Although Byron Sharp grew up on a sheep farm, he’s spent his career defying herd mentality. As Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Byron has debunked marketing conventions and helped brands stick to what works. Along the way, he wrote the seminal book “How Brands Grow,” which you can find on any CMO’s desk who is worth their salt. In today’s special episode of Math & Magic, Bob shares the mic with iHeart’s CMO Gayle Troberman for a conversation with Byron on the marketing strategies backed by science.
You're listening to Math and Magic production of I Heart Radio. The scientific laws which are they're not laws like boushaltons, the laws that this is the way the world behaves, so you can make predictions. I think they get wonderful guidance. Hi, I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to this special episode of Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing. In this episode, my teammate at I Heeart Media are rather Spectacular CMO and former Gasto Math and Magic Yale Trouberman is going to do a special marketers focused interview with one of the world's great marketing thinkers and researchers, Byron Sharp. He's a genuine marketing guru and he is the director of the Ahremberg Bass Institute and a Professor of Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. His approach is best captured by the view that to break through to the frontier of any field, first you have to navigate the fog of conventional wisdom, the established group think that says these are the rules because this is the way it's always been done. Byron had the intuition to question accepted marketing wisdoms and chart a new path. Born and raised on a sheep farm outside of Auckland, New Zealand, Sharp partners the magic of serendipity. Early in his career. He was a marketing manager who, despite an early aversion to academia, ended up working for an academic institution, the University of Southern Australia. After determining that the business school there was underperforming due to a strategy error, Sharp trusted his gut, took a left turn, and here's where the math comes in. He decided to apply rigorous testing methods to study buyer behavior in a field he would help develop the science of marketing. His discoveries led him to author a surprise bestseller, widely considered one of the most influential marketing books of the last fifty years, How Brands Grow and It's built on his learnings. As the head of the Ahrenberg Bass Institute, the world's largest center for research in the mark marketing at the same University of Southern Australia where he started as a marketing manager, Byron's research provides a wealth of insight on the range of industry topics, including one near and dear to me. Best Practices for CEOs around finding the right CMO. Byron says, the best cmos of the folks who are laser focused on the business needs and the big goals. And in my experience this advice is spot on. In fact, Gail has excelled in her role at I Heart because of her laser focused, goal oriented approach. So time for me to pass the mic over to Gail to lead this conversation with Byron on this evidence based expertise on how brand growth actually works. Marketer to marketing guru. Here's Gale and Byron. Thank you, Bob, Byron, I'm excited to be here with you. Before we get into marketing science and growth, Bob always starts as interviews by giving listeners a picture of you in sixty seconds. Are you ready? I'm ready early riser or night out? Have a later offer my Chisenhun Coker PEPSI I live in a current country. Where's that? You know? The stats? Mac PC, Matt Twitter or Instagram, Twitter, CEO or c MO. Well that's an interesting Christian. I'm not gonna be pissing, but I guess well near in invests. You know, I'm CEO, not see bring your fault springing Becausan is coming call or text taste. It's gonna get a little bit harder. So the smartest person, you know, it's not a prison. I think I have and you would have to be, Andrew. You're big technology. You can't live without my Santa Sun PROJECTA first job. My first job was actually a Rando send a Minshapa roller Coast operator. Oh wow, secret talent be at Johnson. What are you reading, watching, or listening to right now? I've just finished watching the same man on Netflix, Guilty Pleasure, my wine cell are okay? From here, We're gonna get into why we're here today. In your seminal book How Brands Grow, which has just been the must read bible of marketing in so many ways. You know, I think the major laws of marketing that you've outlined and How Brands Grow, it's probably one of the most underrated or misunderstood marketing laws. What is it really that you think many marketers are just still getting wrong even though you've given them this plaint book. Oh no, I mean not just terribly impressive. I think the profession is terribly imprisson But we are many ways, like so many other disciplines. I used the medical analogy in my book medicine used to be absolute rubishing stakes. You short people's loves in spite of its being well educated and well in teaching and believing that that we was doing right. I used to say I started in PR. It's when I used to say all the time, when people were you know, in that exaggerated marketer fear moment, it was like, it's PR, not R. It's okay, it's