three months I wrote the first part of the book. In like three hours he replied with all the modifications. So the problem with him is he's very active, also Saturdays and Sundays, even nights. He's super fast, so I had difficulty keeping up to his timing.Andrew Mitrak: It is amazing. At the time that you met him he must have been into his mid-80s and at the time I interviewed him he's in his early 90s and he's remarkably fast, remarkably sharp and smart and you have to keep up with him.Getting a Book Endorsement from Pope FrancisI want to shift gears and ask about another very influential world leader that you met. Pope Francis. And we're recording this in late February of 2025 and there's been a lot of news about Pope Francis's health and we certainly wish his holiness a speedy recovery.You are the first person I've ever met who had his book endorsed by the Pope. And I want to read this quote:"His Holiness encourages every reader, every business leader and every person of goodwill to take inspiration from this work to transform every professional environment into a place of growth, not only economic, but human and spiritual."And first off, congratulations on earning an endorsement from the Pope. I'm sure that's very meaningful to you. Can you tell me the story of meeting Pope Francis and how you came to earn an endorsement from his holiness?Gabriele Carboni: Yeah, I was invited after COVID to a very big event they had organized in Assisi, which is the city of San Francesco. There were like 1,000 young economists and marketers from all over the world, so it was very lucky to be invited. And I saw the Pope from afar. And that was the first time, but it was very exciting because it was with 1,000 people all together waiting for the Pope, it was very emotional.And then I visited him for a private meeting the year later, so it was two years ago. And I asked him to write a forward for my book. The book was not already written and of course they replied by his office, not him in person, they replied that they were not interested.Actually, part of that book is now Enlightened Management. So some of that content was presented to Pope Francis before Philip Kotler. It happened that I wrote a book with other very famous professors in Italy about the civil economy. And that was published by a Catholic Association. So I wrote to the Pope's offices because they said no, but they gave me their email address. Again, pushing my luck, I wrote them and said, "Hey, I have another book. It's already done, it's published by a Christian Association. Can you please write something?" And they replied with a full letter and it was crazy. It's really nice to have a comment by the Pope.Then I met him again last year. I gave him a butterfly as a gift. And actually, Philip already knows this, but no one else knows it. I sent a copy of Enlightened Management and I asked for another comment. So I'm a lucky guy and I push it.Andrew Mitrak: Being politely pushy, that's definitely a lesson for marketers. Just shoot your shot, right? You got to give it a try.Can you set the scene of what it is like to meet the Pope? What are you feeling? What is the environment? Because I never will in my life, very few of us are lucky enough to meet the Pope and you're the first person I've met who met him. So what is that like? Gabriele Carboni: Well, you are usually not alone because they are private meetings but with I don't know, 30 people, 100 people, 200 people. And he is very kind, he shakes hands with everyone. So we were 300 and everyone got a handshake and a picture with the Pope. It's like three seconds, of course. But everyone. And also he gives you a small gift, very emotional and then he always gives a lecture. Last year it was about AI, so it was very interesting.And then you have, if you want, you can say something, like again, two or three seconds. But he's very kind, nice, and of course… holy, we can say.Italian Humanism's Influence on Business and MarketingAndrew Mitrak: So I want to talk about some of your philosophical background into how you became a marketer. And in our email exchange prior to this interview, you mentioned that you began your journey with exploring Italian humanism. And can you share more about what Italian humanism is and how you went from this philosophical pursuit to becoming a digital marketer and a marketing author?Gabriele Carboni: It's about humanism. Also Philip wrote his second autobiography, My Life as a Humanist. Italians have in their background the Renaissance and humanism, which helped us a lot to think business in a different way.One thing I've learned is that in the past, more or less where we have humanism, which was before Renaissance, companies had God as a shareholder. Meaning part of the profits were given to the community, because, of course, they didn't fire the money to God, they just gave to the community. And which is now something we do to benefit corporations or companies that have a purpose. So that intrigued me very much and I bought some books, one I have here for you, it's a book, an original book from the 1800s. And it discusses the economies of the 1700s. It was before the industrial revolution and everything was about people.Andrew Mitrak: What was the name of this book?Gabriele Carboni: Yeah, of course it's Italian, Economics Ideas of economists around 1848, about Augusto Graziani. I think one copy may be available in the world.Andrew Mitrak: And for listeners, it's not some reprint. This looks like an original physical copy… very withered.Gabriele Carboni: And I really appreciate the fact that as Italians, we always put people at the center of our business. Before the Industrial Revolution, of course, agriculture was the main business and it was a business between man and environment, which is something we are looking for now, maybe without a good success.The Renaissance and the Ideas of Patronage and BrandingAndrew Mitrak: In our exchange, you also mentioned that Italian humanism has a direct lineage to the Italian Renaissance and that a lot of modern branding practices could be traced back to the Renaissance and Italian humanism. And if you think of things like the Medici family, which is a name that you just hold in such high regard today, centuries later, that clearly there's some branding element there. And I'm curious if you have any other examples or of branding practices that have roots in the Renaissance.Gabriele Carboni: Well, everything in the Renaissance was related to the arts, not only paintings or statues, also music. The point was to give emotion to people and to give a sense of beauty in the cities, in the houses, the castles, even churches, of course, also the church was a very important player of the Renaissance. Everything in Rome, basically, you can see now, aside from the ancient Romans, they are from the Renaissance.I think art is one of those elements you can use to touch the heart of people and when you do that, then people attach to your brand. In that case, the brand was the name of the family or the church itself. And that was a great branding for Medicis, for example, so great that everyone knows who they are even now. If this is not marketing, I don't know what it is.“The Book of the Art of Trade” by Benedetto CotrugliAndrew Mitrak: And from this era, you introduced me to a book called The Book of the Art of Trade by Benedetto Cotrugli.He wrote this book in 1458. And this was a fascinating book to dive into. And it's not a marketing book per se, but it covers business practices that tie into marketing. It talks about accounting, running an ethical business, and professionalizing business practices.He even talks about the importance of merchants to have proper attire and to be well-informed about areas like cosmography, geology, philosophy, astrology, theology, and the law.So the idea of personal branding in a way, if you're a merchant selling something, know things and just be an erudite individual, be well learned, present yourself because you want to come off as trustworthy to your potential customers and then they'll buy your products. So, not exactly marketing per se, but definitely personal branding and certainly salesmanship.I'm curious how you came across the book The Art of the Trade and what takeaways you had from it.Gabriele Carboni: Well, let me say that it's available also in English, so The Book of the Art of Trade, it's actually the title, the English title, so it is available on Amazon or I don't know, anywhere.Andrew Mitrak: It's published long enough ago, it's all in the public domain too, so you can find it free online as a PDF of it, yes.Gabriele Carboni: Good. Yes.Gabriele Carboni: Well, it's good because again, it puts people and environment at the center. I found it because I was studying civil economy, so the economy before the industrial revolution, which is now fancy in Italy, and there are some universities teaching civil economy and one of the books they suggest is exactly this one. It also teaches you how to relate to what we now call stakeholders.So, marketing and business in general is all about relationships. Of course, with customers or potential customers, but also with employees, talents and everything that we now call stakeholders.The Italian EnlightenmentAndrew Mitrak: Moving on from the Italian Renaissance and some of this area, I want to also touch on the Enlightenment, or the Italian Enlightenment. And Enlightenment is very important to you, it's part of the title of your book. You know, we talked in our exchange on email about the Italian Enlightenment and when I as a somebody growing up in the United States, when I learn about the history of the Renaissance Enlightenment, the Renaissance was focused on Italy, and a lot of the Enlightenment tends to focus on the northern countries and if you even if I look at the English Wikipedia page of the Enlightenment today, you see France and Germany and England and Scotland, they're referenced a lot more and Italy's mentioned but it's not quite as prominent there. So can you tell me about the Italian Enlightenment and what differentiates some of the Italian Enlightenment thinking of this period versus some of the other countries I mentioned?Gabriele Carboni: Well, maybe someone will be mad about this, but we didn't have so much of enlightenment because we had humanism way before that. So Enlightenment is kind of a humanism after a few hundred years. Andrew Mitrak: So the Italians were so far ahead of the curve, it's like you had your enlightenment centuries earlier.Gabriele Carboni: Exactly, exactly what I mean, it's my fault if someone is mad I said that. (Laughs)But during humanism people started to read because at that time not a lot of people could read and not a lot of people could have access to books because books were handwritten and mainly people of the church could read and could have those books, aside from some very rich noble people. And then they started to spread ahead some books about also ancient philosophy and that, of course, created a movement that then brought us to the Renaissance and then spread around the world and at one point, they invented the printed books and that helped to spread the word and I think Enlightenment it's something came before the printed books.Andrew Mitrak: The Enlightenment and the Renaissance era might have been captured by some of the handwritten stuff, but the printing press and that changes everything as far as what's available to people and who gets the privilege of owning books and who gets to learn these ideas.Gabriele Carboni: Principles of the Enlightenment are the same that we are reading now in civil economy. Actually, the civil economy was invented by enlightened economists in Italy. And also Adam Smith was a reader of civil economy, but then the industrial revolution pushed everything to profit and product. So we kind of forgot the person, the people and decided to go for the product and the profit.Civil Economy Pioneers: Genovesi and ParadisiAndrew Mitrak: And so this idea of civil economy, which you've brought up a few times, the people most associated with this are Antonio Genovesi and Agostino Paradisi. They wrote and are kind of the thinkers that are most associated with the Italian Civil Economy.Gabriele Carboni: Exactly. Antonio Genovesi was the first in Europe, meaning maybe the first in the world, to have a course at the university about economics. So the first university course in economics was in Naples with Antonio Genovesi. And then Agostino Paradisi, who was born here where I live, it's called Vignola, it's a city called Vignola in Northern Italy, he was born right here and he had the first course about civil economy at the university of Modena.And mainly they put people at the center again, but they gave us something that is now you can now reuse for sustainability, which is the relationship between companies, the government and the community and third sectors. So they already knew that the market it's going to be rich and prosper if companies work with the government and with the community together. They didn't have the environmental problem, of course. That is the main point.The Arrival of “Impact Marketing”Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So all this tour through history of Italian humanism, the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, all of this, I hope listeners have come along with us on this journey through philosophy and history and thinking, how does this tie to marketing? Well, it all sets the stage for impact marketing. you know, you've spoken about these ideas of business not just being for commerce, but being for people, that everything is kind of all connected and marketing has an impact on everything. So, this area of impact marketing is a specialization of yours. And so in your own words, could you define what impact marketing is and how it differs from traditional marketing?Gabriele Carboni: Yeah, you can define traditional marketing as the profitable satisfaction of needs. It's the short definition, which is the one I always remember, but it is correct. So the profitable satisfaction of needs, meaning marketing cares about profit and customers. Which is kind of a small definition in today's environment.So impact marketing instead is the strategic approach of the company, which relates to the community and the environment to create a positive impact. In this definition, profit is just a result of the positive impact of the company. So this is marketing, impact marketing. So while marketing just cares about profits and clients, impact marketing cares about all stakeholders, including the environment, to create a positive impact, which results in profits.The Evolution of Impact MarketingAndrew Mitrak: Thanks for that definition. And how has impact marketing evolved as a field over the years? Or when do you feel like impact marketing first entered the lexicon of marketing and how is it moved over time?Gabriele Carboni: I defined impact marketing when I was reading civil economy, studying civil economy. Since economics is a big field, I wanted to bring some of the ideas to marketing, which is maybe more modern than economics, at least in my industry. And then I brought those