Essay: Swimming Downstream…at three different speeds.

The shortest version.

Swimming Downstream is about understanding how markets naturally move, and making brands easier to buy within those currents, rather than fighting against them.

The slightly longer version.

Swimming Downstream is a different way of thinking about markets, growth, and decision-making.

It argues that organizations often focus too heavily on what customers think, feel, or prefer— or say they think, feel or prefer — while paying too little attention to when buying situations arise, how brands become mentally available within them, and which market conditions make growth easier or harder over time.

It’s not that positioning, persuasion, differentiation, or creativity don’t matter. It’s that they work differently depending on whether they align with the way brands and buyers actually behave and interact in the marketplace.

Swimming Downstream shifts attention away from isolated tactics and toward the broader currents shaping behavior before individual decisions are ever made — with the goal of making brands easier to notice, easier to retrieve, and ultimately easier to buy.

The version with enough room to think properly.

Swimming Downstream begins from a simple observation: markets move before marketers do.

Most organizations focus their attention on the most visible parts of marketing — messaging, positioning, differentiation, campaigns, persuasion, optimization. These things matter. But they are often interpreted in isolation, without enough attention to the broader conditions shaping how buying actually happens.

In practice, people rarely approach markets as detached evaluators carefully comparing brands from first principles. Buying behavior is shaped by timing, habit, familiarity, recognition, mental availability, category situations, convenience, and the accumulated effects of repeated exposure over time. Much of what determines a brand’s competitiveness is already in motion before any individual campaign or decision enters the picture.

This changes how marketing effort should be understood. Organizations frequently mistake visible movement for meaningful progress — but the easiest signals to measure are not always the most important ones to base decisions on. Short-term response, engagement, loyalty, precision, and even successful-looking campaigns can create the appearance of momentum while leaving the brand no easier to buy in practice.

Swimming Downstream argues that growth depends less on forcing behavior against the current than on understanding the current itself: where demand already exists, how buying situations emerge, which conditions shape choice, and whether marketing activity is reinforcing those patterns or working against them.

The metaphor matters because it changes the role of marketing. The goal is not to abandon creativity, persuasion, strategy, or intervention, but to place them in context—to understand whether they’re helping the brand move with the way the market already behaves or creating unnecessary resistance by working against the way buying actually happens.

Organizations often manufacture friction by solving for the wrong constraints, then conclude “our marketing isn’t working hard enough” or “markets themselves are difficult to move”, rather than “we’re pushing in the wrong direction.” Swimming Downstream argues for a different approach: understanding when buying happens as well as what people think, interpreting signals more carefully, and making brands easier to notice, easier to retrieve, and easier to buy over time.

Excerpt: When the brand comes to mind - that’s what matters.

The power of “when.”

This is one of my favorite concepts to play around with. Because it’s something I’ve seen get short shrift in marketing, with its obsessive focus on “what people think of my brand,” yet comparatively little thought to “when people think of my brand”, which I’d argue is maybe even more important. 

“What” asks people to evaluate the brand. “When” asks whether the brand shows up in the moments where evaluation can even begin. And I can think of a few ways that thinking about “when” can give you an edge on your competitors. 

For one, most brands will stick to “what” territory; this is where most marketers feel most comfortable. But they shouldn’t! Because you’ve just learned that “what” is where people perceive very little difference among brands. By definition, it’s very hard to build distinctiveness here. (Another stake through the heart of Myth #6.)

Here’s another. When you focus on “when,” you shift the emphasis from you, the brand, to the buyer or user. Your proposition is now about them, not you, which makes it inherently more interesting and you inherently more empathetic. That’s just how human nature works.

Now, the obvious answer to the question “When should people think of my brand?” is “When it counts, of course: in buying situations.” But just as there are trick questions, I’d argue this is a trick answer. Because I think what we’re really asking is, “What’ll it take to get people to think of my brand before the buying situation arises? Because if they don’t think about me at least once in a while outside of buying situations, how likely are they to think of me within them?”

Complicating matters, there are already plenty of marketing terms floating around that scratch the surface of “when” in some fashion. We have the so-called “need state”: essentially, why the product category exists. For pain relievers, the need state would be “when you experience pain.” We also have the “usage occasion” or “use case”, which gets a bit more specific about the context: like “when you feel a headache coming on due to muscle tension.”

