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Episode 130

Building Brands That Buyers Remember with Jenni Romaniuk

Big brands don't narrow cast. They want to be known everywhere their category can be part of your life. And there's a reason for that strategic choice.

This week, Elena, Angela, and Rob are joined by research professor Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Jenni breaks down why consistent distinctive assets matter more than aesthetics, how mental availability drives brand growth, and why targeting light buyers is critical for long-term success. Plus, learn why differentiation might not be as important as you think for building a successful brand.

Topics Covered

• [04:00] Origin of distinctive assets research and why good branding matters

• [12:00] When brands should change or evolve their distinctive assets

• [19:00] What category entry points are and why they drive mental availability

• [23:00] How to prioritize category entry points for maximum impact

• [28:00] Why light buyers are essential for risk mitigation and growth

• [33:00] Why differentiation might not be necessary for brand success

Resources:

2022 Contagious Article

Jenni Romaniuk’s LinkedIn

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Rob DeMars

Chief Product Architect

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Jenni Romaniuk

Research Professor at Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Transcript

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects. I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects and Rob DeMars, the Chief Product architect of Misfits and Machines, and we're joined by one of the most influential voices in modern marketing science, Jenni Romaniuk.

Jenni is a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for marketing Science at the Adelaide University, previously known as the University of South Australia, where I recently learned, she started as an undergrad student and now she has spent over two decades reshaping how we think about brands, memory and consumer behavior. She's the author of essential marketing texts, like Building Distinctive Brand Assets, Better Brand Health, and How Brands Grow Part Two, and her research has introduced the industry to academic metrics for distinctive brand assets and mental availability and more, helping brands around the world grow by becoming easier to buy and harder to forget. We're so excited to talk to you today, Jenni. Thanks for joining us.

Jenni: Thank you.

Rob: Now Jenni, obviously you're famous for being a marketing effectiveness guru, but rumor has it, you are a very talented mixologist back in the day for a football club of some kind, a football club bar, which I'm assuming is a soccer bar. Is that correct? That soccer?

Jenni: No, no. Australian rules football.

Rob: Oh, well. All right. Australian rules football. Fantastic. So what was your most famous drink that you were known for?

Jenni: Well, you've got half the story, right?

Rob: That's more than I normally get, right? So I'm pretty excited.

Jenni: What you've missed is, I was actually 14 at the time and I was only mixing soft drinks. So my most famous mix was the traffic light, which consisted of red, orange and green cordial in different layers. And because they had different viscosities, they sat on top of each other, like your traffic lights, you had to layer them. So there was an art to it, but a couple of months after employing me, they discovered it was actually illegal for me to be behind the bar. Even if I was not, even I wasn't doing anything with the alcohol. They just, you know, if they needed a lemonade or a coke or lemon, lime and bitters and stuff, I would rush and get that while they would do the alcohol drinks. But turned out that, yeah, can't do that. And so I got subsequently let go.

Angela: Oh, shoot.

Rob: Oh, shoot. Well, I am excited to try this stoplight, so I've gotta figure out how to make that, that sounds like it defies physics.

Jenni: It's all about the layering and doing it gently. So you have to tip the glass. So you put the first layer in, then you tip the glass, and you have to gently pour in the second layer so it sits on top, and then gently pour in the third layer, so it sits on top of that and no mixing involved, and then you gently pull it back up and then it should sit nicely, and look like a traffic light.

Rob: I love it.

Elena: I'm trying to think of a good segue for that. Maybe now I'm sure you're great at, making sure distinctive brand assets don't mix together. Right. That was really bad. We'll remove that.

Rob: That drink sounds like a distinctive asset in and of itself.

Elena: There you go. That's better. That's better. Good job. Alright, well we're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news. Always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. And I'll kick us off as I always do, with a piece from a third party. This is not easy to choose because Jenni has so much great research and content out there, and we're gonna cover several of her popular topics today. But I chose a distinctive assets focused piece to kick us off. This is an interview that Jenni did with Contagious back in 2022. In it, Jenni explained that distinctiveness isn't about standing out for the sake of it. It's about helping people effortlessly recognize your brand without them having to think too hard, and she breaks distinctiveness down into sensory cues like colors, characters, sounds, and logos that make a brand easier to process and remember.

