58. Battle of Beliefs: Does professional certification kill marketers instinct?

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes.

00:03
Dom Hawes
Welcome to Unicorny. This is a podcast about the business of marketing, how to create value, and how you can help your business win the future. And I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Hello. This is another in our series on existential issues for senior marketers. Now, we seem to be coming back to this theme quite a lot, don't we? But you know what? As marketing leaders, I don't think there's much more important to us right now than this. And I think you're gonna like today's show. Our guest is feisty. He's feisty as f. I came across him after being referred to a blog he wrote called weaponizing the Wanamaker paradox. Now, if you don't know it, the Wanamaker paradox. It's a well known saying from John Wanamaker. He was a 19th century pioneer in marketing from the good old us of a.

00:52
Dom Hawes
Now, the saying is sometimes attributed, erroneously, by the way, in my opinion, to Lord Leverhulme, who was an industrialist from Bolton at about the same time. And you know how we brits like to think we invented everything. Anyway, it's called wanna make his paradox for a reason. And his paradox was, I know half my advertising is wasted, he said. I just don't know which half. And a hundred years later, it's that very saying that lies at the root of many of your problems and many of my problems. Today's guest is Paul Worthington. He is a former head of strategy at Wolf Ohlins and. And these days he lives in New York. But he originally hails from the Shetland Islands. I'm gonna let him introduce himself later. Anyhow, his blog is super punchy.

01:41
Dom Hawes
I loved it so much we looked up Paul and invited him onto the show, as, by the way, did Mike Linton on the CMO confidential podcast. So thanks, Mike. We had to completely rewrite our show. Cause there's no point in doubling up now, is there? Joking apart, Mike's show is a good show and you should probably listen to it too. We'll link both the blog and Mike's show so you can hear that content on today's show notes. And Mike, if you feel like reciprocating, we will not complain. Anyway, we are going to cover some of the blog's content in today's show, but we have new territory to explore because in our pre meet we had a good old rant about a few things. And as I was unloading my usual litany of lingering laments, Paul challenged me in really original ways.

02:25
Dom Hawes
And I think you are going to like being challenged by his highly original views, too. So coming up, we discuss the nature of marketing and how to succeed in it. And in part one, this is a two part episode, as most of ours are right now. In part one, we talk about making marketing more professional, like should we all be qualified? And if we are, what does that do to us? In part two, we're going to explore how to win as a marketer in a C suite of non believers like what's the key to unlocking their support? And what do we do with all the damn data that keeps appearing? Ooh, interestingly, we ask a question. Is it time marketing dumped sales for another lover? Here's how our conversation went down. Hey Paul, why don't you introduce yourself to the unicorners, please.

03:14
Paul Worthington
I run a brand consulting company here in the States called Invention, which I started in 2011. Originally, I'm from the Shetland Islands, so it's a long way from where I currently sit in Connecticut. But I moved to states in 2004, so 20 years last month since I came here, and I've worked in the branding world for my whole career. I was at will fallen for a long time, laughed Wolf Hollands in 2011, set up my own business to do essentially the same thing. And I often joke that I help companies figure out who they're going to be when they grow up and then realize that I actually don't have a better description of what it is I do.

03:47
Dom Hawes
As I said on the introduction, I was looking forward to using the blog you did about the Wanamaker paradox to guide today's chat, but I think you did that really well already with Mike. So instead what I wanted to do was pick up on some of themes we discussed together when we met. The first of which I think really surprised me when you said it, because I've hosted many conversations with cmos on this podcast. Many have complained that marketing is not seen as a profession, that the institutions that run certified courses that are too fragmented or they're not working properly. And therefore it's very hard for us to get the equivalent of a chartered accountant or a chartered engineer, that you're the first person I've come across, actually, who takes issue with that as a colleague. Talk to me about that.

04:30
Paul Worthington
This entirely could be me misinterpreting what a profession is. So let's start from there. I look at it like this. If we look at the things that we've professionalized, they're typically they land in two categories. They're either it's a set of professional baseline standards, because if you don't have them, people might die. So engineers, bridges might collapse, doctors, people don't get good healthcare. And then the other thing where we professionalize is where somebody is at risk of major financial damage, right? Accountants. The reason we have accountants and the reason they follow standard accepted practices is to protect investors and shareholders, primarily. Independent auditing is a relatively new concept. It's a 20th century concept that was created because companies who are listing on the stock exchange and just flat out lying about their performance.

05:17
Paul Worthington
And you can't have a trust based system without any trust, right? So if you think about it that way, these are not things that are trying to drive competitive advantage. They're trying to set a set of baseline minimum standards, because if you don't meet those standards, somebody either dies or somebody loses a load of money because you've been lying to them. And marketing, isn't that right? Marketing ultimately is a function within the business that is designed to drive competitive advantage for that business. You want to exploit the weaknesses of your competition. Marketing is one of the tools you do to do that. If I take a capitalist lens on this, I say, well, why should we professionalize marketing? Why we should we set a baseline standard for marketing? It's my source, competitive advantage.