gonna be okay. That's true. And particularly people who were really big brands, have established meeting, physical availability and means of nots can't really do that much damage. But there it lies also the problem, and that they can be doing a lot of things that are wrong, but they don't realize they're wasting their time on trivial issues that really aren't kind of build the value of the organization. Yeah, before we go deeper up, we usually dig a little bit into your early life so we'll get a little more sense of who you are if we travel back in time. I read that you grew up any sheep farm outside Auckland. Yes, how about painting a quick picture of your childhood? Well, it was quite ideal, like in the wential great country school my mom was a teacher who several times the years, which is a very good teacher, I think, into a very large high school with no academic pretensions at all. It was quite good though, because you know, I studied well if humanities history and remember an art history. There are only two of us in the class until the other day left in the final year, so he had one on one teaching, which was pretty good. That's amazing. But I didn't want to be an academic, and if you're going to be a history you end up in an academic or something. So I was a business degree. I was pretty put off when I studied the management classes, which I thought that terribly pseudo academic. I love the marketing classes because they talked about customers and the reason why firms existed, making products, working out what you would tell to you know, there's a eighteen year old. I thought, this is a business. This is what I wanted to learn. I knew on accounting and things like that, but I wanted to know how businesses work, and the marketing classes seemed to do that. So that's the first sort of serendipitous all into marketing, and then the other one is, as Bob mentioned, I ended up being a marketing manager for the commercialization company of the university, and that was actually really very useful because, you know, as a market PRIs interesting to do as you go through the books and see where the sales are coming from. And you know, much to my surprise, the business schools rather ship and it was all the revenue was coming into. It was the chemical technology and pharmacists, and the Business school was just selling you know, short versions of its courses and things. The only futures if you make discoveries. The real world wants discoveries, and you've got to do that, got to do research, and so well, you know, in the rest is history. So how did the idea of an institute that focuses on research about marketing actually come about? Oh? Well, that was easy. We were marking people, so we're supposed to do research on that. But the I think the odd thing was we pretty low respect for particularly top American journals. They seemed to be just trivial questions, either showing off long words and the sort of humanities orientered marketing ones, you know, the general consumer research and things, or showing off statistics and obscuring findings. So again it's been inspired by those sort of Victorian scientists who actually got out and got their hands to look to the real world and collected real data and didn't try to obscure the data was ridiculously over fitted models and things. And so I started a journal which is about empirical generalizations. You know, we're doing replications and extensions to see does it hold in winter as a hold in summer? Does a hole in this country? Is it for fast growing rands? Is low growing rands? That sort of replication work, which is the major journals at the time, just did not touch that. That always have that new. Everything has to be new. So the basic work of science wasn't being done. And someone suggested to me, you should ask Andrew Ainberg to be on the editorial board. And it knows is he still alive of and do oh yes, well all right, Andrew any broke back. Immedia is amazing, that's what creates the best. But well, we wanted to not be broken both sides of the Atlantic. So Frank Bass also it was a great proponent of you know, he had the view that we can make the marketing's real world science studies the real world. You should be able to find law like patterns just like everyone else has and we have. One of my favorite things that you talk about is the importance of open mindedness in marketing, right, this idea of science and letting the data lead you any marketing suppositions that you actually thought were right and then we're proven untrue. But started dawning on me that the idea of being differentiated will did not fit with some of the scientific laws, like like couple of jeoparty, I mean, that shouldn't happen. You should have you know, two grands that are differentiated away from the others, that they're sharing more with each other but way less with the others. So yeah, we did some studying and compared patterns ex entublication of purchase with the partial map data and you know the perceptual map data which you can predict right, you know, the high premium brands clustered together and the others. This is for the department stores. When you looked at the actual shopping, the low price and the high price were sharing. Was than you'd expect. And then suddenly we got out an actual map, a