concepts to marketing and it was just a few years ago. More or less during COVID, which was also in some ways the better environment to start an idea like that where we have seen people care more about other people, about the environment and so on.Andrew Mitrak: The reason I'm kind of asking about how it's evolved is these ideas of companies doing good not just for their shareholders, but also for the environment. It's something that I feel like has probably ebbed and flowed over time. And Phil Kotler himself wrote the book Broadening the Concept of Marketing and has social marketing ideas and economists have also pushed back on this over time. There was somebody in America named Milton Friedman and he would argue that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits and almost like nothing else. And so then there's also ESG is kind of being part of companies as well and there's been almost a push and pull, I think, between companies purely focusing on their bottom line and returns to shareholders and then these ideas of, well, what else can a company be doing as well? And then not just what the company could be doing, but could marketers within that company be doing? And so it just seems like there's always been kind of a push and pull, at least for the last several decades or so, between the social responsibilities and impacts marketing and businesses should have.Gabriele Carboni: I always use this analogy of the butterfly. Companies are like caterpillars: they go from leaf to leaf to find new customers, new profit and to evolve themselves. But they don't know they will evolve into a butterfly. And that's good because caterpillars need to live, to sustain themselves. Of course, the first sustainability is the financial one.And then they evolve. They create the chrysalis, we can say they start recognizing their values and they create this chrysalis with values. And at a later stage, they evolve into a butterfly and they start flying around and they see there is not only that tree with only leaves, they see they are part of an environment and then they discover they can relate to that environment. So this is mainly the concept of impact marketing and enlightened management.Real-World Examples of Impact MarketingAndrew Mitrak: I love that analogy because if we if you think of yourself as a small business, of course, you want to do good for the world, but to do that you have to sustain yourself and earn some profit, so you need to evolve over time to be able to have the full positive impact on the world that you'd like.I'm wondering if you have any examples of either impact marketing in action or businesses that have kind of gone this caterpillar to butterfly journey and started one way but evolved to really embrace impact marketing as they grew. What are some of your examples of impact marketing in action?Gabriele Carboni: Well, of course, benefit corporations. In the US and some other countries like Italy, you can have a benefit corporation. My company is a benefit corporation, meaning as a company it is written that we aim for profit, but also we have some sustainable goals and we need to achieve that year by year and they have the same value as the profit goals. So, for example, my company gives 20% of the net profits to community projects. And that's an example.And we have the B Corps, so those companies, mainly big companies, that are B Corp certified. And many companies, and this is one point, many companies already do a lot of good, they generate a positive impact, but they do not communicate it. And this is very true for small and medium enterprises. They always donate something, they support some community local causes and they do not share the good they do, which can be good. But if you share what you do, then other companies can bring your example and do the same.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, I think of examples of companies that have done that successfully like there was this shoe brand called Tom's Shoes and they were very popular, probably especially 15 years ago, they were really at their peak or that was around the time they launched and they really brought attention to the importance of shoes for the poor or specifically for shoes in regions of Africa. And there was this idea of buy a pair, give a pair. And that their relatively low cost made shoes but they were sold at a premium price and the premium that you're paying is as a consumer is understanding I'm supporting a good cause, I'm supporting shoes for the world, I'm willing to pay for these and it almost became a social status symbol in a way. Like I'm wearing these Tom's shoes, I'm not wearing some big fancy other designer shoes, I'm showing that I care about a cause and it made, Tom's a more popular brand, it also brought more attention to this issue, and consumers benefited in that they got to wear shoes and signal to others that they care about causes like this.Gabriele Carboni: Yeah. Another example could be Patagonia, which is very well known around the world, maybe the first B Corp. Yes, many big brands like Danone even are B Corp certified and you can read everywhere what they do. I know Danone very well in Italy and they do a lot of great projects for the positive impact.Obstacles to Implementing Impact MarketingAndrew Mitrak: When it comes to other companies adopting impact marketing, what are some of the biggest challenges or obstacles that need to be addressed for impact marketing to be more widely adopted?Gabriele Carboni: Well, it's the mindset. For those who already do charity or are already active in their community, it's to start communicating. Also because customers care more and more about products. Even if it's B2B, they're starting to care about suppliers that care about sustainability. This is also forced somehow in Europe because big companies need to share their sustainable report, for example. But also many companies ask for the ESG rating for their suppliers. And customers prefer to buy sustainable products. So that is one point.Another point is that many companies think that sustainability is a cost instead of an investment. Now we already have a lot of studies saying that sustainability is not a cost, it is an investment and there is a return of investment even shorter than we thought before.Enlightened Management: Impact Marketing for SMBsAndrew Mitrak: I want to come back to your book Enlightened Management and how marketers, especially small business marketers and entrepreneurs can really apply impact marketing from the start. And this book is all about how to take these ideas of impact marketing and apply them for small and mid-sized businesses. I love this area because I've been a small business owner myself, I came from a family of small businesses, my professional work today is about marketing products to small businesses. And I just think that this is a really cool idea of how do you build a business that has social good and thinks about long-term impacts beyond just your profitability right from the start as you're building and founding and growing your business. So why did you focus on small businesses and what are some of the top lessons and takeaways that you have for small businesses and entrepreneurs?Gabriele Carboni: Well, big companies, they have more money and they are somehow forced or anyway invited by governments to do something. So they are already on the path of sustainability at least. And you can also think about Unilever with Paul Polman that brought the purpose at the center of every product. Small companies as said, they usually don't have the mindset or the money to start this kind of new way of marketing and of business. So we tried to give practical advice in the book. There is a whole chapter, a whole part about tools that small and medium enterprises can use.One concept I want to bring you is the concept of the new P's of marketing. So we have redefined the four P's, which are product, price, place, and promotion, of course, thinking about just one P, which is people, to the third power. So it's going to be People X Purpose X Planet, which equals prosperity. It works very well, it's also on the cover of the book. “People, purpose, planet” and P cubed. It works even better in Italian because people to the third power, we say people elevated to the third. I don't know if you say it also in English, but we say elevated. So meaning that people is the person is elevated if they work with purpose and it works for the planet.Andrew Mitrak: I see what you're saying because it's people and to the third power, the three would be elevated on top of it. We don't use that term, but I can visualize exactly what you're describing. Like just another example of the Italian language being much more poetic and pretty than English.The Importance of Purpose and ActionAndrew Mitrak: Are there any other takeaways for marketers and entrepreneurs into really applying this into practice or if somebody is a marketer who's listening to this today and they're inspired by some ideas of enlightened management, what could they do as a daily activity or is there planning their next marketing campaign to bring some of these ideas into their work?Gabriele Carboni: Well, something that was very difficult for me was to find my purpose. And it took me a lot of time. I explained it in another book, but there are those nights you cannot sleep because your brain still works. And I understood that my purpose was to help companies to function differently, to do business differently. This is because my father had a small company and he was one of those who focused on the product. It was a car repair garage and he was always focusing on the car. And the car was perfect, everything was great and you could trust that company that your car was perfect every time. But they forgot about the people who drive that car. So they were always late, they were not treating employees very well. And so I wanted to explain to companies that you can do business differently. So one thing is if you can find your purpose, you wake up every morning knowing what you are doing and why you are doing that. I think everything will be easier.Andrew Mitrak: I can relate, and I think everybody can relate, to those nights as you're thinking, “Am I doing the right thing with my life?” Even when you feel like you're successful, or you had what you thought you wanted, that time passes and you kind of get restless or you think of second guess things. I found that becoming a father and having kids also changed my perspective on a lot of things too. I think about the planet they'll inherit, the types of companies they'll work at, the types of jobs they'll have, and how you want them to spend their time. So it is something that. Thanks for sharing that was part of it because I certainly relate to it and I think listeners relate to that as well.Gabriele Carboni: Yeah. And I always follow Yoda's quote, which is, “Do or do not, there is no try.”Andrew Mitrak: You're totally right and you've exemplified it by asking Philip Kotler to co-author a book the first time you met him, asking the Pope for your endorsement. I think also even for me I relate to it somewhat on this podcast. You think about the things you want to do, the projects you want to do, and you're like, I can think about it, but how about I just do it? How about I just send Philip Kotler an email and see if he wants to talk? And then sometimes he will say yes and the universe pulls you in a direction or gives you a signal that you should keep kind of pulling on that thread and exploring those ideas.We've gotten very philosophical here…I've really enjoyed speaking with you. It's been so much fun going back from Italian humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. How all of these ideas from 500 plus years ago can impact how we think about marketing, what we choose to prioritize. And also I just loved hearing your stories both about meeting Phil Kotler and Pope Francis and it's just been a really fun conversation.Where can listeners find you online and how can they learn more and support your work?Gabriele Carboni: Well, LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. I always respond also to direct messages, so if you have any questions, just write to me and I'll reply.Andrew Mitrak: Thanks so much for your time, I've really enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to staying in touch.Gabriele Carboni: Thank you very much. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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  • Mark Tadajewski: Myth Busting, Mind Reading, and Rethinking Marketing's Origin Story
    A History of Marketing / Episode 14If you listened to my first podcast with Philip Kotler, you heard Phil discuss marketing emerging in the early 1900s as a form of “applied economics.” This week, my guest Mark Tadajewski shares research that casts doubt on that version of events, revealing a narrative of early marketing history that is much more complex than the traditional story and veers into surprising, supernatural territory.Mark Tadajewski is Professor of Marketing at The Open University and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Marketing Management. He’s a marketing historian that I admire for two reasons: First, there’s his dedication to his research. For the past two decades he’s pored over seemingly every artifact related to marketing history. When you listen to this conversation you can hear how he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the evolution of marketing thought and practice. I’m only a few months into exploring marketing history on this podcast, so speaking with Mark Tadajewski was a humbling experience.Second, there’s his bravery. Tadajewski’s research pokes holes in a narrative that’s endorsed by giants in the field of marketing. There’s considerable professional risk in second-guessing the likes of Philip Kotler. But Tadajewski is unafraid of surfacing what his research reveals, even when it links marketing’s development to fringe topics like telepathy, hypnosis, spiritualism, and other forms of psychical thinking. This podcast is called, “A History of Marketing” not “The History of Marketing.” There isn’t one single definitive story of history, so I enjoy presenting multiple perspectives of marketing’s development alongside each other through conversation.Here’s my conversation with Tadajweski:Myth Busting Conventional Marketing HistoryAndrew Mitrak: Mark Tadajewski, welcome to A History of Marketing.Mark Tadajewski: Andrew, it's nice to be here. Thank you for asking me.Andrew Mitrak: Yes, it's so great to meet with you. When I started this podcast, you were the exact type of scholar I was hoping to meet with, so I'm so glad we had this opportunity to connect. You've thought deeply about marketing's history and evolution and early beginnings and you published a great deal of research around this.Your LinkedIn profile states quote, "I challenge conventional perspectives to encourage a critical examination of marketing thought in the broader political economic environment.” And you've also been described as quote, "the foremost myth buster of marketing thought." What are some of the top myths