05:59
Paul Worthington
If you've got weak marketers, I can exploit that and beat you, because that's how capitalism works. So I think there's a first one is its role is very different. And because its role is different, I think setting its baseline, professionalizing, that makes no sense to me. I think the second problem is which theories would you land on to professionalize around? Because this is a major problem. And it's why I laugh when I see this quote that's supposedly attributed to the guy from OpenAI, Sam Altman, saying that 95% of all the work of marketers will disappear. I have no clue whether he actually said this or not, because it's just one of those, like, Internet myths, I think, at this point. Yeah, but I look at that and I go, well, that's interesting.

06:38
Paul Worthington
So which theories are AI models going to choose to base themselves on? Because there's a lot of different theories out there. Because ultimately, we're dealing in social science, not hard science. Right? When we talked about this as well, right? The Attenberg Bass Institute done a really good job of positioning themselves as doing, like, real marketing because they've draped their social science theories in the rhetoric of hard sciences. But that's also dangerous, right? So I look at it very simply, right? Number one, we talked about professionalizing for a really long time, and it hasn't happened. So clearly there must be something that's made that not happen. Number two is, I think professionalizing is bad if we want to think of this as a route to competitive advantage.

07:17
Paul Worthington
You know, you want to be the company that has the good marketers, and you want your competitors to have weak marketers because you want to exploit their disadvantages to your own advantage. And the last one, which is just. Okay, so which series do we centralize around? And I think that's really important because what we found in professional environments is once you start to lock it down and say, these are the basic minimum standards, right? This is what professional means. These systems have become very much less dynamic. Right? So we see this all the time. Like, look at the medical field. How many breakthrough medical innovations have been cast out by the medical establishment? That's nonsense. That's not right. That's never good. And it's like it's 10, 15, 20 years later where they start going, you know, that thing that maybe it was right.

08:07
Paul Worthington
And for all the problems that. The inconsistencies of language, the inconsistencies of theory, and frankly, a lack of understanding by a lot of people for all the problems that causes, we also have a tremendous amount of dynamism. And I think when we standardize, we lose the dynamism. So I kind of look at it through the lens of. Yeah, but you're moaning about what we've got now, but the grass isn't necessarily greener.

08:35
Dom Hawes
I hear you. Since you said that, I've thought a lot about this. And like any self respecting marketer these days, I've gone to AI to try and help me define the difference. I've looked at the two on perplexity, and I've looked at some interesting differences between the two. And what I can see online is basically, it just comes down to the level of education. And I think you cited in the original blog, the Wannamaker Paradox blog, a number, actually. I've been trying to trace the number back to source. It said that 30% of marketers are trained in the US, in the UK, that number is worse. So I should say only 30% of marketers are trained. And I think that kind of backs up the position that the other 70%, therefore, are learning a trade. Probably. So you linked the statistic.

09:16
Dom Hawes
I think it originated in a Mark Richard article, but his source isn't cited. Assuming that 30% is correct and that the rest is a trade, it doesn't really matter, does it? Is this a hollow argument? I'm not sure.

09:28
Paul Worthington
That's one of those statistics that I had a really long, hard think before I quoted it. Because when you say less than a third of marketers are professionally trained, right. The first reaction is horror because you go, oh my God. Right? There must be a ton of people running around without a clue. And then you go, wait a minute, that probably isn't the case. There's probably a lot of exceptionally effective good marketers in that group because they've learned on the job and they've had great mentoring, and they're autodidactic, and they've sought out their own sources of knowledge, and they've done their own experiments, and they figure stuff out for themselves. But that is why I think it is more like a trade. I think if we stop thinking about this as top down professional bodies dictating thou must.

10:13
Paul Worthington
And instead we're thinking that it's much more through the lens of on the job training. You know, it's part of your career development, whether you do it yourself off your own back or whether your employer provides it, that it's about continuously leveling up your understanding of what you're doing through a lens of where you want to go. And I think that's more dynamic. I think it's a lot more effective. What it isn't is going to serve the ego needs of the people who want to put themselves on those professional bodies and, you know, and say, I'm in charge of whatever. I'm the grand poobah of marketing, you know, professionalization, because there's always going to be somebody who wants to be that person.