map map, geographical map, and then oh it's obvious, it's where the stores are. You realize that geography is a way bigger driver if you're going to go buy a toaster or somebody can buy it or either one and young ruberkan had was part of the cantor the two people to be studied track of things, and they kind of gave us their whole data. Yeah, they had a perceived differentiation measure which had be never been done in academia. Academics always infod differentiation from perceptible maps or that you know, complicated things. This actually just directly ask people in multiple ways, you know, questions like you could just take it or not? You know, it's just been different, is it unique? You know? And schools are really really low, really love so even regular buyers of something like two thirds of Apple users wouldn't even take any of those things. Wow, and this is what the real world is. Mind blowing right, Just that surprises even me. And I was chief creative officer at Microsoft for a while, so competing with Apple was We've been of my existence quite sometime. People know that, you know, the mecan dash is built on a Unix operating system, you know, PCs based on that. And then I realized, I thought about my parents and if I see it. Actually, then let's say what's an operating system exactly exactly, and they'd say, you know, we've got this map bar. You told us to buy this map bar. We store our photos on, and we do email, and we serve the web, you know, And is that different? No, it's not different. All the computers do that. Yes, the real world when you realized that, Okay, the reason the scientific rules are like that is because consumers they don't terribly see huge that, you know, they do sometimes they know it Ferrari is not half that you don't need to talk to day to know. They see a lot of brands is in the change, and they don't know much about the brands they're not buying. We're so enamored of our brands, right. We spend so much time in the data and thinking about all the nuances, and we think that translates into the real world. People are just like, what's on the shelf? How much is it? What's convenient? Yeah, and we know all about our competitors and things. But you know, if someone banks with well Sargo and you asked them, what's Bank of America? Like there, I don't know Stargo. Yeah, it's so true. In as marketers. Right, I can tell you all the nuances of first brands superentiation, and they go they just see big banks. Yeah, exactly. Your book's been out for a dozen years, for two years. Now, what are you most proud of that you accomplished with our brands grown? I guess that so many people have brought it and read it, that's a good sign. Yes, I mean some of the earliest findings of the Institute and our advisory board members who are all you know cmos of corporations told us to write it because they needed a book to explain to the CFO and the CEO what they were trying to achieve was marketing is they're trying to move marketing to be evidence based, and there was some for the first time of real evidence behind it. So on that goal. I mean, I think it has been useful, but to transform a big corporation takes off lot of work and talk about it any Bruce McCole, who is probably one of the most famous in starting with the gene at Mars, he still says, this gets forward, one step back, you know. Yeah, more a math and magic right after this quick break, welcome back to math and magic. Let's hear more now from the conversation between Gail Troubleman and Byron Sharp. Some of the criticism of your work was that it eliminates creativity or what we Mathew Magic called the magic of marketing. Why do you think people feel that way or why do you think that completely misses the point of the book. I used the example of the architecture of the book, that it is a wonderful creative people, but they slept build buildings that they can hand out. It's an engineer and they going to stay out. Yes, and so the scientific laws, which are the not laws like dur Shart laws, their laws that this is the way the world. Perhaps, so you can make predictions. I think they'll give you wonderful guidance. I remember creative saying to me a blank sheet of paper was a very scary thing. Yeah, so doing research, knowing what your distinctive assets are and then saying that it's not optional. We used to what we now call distinctive assets used to be called creative devices, and they were sort of optional, you know, like, well stop using for a whole decade, stop using the M and MS characters because someone thought, oh, you know what, all these say about chocolate, you know, but then we say, no, we must use those. And I think to creators, that's really useful. It's like, okay, right, so I'm doing an M and NZ it will be m ends characters. Right. Marketers are so invested in their brands and all this detail and all the nuance and personifying our brands that I think sometimes when we get bored. You know, I've seen so many times where people, you know, new new leadership, new management, new team agencies, and people just want to do new things. It's human nature. They get bored with the same things, and and it's not necessarily because they're not working. The duration of a campaign now it's got to be so much shorter than the days of sort of iconic I