What happens when a koi goes on live radio?

Judd recently joined Michelle Martin on Singapore's 89.3 MoneyFM to talk about Swimming Downstream. We covered the miniaturization of marketing, why CEO types need to step up to the marketing plate, and why when people think of a brand may matter more than what they think of it. They even talked about coffee makers and hula hoops. Here’s how that talk went, lightly edited for length and clarity, and to disguise Judd’s now-apparent tic of beginning all his answers with "Well,...."

Also: in any live interview, there's also a certain "esprit de l'escalier", the phenomenon of coming up with a more complete response just a second or two after the host has moved on to her next question. It's the policy of this blog to bend time; therefore, a few of Judd’s responses here express his just-very-slightly expanded take on the issue being discussed, to provide nuances he wasn't able to pack into the live interview but which may be useful for you.

Michelle: I love your book’s cover art of the koi as imagined in Asian tattoos. It's a powerful symbol. And I wonder, does this book cover or explore why people buy into brands through sort of a cultural lens, you know, the Asian perspective?

Judd: I don't explicitly explore specific cultural contexts around the world. The reality is – and sorry to disappoint the many marketers in the audience – but people think about brands a lot less than we wish they would. In fact, they think about brands almost not at all. They use brands as a mental shortcut, a time saver, so while it's very fulfilling for marketers to think of themselves as building emotional relationships with their consumers through their brands, it mostly doesn't happen.

But the good news is that it mostly isn't necessary, because that's not really what consumers are looking for when they go to shop in any particular category. And that’s true around the world.

Michelle: I'm just curious, because if you talk about building a brand, marketing can't do that without thinking of your audience and what your audience wants.

Judd: Absolutely right. But what audiences generally don't want is to invest their precious time and emotional energy into building relationships with brands. They have too many other things that are much more important to them, and again, that's one of the many myths that continue to drive marketing, despite the vast evidence to the contrary.

Yes, there are always people in a category who will go crazy for a brand, and there are brands that are legendary for the consumer loyalty that they supposedly generate. Harley Davidson is one that I talk about in the book, for example. But if you look at Harley's own sales data, their legendary loyalty actually turns out to be just that, a legend, because the people who buy Harley Davidson motorcycle are really no more loyal to that brand than are buyers of any other motorcycle brands, Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha, et cetera.

But again, the good news is that marketers don't have to invest so much time and energy into creating those kinds of relationships because consumers aren't actually looking for them.

Along those lines, one of the other things I talk about in the book is figuring out when people should be thinking of you. Marketers spend a lot of time, maybe too much, focusing on what people think of the brand. Right? Arguably, though, when people think of the brand is even more important. So, back to "understanding what your marketplace is looking for.” A useful lens is: when do category buyers have a job they need performed, that maybe your brand could perform distinctively, if they would bother to think of it?

And this is one of the differences between brand awareness, which everybody talks about in marketing, and everybody wants to measure, and mental availability, which is the likelihood that the brand will be thought of when it counts, which is in buying situations. A brand can have fantastic brand awareness in a brand tracker or a survey, but this doesn't mean that brand is going to be the one that people think of when it counts out there in the marketplace.

Michelle: That's very strategic. When you think of not just the attributes that you want people to associate with your brand, but when are they thinking of you. That's very nuanced. But let's take it back a little bit. Your book is called Swimming Downstream. And you argue that marketing today is broken. It's driven by herd mentality, belief, opinion, myth. Let's start there. What are most marketeers “needlessly swimming upstream against”?

Judd: One of the great things about marketing today is that we've got a few contrarian, very smart, independent thinkers who have spent decades looking into the data that help us understand how people and brands actually interact in the marketplace. Despite this evidence, many people still believe in things like precision targeting, which is one of the one of the great myths sold us by the advent of digital marketing, right? It was going to make it easier for brands to find the right consumer at the right time with the right message, which sounds fantastic – it’s the holy grail of marketing.

Except it turns out to be an example of what some observers call magical thinking, because it just doesn't work that way. It's nearly impossible for brands to know when someone is entering the market, meaning actually shopping for the thing that you're selling. We do know that as a rule of thumb, at any given time, 5% of your market might be actually actively shopping for what you're selling, but the other 95% are not. In fact, a great many of those people may not have been in the market in the last buying period, or may not be in the next buying period. This makes even the idea of a marketplace itself a moving target.

And while it sounds great to be able to say, "But digital helps me find precisely the right people", even just judging from our own experience we know how often this fails. I mean, how many times you have gone and purchased, say, a new coffee maker. You buy the new coffee maker, and you sit down, and you're in your second or third week of enjoying the coffee that your new coffee maker is making, and you start to notice that your feed is full of ads for coffee makers. Well, we got one, yeah.

So somebody getting the signal wrong happens more often than not. And that's just one of many myths. The myth of emotional brand loyalty is another. I used the Harley example earlier. You know, people just don't have time or interest in building emotional relationships with brands. And yet, all this stuff, this is the current against which we are told we have to swim and struggle against.