She warns against treating branding like a fashion trend, arguing that the best assets are your classic staples, not seasonal experiments. So Jenni, thanks again for joining us. I can't help but start there with distinctive assets because you're famous for coining and promoting a lot of marketing effectiveness concepts, but those are my personal favorite. You're actually the reason why our brand looks and sounds the way it does. So hopefully you like it a bit. Could you tell us about the origin of your research on distinctive assets and why they're important?

Jenni: Yeah, the work in the distinctive assets came about because going back to my PhD, it was all about understanding the relationship between the thoughts that people have and their behavior. And testing different models of that. And what came out of it was a consistent finding that it didn't matter less what specifically people thought and it mattered more how much people thought, so the number of associations was more important than the specific content of associations. Now, that's not to say they can be totally irrelevant associations, but within the bounds of what is relevant and useful in the category, we kind of didn't seem to matter too much.

And so that led to this whole idea of mental availability being about wider, fresher networks and building that network rather than strengthening a single association. And as a consequence of that, to embed those memories, you need to make sure that your communications are really well branded. And so we would go out and say, you know, this means that good branding and strong branding is really important. And everyone would nod and agree and go, yes, we agree with that. And then, in subsequent conversations they'd say, oh, here's our latest well-branded ad. And I would look at it and think.

Okay. We've obviously got some different definitions of what good branding is because having a 30-second ad, which is 28 seconds of stuff and one to two seconds of branding at the end doesn't qualify as good branding, but yet this is what was felt. And then people were talking about when we're talking about raising the profile of branding within the ad, but there was pushback from creatives and they didn't wanna spoil the ad with the brand because of the storyline of the ad, we have to hold back the brand. So it becomes that amazing, all these reasons and excuses why we can't put the brand name in the ad, which often felt a bit contrived. But they were there nonetheless. And so then we started investigating ways of getting around that and distinctive assets came into the fray there.

But at that time, there was no way to know if something was, how strong something was and whether or not it was of value. And when you're building memories, you have to have some form of assessment. You can't just put it out there and hope it cut through. Because there's a lot that can interfere between what you do and what people take away. So that's why we set about going, well, let's get some metrics and we based it really our metrics on what we want distinctive assets to do. But the whole stream of distinctive asset research came out of this idea that we need to make sure everything we do has the best quality branding it can possibly have.

Elena: Could you talk a little bit about how you measure distinctive assets strength? We know that fame and uniqueness are important. Could you talk about why they're both essential?

Jenni: Yeah, they're both essential cause they speak to the two different parts of what we want distinctive assets to do. The first thing to remember about distinctive assets that's really important is they're a tool, they're a tool in your toolkit to create good branding. Nothing special, just like a hammer or a wrench or a screwdriver. All has a role in your toolkit at home, depending on what you need to fix. Then the different distinctive assets we have are like that for the different ways and means we need to brand.

But for a tool to work really well, for it to be sharp, to be effective, it has to perform as it needs to do. And so what are the things we need distinctive assets to do? Well, first of all, we need them to be a proxy for the brand where the brand is either not present or not noticeable. Okay, so when a word may not be the best way to express because of the environment, or doesn't have the visibility in that particular area. And so distinctive asset replaces that. But because we're evoking memories, we only want our brand to come to mind. If we've also got other brands coming to mind, then we're basically putting our communications dollar toward competitors. So that speaks to the two things of fame and uniqueness.

Uniqueness is about do we own this asset? Are we the only brand that comes to mind when this asset is present? And fame is about how widespread is this ownership? If I show this asset, how many people are gonna pass my test and actually think of the brand and how many people are gonna fail it and not think of the brand. And that amount of that gap in your fame between a hundred percent and lower is essentially your risk. So the lower your distinctive asset is in fame, the riskier it is as a branding device. And the same with uniqueness. The lower your uniqueness is, the riskier it is as a branding device for a different reason, and that is because you are then creating mental competition with competitors, which means your chance of being chosen once thought of is diminished because a competitor is there as well.

Elena: So if I'm a brand who's looking to evaluate my distinctive assets, how can I do that? How can I evaluate how strong they are now? And then how do you recommend marketers track that over time? Because I'm guessing just a one and done evaluation isn't enough.

Jenni: Yeah, I reckon I look at it in two ways. So one is you should do a strategic review of what you've got and what you could have. And that involves assessment of the metrics, but also the conditions under which the tools you are going to use are where are you going to use them. For example, what you wanna make sure is you don't have, for example, a toolkit that just has 10 hammers. No one needs 10 hammers. But by the same token too, you don't wanna spend money on a wrench if you're not gonna be working with some pipes or whatever you do with a wrench. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea, but I know it's linear.