you've busted or the non-consensus ideas you put forth? How have you sort of earned this reputation for challenging conventional perspectives?Mark Tadajewski: The myth busting thing, I think it's a result of somebody else's paper; [D.G. Brian Jones] a colleague that I worked with a lot actually in the last 20 years wrote a paper called "The Myth of the Marketing Revolution." And you see lots of similar titles to that. And so what I've done basically, whether it's the marketing concept, relationship marketing, service dominant logic, the history of motivation research, the history of marketing education generally, with all of those, I've generally looked at the literature and gone, okay, this is great.But I know from being a bit of a sad character who sat in offices at midnight, looking through the Harvard Business Review from the very first issue and going through everything, this doesn't seem quite correct. And so if I get a sense that there's an argument that I think is problematic, then I tend to start digging a little bit more.Rethinking "The Marketing Revolution": Did the Marketing Concept really start in the 1950s?There's a paper by a guy called Robert J. Keith, published in 1960 in the Journal of Marketing. It's called "The Marketing Revolution." Now Keith's core argument basically is that throughout the history of marketing, what we see is a progression. We've gone from—he's talking about the Pillsbury Company in particular, but he's generalizing his argument to business generally—So he says we've moved through a number of stages. He talks about a production era, which is roughly 1869 to about 1930. Then it's a sales era, 1930 to 1950. Then the marketing era in 1950. And that's where people usually stop. But he also mentions a couple more. He talks about marketing control, about 1958, and he talks about something later called “change.”Now, a lot of people, you know, if you open an introduction to marketing textbook, any of them pretty much, they'll say the marketing concept—this idea that the organizations should be orienting all their activities around the consumer—appears about 1950. I was like, really? You really survived in business, if you're a production-oriented company, just by producing whatever you could and hoping everybody buys it? Or through hard selling? You just sell people as many things as possible. You don't worry about overloading them? You don't worry about telling them fibs because you're never gonna see them again? It's a transactional orientation. You don't expect to see them again in the future, so you can get away with it now.And so what? In the 1950s people suddenly saw this light and went, "Oh, you know what we should be doing? Actually, we should be making things people want." And I thought that just doesn't sound really true.I started reading again some of the other historical papers that have been written in that area and people were contesting it; the textbooks were never picking it up. It was like, okay, this is really interesting.John Wanamaker: A 19th Century Relationship MarketerSo I started writing my own papers on how you should think about this differently. I found earlier examples like, you look at the merchant princes from the 1850s onwards basically.John Wanamaker for example, a really famous retailer, would walk around his store with customers and he would be offering them, you know, whatever sweets or nuts or whatever he was eating and chatting to them really nicely and kindly. And he was really smart because he would give gifts to the children. You know, so immediately you're impressing the parents, the kid loves it massively. And the kid goes away with a really positive impression and when it comes their turn to buy, they come back to you. And Wanamaker's there selling them the things that they actually want.Andrew Mitrak: Wanamaker also has one of the most famous quotes in marketing, which is something along the lines of, "I know that half my advertising is wasted, the problem is I just don't know which half."I gotta do a full episode on Wanamaker because he seems like a really fascinating guy.Mark Tadajewski: His stores are fantastic. But I used Wanamaker to say... I'm dipping about a little bit, but you get the marketing concept, and then you get later developments called relationship marketing that people say appear in 1970. That's complete fiction as well. You know, people have always been interested in long-term relationships.You read Henry Sidgwick, who was somebody that Harlow Gale used to read. He would talk about how people like to find organizations, you know, even in like 1850, that they actually like to deal with because if you could deal with them once and they sold you something great, you could go back and it meant you didn't have to think or worry about who you're buying from. So this, again, none of this was new.But when I was looking at the Robert J. Keith paper, I was like, okay, he says Pillsbury are orienting themselves all around the consumer, that's great, but I know that argument also appears in Percival White's work from 1927, where—and this is a pretty much near verbatim quote—it says, "the thesis of this book is that the beginning and end of all marketing is the consumer." It's like, oh, okay, that sounds very much like Robert J. Keith. So okay, we can critique it on simple grounds. People have mentioned this before.When you look at some of the citations of people mentioning Keith's work, they usually cite a guy called [JB] McKitterick, who actually says in one of his papers—and it's a really interesting thing that should have been the giveaway—you know, [paraphrasing], “People that take their time to read earlier business periodicals will usually find out that most of the ideas that we think are original to us have usually been articulated way before.”Not So “Customer-Centric”: Pillsbury’s Price Fixing CartelMark Tadajewski: So I go and read this material and I knew the history was really flawed. We're trusting Robert J. Keith quite a lot here. His narrative sounds a little bit self-serving. Pillsbury's gone from ignoring the consumer in 1870 to orienting everything that they do around them.I said, well, how can I find out what they were really doing? So I read the histories, that didn't tell me much more.I thought, oh, I know what I can do. I wasn't sure whether this would work, but I knew that the Freedom of Information Act in the United States—there are loads of reasons why you might not want to do this, but I did it anyway. So you basically write to the FBI. And you say, can you send me any information you have on this company, these people? And as long as they're dead or it's a company, they'll generally, depending on whether the information needs to be redacted or kept back, they'll send it to you. And they sent me the file on the Pillsbury Company.And so I was reading this. And as I'm reading this one Saturday morning, I'm sitting there and I've got, you know, bits of an idea for this paper and I'm reading it going, wait a minute. The period when he's saying we're now revolving everything we do around the consumer? Pillsbury was involved with a price fixing cartel, which is about the least customer friendly thing you could be doing, and the FBI were investigating them. And so it traces how they were doing this. Basically they were flying into, I think it was the Twin Cities. They were flying in there.The FBI were monitoring who was traveling, what they were—you know, they were finding out from hotels who had stayed where, what people had talked about. And it seems like they had people that were feeding them information, informants, saying there's price fixing going on amongst these 12 companies. And interestingly, when they confronted senior executives at Pillsbury with this information, they went, "No, no, no, no, no, no. We haven't done this," you know.I probably wouldn't do that with the FBI. Because they're going to find out. And so the FBI keep digging and they do find out substantial evidence that price fixing—basically people have been meeting. You can technically talk about past prices, yeah, that doesn't violate the Sherman Act, which is basically an act that deals with restraint of trade. But what you can't do is talk about even speculatively what prices might look like in 12 months. And that's where they really landed in a horrible bind.Andrew Mitrak: By the way, this is Pillsbury, the company that in America is best known for the Pillsbury Doughboy that goes "tee hee." Behind it are these people who are engaged in a price fixing cartel to undermine consumers.And what year are we in by the way? What year are these meetings happening?Mark Tadajewski: They say—the FBI seem to think it was happening before the period that they managed to investigate it, but they say at least since 1958 and up to the mid-1960s. And the company actually did say, well, this won't have impacted the consumer because even though we control this massive market for—it was flour, the product they were controlling the price of—they said, well, we're only dealing with business buyers basically, flour millers that will buy from us. So we're not actually dealing with the consumer. Which is hugely disingenuous because companies don't often go, "Oh, I'm paying more for this, we'll just deal with that and not pass it to the consumer." Prices, you know, get passed on to the consumer.So eventually, after the evidence was passed to them, in this period that would effectively be where Robert J. Keith is talking about marketing control. Now marketing control in Keith's article, or in later speeches, was basically the idea that the whole of the organization will revolve around marketing and marketing is in charge of all decision making effectively. At this point when Keith's talking about marketing control, they're actually engaged in trying to control the market in a far more nefarious and insidious way that has negative consequences for the consumer.So not only can you contest the history of the marketing concept by saying, well, it appears much earlier than lots of people think it does, and here are all the examples... but also, when Pillsbury were mentally orienting all their activities around the consumer—and they put it like this, "the consumer should be the center of the business universe"—they were actually doing what they could in this particular case to ensure that they maximize their profits rather than delivering, you know, more competitive prices to consumers. And again, you know, you can only study this using methods like asking for information from the federal government.Beyond “Applied Economics”: Psychology's Forgotten Role in Early MarketingAndrew Mitrak: There's an amazing use of the Freedom of Information Act. So I'm starting thinking about all the historical characters I'd like to do a FOIA request on. My first interview on this podcast was with Philip Kotler. I asked him about the origins of marketing and Kotler described it as emerging as a field of applied economics.Mark Tadajewski: Yeah.Andrew Mitrak: And this framing of marketing as applied economics, this is one of those conventional perspectives that you challenge. So what's your take on this description of marketing's origins?Mark Tadajewski: You see, it sounds really plausible. I mean really, really plausible. And again, when you've got people like Philip Kotler or Jag Sheth or Professor Kumar as well actually, in a paper in the Journal of Marketing, saying—Kumar said something like, "until 1945, it was generally accepted that marketing was developing out of economics," and I was like, okay, this is really good.So I started to look and see, well what are the connections here? And people didn't really explain it. And so that was where I was going, well this doesn't—right, so people assert it but they don't really tell me what happened. And when you start to look at what might have been the case, you read Bartels's History of Marketing Thought. And the chapter where Bartels is talking about marketing's connections to economics—something that was explored by a guy called Don Dixon in much more detail—Bartels actually goes, here's what marketing theorists and thinkers could have taken from economics, not what they did, what they could have taken. So it's speculative. And there's about three references at the end of the chapter, so it's like, you know, he's guessing a little bit, it seems.Now that some people have looked at what marketing has taken, Dixon does it really well, and it's been a long time since I've read it. But so I was looking at that and going, okay, the links seem to be a lot weaker. So, okay, maybe we need to be a bit more tempered. You know, we can't just assert marketing developed out of economics. Perhaps there are lots of different intellectual trajectories there. And so that's where I was thinking.And what Bartels actually does seem to suggest more clearly is that if anything, marketing was basically springboarding off economics. In the sense that, here's this fairly abstract science, yeah? Okay, but the marketplace is much more complex. So when you read a lot of the papers around the subject in the early history, what you find are early people that were trained in economics going out to the marketplace because they were aware that their abstractions didn't map onto what people were doing in the marketplace very well. So they do stuff like going into the shops, literally following goods as they were moving from production through to the ultimate consumer to see which intermediaries were adding value, who was important, who was not, where was cost being wasted effectively.So the picture was more complicated. And as I started to dip into this a lot more, it was like, well, okay Bartels suggests economics could have been important, but he also suggests that economics certainly wasn't the only major strand of thought that was influencing marketing thought. And he says psychology clearly is really important because, you know, if you're trying to understand the consumer, then you need to be getting into their mind in some way shape or form through appropriate research, even through introspection.But what I found really interesting about Bartels the more I looked at it, I was sitting there just trying to make sense of this. And he says, what's really, really, really important that psychology's told us a lot about? It's about the power of thought. I was like, okay, that's an interesting angle. And Bartels seems to imply that, you know, there's something there to be looked at. I started exploring, “Well, how's psychology influenced marketing thought generally?” And so that led me to people like Arthur Frederick Sheldon, Katherine Blackford who was a psychologist character analyst, and people at Harlow Gale. A lot of these figures aren't really written about very much in marketing, or if they are, it's very partially explored.And so I started exploring the different connections between psychology and marketing and that took me along, yeah, some really interesting pathways.Arthur Frederick Sheldon: The Correspondence SchoolThe more I looked at people like Arthur Frederick Sheldon and his correspondence course for example, which I wanted to explore particularly the early parts of marketing