We've been sold the idea of success as sort of a noble battle against opposing forces. But when you understand and can recognize and apply the currents of behavior that actually drive brand and consumer interaction in the marketplace, then you can swim with these currents, instead of against them.

Michelle: “We are in a position to know what actually works”, you say. So what does the evidence based understanding of marketing tell us about how to grow your audience?

Judd: There are a few simple principles. One is that, because you don't know when any particular category buyer is going to be actively shopping, you have to be talking to your whole marketplace, your whole audience, as continuously as you can, which, again, flies in the face a lot of people are doing, which is sort of doing a media campaign here and an influencer campaign there and a sales promotion over there. So you have one effort aimed at the wider marketplace, another that appeals mostly (if at all) to your brand's social media followers, and a third which mostly rewards current customers who were likely to buy you anyway.

But since the goal is to build and maintain mental availability, a continuous sort of reminder or reintroduction approach turns out to be more effective, because, again, you never know when somebody is going to be entering the market. And we also know it doesn't take many exposures to a marketing message to actually create the behavior change that we're looking for. The evidence gives us permission to take pressure off ourselves to build complex funnels – “first we build awareness, and then we build interest, and then we build desire, and then we turn that into action.” It turns out that A, that's not really how it works, and B, trying to do that just reduces your opportunity to reach more of your market, which is what you need to be doing all the time in order to win the new customers you need to grow or even just stay in place.

I want to follow up on one little thing you said, because I do use the phrase “We are in a position to know…” I say that a lot, but I'm certainly not the first person to talk about things like mental availability and talking to your whole audience. So the data are out there, but one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that brand and business owners, who are really the main audience for my book, are not necessarily getting exposed to those voices and those messages.

There are some more advanced marketers who are getting on the knowledge train, and that's great, but for many brand and business owners, for whom the stakes are, after all, the highest, they don't know that this stuff is out there. And if you don't know which questions to ask, it's hard to believe you'll ever find the answers you need. It's my goal to help move at least a few people from being "in a position to know" to actually knowing.

Michelle: Which is why I think many leaders leave marketing to their marketing heads. But you argue in this book that leadership needs to own the marketing conversation, or at least be part of it. So why should CEOs and business leaders, and not just CMOS, who have deep specialized knowledge in this area, step up when it comes to marketing?

Judd: That's a great question. The main reason is that marketing isn't something that you do at the end of a process of getting something ready to sell. Marketing is no more or less than how, and how well, a business competes. If that's not the concern of your CEO, then you've got the wrong CEO.

So, no, the things that marketing does tactically are not necessarily things that a brand or business owner needs to know in detail. But they do need a very clear view on how the brand needs to compete, which means they also need to understand where the brand is lacking in competitiveness – and where it might be wasting resources doing things mostly because it sees other brands doing them.

Michelle: You say effectiveness isn't what it used to be, maybe success is a better metric. How should businesses think differently about measuring marketing's impact today?

Judd: They should think about it in the same way that they always should have. You know, marketing was invented to help businesses grow, simple as that. And in the book, I propose a way of thinking about the main job for marketing to do, which is “to make the brand easier to buy.”

Now, there are a lot of ways marketing can do that. Marketing can make the brand easier to buy by boosting its mental availability. How to get more people to think of that brand in buying situations might involve doing campaigns that are more distinctive and better at generating fame for your brand than your competitors'. Building distinctiveness and building fame are the two most powerful levers in building mental availability.

Marketing should also help grow a brand's physical availability. Because if you've got a lot of people thinking of you when it counts, but if they can't find you, then all that availability goes to waste. You know, are people able to find it in the places where they expect to, where they want to, at a price that they're willing to pay? Does the brand perform for them in the ways that it needs to? Can they actually use it?

These are all things that marketing and company leadership need to have an understanding of and a point of view on. And they’re all measurable in ways brand and business owners can act on.

Michelle:  I have to talk about the digital question with AI disrupting pretty much every corner of everything in marketing, I can think of how content, personalization, even strategy, is being impacted. Do you see this helping businesses swim downstream more effectively? What do you make of the saying that, hey, you don't need that many people in marketing. You just need a chief marketing officer who knows how to use AI.

Judd: Well, I would say that businesses that take that approach are likely to find themselves not only not swimming downstream, but having to do battle with even bigger waves as they fight upstream.

Now, we have what I think of as the research AI, and the generative AI. So I want to separate out the image creation, the video creation, the applications of AI which I would consider to be executional. And look, I'm a former copywriter who believes no AI is ever going to write as well as a good copywriter. But what AI can do in that situation is, if given a good brief, it can give you 20 headlines that a writer could then improve or work against. So on the executional side of marketing, I think AI does offer some ways to become more efficient, by offering a head start of sorts.