Rob: I'm with you.

Jenni: So, you know why spend money on a wrench if you don't need it? So this is where you have to assess where you are now and the reason for knowing where you are now is sometimes we've built up assets because of our past and we shouldn't just throw them away cause it's hard to build distinctive assets. But where you are now is only an indicator. It doesn't necessarily suggest where you want to be. So that's where you've gotta look at what sort of assets do you need, what do you have that can fulfill that, and what do you need to acquire that gets you to that destination as well.

And so that's why we talk about building a distinctive asset palette, which is a set of assets, each of which are diverse, and bring something to the table that other assets in your toolkit don't. And that gives you something that you manage over time. Now you do that strategic review first, and once you've done that, you don't need to do a full scale test. You only need to test the ones that you want to keep and the ones you wanna acquire. And that can then be a smaller scale testing that you can do. You shouldn't continuously track your distinctive assets. There's no need to do that. They don't change that much. Once a year is good.

Once every two years, if not. Sometimes people will do after the strategic review, say a six month assessment to check to see they're on track. I would only do that if you're very quick in implementation cause six months isn't a lot of time to change stuff and roll stuff out. Usually a year is what's needed by the time you work out what needs to change, make those changes, get them to market so people have enough time to experience them. And then have something to assess.

Elena: Well, making changes. This is a very relevant question right now, considering the Cracker Barrel news. That's, I'd love to know your opinion on that if you wouldn't mind. But when is the right time to change or evolve a distinctive asset?

Jenni: The time to strategically review your assets is when you have new environments in which you need to brand. So say for example, you've been constantly selling in store and now you're selling online or on phone, mobile commerce, it's a different environment. What helps you stand out on a phone when you've got other apps that are all different colors, shapes, words, et cetera. It's quite different from what helps you stand out on a shelf or on an online search result. So when you change environments, it's good to check your distinctive assets are still fit for purpose and do you need to build something else.

And that can be media or sales environment. So if you suddenly start advertising on TikTok. Yeah, it might be that that environment, by the nature of the short form video, what the algorithm favors, et cetera, might lead you to use different branding assets than you might do in LinkedIn or in banner advertising. Because of that nature of that environment, the environment's the main reason that I would change. I don't know any justification for others other than maybe some assessment if you do genuinely think there is, society has changed and something has made an asset irrelevant, or not appropriate.

So I am thinking of the Uncle Ben's and Aunt Jemima changes and the Land O'Lakes Native American changes where the cultural stereotypes are considered not appropriate anymore on branding. So that's a reason to change. But changing just because you feel it's a little bit out of date that I'm uncomfortable with because I don't see any evidence that that is of value.

Angela: It feels like there's a, maybe a better or a higher likelihood with a marketing leadership change. Do you see that, as CMOs come in and out, that's one of the first things they might look at is just, do I feel connected to this brand? And perhaps it's more fun to focus on logos, colors, sounds. And as marketers, we're so close to our brands that it's intuitive for us to think about all the ways that consumers might need us or when they might think of us, but the fragmentation of media, the busyness of our lives. Marketers can maybe be giving greater focus to something that you push hard on. I've seen, which is category entry points. I'd love to just hear like how do you think about category entry points? Why are they so critical to a brand's growth?

Jenni: I answer the two parts of your question there. The first thing going back to why leadership change and the impact on distinctive assets, I talked about this actually at the beginning of the book in the seven sins of distinctive assets. And one of them is pride, in that often distinctive assets are the sacrificial lamb when an organization wants to indicate change. And the reason they work is that they're visible to everybody externally. So they can be an easy, what's perceived as an easy, visible signal that the company is changing. The problem with that is, and this particularly happens if there's been a downturn, if sales have gone down and the company needs to refresh and sort of stuff, the distinctive assets are often in the firing line there. And the problem with that is that it's solving the wrong problem. Often, rarely is it the distinctive assets that are the reason why the company is going down. And what you might have done is exacerbate the problem by removing something that actually was working and replacing it with something that is suboptimal. So you just basically continue making it worse. Leadership changes, distinctive assets are vulnerable. What does help is if you've got metrics, if you've got strong metrics to say, yeah, we can change that tagline. But I want you to see here it's got 90% fame and 95% uniqueness. And if we change it, that's actually gonna decrease the quality of branding in a whole heap of our materials, not to mention the cost of changing it. Are you sure that's the where you want to go? Sort of, you know, actually laying it out. And then if they're insistent on changing and do it, you at least know the size of the problem and how to mitigate it. Because if you use assets that are poorer in branding, that means you have to dial up your direct branding to compensate for it. And that's what I rarely see happen. Even in organizations that have some strong, distinctive assets, when they don't use those strong, distinctive assets, they rarely dial up brand name usage for the poorer, distinctive assets to get that equivalence in branding.