thought, how psychology and economics were vying for engagement there. And Sheldon in his textbooks basically that he would give to students, was talking about again the importance of studying the consumer and providing them with goods and services that they really want. And he made the really important point that people don't really buy products. They buy the services that the products provide, and people buy services that are useful. But to understand what useful actually means, you need to study the consumer and you need to understand how they might be thinking about a product, what types of goods might be really applicable to them.And you see multiple strands of psychological thought appearing at this time. Now, one of the most problematic, but she published with Sheldon in his correspondence course, was Katherine Blackford, and she was one of the earlier writers on psychology and marketing basically. And she called him—you know, she had a very high opinion of Sheldon and she called him like the equivalent of Shakespeare and he was called the philosopher of selling. He was a really prominent figure.But she was using something called character analysis, and this is never written about in textbooks for a very, very, very obvious reason. It was basically based on physiognomy—so the way people look, making judgments about their intellect by virtue of the slope of their forehead and how far back it goes, that thing—but also phrenology.Now that might be a little bit familiar. It was basically this idea that the brain is this cluster of localized organs effectively. And the more active they are, the more you can feel them, you know, through somebody's scalp basically. Really, really quasi scientific, but it was really powerful at that time. So this whole idea of making judgments about people and their psychology on the basis of the way that they look or the bumps on their head was being explored.Andrew Mitrak: You've talked about Arthur Frederick Sheldon and let's just ground listeners into it. Where are we in history? So who was Arthur Frederick Sheldon? I'm just looking him up here. He was born in 1868, lived through 1935 and within that period, when did he make most of his contributions to marketing thought or why consumers buy things?Mark Tadajewski: Right. Well, he started correspondence school in 1902.Andrew Mitrak: What exactly is a correspondence school?Mark Tadajewski: It's basically like distance learning, but 100 years ago, 100 plus years ago. So people would write to him, they'd subscribe to his school and he would offer discounts for cash, all this stuff to get people to subscribe. And you'd get a course basically, and you get all of these little manuals. In fact I might have one. So yeah, this is what you would get.Andrew Mitrak: So yeah, you're holding up a pamphlet. I see you have your post-it notes in it. How many pages is that?Mark Tadajewski: So the pamphlets, it's quite a small pamphlet, but this is 112 pages. They would be up to like 32 in each curriculum, okay? Again, these are nightmarish to get hold of now.But students would write to him. He would send them these booklets. And they'd have exercises in for people to do. But his whole philosophy of selling as I'd mentioned, it links very much with what Vargo and Lusch have more recently called service dominant logic, and it's this idea that people don't buy the goods, they buy the service that the good provides. And he said to his students, the people that employ you, that you work for, the people that you serve, they're interested in buying the service that you can provide. All everybody ever does is provide service, which is usefulness. So the more you train, the more useful you can be to an employer.Andrew Mitrak: So the students in this school, what are they hoping to get at the end of this program? I've signed up. Am I looking to have a career in sales, am I looking to have a career in advertising, am I hoping to become an early type of marketer? Like what is it that they hope to get out of it?Mark Tadajewski: All of the above. So the people taking these courses are the people that couldn't afford to go to university because obviously universities, you know, it's still the preserve of pretty affluent people or people that are willing to get into a lot of debt to get through it. Now, at this point, you've got universities full of relatively wealthy people and you've got a vast amount of people that are moving into sales oriented trades, working in shops, that thing. So this was like, okay, how can I improve my prospects going forward? Oh, I can take these and I can read them at night, I can upskill that way.And Sheldon would issue a certificate. I think it was—this was really intelligent—it was valid for three years or thereabouts. And every three years if you came back and did the course again, you would be regiven the certificate. So you could train in—you know, it covered salesmanship basically, but it would give all the students basically all the cutting edge buzzwords that they needed. It would give them insights into some of the most advanced thinking of the time, and character analysis and stuff like that was pretty advanced at that point.But he was, Sheldon was a very, very, very savvy marketer and this is something that we can all take from these people. Sheldon was connected to the Rotary Club. You know, these huge amounts of business people that start forming service clubs in the early 1900s or thereabouts, 1908, 1910 onwards. And so his students basically would do these courses, they would generally then get their certificate, they could then say to their employer "this is what I've done," and for a lot of people at that time, that would demonstrate the progression their employers wanted to see. They wanted to see students that were actually engaged and were willing to go home at the end of a day, read these booklets.Now, what was good about the booklets, I mean this is really smart. They not only gave you all the business, sales, marketing knowledge that you needed in a really succinct form and they're really clearly written by and large, but they also gave people advice about health, wellbeing, the types of exercise they should be doing. You know, encourage people to drink a lot more water, avoid alcohol, avoid cigarettes. You know, recommendations like, before a job interview, maybe don't stop at a saloon for a glass of whiskey because that's not gonna look great. You know that thing. But it was basically like a university course in miniature.But universities were incredibly jealous of this material when it started to appear because these courses were selling for relatively limited amounts of money to lots of people. And I mean Sheldon's school went pretty quickly from, you know, a couple of thousand students to 15,000, and then by the time Sheldon dies, it's estimated that he's taught at least 250,000 students across the world.So he was an influential guy.Andrew Mitrak: It's this early distance learning, hundreds of thousands of students have purchased and signed up for these pamphlets, they've read about that and this is years before the MBA program emerges. This is the certificate you can get if you want to be in sales and show to your employer that you have the knowledge, that you're eager, that you're learning about it in your own time and this can help you stand out from other candidates. Was the word marketing used in these books or is it more that it had a lot of the fingerprints of marketing? It just wasn't sort of rolled up into marketing. Or how did marketing sort of fit into the Sheldon school?Mark Tadajewski: A lot of the time they're talking about salesmanship rather than marketing. But marketing as a word has been around since like the 16th century, 17th century maybe, but it's been around for a long time. At this point they're talking a lot about salesmanship, but in a lot of ways that have contemporary resonance.Sheldon's Ideas: Business Building, Relationship Marketing, and Customer Lifetime ValueMark Tadajewski: I mentioned relationship marketing. That's shorthand basically for forming relationships with consumers. Sheldon's whole business philosophy was oriented around what he called business building, which is this idea that once you've got a customer, you want to hold onto them. And so he talks about the permanency of patronage.Now there's a really cool example and this is all information that he's giving to students, you know, who haven't maybe got mentors or anything like this. So this is all really valuable. He talks about basically every interaction that you have with a customer can build and build and build and you can sell them more and more. And so he talks about a young couple who come into a store and they're after a parasol for their baby carrier basically. And he goes, you may or may not make the sale at that moment, but what you've got is information. You've got information that at this house live a young couple who are relatively affluent, who have a young child. And the child's going to grow through these years and you can probably every couple of years sell them something different that's right for their child at that point of development. And the ideal he said—and again this is pretty heavily gendered—is you want to keep the customer until the point when the mother of the family is buying a tombstone for the father. So, you know, when people talk about customer lifetime value, this is...Andrew Mitrak: That's literally customer lifetime value.Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, you've got them from the beginning till the end.Andrew Mitrak: The other thing that you bring up with these Sheldon books is that it's not just about salesmanship, but it's about lifestyle. It's about how you present yourself, how you're healthy.Mark Tadajewski: Well you've got to remember that, you know, it's an early professionalization move because you've got traveling salesmen at that point who are quite well known for living, you know, fairly alcohol infused lives and socializing with people to get them to buy. And Sheldon's point is, no, no, no, no, no. If you want to have a long career and if you want to be the professional individual that you are, this is how you should live your life. You know, you shouldn't tell rude jokes. You should drink in moderation if at all. And he provides exercises that people should be doing as well. And he says, you know, if you do all of the things that I recommend—now, this is a bit dark—you could live till you're 100 years old. Now Sheldon didn't. He lived till he was like 67. So, you know, there's a mixed message there.This has been happening for a long time. And you can understand why because it's great for employers. If you've got somebody that's been through this course, you're going to get employees that know how to take care of themselves. They know about relevant business practices, and you're probably going to get quite a lot of mileage out of them because if they're young and they're healthy and they're engaged and they're not drinking heavily, they're going to stay in your employment for a lot longer. It's not coercive. You know, it's power relations in a really positive way. In other words, I become a great employee by doing all of these things. I live a long, happy, fruitful life that works well for my employer, it works well for the banks that fund my employer's expansion of his business. Everybody benefits effectively. So it's a really seductive discourse.Weird “Science”: Phrenology, Hypnosis, Telepathy, and Psychic InfluencesAndrew Mitrak: There's that seductive discourse that is, you know, overall towards health if you're encouraging people to exercise, not drink or reduce smoking and things like that. But there is also sort of this thread of the weird ideas of psychology. Phrenology you mentioned. What was his relationship to Katherine Blackford? Do they collaborate with each other?Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, it's a complex one. Sheldon basically sought out people that were at the cutting edge of whatever discipline they were at or involved with. And he saw Katherine Blackford—she was apparently a trained medical doctor, there's some uncertainty on this front. But whatever she was, she was extremely well versed in then popular-ish ways of looking and understanding people: phrenology, physiognomy. These were not massively obscure at this point and marketing did a lot to try and beat it out of its early practices.But so he's looking at people like that. But when you read his books, you get a lot of very up to date perspectives, you know, business building, service, all these kinds of things, the importance of market research in different ways. But then there's also really what strikes the contemporary reader as a bit of a shocker, because he's there going, "Oh, and now I'm going to talk about hypnosis and its role in sales." You're like, okay, that's unusual. And then it moves on fairly quickly to telepathy, which in case people aren't familiar with it, it's mind-to-mind communication without the mediation of the ordinary senses. So thought transfer effectively.Andrew Mitrak: Telepathy is having a comeback. There's a very popular podcast right now...Mark Tadajewski: The Telepathy Tapes. Yeah, yeah.And again, what people need to always remember when you look at this material and even in the contemporary present—because there's telepathy being brought back into business through materialist telepathy and you've got brain-to-computer interfaces and a whole bunch of things—it's not dismissing these things outright, but looking at this literature and going, well what were they really talking about?Now Sheldon in terms of hypnotism, he's dead against it, because he's very much of the mind that marketing and sales education or engagement basically with the customer should always be about educating them. It's not about deadening their will, which is how he viewed hypnosis. You know, imagine let's go a bit extreme, the people on the stage that you've seen being hypnotized where they're suddenly, you know, dancing like a duck or quacking or all this stuff.So that's what he's reacting to. It's like the hypnotist is seen to be somebody, like Demare's work, you know, somebody that's got immense power over the person that they're hypnotizing and it deadens the will entirely. Now Sheldon was very savvy because he realized that wasn't a good look, you know, then you don't want to be doing that. So he's very critical of hypnosis, but very positive about telepathy. Right?And so this makes a lot of sense when you start looking at the intellectual foundations underpinning it. So he's using a lot of the material from a guy called Prentice Mulford, who talks about mind-to-mind communication in his own way. And also a guy called Thompson J. Hudson who wrote a book where it was all about psychic development basically, but he talked about the self as divided into the objective self and the subjective self. Now what this should be telling a lot of people is the idea that the conception of how Sheldon and people at that period were understanding who we are and how we act and how we think is way more complicated than a lot of the early literature tells you. It