mean, which are goes to your whole point of mass marketing, right. You know, one of the things we talked a lot about it, I heart because we reached nine out of ten US consumers just on broadcast radio, and then we have our podcasting and our events businesses, which are also bidding. But one of the things that you know, why we quote you so often and are huge believers, is you dispelled that false assumption about mass marketing just not being competitive anymore in an error of targeting as marketing still critical. Talk to us a little bit about that. Well, I remember which UNI legal ones said. You know, the great thing in the past was that Marcas came up with these targets that excluded most of the bias. I don't want to talk about the bias. But unfortunately, when I handed the money out of the media agency that was impossible to deliver, the brand was saved. And you know, we've got to stick to your grown anyway. But you know that we now have the technology that the bus could actually deliver on those highly restrictive targets, and that would be a fantastic way to drink the brands. Funny, I do a podcast like a clubhouse to podcast conversation with marketers called maybe You're Not the Target. Yeah, I think that's a human bias comes in in so many ways. We have so much data at our fingertips now as marketers versus problem. When you wrote this book, it was much harder to get, you know, research and data. Now we have so much data at our fingertips, and yet I think we're making less informed decisions very often. The send was why I now it's find as anybody who wait for big brands people, we can like some category grows. Of course we like category grows. You know, category, How do categories grow? I'll give you a clue. It's like brand. It's okay, people who are not buying the category buying the category? Right, would you like to talk to people who currently do not buy the category? Oh yeah, I suppose we would. Right, So not only have to reach all category buyers, including the lightest you know, but you actually people who are not in the category at the moment. That how you will grow? Well, you can chase our big drink your brain. No, it's amazing. We see this all the time that I've heard, you know, Mark Pritchard at PNG just a terrific example of years back when P and had sort of moved dramatically away from a lot of mass reach media. They moved almost entirely out of broadcast radio. They were making some decisions to cut budgets. So instead of just like a lot of marketers cut across the board, marks started digging in and to that principle was like, we need growth, we need mass reach. Let's start trying some master each media again and affordable media because we're in a moment of making cuts, and he started reinvesting with a lot of their big Master reach brands back into broadcast radio and into out of both of which they had they had pulled way back from, and they saw this just amazing growth. The premise again, if you're talking to night out of ten Americans about your laundry to churchy, you're probably going to find some new consumers who pop into the storm by it complementary emails saying how it really turned the hats and you put them back up to the christ to yes, you know a few years ago and I think now they're in like the top probably four or five broadcast radio spenders all up, and they've had, you know, just a phenomenal track record of growth. You know, tons of their brands now are very loyal, very dependent on broadcast radio, which we love. Obviously, they're great clients of ours. People going dark right, doing visted campaign and then going silent. You know that suddenly the consumers have stopped buying or some people they need to risk right, yes, or they'll just remember for these long periods of time. Yeah, I don't know if you have any data on this. I've seen some research about how long it takes when you go to our how long it takes to kind of buy back that recall, you know, that mind share with consumers someone else has coming and taken. Part of the problem is reducing the efficiency to spend by clustering. You know, you're pressing, clustering all your money and stid of one month and then nothing the next month. You just spread it out out of the two months. Golden rule is buying media spread it out. Yeah, I think that's probably gotten a little better in the you know, the digital era. There's a little more always on probably spending, but there's still this heavy reliance we see from so many customers. And you talk about our OI not being the best driver or measure of growth. So many customers you see buying these very precious targets. I call it the gritty strivers, you know. And so I'm gonna pay a premium on a premium on a premium to reach the this this epicenter of my target. And and I've added so much cost to my media because I'm targeting and targeting and targeting, and again I've shrunk my POE consumers dramatically by doing it. Why are you paying that huge premium because I don't want wastage? Right? Some of that listage is the future customers. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Tell us a little bit about how you think about late buyers versus heavy buyers have to have friends. What we did five year analysis by the continuous panel analysis and ships a typical consumer good about eight percent of your buio only buy you once a year or thessault than once a big two years, with three years of fouritious or five. And people go, okay, well, but then they can't make out much of my sales, right because they're so light. You know, well, i'mbout forty so am I? Right? Your brand tracking only talks to people who have bought the category of the last two months, and you're actually buying these precise targets to only try to reach really you're just talking to your friends basically. Yeah, And it so feels like that sometimes I read these briefs. In the States, there's a lot of media decision makers and people writing the briefs and making a lot of these decisions are very centralized in New York and Brooklyn. Increasingly, Bob always says, how many of you in this room own a tesla. How many you've been in a tesla? You know, it's a It's less than one percent of cars on the road in America. So that's what we're always talking about it. I heart because we have this mass reach and much lower CPMs, So we've got two things going for radio there. What do you see as the challenges about mass reach? Well, fragmentation obviously, but we've got clever people that's got computers and then we do get that reach. I mean, once upon a time these I grew up in a country and in New Zealand, we only had one of the TV stations. So yeah, you put an ad on, you pretty much reach the country. Yeah, and I caught some great brands and built doing that. And then you know, later it got more complicated. And so I used to tell offic I told and saying, you know, you guys used to say, you know, this is all of this new media and it's difficult at leit about it. You know, whereas we new TV, you know, really you didn't know TV. It was just easy. It was just there's three choices. Most of Americans watching so often people you know, they'll hear the data. Americans lower costs, like we have all these cases of other brands and chrome like g by using the mass media and people very they'll be very skeptical, but they'll they'll do a little test and then they'll just go Wow. It's sort of like buying TV back in the day in New Zealand. You know, you're just reaching a lot more people. You're gonna start seeing sales grow. So I would like to see market has drink a lot more research and learning a lot more about things like radio, TV, outdoor. It's like always there's also we must know a lot. Really, what do you know about it? Yeah? You know, I love saying so in the front Time TV show, how many people who watched this week will be back watching next week? People, I don't know. We've known this for fifty years. We can predict this. But you know, I've played the universities because most universities don't teach media at all. Yeah, it's so interesting because, yeah, on the media side, I think people get so caught up in the r o I metrics and these sort of momentary KPIs. You know, there's a lot of people touching a campaign, a lot of hands on keyboards going I'm just going to drive that number or that number or that number, and they're all in isolation of they're not actually growth of sales. Yeah, they're not thinking about mental and physical availability. Those are the two big things undependent value of your company. Yes, yes, what about message? You know you talked a lot about not getting too specific on who you're targeting, so you're going after the biggest pool of potential customers. But when it comes to messaging, you do believe in specific messaging. How do you advise people if you're talking to everyone, how do you find a message that works. Well, that's why we have advertising agencies because it was certainly, you know, just all that persons interesting cats, right, Well, we put again that the dollars and put a dollar. It was that easy. We wouldn't need every agencies. No, we need avertyping agencies because we go, okay, well you need to communicate to millions of human being and they're all very different. They do have a comment that they're human. M h. You to work with Matt, Okay, we need will resonate because it's very hard to act and do customization. People are realize that. But all the research of the tests, the academic tests we try personalization, the results of miserable. So it's much better to place at bit on great creativity that resonates with lots of people, with a little bit of sophisticated mass marketing. I mean, obviously if someone speaks Spanish by than English, then you talk to him. It's been but what we wanted, mass scale without creativity appreciate actually did that. We we set what do you call it the crap track. Yes, I was there in that room for that spanship brilliant. We're wasting all our money creating all this different content and so we had little money left that actually by media actually make sure anyone heard it or so. Yeah, that's true, It's very true. What do you think about in this world where everyone's talking about privacy, you know, a world where we've become so dependent on targeting and now with the Kingbridge Analytica and all of the maybe abuse of targeting that's happened, it's people are going to be pivoting back to mass marketing. But also because they're targeting never worked. You know some reports Nico human is very good work in this area, you know, buying on programmatic platforms