Rob: I think we can all agree though, the planet Earth has never talked about Cracker Barrel as much as it has in the last, you know, two weeks. So there's a case to be made they did that on purpose.

Jenni: I don't think so. I think sometimes we ascribe, I think they genuinely thought they were doing the right thing. And this whole pattern of simplification of assets, of logos has actually been going on for a while. And it's to the detriment of the character of it. And that's the big problem that people don't miss. They're designing for aesthetics not for distinctiveness. And when you design for aesthetics, yeah, nice clean lines, simple words. That looks good. The problem is it just looks the same as everybody else as well, and that's where you fall down. You lose the sense of purpose of what it was supposed to be about, and that's what I think went wrong.

I'm just really grateful for them because we'd constantly been using the Gap as like the biggest screw up in branding. It's nice to have them. Now we've got a new one. So if someone can just quantify how much this cost them, that would be really helpful for me because it's always good to have a number cause we used to have the Tropicana and then we moved on to the Gap one, and now this is the next sort of landmark big screw up in branding. It's good to be current.

Rob: The only logo ever developed that you can actually hear the banjo playing when you look at it, you know?

Jenni: Mm-hmm.

Angela: Yep. Totally. Yeah. Do you feel like something like distinctive assets and just focus around what the brand looks like, gets more attention than something like category entry points, just in terms of a marketing team or just the company's ability to really think through what are the big levers for growth for the business?

Jenni: No. Category entry points have become a lot, have really, I'm surprised at how much momentum they've gained. I mean it really was, I used that phrase of category entry points to sort of sequester off a certain type of brand association that I felt was just being neglected, particularly in brand health trackers. That's where it came through because I was reviewing brand health trackers and I was looking at them going, these are all about the brand, very little about the buyer. And if we are measuring the perceptions in people's minds, there's two types of perceptions. The things that evoke the brand and the things that the brand evokes.

And it seemed to be very focused on what do you think of me as the brand rather than when or how do you think of me as the brand. And so that's where I wanted to reorientate those type of perceptions to go. We actually need to get, and this sort of fitted in with the mental availability work of our concern should be what evokes the brand, not first because it doesn't matter what the brand evokes if it's not there in memory in the first place.

Angela: Absolutely.

Jenni: So that's where that focus came in. Now, the big issue I have right now is because this has become a ubiquitous term, I think there's a lot of people who don't quite understand what category entry points are. So I'll often get lists, particularly from my sponsors of going, Hey, we did this category entry point research with someone else, and this is what they've given us. And I, you know, usually have to inform them, half the things on their list are not actually category entry points.

Angela: Help the listeners then. How do you define it? How do you go about identifying and maybe prioritizing those CEPs for a brand?

Jenni: Well, the first thing is category entry points are about consumers, about category buyers, about category users, depending on your category, or donors, if you're talking about nonprofit cause that fits through. So anything that has to have an object is not really a category entry point. So, for example, trust is not a category entry point in the vast majority of markets. And the reason for that is that you trust a brand. And so it's something that is evoked with the brand rather than something that evokes the brand. So versus something like, I've gotta get the kids' lunch, or after this I've got a meeting, I'm gonna feel like a coffee to sort of get my brain back into gear.

So those are the sorts of things, the thoughts that you have before you've even thought of any brands that get that, if a brand attaches itself to it, helps and gives them what we call a mental advantage. So they're not about brands, they're about buyers. Now they do change in different categories. So the mistakes that people make are things like, they include physical availability qualities as category entry points. So that's things like, I want something with a wide range of options. No one wants something with a wide range of options. They want to make sure you've got their option. No one goes in and goes, I'm gonna buy 10 different bags of chips. But if you like sea salt and balsamic vinegar, then you wanna make sure they've got that one. You actually don't care what's in the rest of the range.