10:53
Dom Hawes
Hey, unicorners. Paul is making me reconsider my religious beliefs here. So let's interrupt the service for a mo and head into the confessional. I confess that prior to meeting Paul and listening to his argument, I had 2ft firmly in the marketing should be a profession camp. But I went away and did my own research, and I thought about the point he just made, which is that just because 30% of the people in marketing have no formal training, that doesn't necessarily mean the other 70% are not trained. Look at me, for crying out loud. I've started marketing for 20 years and I now run a group of 200 people. I have no formal training at all. So I fall outside that 30% stat. Where does that leave my beliefs now? Well, annoyingly, I'm somewhere between the two camps, but kind of in a good way.

11:44
Dom Hawes
I now actually think that it doesn't matter, actually, whether it's a trade or a profession. The most important thing we can do, as Paul says, is enable the people who are doing it. This means giving people the basics they need, and that's the professional training bit. Then giving them the experience and space to experiment and add value. And that is the on the job learning bit. And also, being marketers, I would hope being curious a lot will study in their own time, too. I'm not just posturing here. This is something I want to instigate in my own firm. Because while I want my new hires to learn some rigor, learn some process, and structure their thinking, I do agree with Paul that standardization might just come at the expense of dynamism.

12:32
Dom Hawes
So let's pick things up again with Paul and explore how we go about enabling dynamic team members. Paul, tell us, how should team leaders prepare their prodigies?

12:43
Paul Worthington
Almost certainly they need to be looking closer at how they internally train their marketers and who they rely upon for that training. Definitely, because I think that one of the things that, like the tech companies in our space, are extremely smart and extremely well capitalized, and they offer a lot of training. Ultimately, it's about how do you use their tools? And I think that we've got to be really careful with that because I think we do run the risk of having a lot of people who know how to twiddle the knobs on the dials of the tools, but have very little understanding of what's actually going on and why numbers are moving the way they're moving, or any of these things they're just looking at.

13:24
Paul Worthington
You know, I have to hit a certain target on a KPI dashboard and that's what I'm going to do. That's where, again, I think the competitive advantage piece comes in. If, as is common in the marketing circles, there's the refrain that marketing today is not particularly good. That's not my statement. I'm just saying there is a general view across the piece that marketing, for whatever reason, is not good right now. Then I say if you are an opportunistic capitalist in this environment, then you're going to go in there and push hard on the marketing lever, and you got to make sure your people are trained, and you make sure it's fully invested in, and you're going to make sure it's driving value to your company. Because if that view is correct, then your competitors are more likely to be weak.

14:06
Dom Hawes
I think it's a good point. Also, I really like the point that you got to be careful where you get your training from. And part of that, for me, comes down to language. Language is the start of everything, and in marketing, it's far from perfect. I think a lot of people that have attention in the market have got something to sell, like educational courses or, as you say, analytics dashboards, or other kinds of technologies. I think it means the language of marketing. It becomes even more gobbledygook than it was before. Let's not start with letters. Let's start with numbers. Quant, not quo, because it's often numbers that the marketing scientists use to sell their wares. We spoke about bogus and zombie statistics, lies and laziness, that kind of stuff. Where do you think this comes from?

14:46
Paul Worthington
There is an irrational power that rational numbers have, when presented with confidence and authority, that is vastly exceeds their actual veracity. So I think there's that old thing, isn't it? Lies. Damn lies and statistics. There are so many times in my career where I've seen a number be produced where the method for getting to that number is so speculative and bogus, it gets put in front of somebody, and then suddenly that number becomes truth the moment it's presented. And I have to say, I've had this conversation on a number of occasions with people which says we should not present that number because it's inaccurate. We cannot back it up with any degree of accuracy. And if we present it, they're going to believe it.

15:37
Paul Worthington
The reason why the numbers side is so important is that we in business, we've taken this view that we are being data driven, and that numbers, no matter how spurious, are often the vehicle for that conversation. And I think that one of the challenges we have often, the number isn't the problem, it's the way in which it's presented. So I'll take the Aaron Baer bass, the marketing science folks, for example. They like to give numbers, 95, five, whatever, you know, in market, out of market, and that's fine, but they dress it up in the rhetoric of hard sciences. So they're presenting it as if. As somebody else pointed out, you know, if you. If you merge hydrogen and oxygen, you get water, right? So you merge hydrogen and oxygen, you get water. And does that every time. Well, not every moment in market.

16:22
Paul Worthington
Is it gonna be 95, five might be 90, ten might be 97, three might be 80, 515. It doesn't actually fundamentally matter. What matters is that the principle is that you're always going to have vastly more people out of market than there are in market. And so you need to consider how you treat both. That makes sense, but it's when it starts to become these very hard numbers like the burnett and field, 60 40 for media allocation, wow. You know, take that as a given, then I think that you're insane, because their data set's awful. But if you take that as a principle and a start point, then I think that's fine.

