“What The Funnel?!” goes for a swim, downstream.

A few weeks back, Judd joined Nur Khairah Abdul Rahim on her “What the Funnel?!” podcast to talk about Swimming Downstream. Here’s how that talk went, lightly edited for clarity.

Khairah: Judd, congratulations on the launch of your book! You quote David Packard saying “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” That sounds empowering – and slightly damning. Are marketers set up for failure due to the sheer impossibility of their roles?

Judd: Thank you, and I agree with the empowering part!

As for being set up to fail, I’d say the opposite. When CEOs and the rest of what one of my reviewers calls “the top of the house” recognize that marketing means “how the business competes”, it becomes their responsibility too, so the role of all those people with marketing in their job title gets a lot more interesting. Because now the focus is commercial success - as it should be.

Also not sure I agree with the “sheer impossibility” part. Without a doubt, there are a lot of fundamental misunderstandings of what marketing is and how it works, and people and companies that labor under these misconceptions are always going to find it harder than it needs to be. But marketing didn’t get complex on its own; we all made it that way, and we can remake it if we want to. That’s one reason I wrote the book.

Khairah: In your book, you argue that many companies waste time and money copying what others do, simply because they believe that “everyone knows what works in marketing.” For marketers walking into large, legacy-heavy MNCs, what’s your advice for navigating the weight of inherited “best practices” without being seen as a disruptor too early?

Judd: I’m not sure when’s the best time to be “seen as a disruptor”, if that’s your goal – nor do I think disruption is always or automatically a huge plus. But I’ve always tried to play the “I’m new here, so please forgive all my naïve questions” card for as long as possible. Sooner or later that permission runs out, and it’s not very convincing when people who’ve been in a company for years all of a sudden develop a curiosity about what’s going on.

As for the navigating part, as you know from reading my book, I’m a fan of the brutally simple question. So I’d recommend getting used to asking “This thing that we do here or that we’re thinking of starting to do – how does this make our brand easier to buy?”

Khairah: You also highlight a critical irony: that marketing today is often too commercial for culture, yet not commercial enough for the industries it serves. Can you unpack that a little more, and how marketers can strike a better balance?

Judd: Aside from the occasional pop-culture phenomenon like Mad Men, marketing hasn’t done itself many favors when it comes to building its own popularity. It’s become increasingly annoying, disrespectful, greedy and inescapable – that’s not a healthy combination, so it’s no wonder it’s one of the least admired professions.

It’s also become demonstrably less effective since the turn of the century – 20% less effective across a broad range of hard and soft metrics. That’s due partly to marketers drinking too much of the digital Kool-Aid and overcommitting to tactics that sound wonderful – performance marketing and precision targeting come to mind – but have been shown to be much less effective than promised and in many cases counterproductive.

And partly it’s linked to marketing’s age-old problem with accountability, or rather the lack of it. As a result, marketing as a discipline has slid further and further away from the business outcomes it’s meant to be driving – in place of which all kinds of BS metrics have overtaken the conversation – metrics that indicate how much the CMO’s ego has been boosted rather than how well the brand is attracting the new customers it needs even just to stand still.

As for the second part of your question: what can marketers and the people who hire them do? They can get over whatever puritanical shame they feel over the fact that they’re meant to be selling stuff. They can commit to a more commercially-focused understanding of the job marketing is meant to do – in the book I propose “make the brand easier to buy.” They can make the effort to understand which levers are actually proven to drive growth, so they can focus on these instead of, say, trying to sell brand purpose or boost engagement. They can treat their audiences with more respect. Any one of these would be a great start – all of them together would be a dream.

Khairah: You’ve worked in marketing across three continents and several decades – what are three marketing myths that have persisted for far too long, and you’d love to see retired?

Judd: The myth of the 100% loyal customer base – that holy grail that doesn't exist in the real world - and the many misunderstandings around customer loyalty in general. Loyalty exists, of course, but mostly as a mental time-saver and very rarely at a deep emotional level. Similarly, 100% loyals do walk among us, but no research has even found them to be more than a small minority of buyers in any category.

Then there's the myth that the path to growth is to sell more to existing customers (and the related myth that this is both super-efficient and super-effective). This one and the flawed premise it's based on have actually been attacked almost from the moment it first emerged, but the fact that it was born in a Harvard Business Review article gives it a veneer of authority that's like Teflon. The reality, as proven over and over, is that businesses need to win new customers even just to survive, let alone grow.

We also have the myths of precision targeting and the misplaced faith in segmentation (which never seems to me to be applied in the right context or time but rather slapped on too late in the process to have any meaningful impact).

These are just a few examples of the popular but misguided “upstream” thinking my book aims to debunk.

Khairah: You talk about how success in marketing depends on recognizing the many drivers of performance, but also acknowledge how fragmented today’s landscape is. How do we practically distill the key levers of growth when so much of what works is complex, unmeasurable, or only obvious in hindsight?

Judd: I’m not sure I said there are “many drivers of performance” – and if I seemed to that’s certainly not what I meant. Actually it’s just a few, and they all relate to making the brand easier to buy.

Become more famous – for something that people who buy your product or service pay attention to. Become more distinctive – make your brand noticeable in ways rival brands don’t, so it’s easier for people to remember you when it counts. Talk not to narrow slices of the marketplace you think you can most easily reach but to your whole audience of category buyers, because you can never know when any particular person will be in the market for what you’re selling.

Doing this stuff will boost your mental availability – that’s the likelihood that your brand will be thought of in buying situations. Complement this by also building your brand’s physical availability – meaning how easy it is for buyers to notice it, to find it when they’re looking for it in the places they hope to find it, to pay for it, to use it.

