meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Moment 125: The Marketing Professor: The Biggest Business Mistake You’re Probably Making Without Realising It

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.613.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this moment, the advertising and marketing expert Rory Sutherland, discusses the number one curse of modern businesses. Rory believes that too many companies are following the false goal of finding the perfect measurement of spending to outcome. This can led to companies obsessing over what can be measured and underinvesting on the things that really matter but are hard to quantify, this can include fundamental targets such as customer loyalty and repeat purchasing. A further flaw in this way of thinking is that all data that leads these decisions comes from the past, which means there is a limit on what big data can tell you about future spending. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/DRKcci1xICb Watch the Episodes On YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Rory: https://twitter.com/rorysutherland?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is actually the great curse of a lot of modern business given the title of your podcast,

0:09.6

which is that people generally over obsess about things which are immediately quantifiable

0:15.2

and underinvest in things which are valuable but hard to actually put a figure on.

0:21.7

And so things like engagement or loyalty of course, I mean it's worth noting that customer

0:26.6

loyalty is much, much slower to measure than for example conversion. And so the extent

0:33.2

that money is invested in performance marketing or the bottom of the funnel relative to let's

0:37.9

say wider brand fame. It's a widespread problem in the whole business world which is that

0:44.4

the money is necessarily being spent in the channels it is because it's more effective

0:50.4

there but simply because it's more of it's easier to prove that it has an effect. The truth

0:56.6

of the matter is the world will always be too uncertain for us to know who our customers are

1:01.2

in advance. And therefore since you know 97% of the potential customer base aren't in market

1:07.9

at any given time and therefore won't be uncovered by search or you know remarketing or whatever.

1:15.3

Spending money on the 97% of people in advance ahead of times is still a very effective thing

1:21.8

to do. The reason people do too little of it is that it's hard to quantify. On that particular

1:27.2

point then having worked in the advertising industry this is a conversation we have all the time

1:30.6

of clients which is you'll meet a certain type of client who's very religious about the bottom

1:36.7

of the funnel. If I can't track it and I don't know exactly. I won't do it. Then you'll sometimes

1:42.1

meet the opposite which is someone who just loves to spend on brand and I don't necessarily think

1:48.0

it's wrong. I mean Mark Ritz very good marketing professor always talks about the importance of

1:53.7

both ism and he says it's vitally important that when I actually speak about the importance of

1:58.5

brand marketing that you do not interpret this as denigrating digital marketing. In fact I go a bit

2:04.4

further and say the bottom of the funnel in many respects is the thing you have to optimize first

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from FlightStory, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of FlightStory and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.