16:59
Dom Hawes
Yeah, I've seen you say elsewhere, maybe, actually, I think it was in one of your recent blogs. As a rule of thumb, these things are fine because they lead you in the right direction. I mean, the 95 five thing is of particular interest to me because it also assumes that human beings only have two modes. You're either in market or you're out of market. And my instinct tells me that's bullshit. That actually quite a lot of the time, you might not be technically in market. You might not have a budget sitting behind you that you're looking to spend, but you're interested and you're actively looking, like it doesn't have to be one thing or the other.

17:29
Dom Hawes
But I think if you go into it thinking that you're either in market or you're out of market and that you're allocating your budget according to just those two things, you might miss probably some of the more interesting potential customers. I don't know.

17:41
Paul Worthington
I mean, let's give you a very simple example. I love a ton of the stuff that's come out of the marketing science community, and I think they've done an exceptional job of positioning themselves and differentiating themselves from everybody else in the world of marketing, which is ironic, because they claim that positioning and differentiation don't matter.

17:59
Dom Hawes
Yeah, we're gonna sort that out in a future episode.

18:02
Paul Worthington
Yeah. Which they're proving to be rather excellent at this thing that they say isn't actually important. Where I get a little upset with them is this wrapping of social science theory and hard science laws and facts. And I think that's wrong, that rhetoric is misapplied. But the other problem I have with it is it's really obvious that their entire theory is centrally built from the CPG kind of FMCG world of very low involvement purchase decisions, because nobody gives a shit about their chocolate bars and nobody gives a shit about their washing powder. These are the. These very low involvement decisions that you make. I mean, I think. I kind of remember the stat on this, but I think that the bread aisle is where we spend the longest in the supermarket, and the average is 56 seconds.

18:52
Paul Worthington
They've obviously not seen me trying to figure out which of the washing machine powders I need to get, but I think the point is in market, out of market. If I need washing up powder from my washing machine, then I'm going to go buy some. If I don't need it, I'm not. But that's different. Say I'm buying a car, or say I'm in a b two B environment and I'm trying to figure out whether I should work with a cloud provider. These are not low involvement decisions. These are high involvement decisions. You're doing a lot of research, doing a lot of understanding. Buying a car. I may have decided what car I want three years before I'm ready to buy it, but I've gone through a very involved emotional and intellectual process to get there.

19:32
Paul Worthington
And I think that's what the marketing science stuff misses a lot. Right? It's not that the stuff that they talk about is good, it's all the bits they miss that I'm more worried about, because it's the sin of a mission. And I think that's potentially going to lead people who aren't in those FMCG kind of CPG categories into potentially some really tricky waters. By following this path, you know, if it's misinterpreted, it just ends up being a case of like, make the logo.

19:56
Dom Hawes
Bigger, the original marketing sin, right, because.

20:00
Paul Worthington
They'Ve wrapped it in hard signs rhetoric and said, yes, thou shalt make the logo bigger.

20:11
Dom Hawes
As we draw to a close of part one, I think Paul has hit the nail on the head for me. I understand why he's shaken my belief about marketing being a profession. And it's this, the desire to have everything done with data led decision making, endless rois, KPI's dashboards, all that science stuff. It's eroding our instinct, it's stopping us from challenging something like that 95 five stat and saying, hang on, that just doesn't happen in my life, which is real, so why am I bringing it into my professional life? It just doesn't make sense. Now, the science, like the training, is, of course, incredibly useful, vital even. But when we as marketers hear something that just doesn't feel or sound right, but we go ahead and follow it anyway, that's when the big problems kick in. It's not the fault of the science.

21:01
Dom Hawes
The science still demands our interpretation. So when we hear something like 95 five, we can say, well, that's fine for unconsidered buying, Paul's example of buying loo roll or washing powder. But in my world, and I know that's the same world that you live in, that stat just doesn't add up for considered buying decisions. It's the statistic here that I think is bogus, not the concept. We all know that only a proportion of our addressable market will be actively buying at any time. But if you're buying in a complex business, just because you're not deploying budget doesn't mean you're inactive or therefore technically not at some stage of the buying process. The world is more complicated than simple statistics make it so. I get the point of the stat. But like the wannamaker paradox, it's not a rule. It's not hard and fast.

21:51
Dom Hawes
The moment a stat like that looms into view, our job as the marketers in the organization should be to say, stop. Let's think about this. Does it make sense or not? And then act accordingly. That's when the training and on the job know how comes together. Well, that's it for part one. Coming up in part two with Paul Worthington, we look at how you keep your head above the data flood. We look at the one thing you can do to make it in the C suite and how you can have a better relationship with sales. Don't miss it. You have been listening to unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairle is the series producer. Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant. Pete Allen is the editor. Peter Powell is our scriptwriter and editor.

22:42
Dom Hawes
Unicorny is a Selby Anderson Production.