We also have the “first moment of truth”, the point in-store when the category buyer is triggered to make a purchase decision. Similar in name but completely different in meaning is the “aha moment”, the point where a new user of a product first experiences the value in that product. Tech startup founders and SaaS marketers will know all about this.

We also have the newish concept of “category entry points”, developed by Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. These are contextual cues meant to help a buyer recall brands in a buying situation. (Although I’m not convinced they really work this way, as I’ll get into in a minute.)

One final “when” to consider stems from “jobs to be done”, the theory developed by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. The concept here is that people don’t buy products and services per se; rather, we “hire” products and services to perform certain “jobs” for us. Christensen found that innovators who better understand buyers' needs create solutions that address more of these “jobs” and consequently get “hired” by more people. (If you think that sounds like a good way to win the popularity contest, you’re absolutely right.)

One of Christensen’s most-cited cases involves McDonald’s milkshakes. Conventional thinking says that milkshakes are for pairing with burgers, yet McDonald’s was selling huge numbers of shakes in the early mornings, before the burger menu was even open for orders. Jobs To Be Done research uncovered the reason: commuters were buying these milkshakes to have something filling, tasty and easy to handle that would make their commute less boring – a completely different “job” from the conventional task of complementing your burger.

The Jobs To Be Done concept aligns beautifully with our sense of the “power of when” because, much like the milkshake example, what’s at stake for the buyer is always context-dependent. So there’s always a specific “when” that creates or reveals jobs your brand can be hired to perform. 

We’ve now amassed a small mountain of ways to think about when brands come to mind. Why do we need another? Because one question still remains: if brands benefit from being recalled earlier in buying moments, how does a brand achieve that advantage?

Need states and the other existing ideas, useful as they are, generally apply equally to every brand in the product or service category — not to any one specific brand. (Even Prof Sharp’s category entry points are category not brand entry points.) So they won’t help make any particular brand more competitive. 

We need a different kind of cue that reflects what’s really at stake for the buyer – something that doesn’t just bring a category of product or service to mind, and that can be distinctively branded by a single brand. Claimed, if you like.

One such cue is the mechanism I call a wedge — a portmanteau of “when” and “edge”, for reasons that will become obvious.

Here’s my logic. We work to make a brand strongly associated with a particular set of stakes. When these stakes arise, this brand comes to mind first and enters the choice process ahead of competitors. That association acts like a wedge. And a wedge makes your brand the one that shows up first in the buying moment.

Like a use case or a Job To Be Done, but unlike those category-level concepts, a wedge is claimed by a specific brand and is branded accordingly. That’s how it can function as a structural advantage. Provided the brand promotes and reinforces this wedge consistently over time – so it can compound, like the brand’s other assets. 

This metaphor may make more sense if I tell you where it comes from.

When I was a kid growing up in rural New Hampshire, we heated our house with three wood stoves. So I spent a lot of time chopping firewood. And I became intimately familiar with the splitting wedge: the tool used to split fat logs into skinnier pieces that fit into the stove. The action of the wedge felt similar to what I’m trying to describe with the marketing wedge. 

Give it a tap, tap, tap and the wedge goes further into the log. Each tap on the wedge forces the pieces farther apart. That’s how it works in the firewood sense. In the marketing sense, repetition drives the wedge deeper into memory; as it goes deeper, it separates your brand from competitors. That’s why distinctiveness plus repetition equals competitive advantage.

I’m guessing some examples would help. Here’s a fairly simple one for beer.

“I’m thirsty” is a need state, “Rewarding yourself for a hard day’s work” is a usage occasion and “The sound of a bottle opening” a category entry point. A corresponding wedge would be: “When I want to knock back a few cold ones and unwind with workmates without having to explain anything to anyone.” And this very wedge was defined and branded through the long-running “Miller Time” campaign from Miller beer in the US. (Fun fact: even though the Miller Time campaign was retired years ago, the Miller Time phrase still carries the same connotations … for beer drinkers of a certain age.)

Let’s try another example, for Snickers – a wedge that does double duty.

“I could use a snack” is a need state. “Hanging out with the guys” is a usage occasion. “Quick energy boost” a category entry point. A long-running wedge for Snickers bars is: “When your mates can see you’re weak and whiny because you’re hungry.” What makes this wedge effective is not so much the “You’re not you when you’re hungry” observation - that could apply to multiple snack brands. It’s the fact that Team Snickers have branded it so distinctively, and so consistently well, it’s become untouchable for any other snack brand.