Angela: Right.

Jenni: But there are different things. That range is really important if say you're a retailer. Because that is something that shapes when people are coming in. So category entry points are category specific for one. There are some that span different categories, but you always have to look at it through the lens of your category because if you try to generalize them too much, you end up with things that just don't replicate what goes on in people's brains. And then if you don't have what replicates what goes on in people's brains, your results don't match. They're not useful. So that's the first step is to really understand what's going on in people's brains before they've even thought about brands.

Angela: Great. And then once you've got that list, right, of what are all these when moments, when I want consumers to think about my product or service, then how do you go about prioritizing the ones that matter most? And one of the things we've talked about on the podcast before is less is more, and more, you know, as we think about messaging and perhaps budget matters in that decision making as well. But like, how do you prioritize what might matter most for the brand?

Jenni: So it's a couple of things here. So first of all, a common approach is to do things like driver analysis where you take some dependent variable and you look at that. Most of that analysis is flawed cause it doesn't take into account the underlying response patterns that people have to attributes. Even if you get that part right, of the right dependent variable, when you actually look at individual category entry point attributes you find they actually all pretty much have the same effect that you are really teasing around the margins of tiny differences that don't really matter. But that's the individual level effect.

And quite frankly, actually doesn't matter what we want is a big aggregate level effect cause we're about shifting markets. Individuals make up a market. So this is why we approach it in a different way and go what makes it useful for a buyer and a brand? And so the first thing is how commonly it occurs. So something that occurs really commonly is gonna be more valuable typically than something that doesn't.

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Jenni: Or at least for your mass marketing activities. Now, there are some things that are really valuable that don't happen very often. So for example, if you're a paint company, then someone painting their entire house is a very valuable purchase occasion cause they're buying a lot of paint at that time, but it doesn't happen very often. Cause it doesn't happen very often, you wouldn't put in your mass advertising, here's where you paint your entire house, because you're gonna hit a whole heap of people for whom it's not gonna be relevant or never going to be relevant. You might look at other ways of communicating to them, but the things that are common to a wide group of people, they're the things that can inform your mass marketing.

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Jenni: So when you're talking about how many, that becomes a short versus a long term decision. At this stage, we would suggest that because we know from our co-advertising work, when people put multiple brands into an ad, only one brand wins. We find it difficult to believe people can process multiple messages within an ad, so one is a good objective. And I say a good objective cause I've seen ads where I'm not even sure what the one is, but at least having one. That said, we do have R&D that's looking into this in more detail, so I may change my answer in the next 12 months to two years based on empirical evidence.

But at this stage go one. But that doesn't mean you always have to have the one, so you could have one for this execution and then have a different execution that has a different one, another execution that has a different one. So in the long term, you're building up wider, fresher networks, each individual marketing activity has one objective, one brand, one message. You've gotta get that. But over time, you have the one brand with different messages. And the reason we suggest that is that if you just look at the difference between big and small brands, the big difference is bigger brands have more category entry points and more mental advantages on category entry points than smaller brands do.

So that tells us that they did something that led to that. And is the approach of always having only one or two and sticking to that in the long term, gonna get you wider, fresher networks? It seems really hard to understand how you get from that to that. What makes more sense is over time you build up that repertoire of things that you've known for, and when you look at the big brands around the world, they don't narrow cast. They wanna be known everywhere that you want to be, where that category can be part of your life. So emulate where you wanna go, or go where you want to emulate is probably a better way of putting it.

Angela: I love your push around looking for category entry points that can be common to a broad audience in today's day and age. I feel like it's shifting more now than it maybe was a couple of years ago, but just with the growth of digital and things like hyper targeting, and how brands grow, you emphasize the importance of reaching light buyers and something like category entry points that are common. There's the debate over looking for your whale customers and how do I get the most out of them in a short period of time, versus finding value in those light buyers that over time are going to add up, they're gonna become influencers. So when you think about light buyers, what have you found, why are they so central to that long-term brand growth?

Jenni: Yeah, I mean, there is such an overwhelming evidence of why targeting heavy brand buyers is neither useful nor necessary that I'm still surprised people are talking about it. It does astonish me and the evidence and so many different instances against it. But anyway, yeah, good luck to them. But the thing about light buyers is two things to remember. One is there's lots of them. Secondly, it's risk mitigation. So if you're a packaged goods company, you have a lot of people who just buy you once a year and you need them to keep buying you once a year just to keep the share you've got.