just tells you if you read EK Strong's work from the 1920s, it just talks about consciousness. It doesn't talk about the strata of the mind or anything like this.And Sheldon's drawing upon this literature. He says actually there's effectively a subconscious and a superliminal consciousness. And that material feeds into the discussion on telepathy in the sense that the subjective self that Sheldon's actually referring to were seen to be the conduit for where our memories are stored, is the facility that enables telepathy effectively. And it will eventually become—you know, the subjective self is also defined as like the most suggestible part of who we are. They often split the self into two brothers. The objective self being the smart logical one who doesn't take other people's opinions without extensive critique, the rational part of our mind. And the subjective self is the brother that's been left in charge of the business that's not really that skilled at it and is ripped off by sales and other people who can tell them basically whatever they want.So Sheldon's there using all of this material and he says, well, the literature on telepathy suggests that this is actually very productive. So he explains how you can think about using it in your own business practice and he basically encourages the neophyte salesman to be as sensitive as possible, so that you can sense when the psychological moment in terms of making the sale is there before the consumer themselves is actually aware of the moment. And he says, and you can do this through telepathy. And this is going to, you know, 250,000 students."Telepathy" in Sales: Literal Mind Control or Enhanced Sensitivity?Andrew Mitrak: And if I was to steelman telepathy or try to take it as seriously as I could. Obviously there's reasons to be skeptical of telepathy, but if I also think of all of the sort of unconscious communications and there's what's spoken but then there's—if I'm a salesperson, there's how I present myself, how I dress, how I greet you, all of the things that are like non-verbal communication that can influence somebody. How products are packaged, how they're presented, the idea of desires and keeping up with your neighbors and all of the irrational thoughts that we have.All of that to an early thinker who's trying to find new words for it could think of that as telepathy in a way? Or it's something that's magical that's hard to quantify. Was that what was influencing this word of telepathy or do they literally mean like, I'm going to use brain to brain transmission of thoughts and stuff? Was it sort of that first sense or more of like that literal sense of how we think of it today?Mark Tadajewski: Both. Yeah, so in other words, all the things that you mentioned about appearance, your knowledge of the products, your ability to engage with people, a lot of that was associated with being personally magnetic. You know, having some charisma that would engage people, being interested in their interests and trying to discern what would most appeal to them.But they go beyond this, quite considerably beyond it in some cases where it's very much not only do you need to know about the consumer, but in an ideal sense, the person interested in telepathy should—or the salesman that's thinking about using it—you know, wants to find themselves a nice quiet location where they can visualize the consumer they're trying to target and try to imagine them in their life and what they're doing at that moment and send, you know, whatever messages you're trying to convey, literally project them. One of the examples is, try and imagine the person that you're seeing like they're at the end of a long tube and that will help you funnel your thoughts towards this person. I know, I know how this sounds. But they took it deadly seriously.Now, when you read William Walker Atkinson's work, who's similar in orientation to Sheldon. Atkinson's there going, well, you know, we might not be successful the first few times we try telepathy, but you've got to practice this and there are lots of ways you can practice it. And he basically gives people exercises to do. So you know, there's a phenomenon called the sense of being stared at basically, and you may or may not have experienced it yourself.Andrew Mitrak: So this is the idea of if I'm at a restaurant and somebody across the restaurant is looking at me – or if I'm observing somebody else, there's some sense that you know you're being watched. Is that sort of the idea?Mark Tadajewski: Yeah, and that was one of the exercises that he recommended to try and enhance your psychic sensitivity. You know, to see whether you can make people turn around when you stare at them from the back. And there's a lot of this. You know, like trying to justify telepathy by going, it's a bit like wireless telegraphy. So you see people like Mark Twain talking about this, Samuel Clemens. So they give them lots of examples about how to do it.But what you seem to find is that there's a date often given for when there's a shift away from these arguments. And it's 1912, it seems to be. And so William Walker Atkinson in particular, who's similar in orientation to Sheldon, in his work in particular, in the early literature you see him very occult oriented. You know, "Here's hidden knowledge that I'm imparting to you as a student," that thing. But later on he suddenly reverses. He suddenly says, actually no, people aren't taking psychology seriously because we've tied it too closely to the occult, to telepathy, to all of these kinds of unusually esoteric knowledge that people, particularly business people aren't seen to take too seriously. So he reverses and moves away from those perspectives. But, you know, irrespective of where you look, again, I got tons of this stuff lying around.[Holds up booklet] So for people that can't see that, that's a booklet on Practical Mind Reading by William Walker Atkinson.Mind Reading and Sales Management: The Impact of “New Thought”Andrew Mitrak: What year was Practical Mind Reading published?Mark Tadajewski: This was… 1906.Andrew Mitrak: And so what's the relationship between this and early marketing? Practical mind reading and early marketing? What is the connection between the two?Mark Tadajewski: Well William Walker Atkinson, who was a very astute promoter of this literature, so he would write on really occult subjects and also really sales managerial stuff, because his background—he worked in his dad's retail store at a greengrocer as a child and then later became a lawyer, when that career didn't flourish in the way that it was intended, turned to a lot of this material.And they're all—all of these people basically at this time, they're all very much immersed in a literature that's called New Thought, okay? This is not sales or psychology that's necessarily underwriting a lot of what they're thinking, it's New Thought, which is the idea that thought, the way we think generally, has an ontologically powerful role in the world. In other words, our thoughts can shape reality. That to some people may sound a bit like, you know, the book The Secret or the Netflix film.Where it's like, "Oh, you know, if I treat the universe like it's a vending machine, I can manifest whatever I want." You hear this stuff everywhere. Now they cite a lot of the New Thought literature, but what they do not tell you in The Secret in other places, which William Walker Atkinson and Sheldon do is, yeah, you know, have your subjective dreams, have your wishes, mobilize them to actually get out and do something in the world. It's basically a way of encouraging people to be optimistic and, you know, people that didn't have the financial backing that other people had to go, "Well I can do something with my life," and it was meant to encourage them.But they said, okay, your practice as a marketer or a salesperson or whatever hinges on subjective realization—having those dreams, having those wishes and mobilizing them—but then objective realization. In other words, your subjective wishes will come to absolutely nothing if you don't go out into the marketplace and work really, really, really hard. The “work really hard” stuff's forgotten from The Secret. Everything just appears for people in The Secret, money and parking spots and all this stuff.But so that's what they're all working with. And so that literature gets very occult. They start talking about how the unseen world—and by the unseen world, I mean dead people—can help you and can give you energy and can help you generate your ideas and get them out into the marketplace. And it seems very, very occult, but it's—and a lot of it is quite esoteric, but it has a really optimistic undertone, which is, okay, life may have dealt you a really nasty deck of cards, but let's go into the world with our best foot forward and here's how we can make a success of ourselves. Positive thinking, being enthusiastic, being engaged with people, reading this literature that was meant to improve you, enhance your sales presentations and skills and engagement and healthy living. In other words how you can actually do something really successful with your life. So that's where a lot of them are coming from. And they'll take any scientific perspective that they think will advance their interests to do so and it was, you know, hence the number of students, very successful.Harlow Gale and Psychical Advertising ExperimentsAndrew Mitrak: So continuing down this sort of unusual branch of marketing, one name that you brought up earlier is Harlow Gale. He's a relatively little known person today, but he lived from 1862 to 1945 and you wrote about him in a paper called "Rethinking Harlow Gale: the psychical influences on his contributions to advertising and their enduring reverberations." So can you share with listeners who was Harlow Gale and what were his contributions?Mark Tadajewski: Gale, really challenging figure. I mean really challenging in the sense that he was supremely smart and also very forthright in terms of pursuing views that he felt were correct. So he had a very short academic career effectively. He was basically forced out of his institution. I think it was a really short span of time; people can find it in the article. But Gale's an interesting character because he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. Now the Society for Psychical Research study things like telepathy, clairvoyance, apparitions of the dead, all of these kinds of things.Now Gale becomes interesting in the sense that he's known as an experimentalist in advertising, one of the earliest. What people don't get from previous studies on Harlow Gale is the fact that before he becomes the experimentalist in advertising, he was actually going to seances and all these kinds of things where he's looking at people that are trying to make other groups think in certain ways and he's very interested in what they're saying, what they're understanding.But when somebody's there saying "I can see, you know, God or Jesus or the saints in front of me," Gale was noticing how these dynamics operated in the seance context. And Gale goes, "What's the unifying thread here?" It's suggestion. These people are all being encouraged to see the saint, to see—in one case it was a floating vegetable above somebody's head—you know, all of these kinds of things. And so Gale's there going, okay, this tells me something about human nature effectively, that people can be very suggestible.Gale's immersed in the Society for Psychical Research, their literature, especially F.W.H. Myers's work on the subliminal consciousness, and what Gale will call the multiplex self. Now that just basically means as intelligent human beings, we're both intelligent, we're also suggestible, but we also have a superliminal consciousness and a subliminal consciousness. Note the term. I'm not saying unconscious because even your subliminal consciousness was believed to be processing data constantly, okay?So it's a really sophisticated view. Think: if I go to sleep and I dream about a work task, the dream can sometimes provide the solution if your brain's relaxed and it's thinking in different ways.Now Gale's bringing all those ideas to his advertising work as well. So he's studying his students. And he goes, okay, I'm going to mail practitioners, see what advertising media they use, how they promote their goods. And I'm also going to get my students to look at some of these adverts as well because I'm interested in, you know, what gets their attention effectively when they look at an advert. Is it the text, is it the imagery?Now, what he's trying to identify there is, right, not everybody will be affected by advertising in the same way. Some people will be much more critical and uninfluenced than others. There will be some people that can't articulate why an advert or why a particular brand or why a product influences them at all.That was his cleavage point for trying to theorize how the subconscious plays a role in advertising interpretation. His argument—and this is where we have to give him loads of credit because it's really early on—was if somebody can't really explain why they bought a product, maybe they've been influenced at a subliminal level, and that's the influence that's going on there. Now subliminal and subliminal self, this isn't framed as a negative thing. It's not Hidden Persuaders. Gale's just going, there are other ways for us to be absorbing information and making sense of it.Now, Gale's work really can only be understood if you combine the background in the Society for Psychical Research with his studies in advertising. That in short is what he did. But when you read earlier studies, they would just mention, "Here's Harlow Gale, published on advertising, did this, did this," and published in a journal called the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.But nobody decided for whatever reason—and I'm not judging anybody—nobody went, "Well, that's an interesting journal." And when you do start to dig into the background you go, okay, he's making sense of human suggestibility in these contexts and he's studying people in seances, he's studying people that are claiming clairvoyance, seeing distant sights way beyond what you can see literally in front of you. And so he's trying to explore whether some of these things exist or whether there are other dynamics in play. And the dynamics that they come together on is some degree of suggestibility that gets in below our conscious analysis basically.Walter Dill Scott vs. Harlow Gale: Reframing Subconscious Influence as “Suggestion”Now, the difference between him and Walter Dill Scott: Walter Dill Scott really doesn't like psychical research at all. He thinks it's something that is making psychology look ludicrous, in other words. Now Scott was publishing a lot on psychology and was well connected to the business community. And so he was explicitly trying to demarket psychology as he understands it away from earlier psychical perspectives. Now the turning point for him seems to be, he goes home to visit his family and a friend of his goes, "Wait a minute, why are you studying psychology? Why would you be interested in all these occult weirdnesses?" And