Let me reinforce this with one last example that illustrates the wedge’s full advantage-building potential. 

“I need to buy a gift” is a need state. “Find a special gift for someone I love” is a use case. And “Romantic gesture” a category entry point. So far, so good. But the diamond company De Beers recognized a higher-value wedge: “When you’re trying to impress the woman you want to marry.” With this, they essentially invented the “tradition” of the diamond engagement ring – and created a whole new line of business.

You’ll notice these wedges don’t simply restate the need state. Instead, they raise the emotional stakes. Brands can only do this relevantly and credibly if they’ve observed and understood what’s at stake for their buyers in ways competitors haven’t (or haven’t promoted yet). 

And folks: this is your source of competitive advantage.

Digging into what’s at stake for your buyers should also make your brand more noticeable – because it shows that you’ve grasped something meaningful about the buyer’s life that your competitors haven’t.

But maybe best of all, building competitive advantage through smart wedges doesn’t require you to develop an objectively superior product or service. It doesn’t require you to outwork or out-execute your rivals. It only requires you to be astute enough to spot hidden but important “jobs” your buyers want to “hire” for, but your competitors haven’t yet discovered.

Understanding wedges and how they work opens up a whole range of opportunities. You can boost your brand’s mental availability by giving category buyers new reasons to think of it. You can increase your brand’s popularity by appealing to new types of buyers. You can create new competitive advantages, by blocking other brands from leveraging a powerful category-level observation, like Snickers has done. Or, as with De Beers, you may even create an entirely new market.

For anyone who understands marketing as “how the business competes”, the wedge offers a clear opportunity to create advantage. There’s nothing mystical about them; the ingredients have always been there. So I’m not claiming this is a blindingly novel concept. What’s surprising is how rarely brands try to claim these moments deliberately — and reinforce them long enough for the advantage to take hold.

Essay: A handful of epiphanies

These epiphanies are drawn from a talk Judd gave at a recent event hosted by KPMG Singapore’s Clients & Markets Group, a discussion of the important discoveries that have most shaped his thinking.

1. It’s never too early to have “the marketing conversation.”

There are two kinds of company. In one, marketing is tacked on after a long process of customer insight and analysis and testing of everything from product and service development to pricing and distribution. In this company, marketing is how you sell whatever it is you make.

In the other, marketing is viewed as “how our company competes.” It’s not a department or a team or a skillset; it’s rightly seen as the responsibility of what my friend (and former Fortune 500 CMO) Stephen Ban calls “the top of the house.” In this company, marketing is how you make something the market wants to buy.

Which means “the marketing conversation” happens early and often and continuously. Because among all the conversations that are taking place, this one matters most.

This ultra-important epiphany also comes with its own corollary, because while it’s never too early for the marketing conversation, it can easily be too late. And when this happens, the only thing marketing can do is to make the best of the decisions that’ve already been made upstream. For better or worse. And it’s why – to paraphrase the late great Jerry Della Femina – nothing kills a bad product faster than good marketing.

2. What people think of your brand is arguably a lot less important than when they think of it.

Brand and business owners, and the marketing apparatus that supports them, spend a lot of time focused on brand image: what people think of the brand, or, more often, what the brand owner wishes people were thinking. This feels only natural, and it’s hard to blame those brand owners. Except their thinking turns out to be based on a set of flawed premises about how people actually interact with brands out in the world.

For example, people think less about brands than marketers believe (hope?) – a lot less. They think the brands in any particular category – car insurance, soft drinks, laptops, banks, jet fuel – are mostly alike. Far more alike than they are different, let alone unique. They do a lot less rational comparing of brands, even in so-called high-interest categories. And brands serve mostly as a mental shortcut – triggered by emotions, perhaps, but with a deeper emotional pull only for very few buyers.

All of which means that the “what” of brands – developing it, promoting it, measuring it – soaks up a disproportionate amount of business resource relative to its importance to the people who actually shop for these brands.

As Prof Byron Sharp has said, from a commercial perspective, the most important decision buyers make is whether to buy at all. Which means that when a buying situation arises, what matters is not so much that your brand be evaluated, seen as different, or remembered for containing 20% more of some key ingredient, but that it be remembered at all.