and showing that you know, you could do a targe of saying men, and you reached men about half the time, and half it's only reached women. You know. I mean, we absolutely thought we could do this and we couldn't. But most of the time we don't need to target geographic right, Geographic is hugely important because I do not have physical availability. It's a very pat and so I would want to be able to buy media on geographic basis. Yes, that's a really important tipling thing. Where people live really matters to their lives. Ducan lots re search shows that you know, where people live affects what they do online. And then some categories have end debased, you know, like I'm selling women's clothing, so I want to the women or some have some age. But after that it all gets quite trivial. Really, we don't need anything much more than that. You think consumers are easier dis way than we think. We don't need to get seven hundred data points. I've seen literally target lists from you know, digital campaigns where there's you know, fifty sixty different criteria people are buying one impression that is a mistaken belief. It's in shoudive belief that if we get more datas My bit of predictions the forecasting side of just just shape their heads and go Now you wan't now you want a preid simple models out before the most complex. Uh. How do you feel about loyalty programs? Same problem, talking to too few people too often. It might be a multi programs. Yeah, we now know why they don't do a lot. You can detect the dot lifting nualty. But it's rather disappointing. And the reason it disappointing isn't because why do you join that department's stools dualty program? Because I shot there regularly, right, And if you don't, you don't even hear about the little very true, that's the recruits are getting glass. And then there's also the incentive effect if you don't buy, then you go on up to get many points. So they're very extensive or lower reach. And the low quality media it's like Facebook friends. You know, I'm going to build up a big thing of people who liked on Facebook. That is low quality media because you're just talking to the same people. I don't know that. It's so funny, it's so true. I'm not a big loyalty club person, but you have a certain retail story shop at all the time so I accruit points. It's usually the first story I go to, and I shopped there quite often, and every time when they go, oh, you get fifty dollars off this, and I'm like, amazing, but I was going to buy this anyway. And country like, you've got a lot of people living in the rule though you know, there's only one guest station. I'm going to buck them anyway, the one into down. That's so true. Yeah, no, it's interesting. We've been talking a lot lately about rural America, you know, smaller towns where you know, obviously because we have reached Americans, we're reaching rural, suburban, urban, all of the flavors of this nation. And I think so many marketers, you know, you see campaign after campaign after campaign we want to buy the top twenty markets, top twenty markets again, most expensive, top twenty markets. You know, there's so many consumers out there. You've never exposed your message too, if you just went a little bit broader. I've done some diagnostics and brands launches that have failed. One of the reasons it's the people in the country you never reached, never even got your message once. Wow. And usually it's the sales can has done a great job, and you know they've got it into Walmart or something. It's there, it's ready to be bought. Sword on ship because you only top twenty markets. Well, that's interesting to memory structures that you talked a lot about. Can you explain the theory about memory structures. Consumers are fairly naturally loyal. They don't really care that much about brands. They keep going about to the same restaurants, the same stores, the same brands on shelf. And this is what is brandiquity. You have mental and physical availability, but you need to have this to overlap. And you know a lot of times it isn't overlapping, and that a lot of people who are coming into the store just do not see you because there's pins of thousands of items in the store and they zoom in on the few that they know and then they get out of the store. You get a terrible return on the physical availability, whether that's on a website or in a physical store, you get a terrible return on because you went in their heads. Likewise, there's no point being in people's heads. They don't know where do I get this thing from? Nic As the scot Line, the world's biggest search engine is between people's ears. I spent so much time trying to figure out how to do audio creative well. And we always say that the world's best production machine is between your ears. So you know, by saying Grand Canyon with jello, you're picturing what color jello. It's amazing how we can fill in the pictures and be even you know, targeted with audio creative. Right. You know, I could say did you have lunch today? Was it good? Do you even remember it? Yeah? Right, And all of a sudden, I have you thinking about your lunch. Whereas you know, back like in Microsoft, I would have to make four spots for year for Xbox for thirty one countries. And that living room didn't look like anyone's