he seems to take that really to heart because when you read his books, he's there going, "You know, this is all medieval superstition." Doesn't engage with the literature like Harlow Gale who has been a member of the Society for Psychical Research, read all of the literature, undertaken experiments himself, been really involved with all the key figures in it.Walter Dill Scott, 1869 –1955And so this seems very odd. And my point when I was looking at Walter Dill Scott's work was, okay, this is interesting. What you get here is you go from a multiplex interpretation of the consumer—this consumer who is stratified, so you've got subliminal, subconscious, it's a multifaceted consumer—to Walter Dill Scott who just goes, no, the consumer's not—he doesn't say multiplex, he just goes they're duplex. In other words, they can be rational and they can be suggestible. But most people are—and this is where we're problematizing the notion of economic man in a really big way—most people aren't rational at all. We like to think we are, but most of us are really the creature of suggestion, he argues. Now that's a perspective that's really common at the time.But Scott is there, so Scott's there going, psychology is not psychical research. People are influenced by suggestion much more. And he dismisses psychical research as superstition, doesn't engage with the work. And for me, my point in looking at the transition between the two was, Scott's there claiming he's a scientist and yet he completely voids any engagement with the scientific method. He doesn't read the literature, he doesn't make a rational reasoned interpretation of it and critique of it.He just goes "this is medieval superstition" and dismisses it. So the idea is that psychology as it's imported and incorporated into marketing isn't necessarily stretching our critical faculties, in other words. When it's introduced at that point, it's introduced in a really, really unscientific, uncritical way. That's why I wasn't a big fan of Walter Dill Scott's work. He had a huge impact, but Gale was more interesting.Andrew Mitrak: On Walter Dill Scott's biography—so born 1869, lived until 1955. He was the president of Northwestern University, wrote a book called The Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice in 1903, and continued to write about the psychology of advertising. He was a professor of advertising and psychology. So an academic clearly held in high regard as president of Northwestern, early thinker in psychology and advertising.But the quibble with him is not so much whether telepathy and other sort of weird parts of advertising were wrong or not, it's more that he dismissed them just because of all of the baggage that they carry, or that there wasn't a critical analysis of it. He was more, "Hey, just call all that stuff suggestion instead." Is that sort of the right way to think about it?Mark Tadajewski: That's pretty much it. But you know what the really hilarious thing was? Walter Dill Scott—remember I already said to you that Sheldon was very critical of hypnosis because he saw it as deadening the will—Walter Dill Scott taught suggestion by hypnotizing his students because he was a trained hypnotist, who was really highly skilled. So the way that he would teach them would be to say, "What do you think of this product?" and it would be like, you know, some soap or something. And it would smell horrible, or perfume. And he would say "It smells—you think it smells really sweet," and they would say it smells really sweet. And he would say to their students, "You see, this is what suggestion is. Of course, of course though, business people don't hypnotize like this, but they do engage in suggestion," which of course is meant to limit the way the consumer's critical of your offerings.But you know, he's an interesting character but he's full of contradictions. But he was really smart in the sense that he went, spoke to practitioners, wrote really easy accessible books for them. And then every time he rewrote material he would introduce case studies where people had applied his ideas from his earlier books and he would summarize them. So in other words, you got theory, you got people that have used the ideas and here's how they benefited from it. So he was super astute. And again, I'm not dismissing his contributions, I'm just saying if you're going to claim to be scientific, then it would be nice to see you actually apply the scientific method when you critique something.Fom AIDA to the AIDAS Model: Sheldon's Lasting Impact on AdvertisingAndrew Mitrak: Just to recap. We've talked about A.F. Sheldon who had a massive influence on marketing especially because of the sheer volume of people that he educated through his correspondence schools in the first half of the 20th century.Mark Tadajewski: His impact was huge in the sense people that you've spoken to have mentioned the AIDA framework: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. Well Sheldon said, yeah, that's great, but remember we're trying to create the permanency of patronage. You don't just get people to buy your product, they've got to be satisfied because if they're satisfied they then become confident in your offerings and come back. So the AIDA model was transformed into the AIDAS model with Satisfaction being on the end. So he actually impacted advertising theory in a really substantive way as well.Why Was This History Lost? An Accidental Omission or a Deliberate Burial?Andrew Mitrak: That's right. So Sheldon is impacting advertising theory. Gale has this sort of unusual strand of thinking where his work has touched on clairvoyance, telepathy, spiritualism, and he's also one of the first experimenters in marketing and advertising. There's this whole body of work in the early 1900s that is these weirder things that are sort of lost to history. The question is, why was all of this lost to history? How did it sort of get buried in the history of marketing?Mark Tadajewski: You know, history's written by the winners by and large. And people like to tell really progressive narratives about themselves. You know, when I refer to the Pillsbury narrative earlier, it's a really progressive narrative that suggests marketers have gone from this point to now being much more enlightened. And it doesn't look great to be looking back on your history and go, okay, we talked about phrenology, we talked about telepathy, we talked about hypnosis, and there's a lot of occult material embedded in all of this. That's not a great look in an introductory textbook.So I think a lot of this material disappears because one, the material's really fragile, that disappears. It's not saved, it's not scanned by a lot of people. And then, you know, as these narratives like "marketing's applied economics" get repeated, they just become a—you know, I don't mean this in a rude way—but they become a shortcut to thinking. You know, so it's like, well that's that history and that's what I've got to teach. I don't need to think about it anymore than that. And it can become, you know, it smothers critical thinking effectively. But we're all guilty of it, you know, in lots of areas of our lives. We have to just assume that what we're being told is correct.And that's really it. History's written by the winners and a lot of this stuff is written by people who have been written out of history in lots of different ways.Finding Marketing History Through Foucault and the Cold WarAndrew Mitrak: I want to ask you what initially drew you to marketing as a field?Mark Tadajewski: The honest answer is, it was really the only first subject, you know, that I really enjoyed. I really didn't like school full stop and then I got to college. Not college in the American sense, college in—I was 16 and I'd failed most of my exams, so I went to the local college where they helped me a lot. And I took a business studies course and it was the first time things seemed to drop into place, you know, and it was just fluid for me. So the minute we got to marketing in that course, I was kind of—it was just really interesting. I really enjoyed it. And of course, the minute you enjoy something, you just immerse yourself in it, so you improve much more rapidly anyway. And it was off the back of that really.And then I very luckily went to a great university where I did political economy and politics, but then as a master's degree, I went to the University of Leicester and did an MSc in marketing. And there were some amazing scholars there. And again, this probably makes me look really shallow, but I went to see the professor of economics who was the head of the school at that point. And I walked into his room and it was just—it looked like an Amazon depot. It was just crazy books everywhere. And I just thought this is so cool. This guy just sits and reads and thinks and lectures and writes papers. I mean, what an amazing job. And I was like, okay, this is interesting.And he was really good. He'd recommend readings to us every week and I was that student—I always get to lectures and stuff really early because I always dread walking in late. And I'd be there like an hour or two before the school opened because I'd go on the train. And I used to sit and read all the material he'd recommended, which I didn't think was unusual. I just thought I was doing the right thing. And he used to say, "Oh, what do you think about Coca-Cola's valuation?" or something like that. And I'd have all the figures because I've been reading Kellogg on Marketing that he'd been flashing up the week before. And so, you know, we'd developed a bit of rapport and he said, "Well, we've got, you know, a PhD program." And I went, "Well I'm broke," which has been the story of my life at least up to that point. And he said, "Well we can figure something out," and he got me onto the program and I was surrounded by really, really talented people who basically gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted. And that's really unusual. So I was just incredibly fortunate in so many different ways.And when I got to the PhD program, they said, "Well, what are you interested in doing?" One of the people that supervised me was an organization studies theorist. No, I wasn't supervised by marketing scholars. And they said, "Well, do you like history? What do you like?" you know, thing. I said, yeah, that sounds good. And they recommended certain readings. They told me to go and look at Michel Foucault's work in particular. Really prominent French theorist who writes books that scare everybody to death. My supervisor, he was a really smart guy, his name is Campbell Jones, and he said, "Well here's a book called The Order of Things and it's about all these transitions between different disciplines and how they change. Oh it's the scariest book you'll ever read." And he said, "Could you do something like that?" And I went—because you don't want to say no—I went, "Yeah, yeah, sure, sure. I'll give it a go." And that was my introduction to it. We didn't have any formal training in terms of studying the history of marketing. Didn't know anybody that had really done it. So I just started reading and reading and reading and it started from there basically.Andrew Mitrak: You found marketing when you were around 16 years old then. Yeah. And it was this Foucault example that sort of led you to dive deeper into marketing history. Yeah. Where did you start? You have this assignment, you have this big ambitious goal. What do you look for first?Mark Tadajewski: I was really interested in how people come to think in the way that they do. How does our world become taken for granted? And so I knew that there've been lots of studies on the development of marketing, but very few of them had actually really linked them to the political, economical, social changes going on. There'd been a few papers but very, very, very few. And the reason is because it's really hard to do and it requires a lot of leg work. So I went, okay, that's something I could do.So I started to dip into, you know, looking at the history of the business school, looking at the development of marketing and then going, okay, what important turning points have we maybe not paid much attention to? And one that hadn't at that point really been noticed particularly—because I'm talking about 2002 at this point—was the Cold War. I was like, okay, this clearly had massive ramifications, you know, 1947 to 1990. How did this impact on marketing and the business school?And so I started reading around it generally and I chanced upon a—it was a book review and it was in the Journal of Marketing and it was a book called Philosophical and Radical Thought in Marketing that was being reviewed. And the person reviewing it was a guy called Hal Kazanjian. Could be pronouncing that very badly wrong. Sorry Hal. And in it he talks about how, you know, philosophical and radical approaches to marketing, this is really cool, this is really different. But he goes, you know, previously we wouldn't have done it. He doesn't really explain in a huge amount of detail why not. So because I've never really had a filter where this stuff is concerned, I just emailed him and said, "Why? What does this mean? Can you tell me?"And he went, yeah, yeah. He goes, "Well, you know, at this point in time, of course there's a really virulent anti-communist movement." And he said being called liberal was bad enough. But if you so much as looked a little bit, you know, much further left leaning, then it became a real issue. What was scary enough when you started to dive into this in a bit more detail, it was enough for somebody to point at you and say "This is this guy's political economic orientation. He's a fellow traveler or he's interested in reading left leaning newspapers," and it could get you into a world of trouble. And Hal said his doctoral chair, the person on his committee, hadn't been very quick to sign a loyalty oath, you know, basically saying "I'm not a communist, there are no weird views being espoused here," and that was enough to get him basically, I believe, fired, ruined his career, had severe implications for his life.The Cold War's Chilling Effect: How Politics and Funding Shaped Marketing AcademiaMark Tadajewski: What I started finding the more I dug around this, this wasn't unusual. So you'd see people turn up at lectures that you were doing, you know, at that point and you wouldn't know who they were. There were just two or three people stood at the back. It was external monitors evaluating what people were saying. And did you—in other words, were you being critical of the United States and its stance and its political economic system? Were you mentioning Russia too frequently? Were you mentioning it in a positive way? And if you did, there'd be serious consequences for you.Now, at an individual level that sounds scary enough, but this was a fairly widespread phenomenon at this point in time as I started to find. And so I was there going, okay, there are lots of individuals that are being affected quite negatively by this. You hear about McCarthyism and you know, everybody gets the image, you know, it's real red scare terror and going after people in Hollywood, but also really badly in the