Now, even if you're someone like Coca-Cola, you have a big chunk of people who just buy one Coke a year. It's not like they get to the end of the year, January 31st and go, oh damn, I forgot to buy my year's annual Coke. Quick, get me to a store so I can get that. No, a lot of people drop off of being a light buyer for a brand and don't even know they've done it. Because links to memory structures are small and fragile, and if you don't get out there and build, keep them, they're often using other brands as well, it's so easy for them not to buy you. Caring about light buyers is a risk mitigation strategy as well as a growth strategy because when brands decline it's light buyers that drop off first.

That's why sometimes you see a brand that declines has a bit of a bump. Its loyalty looks higher than expected. That's because all the light buyers, a big chunk of light buyers have dropped off, and when a brand stops advertising, that's usually where the drop off comes from. The people who know very little about the brand and buy it infrequently and just don't get that right reinforcement that they normally would've got. So if you are not caring about your light buyers, you are risking a lot with your brand.

Rob: Now, Jenni, Elena, and Angela have talked at nauseam on this podcast about my lack of mental availability between my ears, but that's not the kind of mental availability that you've really brought to in terms of the core concepts of marketing. Your mental availability in your work really reflects the ability for brands to be present in people's brains. So what's the best way to increase that? Not what's the best way to make me smarter, but what's the best way for brands to increase their mental availability?

Jenni: Well, I'm gonna correct you a little bit there. It's actually presence is one thing, but retrievability is what mental availability is about. It's about the freshness of the networks. Because we have lots of brands that are present in our brain. I've just actually had a fun exercise of reading some magazines from the 1970s, women's magazines from the 1970s. And there are brands there that I go, oh my God, I remember that particularly, stocking brands. Remember when women used to wear a lot of pantyhose? There were some really weird pantyhose ads out there. Let me tell you, like there's one with a woman with only a top and pantyhose putting a book on the top shelf on a step ladder, and I'm just like, really?

Angela: That's not what you wore when you put your books away, Jenni.

Jenni: Absolutely.

Rob: It was written by David Ogilvy too, like some dude, you know, like what, that, like, how does that make sense?

Jenni: Anyway, but I still have latent memory structures for a lot of those brands because I was a child in the seventies. So it's not about being in the brain, it's about being retrievable in the brain. And what it takes to do that is this, what we call why we focus on wider, fresher networks, and that means that connection between brands and the things that are used to retrieve brands from memory. And that's what category entry points are about. They're about the things that shape memory retrieval and about getting a mental advantage on those so that your brand gets thought of more than it really should. And when you have any form of communication.

You can have these effects of a messaging effect, which is a link with a specific category entry point, but that act of making the brand think in the context of that category entry point, also refreshes the other things that someone knows about the brand as well. And so it lifts the network as a total for the brand and gives it a heightened advantage. And that's what we're constantly working for in our communications because we need to do this out of purchase because when people are in purchase, they've got so much going on. That's the time you use the things you've built up. It's not the time to build up stuff. That's where you reap what you've sown outside of the purchase cycle and the building of your distinctive assets and your use there, which help the branding stand out in those environments.

And the category entry points, which are about getting the mind ready such that you have a mental advantage going into it, is what helps a brand succeed in those sorts of environments. Or gives it a better probability of succeeding cause the other thing to remember too is we're always dealing with probabilities. There's no guarantee of retrieval from memory. It's a probabilistic process. We forget sometimes the things that we hold dear because our brains are just a bit dodgy. So we're only ever talking about upping the odds. So anyone who can promise you certainty in retrieval, yeah, doesn't know their own memory or anybody else's.

Rob: So a lot of the things that you've talked about this podcast are sometimes considered spicy or contrarian to common belief. What's your most contrarian marketing opinion? We'd love a good contrarian opinion.

Jenni: I still see no evidence that a brand needs to be differentiated to be successful, and I've been looking for it for 20 years and most of the evidence that is in there is very, very weak and easily refuted. And I've done my own testing and that hasn't seen any evidence of it.

Rob: Well that is a mic dropper. And it seems like you just continue to find great content for books. So you've written some popular ones. Do you have another one that's kind of on the horizon here?