But in terms of strategy development? I use AI to help me understand what everybody else in the space I want to compete in is doing, so that I can do something different. I don't use it to tell me what to do. So I’d say that marketers who are inventors, and who want to find out what not to do, will find AI a very useful tool. Marketers and business owners who use it to try to figure out which direction they should go in are likely to experience pain. Because this path leads you to copy even if you don't mean to. And that's the opposite of what marketing needs to do.

Michelle: I think you say that marketing is doing a poor job of marketing itself. Why is it losing? Is it losing a credibility battle?

Judd: I think marketing has been chipping away at its own credibility for decades. Every once in a while we get a pop culture phenomenon that kind of puts some glow back into the marketing space. Most recently, that was Mad Men. But those are pretty rare, and it's true, marketing hasn't done itself any favors. It's become more intrusive, invasive even, more annoying, more repetitive and emotionally flat. It's become more greedy. None of those is a ticket to winning a popularity contest.

To take ad agencies as one small slice of what marketing is, the agency model has been broken for years. The holding companies, the financial management of agencies, at the expense of relationship building, training, people development has all taken a toll on the usefulness, the appeal, and the effectiveness of marketing. Some of those smart, contrarian thinkers I mentioned earlier who have studied this have actually calculated that marketing is 20 to 30% less effective now than it was 20 years ago.

A lot of that is due to marketers' overcommitment to digital tactics. People talk about the fragmentation of marketing a lot, but the way I see it is actually a miniaturization of marketing. One example of what I mean is this: when I see something on my screen, you might be seeing the same thing on your screen, but you're probably not, and we have only limited opportunity to see who else might be participating with that particular brand's messaging. And by participation, I don't mean “engagement” in the click-y sense. I just mean how are people responding to it, and how are people like me, or not like me, interacting with this brand?

That's something we used to see: we'd be watching campaigns on the same screen together, and we might talk about them, or we might say, I've tried that product and it's crap. The point isn’t the conversations per se, it’s that we had the opportunity to experience the largeness of commercial ideas, and to feel things becoming popular in real time, among “people like me” as well as among “people not like me.” There was a democratizing, socializing effect.

Today we have conversations that seem to take place mostly in the keyboard warrior sphere, where people will argue until the cows come home about the new Cracker Barrel logo. But that’s what I would call political signaling more than evidence of the kind of consumer and brand interaction that helps marketers.

Michelle: So there's smaller campfires, and we're all talking about different things all the time. So you mentioned the E word. How can players attempt to navigate the shifting rules of engagement?

Judd: I would start by asking, what sort of engagement are we talking about? By “engagement,” do you mean how should brands attempt to engage their marketplace? Or do you mean how do we want consumers to engage with our brands? Those are two very different things.

Again, the evidence is pretty clear that people aren't interested in engaging with brands and “becoming part of the conversation” and all those things that we used to say at the dawn of the digital marketing age. But in terms of the rules of engagement for brands interacting with their audiences? Well, treat people with respect. Try to try to appeal to their imagination, not just their wallet. Use the ancient tools and techniques of storytelling.

And to take just advertising – which, again, is not marketing, it's just a small slice of marketing – but because advertising is so visible, it gives us a lot to talk about. The campaigns that continue to work well today use the same storytelling techniques that successful campaigns have through time. Recurring characters, people actually having conversations, people creating actions and reactions and having emotional responses to things. You know, music, humor, all of the things that the Greeks knew and maybe even the cavemen knew about keeping people's attention and importantly, helping them to remember things again.

Mental availability is about is your brand going to be remembered when it counts. And one good way to get remembered is to do things that are memorable. And, you know, people don't remember yet another commercial with people just dancing around in the street to some EDM soundtrack. They remember characters that they've seen before, that make them feel something, that make them wonder “what are they gonna make happen this time?”

These are just a few ways that brands should think about keeping their audiences and marketplaces engaged.

Michelle: I need to ask you, because you're a marketeer, what you think of Labubu – the ugly, cute dolls that have taken over the world. Is that a master class in viral marketing?

Judd: Is it a masterclass in marketing? I don't know. There's always been viral marketing. I think we're just more aware of it now, because now we have a label for it. I think what we call viral now is what we used to call fads. Like when I was a little boy and hula hoops came out. Remember the hula hoop?

Michelle: Oh yeah, I got one when I was 12. There you go.

Judd: So hula hoops were the one of the viral marketing themes of their day. The message wasn't passed through the internet, because we didn't have the internet then. But there was very much a virus going around. Somebody saw somebody on the playground with a hula hoop, and somebody else tried it, and then somebody else, and then all the kids ran home and told their parents, hula hoop, hula hoop, hula hoop. And that's all parents thought about. And they flocked to the stores, and hula hoops sold out.

So the Labubu phenomenon is just the most recent example of something that we've seen happen time and time again. Good for them! I guess my question would be, what do you do next? Because the annals of marketing are littered with the carcasses of brands and businesses that were super hot, only to get ice cold a short time later. If I'm running the business, my question is going to be, what are we going to do that's going to keep the business competitive? What do we do next? And what are we learning that'll fuel that next success?