university. And so I was like, okay, here are individuals being affected, but where are the institutional shifts? Are there bigger factors in play?And I noticed that the business school was being criticized for producing overly descriptive research. The staff were being criticized because they didn't have PhDs generally. The students weren't seen to be very good. And so at this point it's like, okay, they suddenly start to get a lot of funding from the Ford Foundation in particular, which is a big philanthropic organization. That's an interesting link.And what I noticed was that the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller—the big three they're called—they were focused upon by a number of really prominent government committees, you know, in the mid to late, I think it was the 1950s, but in a big way. And what the committees were focusing upon—so there was a report in 1952 and I think another one in 1953—they said, okay, we're looking at the philanthropic foundations and their funding and they seem to have been supporting social science in quite a big way. And so they'd been looking at racism, inequality, how they can handle some of those issues basically. Now the big problem was that the label social science, for a scary number of people, was conflated with socialism or some form of social philosophy.And so you've got these foundations who are very powerful, very affluent being targeted by the government effectively. And they're there going, "Oh no, no, no, no. No, we're not. This isn't a social philosophy. In fact, what we've been doing if you look carefully is by studying some of these issues, we've basically been looking for ways to relieve the pressure in the system." You can get a sense of the desperation. And so they thought it very appropriate to suddenly twist their funding a little bit, to start funding something that would be perceived to be ideologically neutral or preferably a big support for the US political economic system. The business school was an ideal candidate.Ford Foundation's Role in Promoting "Behavioral Science"Mark Tadajewski: [The Ford Foundation] poured a lot of money into this, into the business school generally in an effort to upgrade it. In other words to make the business school, the research that was being funded, the people that were being trained, as scholarly, scientific, as objective, as neutral, as behavioral scientific as they possibly could. Now you'll hear a lot of people toss about the label behavioral science. That wasn't developed off the back of academics coming together and deciding that that was the label that fit what they did. That was a label that the Ford Foundation actually coined and then said "This is what we're funding. Do you fit into this specialism?"Now they funded lots of business schools, but lots of individual professors in particular. One name that I'm sure you've heard before, in fact I know you have: Wroe Alderson was given a visiting professorship because his research was very interested in improving marketing management and in improving executive decision making, a lot of his work in that area. But also people like Philip Kotler.Philip Kotler received money for computer simulation. Again think: computer technology enhancing executives and their decision making ability, very ideologically neutral, very positive in other words. And then, thinking about Jag Sheth. Jag Sheth mentioned in his discussion with you that he'd been connected—well he was obviously connected to John Howard. John Howard was funded in multiple different ways by the Ford Foundation because not only did they fund institutions, training programs, individual scholars, but they wanted to fund textbooks because how do you get this vision of what marketing and business research should look like out to as many people as possible? You produce textbooks.Now Howard—the first book he did, it was something like, I can't remember the title of it off the top of my head, but the first book that he produced, Marketing and Executive Behavior or something like that, was funded by the Ford Foundation. The second one was a book called Marketing Theory which was a general version of the first book that he produced. And then the third, that material fed into the Howard and Sheth book that Jag was talking about. So the Ford Foundation's fingerprints were on a lot of this material. And a lot of the mathematical specialization that you see growing in the 1960s developed off the back of the Ford Foundation and their training programs in advanced mathematics and statistics.Now, pretty much any big name from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s either came in contact with the seminars themselves. Kotler was at one for example. Kotler's a very skilled mathematician, and the first edition of his textbook was much more mathematically oriented but he was told to revise it because it didn't have enough pictures, quote unquote, which I thought was cool. But so you see then, they funded these really prolific researchers and you had to be, you know, somebody that they thought was super talented, highly likely to be very research productive. And people like Kotler, Perry Bliss, John Howard, they all fit that mold, and they did end up making huge contributions. So Ford's money went a long way to turning marketing into the positivistic, managerial, quantitatively oriented discipline that it is by and large in lots of countries. And that's really a result of the Ford Foundation's funding. And that you can trace back to the Cold War. And so the way the discipline looks isn't just a natural occurrence of scholars coming together. It's tied firmly to political and economic factors and the need for scholars at that point in time to be pledging that they were in the fight against communism effectively, which, you know, it's understandable, isn't it?Risks of Researching Marketing's PastAndrew Mitrak: Researching the history of marketing, it requires a lot of legwork. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. One, you're researching the history of ideas and there are certainly physical outputs like advertising or public relations things or textbooks where you have a physical record that's written and captured in some way, but a lot of those things, they can be ephemeral. They sort of disappear. Also you're studying the idea of thought, which is an organizational structure which may not be captured in the same way. So are those the reasons why it requires a lot of legwork to study marketing history or are there other factors at play that make it a particularly difficult or labor intensive field to study?Mark Tadajewski: Well it's high risk, you know? Because when you've got a lot of people saying, here's the way the discipline developed or here are the core theoretical traditions and this is how they've developed. You've got to go, well, that seems reasonable, but I think there's something more there. And you have to, to some extent trust your gut and then start to go digging around. And you can go down lots of blind alleyways and that kind of, you know, if you're going to do that as a PhD student, you could run up to the time that you're actually allowed to do research for and you could get nowhere, so it's really risky.But you're right, getting hold of a lot of this material. In fact I've got—I'll show you this—getting hold of stuff like this is really tricky. This is from 1906 I think this one.Andrew Mitrak: And for listeners who are listening and not viewing, can you describe what you're holding there?Mark Tadajewski: Yeah this is The Business Philosopher which is the journal that Arthur Frederick Sheldon published. So if you were subscribed to Sheldon's correspondence school you would get a collection of these where you get an annual subscription to The Business Philosopher, you get all of his other books as well. But material like this, you know, you can see it's very flimsy. It's over a hundred and something years old now and to get hold of it's hard enough. But to get even earlier versions of the course is tricky because there are earlier versions.And again, to find this material you've basically got to go, okay, here is all this received wisdom. I don't think this is correct. I don't think this is correct. I don't think this is correct—which could make you sound extremely egotistical. Right. But it's also incredibly dangerous as a researcher because if I'm saying, "No, I think everything all of these really established professors have said before me is wrong," and you're this newly minted PhD student or new lecturer or new assistant professor. I mean you're on really risky territory. So it's really tough. So you've got to be in an environment that encourages it, which is rare in itself. You've got to be very lucky in terms of actually getting to the end point with this project as well. And you've got to find journals that will publish it, which is really tricky because a lot of the very high profile journals don't tend to engage with a lot of historical research. They'll say things like, "Okay, this is great, but how can we operationalize this to improve management decision making this, this or this?" So there are a lot of factors that can discourage you basically.Andrew Mitrak: History can be debated, history is political, history's all sorts of things. That's why I used a hedge. I called my podcast A History of Marketing—not The History because I always felt like the definitive article "the" puts a lot of weight on it. I'm like, you know what? “A” history, I have no skin in this game. I just want to hear everybody's ideas, learn everything I can and so this is “A History of Marketing.”Mark Tadajewski: You know on that point, I think it was my external examiner for my PhD who told me—he was a reviewer on a paper I'd submitted to a journal and I think I'd called the paper at that point, "The Something, Something, Something." And he said you really need to change it to "A" or—because I was running out of how many times you could use "A," I was putting "Towards a History," you know, like everywhere you could.Learn More from Mark TadajewskiAndrew Mitrak: Mark, I'm sure a lot of listeners are interested to learn more of your work and dive deeper into these strands of marketing history. Where would you point listeners to? How could they learn more about your work and what of your published articles would you point listeners to?Mark Tadajewski: I would probably go to LinkedIn and then look at my academia.edu page. That's where I can upload a lot of the material that I've written. Start with whatever grabs your attention. That's the best way to approach any of this material because if you're not interested in it, it's not going to stick or resonate with you. So, yeah, find what you like and I hope you enjoy it.Andrew Mitrak: I certainly enjoyed it. Well, Mark, thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.Mark Tadajewski: My pleasure. It's been really, really nice to talk to you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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  • Louis Stern: Marketing Channels, Power, and Conflict
    A History of Marketing / Episode 13"Place" might be the most often overlooked of the four P’s in the marketing mix, but it encompasses channels and distribution. Power dynamics and conflicts between companies (and sometimes within them) shape how products reach their customers. Few have influenced our understanding of marketing channels more than Louis Stern. Lou is the John D. Gray Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Northwestern's Kellogg School and the namesake of the American Marketing Association's Louis W. Stern Award, which recognizes contributions to marketing and channels of distribution.Lou is also the author of books including Marketing Channels, Management in Marketing Channels, and Marketing Channel Strategy. Lou drove renewed interest in channels by bringing a fresh perspective. Where prior researchers saw channels as logistics and warehousing, Lou viewed them as dynamic systems governed by power and conflict. Lou brought these insights to clients of his consulting practice which included IBM, Ford, and Johnson & Johnson.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsThis conversation explores the evolution and strategic management of marketing channels, covering:- How channels evolved from analysis of physical places to corporate strategy- IBM’s consumer PC launch and its failed attempt at operating retail stores- Whether sales or marketing should own distribution- And much moreNow here’s my conversation with Professor Lou Stern.The Two Critical Issues of Channels: The Amassing of Power and Resolution of ConflictAndrew Mitrak: Dr. Stern, thanks so much for joining us.Lou Stern: You're welcome. Good to be here.Andrew Mitrak: Is it okay if I call you Lou?Lou Stern: You sure can.Andrew Mitrak: So, Lou, how would you describe your career in marketing to somebody you're meeting for just the first time?Lou Stern: Well, I followed a path that not a lot of people do follow. I focused on a subject called marketing channels, but I did it in a very unique way.Andrew Mitrak: Before we get to marketing channels, how did you get into marketing as a general field to begin with?Lou Stern: When I was an undergraduate, I took a course in industrial organization economics. Part of that course had two particular readings in it. One was by a professor at Harvard by the name of Joseph Palamountain, and it was called The Politics of Distribution. And it was fascinating. It dealt with the battle between automobile manufacturers and automobile dealers, and how the dealers coalesced in order to make sure that the manufacturers didn't overwhelm them.The manufacturers were in the mode of overwhelming dealers, and so the dealers felt they had to protect themselves. It also dealt with other industries in which similar battles were taking place. So that was one thing that really sparked interest.The other was by Kenneth Galbraith, a very famous economist. He wrote a book on countervailing power. The focus was on how retailers square off against manufacturers in order to be able to protect their rights, their properties, and their way of doing business. So those things combined to spark the fire.As I became interested in marketing channels and got deeper and deeper into the subject, it became obvious to me that the field was really dismal. It was dismal because it was descriptive. It was telling stories of how retailers did things, how wholesalers did things.And it was focusing on such wonderful topics as, "What's the difference between a one and two-story warehouse?" That has to spark all sorts of fervor in the hearts of men!I kept saying to myself, how can I make this field much more interesting, particularly for myself? I had no interest in going out and describing the functions of warehouses. I had an interest in having an intellectual pursuit that was something that would stimulate me, but also stimulate all kinds of young scholars coming along behind me.I discovered that two critical issues in channels were the amassing of power, which I already looked at in industrial organization economics, and the resolution of conflict because there's