living room because I was trying to bash up you know, Southeast Asia and Europe, and no one had that living room. But if I said picture yourself in your living room, I'm relevant right there with everyone. The impultance of having audio distinctive assets, even if you are using video, the fact is you've got to expect fleeting exposures. People will not be at tension to all that, and there's something you can do about that. And you shouldn't worry. You should just be cognisive of all that. So I need this tv AD to work in audio as well as as individual Yeah, I know, particularly people multitasks too. I think a lot of brands have gotten more sophisticated in understanding how important audio is because it's tastes in your head and then like you said, there it is on the shelf. Oh yeah, I don't even know why I am picking that up, but it's in my head. To stop paying more attention to jingles again, Yes, you know we Yeah, we used to do some jingle hacks, would get musicians in with marketers and actually work on collaborating real time, and some amazing campaigns came out of that. Because a lot of household you know brands, we know what they are, We just need to remember to buy them. Remember they're available. I cannot end a Math and Magic interview if I didn't ask you to shout out your favorite mathematician. Who's your favorite numbers person? That would be Gerald Goodhart, who which with us as a cheer about advisable Frank Emeritus Professor Honor Doctorate from the University of Southstralia and colleague with Andrew and why do I say Gerald because Gerald described himself as a reformed statistician than he would always right, what's the simplest way of showing this very key, not what where did the data come from? I really understanding the data stable before subjecting it to any sort of complex he could cut through the bullshit very well. There's a danger when people learn statistics like Gerald did, they just get enamored by their it's like their machinery and yeah, the slice, and they totally lose picture of the real world. So, you know, with someone who needs statistics the Cambridge but became a silist rather than someone who played being a statistician, that's what we need more of. Definitely being true to the science of marketing. How about the other side of the table, who's your favorite creative? Who's your favorite MAGICI ship on the other side of the mouth and magic coin. George Felix, who was at Proper and Campbell gets responsible for the old Spice revival fantastic magic and totally fitted in with you know, the scientific laws that was really word and did it when he went to Knowing a Chicken. He was part of the team that finally brought back the Colonel l back. I think there was a time where yeah, turn Chicken changed its name at KFC because because the mont pun't worried about that weird fried. This is a classic example of marketing team just in their own little bubble, right, simnicate. Everyone knows it's fried. Everyone knows it's fried chicken. That's why they lost on you when you're wiping the grease off your hands. That's why it's good. Yeah, might go, oh, you know this old white guy from the South, that's not really so good to go, Well, don't think about that. It's a distinctive asset. It's branded. As I always point out, no one stops to think, why does the bigger chant a spot of shame? Also, nobody cares bringing the king back. That was also genius. Yeah, that's totally in line with the signs. And that's wonderful, gradual and right ready to do it. So true, it's so true. We need more bravery definitely the creative side of the equation. Well, this has been amazing. I think marketers out there are ready to learn a little math, a little magic, and your book Our Brands Grow has just been really the bible for so many marketers. Who are succeeding, and it's amazing the advice you have from marketers holds up so well, so so well today. So here are a few things I've picked up from Gail's conversation with Byron. One, A data driven approach can fuel creativity, not killing. Byron uses the example of architectural design. Math and magic must come together to create buildings that are beautifu full and structurally sound. Stay rooted in data and facts, and your creative ideas can flourish. Two. In an era of targeted advertisements, mass marketing still works. While targeting can be a powerful tool, over targeting can cause missed opportunities. Byron's research still finds that reaching more people brings in more customers. Three numbers don't lie. As marketers, it can be tempting to create the campaigns we want to hear, but the data shows that our preferences might not reflect the mass audience. Byron reminds us that we need to cast aside our biases and stick to the messages that have proven success or Conventional wisdom often hides the truth. When we buy in the group thing without examining the proof, we often miss the right idea I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Susan Ward for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feed, Marissa Brown for pulling research, our editors Derek Clements, Mary Dow and Ryan Murdoch, our producer Morgan Levoy, our executive producer Nikki Etor, and of course Gayle Roel, Eric Angel Noel, and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,