All of these success factors are measurable. Some involve degrees of complexity but nothing extraordinary. As for “obvious in hindsight”: I’d say they’re quite obvious already, thanks to the decades of study and analysis done by people like Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Les Binet and Peter Field, Orlando Wood, and others.

Khairah: You cite a stat that only ~10% of customers view their preferred brand as “different” or “unique"; even in Apple’s case, this figure is low at 23%. So is all our effort toward differentiation a branding dead-end? What should we focus on instead?

Judd: We should focus on boosting brands' fame and distinctiveness, in order to build mental availability. As I say in the book, paraphrasing Byron Sharp, marketing’s “differentiate or die” mantra turns out neither to work very well nor to even be all that necessary, as the commercial success of large brands – which according to their own customers are largely undifferentiated – shows us in spades.

Look, there’s a lot of debate about differentiation vs. distinctiveness, and the differentiation camp has some good points to make. Still, I come back to the point that the only people whose opinion on this matters are the buyers in any brand’s particular category – and they’re the ones telling us that the brands they're buying aren’t very different.

Even if we think for example about innovation – for which the only commercial purpose can be to differentiate, right? – if we think about innovations, they are fundamentally copyable, sooner or later. Brands that commit to this path have to work extra hard, and yet so many of the innovations they end up selling are really little more than incremental improvements on existing solutions. Distinctiveness, by contrast, is legally protected – from the shape of your product to the colors you wrap it in to the slogans and sounds you use to sell it with, these are all protected by trademark law.

Anybody can sell you a diamond ring, but only Tiffany can sell it to you in a robin’s egg blue box – a brand asset that arguably increases the value of the ring itself, I dunno, maybe 3-fold.

Khairah: You reference the infamous Tropicana rebranding fail of 2009, where sales dropped $30 million in weeks. If you were leading that initiative, how would you have approached the redesign differently? Where do you draw the line between elevating a brand’s image and losing essential memory structures?

Judd: Again, I hope I would have applied the power of a brutally simple question: “How is this gonna make my brand of orange juice easier to buy?”

The team behind the redesign tried to solve a problem that seems to have existed mainly in their own imaginations, and they failed to understand (or deliberately ignored) the visual cues Tropicana buyers were using to locate the brand on-shelf, so this project was probably doomed from the start.

But let’s commit to the joke, and say that OJ buyers really did want to “see their juice” as the marketing agency, Arnell, put it. There are other ways to achieve this outcome that could have preserved the brand assets that buyers had been relying on for years and prevented their being substituted with the very generic (and therefore confusing) imagery Arnell chose. Not to mention what's for me the most bone-headed decision: to re-set the brand's logo in a new font, and to tilt it vertically instead of running it horizontally as it had been.

Look, human beings are resistant to change – especially when we’re in our role of category buyer. That doesn’t mean brands should never change. People do get used to the new and forget their prior aversion to it – this happens with brands and products and packaging as well as with the campaigns that promote them. And yes, extravagant and even weird sometimes can work.

But all of us in marketing have to remember that people actually think about brands very little – hardly at all, in fact. It’s quite humbling! At the same time, it clarifies that “make the brand easier to buy” really means “make it easier to buy for people who buy very rarely and are barely thinking about it at all” (which is in fact most buyers). So the harder you make it for people like this to recognize you, the harder you make it for them to buy you. And that’s how Tropicana screwed up.

Khairah: Much of your thinking is strategic and long-term, which can sound resource-heavy. For small or resource-strapped brands, what do you recommend they prioritize and focus on first?

Judd: I’d like to think that ALL my thinking is “strategic and long-term”! But we shouldn’t misinterpret that as meaning “stuff that costs a lot and takes a long time to happen.” What it means is “stuff that has effects we can see right away AND which continue to grow the brand's market over time.”

But back to your question. In my experience, for any brand of any size, the two most important resources are, #1, the collective imagination of the team driving the brand – their ability to design, develop and stress-test potential futures that could plausibly expand the brand’s market – meaning, that make their brand more popular. And #2, the twin disciplines of asking hard questions and not settling for easy answers.

Neither of these resources demands the additional expenditure of money, though obviously companies do sometimes invest in expert guidance from outside (or I wouldn’t have a business).

Neither is there much mystery to the process. It starts with a few core questions every brand or business owners asks him or herself sooner or later: Where are we now and how did we get here; Where do we want to be instead and what’s keeping us from getting there; How might we get there; and finally, Are we actually getting there?

So whether you’re a small resource-strapped brand, or a large and seemingly well-funded one, answering these questions with rigor and honesty will help you figure out what you should become famous for (or more famous for), how you could become more distinctive (meaning easier to remember, recognize, and find), and how to make your brand easier to buy. There's no brand on earth that wouldn't profit from these answers.

Khairah: If you could get every marketer to ask just ONE question before launching their next campaign, what would it be — and why?

Judd: Probably unsurprisingly by now, it'd be “How will this help make my brand easier to buy?” Obviously they need to ask this way before the launch…like, when campaign (or package design or product improvement or social initiative) proposals are being presented. Because it is a fantastic bullshit screener.

Also, in case I didn’t say this before, the “how” is really important. Otherwise it’s just “will this help make my brand easier to buy”, and this version of the question simply invites people to answer “yes” – with a lot of confidence, but without any support. This happens every day in marketing-land.

Khairah: Finally, why should every marketer read Swimming Downstream?

Judd: I'm so glad you asked!

I’d say: “Because when you do, you’ll come away equipped with an arsenal of management-convincing arguments in favor of doing what will help your brand grow, and against what won’t but may well be considered best practice at your company. All of which has the potential to drive more successful business outcomes with less waste. So if you’re the boss, you’ll look like a genius. And if you’re not the boss, you’ll look like a boss in the making.”