all sorts of conflict in channels of distribution. So that led me to all sorts of doctoral students who became interested in the subject, and the rest is kind of history.Elevating Marketing Channel StrategyAndrew Mitrak: It sounds like when you were in school, it was almost approached from a mathematical sense, but what you found was that there are all these interesting power struggles.If you look at a company, how those companies interact with other companies, there are different points in a value chain and distribution where somebody's trying to take more.Companies face all these decisions: do I work with this partner or that partner? Do I build it myself? And these are all strategic questions that companies make when it comes to their marketing channels and distribution.Lou Stern: Absolutely. And I would talk to executives about my perspective of channels – how to look at them, how to manage them, how to figure out how to go to the marketplace, how to work with different kinds of distributors. I developed a kind of a framework for that, and I found that they really loved it. They were really enthusiastic about it. The business world ate it up.They said, "That's where we live, that's what happens to us." We need to be able to understand how to work with these strange people, whether they're suppliers or shippers, or retailers, or manufacturer's reps, or whoever they were.They needed more schooling on how to look at it, and they needed more schooling from about 30,000 feet. They get so wrapped up in the minutia of channels – and believe me, anybody that's worked in that area in a company understands that – they needed to be able to stand up on high.Inside IBM's PC Launch and Brief Retail ForayLou Stern: So, for example, I got a call from an executive with IBM, and they said, "Professor Stern, we've got an issue that we'd like to discuss with you. We are bringing out something called a personal computer in a very short period of time, and we don't know quite what to do with it."They knew what to do with it from the point of view of how it functioned, technologically, what it was, but they had very little concept of how to bring it to market.So they asked me, would I work with them and a consulting firm in Chicago to answer the question? My response to them was, "I wouldn't know a personal computer if I fell on one!”Right? I have no concept. I surely don't know how to use anything like that.And they said, "We'll teach you. We'll come up to your place. We'll spend three days with you and teach you how to use the personal computer, we'll give you one, as long as you're willing to spend some time with us and help us think through this issue."And that was real fun. That was a magnificent time, and we worked together so that they learned how to work with dealers – ComputerLand, Businessland, all those guys sitting out there.They at one time said, "Should we open our own stores? Should we have IBM stores?" And I said, "If you do, I'm going to throw the computer out the window." I said, "Don't touch it. You guys don't have the mindset to be able to work at a retail level."IBM did open some stores, but then they closed them almost immediately. So at any rate, that's the kind of fun stuff that I got involved with.Andrew Mitrak: What an iconic company for such an important time in history.Who Should Own the Distribution Channel: Marketing or Sales?Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about this example because your books and literature are on marketing channels. Were you working with a marketer at IBM, or was it more of an operations executive or a finance executive? Sometimes these companies didn't even have marketing teams yet. So I'm curious, who was your sort of main point of contact and who were you working with?Lou Stern: That's a great question, Andrew, because most people don't realize what the answer is. Marketing channels is probably... I don't think an advertising executive in a corporation would know a marketing channel if he fell on one, okay?Marketing in most corporations – it may have changed some since I was involved – has to do with advertising, product design, all the other Ps, promotion. It doesn't have to do with place or distribution.The salesforce owns distribution. It's a selling function. I don't agree with it. I believe it's a marketing function. I believe that marketers have to be the people to determine what happens, because all of these things have to be coordinated. You don't just have a marketing channel for the sake of marketing channels; you have one because there's a product that has to be developed and thought about to some extent as you think about what channels it's going to go through.So the issue is, sales owns it. They shouldn't own it, but they do. And because a salesforce orientation is focused strictly on making sales, they don't think strategically, because they don't get it. And IBM at that time was a salesforce. The salesforce dominated the whole corporation.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, if I was to think of IBM up to that point, they were probably selling mainframes, which at that time took up a whole room in an office building. It's a very one-to-one salesperson meeting with an individual company or individual buyer. Maybe they're buying one, maybe they're buying a set for a number of their offices, and it's a very manual install.When you're launching a PC, it's a personal computer, that's a mass-market product, or supposed to be a mass-market product, and you're dealing with a larger scale.I think of one way to split marketing and sales: sales is usually more of a one-to-one process, marketing's more of a one-to-many process. If you're IBM going through a retailer like ComputerLand or precursors to Best Buy, you're finding the right channel, the right retailer to reach scale, which is very different than selling a mainframe to a company.Lou Stern: That's exactly correct. They had a mainframe mental set, and of course, I was not involved with the mainframe end of the business. But figuring out how to use this kind of new consumer product was a real shakeup for them, and they tried very hard to learn what it would take to be much more marketing-focused than they had been in the past. It wasn't that they were at all a bad company; they were terrific. It was just that they were not used to this new world of marketing channels run the right way, so to speak.Marketing Beyond Promotion: Channel Focus on How Customers ShopAndrew Mitrak: If I had a job description for a channel marketer today, the assumption would be that this person's a digital marketing channel manager. They do our emails, they do our website, they do our search engine optimization. Maybe they're doing our paid media. And it's all very focused on the promotion of those four Ps, and it's not thinking about product or thinking about place.Do you know when that happened? Was there a time when marketing was a little more holistic and less focused on promotion? That doesn't sound like it was the case as much when you were developing marketing channels?Lou Stern: I suspect that the emergence of Amazon was a hammer that smashed into the heads of many, many folks. The key to getting this focus, to incorporating marketing channels as a mainstream marketing issue that you must take into account just as you take into account products, promotion, and price – the key to it is something that you do all the time in advertising. And that is focusing on the customer, focusing on the end-user.You have to define your end-user, and you have to then do research to determine how the end-user – whether it's a corporation, or an individual, or some other entity – how that corporation or person likes to shop.Everybody shops.And so the question becomes, how do they like to shop? Do they like to shop online? Do they like to shop by going into stores? And it isn't where they want to shop, it's how they want to shop.There are attributes of shopping. That is, some people need rapid delivery, some people want to see variety. Some people have other issues that are of concern to them as they think about purchasing something. And that focus – the focus of how your customers want to shop – is the key to the kingdom.And what you know from everything else you learned about marketing is that there isn't one customer. There are lots of customers, and there are lots of customers that fit into segments. So you've got all sorts of different segments out there who like to shop differently.Oh, wow, hello, right? So eureka! You've found it!So then the question becomes, how do I deliver those shopping attributes? We call them shopping behaviors. How do I deliver on those? What kind of folk can I employ that will allow these people to shop the way they want to shop? And that's a marketing thing. It takes segmentation-type research.And then once you've determined how people want to shop and how you'd like to reach them, then you have to manage the thing. Once you set a channel up, you got to manage it, just like you would manage a corporation. Only you may not have the power. Someone downstream may have the power.You want to try to tell Amazon how to operate? Good luck! Right?!You won't be able to. But you'll be able to go to Amazon and say to Amazon, "I have found out how customers of yours like to shop for my products. And I want to work with you to enable you to be able to give them what they need." It's a total different mindset. Okay, and that's marketing.How Lou’s Textbook Sparked Marketing Channel Theory & ResearchAndrew Mitrak: You wrote the book, Marketing Channels. I think the first edition was in 1977. What change in thinking did that present, and how did companies and academics respond to it?Lou Stern: What that book did was it gave people who were interested in the subject a vehicle to use in teaching. There was nothing before that, really.I shouldn't say nothing, there was one book I think, but it wasn't exceedingly popular. But this gave them a kind of a research vehicle. And what I mean by that is it laid out an approach to the subject, which they could then use in their research in attempting to write articles that would be published in learned journals.So it evolved a whole area – for a while it was relatively hot – called inter-organizational relations and relationships between companies, and then eventually it evolved into something called relationship marketing. Relationship marketing is how do you deal with people – both your customers, your suppliers, your middlemen, whatever, salesforce – how do you deal with them and work with them so that the relationship can be effective? All of this came spawned out of that book. It gave them something as a framework.And what has to happen is that you have to have theory in academia in order to be able to test it. So if you have a theory about make or buy, that's a big issue. Do you do it yourself or do you get somebody to help you? And there is a wonderful theory called transaction cost economics. It was developed by Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize winner, and Oliver Williamson at Berkeley, Nobel Prize winner. They were different eras. Coase started it, Williamson advanced it.And what transaction cost economics basically says is that it is the transaction costs that make you decide whether you ought to buy or make, whether you ought to vertically integrate your channel of distribution, own the outlets – that IBM question, right? Should we go into the business of retailing or not? And Coase and Williamson argued it's determined by the level of transaction costs, and transaction costs are influenced by the state of opportunism in a channel.Put bluntly, how much are they going to screw you when you deal with them?How opportunistic are they? Do they simply look for their own interests and are they willing to take steps to promote their own interests against yours?That's a very key point because the more opportunism there is, the more transaction costs elevate. So that said that the book, the textbook and the issues that I was trying to address to the whole field – power, conflict, relationships, all of that stuff, trust, you can think of all the issues that go with it – they became fodder for academics.Breaking Silos: Why Channel Strategy Requires System ThinkingAndrew Mitrak: As I was reading your book, a few things came up for me. I realized I, as a marketer, have such a bias towards thinking about one company or my own company or my own product or my own brands.When you're on a marketing team, whether you're leading it or a cog in the machine, it's so hard to get even a team aligned around the brand, the growth strategy, the messaging. And when you introduce another company or another partner or another organization, it gets even more complicated.I have this bias towards thinking single-company. If you ask me to describe a marketing job, I'd probably describe somebody working for a single brand or a single product.When you wrote this, did other marketers also have that bias, or did this change that for people to think a little more not just about a single company, but about how multiple companies interact with each other to bring something to market? Did that shift thinking in some way?Lou Stern: Well, anybody that certainly came to my class walked out of the room with that perspective, right? But the idea of relationship and thinking in that term is a pretty difficult one to swallow. It's hard to put it into effect.You often have to go through the salesforce, and the salesforce is not generally intellectually oriented. It is difficult to make that case when they feel that the distributors are simply sitting in yachts, smoking cigars and living a life of Riley. They have a terrible bias against downstream people.So, in many cases, it's the great salesman that understands that they're dealing with the system. And in order to be able to deal with the system, the parts have to fit together, and the more they fit together, the better.Look at Walmart, who's changed their perspective a lot over the years. Their first perspective was to beat the hell out of suppliers, and that's what they did. And I think that what they've learned, especially in their relationship with Procter & Gamble, is that they've learned how to make a system out of their relationship, and they made it a win-win situation for both of them.Further Reading on Modern Marketing ChannelsAndrew Mitrak: Lou, this conversation's been a lot of fun. I'm so glad we were able to do this. If somebody is learning about marketing channels for the first time or has listened to this and wants to learn more about your work, where would you point them? What would you suggest?Lou Stern: I suggest they get a hold of the ninth edition of my textbook. I'm no longer writing it, but my name is on it. The lead author is a guy by the name of Rob Palmatier. He's at the University of Washington. He is a brilliant guy. It's something that you can read and enjoy parts of it. Just skim around and read what you want.But don't forget, it's power and conflict that's going to determine whether you're going to win or lose. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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