This is the concept of mental availability, or as I like to think of it, “brand awareness for the commercially savvy.” Not the artificial, research-y, 7% higher “for people like me” kind of awareness, but awareness when it counts. As I’ve written elsewhere, high brand awareness in a survey may make you proud, but high mental availability in the marketplace can make you rich.

But “when” thinking doesn’t end with mental availability, because once you start digging into the whole context around planning, purchase and usage of the brand you discover a gold mine of opportunities. By thinking more creatively than their competitors about these “when” questions, companies have been able to create not just clever marketing stunts but lasting commercial advantage.

Like Snickers has in shifting from a “what” focus based on being “packed with peanuts” to a “when” focus that’s all about rescuing you from being seen by your mates as weak and whiny when you need a snack. Some companies have even built entire business categories on “when”, as DeBeers did by inventing the “tradition” of the diamond engagement ring, for when you most need to impress the woman you love (along with her peers and family).

The evidence is clear. For consumers, most brands are good enough at what they do, and the “what” doesn’t vary much within a category. For brand owners, then, the choice should be equally clear. You need your brand to be memorable more than you need it to be meaningful. Creating memorability on the basis of “what” is hugely challenging and likely to be ineffective anyway. The real opportunity is to define and distinctively, memorably brand new occasions when buyers should think of you.

3. All business owners are grappling with the same basic questions.

Every industry has its own terms of art, metrics, benchmarks and rules of thumb. And business leaders in any one sector can be downright dismissive of the way other sectors operate. But while the language used may differ from company to company, leaders’ concerns, it turns out, do not. I’ve never done a stakeholder interview that didn’t kick off with one of these issues: 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? Are we actually getting there?

Left unanswered, any one of these questions can cause a loss of sleep, any combination a loss of hair, and the whole set a loss of job. Which makes any one of them a winning conversation-starter. Of course, moving from conversation-starter to actual productive conversation requires being able to shepherd stakeholders past their easy early answers, to challenge their assumptions, and to insist on evidence-based answers to each question’s built-in follow-up – “And how do we know?”

That takes considerable skill. But the payoff is also considerable. Because these plain-language questions can be answered by every stakeholder – nobody ever lacks a point of view. Further, since each answer feeds the next question in the cycle, the exercise serves to stress-test its own logic as you go along.

I’ve worked for a lot of companies that flogged complex, “proprietary” approaches to getting stakeholders to reveal their concerns and assumptions. But I’ve never seen anything work as effectively as these deceptively simple questions. After all, when you’re trying to help a client develop potential solutions, the most valuable commodity is their stakeholders’ time – why would you waste a minute of it getting them to buy into the wonders of your system, when you can dive straight into the issues that are already on their minds, in a language they already know?

4. There's a secret weapon business owners can use against marketing fluff.

Speaking of plain-language questions, there’s another one worth exploring, because it gets at the core of what marketing needs to be doing in the first place.

Remember, a brand has one main job to do: help the business that owns it to grow. But as marketing has developed (I hesitate to say “matured”) and expanded and fragmented and digitalized and gotten insanely complex, its practitioners have indulged in all sorts of navel gazing, fluffy metric touting, cultural “impact” claiming and general shiny object chasing – all at the expense of commercial relevance.

Which means that business owners – not only but especially those who lack a foundational understanding of how marketing actually works – need a tool that can both filter out the inevitable BS and bring the marketing conversation back to commercial reality.

And as it happens, there’s a brutally simple question which does exactly that: “How is whatever you’re proposing going to make what we’re selling easier to buy?”

Note that little word “how” – these three letters make all the difference. Because it’s not enough to ask whether the marketing proposal will help; no self-respecting marketing person will ever answer “no, not really.”

Sure, getting at “how” is harder and takes more thought. Good answers will plausibly cover a wide range of marketing influences across the 4Ps (product, price, place, promotion). But again, the good news is that companies that train themselves on this exercise will start to find they’re wasting less resource on stuff that doesn’t really help them compete. And creating more impact from the stuff they’re now focused on instead.

And the best part is, you don’t have to be a marketing genius to improve your outcomes. You just have to understand that marketing works best when it focuses on doing one thing well: making the brand easier to buy.

Conversation: “What The Funnel?!?”

A while 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.”

Conversation: 89.3 MoneyFM meets Swimming Downstream

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.

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 everywhere 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?