Jenni: Possibly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's always a balance of how much, does the world need more books versus other ways of communicating content? So there's always content coming out, how it gets shaped and put to market that may still be a bit in flux.

Elena: Well, we'll be on the lookout when you do publish. Jenni, you're also on the road. Do you wanna talk a little bit about how brands, How Brands Grow Live?

Jenni: Yeah, this is, we are really excited about this because typically to engage with the full resources of the institute, you had to be part of a company that would do it because we have sponsors that sponsor the institute, which means they get access to all of our findings before the world does. You often get a couple of years head start on people, plus you get access to the research as we develop them to really drill down what does this mean for us in our organization. But we now have How Brands Grow Live for executives, which is a spinoff. We had a How Brands Grow Live, which was a two-day training program that we did within our sponsors, but we only do that for our sponsors. This is something that anybody can sign up for and come along and apply How Brands Grow, learn about How Brands Grow philosophy from myself and or Byron and team of researchers. But also, you know, work out how it works for your organization and your brands and what's really apply it and ask questions that are relevant. And we have some really fun conversations cause there's people from all different types of organizations together and discovering what is similar about their challenges as well as what is different.

And often they find there's more similarities than differences, even though they might be from different parts of the world, different parts of marketing, different types of people. We've even had people from agencies come in thinking they were gonna do stuff to help their clients and discovering that they can apply How Brands Grow to grow themselves as an agency and going, oh my God, we can actually use this for us. And going, oh, really? Wasn't expecting that outcome out of it.

Elena: Yeah, we've been there ourselves. Jenni, and I know you're going to Boston soon. I think this episode will come out a little bit after that, but are you headed to Boston too?

Jenni: I am, yes, yes, yes. I'm celebrating my birthday when we're in Boston. So we are going to, I'm dragging one of my colleagues to Salem to see the witches in Salem on my birthday.

Elena: That's fun.

Angela: That's fun.

Jenni: Yeah.

Elena: Yeah, that's great. That'll be a lot of fun. I wanted to wrap up with something a little fun. We were talking about how you started your career early at 14. Maybe you had a career before that too. But if you weren't a marketing scientist today and a professor, what different career do you think you'd be in right now?

Jenni: That's a good question. I mean, my skill is really, I'm really good at problem solving. Give me a problem, I'll work out ways to tackle it. And I think I would apply that anyway. And I used to joke when I got sick of everything, I'd go dig wells in Guatemala, which was kind of a metaphor for going out and we don't have the sort of Peace Corps here in Australia, but that sort of mentality of going out to do good in the world and help third world countries in some way, shape, or form. So I probably would have ended up doing something like that. I ended up in this field instead. I never really planned to be, I never planned to be a professor, never planned to do anything like this. It just kind of ended up that way.

Angela: Very cool.

Elena: Angela?

Angela: I don't wanna use the same thing over and over again. I'm always talking about my love for behavioral psychology. But a different take on it might be, I would love to be like a thinking coach for kids, like system thinking for kids would be so fun. I would love to do something like that.

Rob: These are all really good. I have no marketable skills, so I would probably go with street magician.

Angela: Okay.

Rob: I thought you were gonna say CEO.

Jenni: That's.

Angela: Touché.

Jenni: Well, isn't that what, isn't that what CEO is?

Rob: Right.

Jenni: No marketable skills, CEO or game show host.

Angela: I feel like you need skills to be a magician, Rob.

Rob: Well, I can, but I can do a couple tricks. But see, the thing about a street magician that's different than a regular magician that has to go on a stage is if you suck, people just think you're asking for change. You don't actually have to be that good. So you kind of have a backup built in. So with that.

Angela: Okay.

Elena: Yeah, I think I love animals. So something with animals like horse trainer, or there's someone down my street who runs a doggy daycare. Like, how fun is that? Just every day you're just hanging out with dogs. I might need to convert my backyard into a doggy daycare pretty soon. Great. Well, Jenni, thank you so much for joining us today. Before we close out, where do you like people to follow you? You're very entertaining on LinkedIn. Do you like them to go there? Is there anything else you'd like the listeners to know?

Jenni: Yeah, LinkedIn is the main format. I like to keep my social media use sharp and sweet. So yeah, LinkedIn is the primary format to engage with me. So yeah, get on there and link with me.

Elena: Great. Thank you so much for joining us. You were amazing, so we're really happy you took the time to join the pod.

Jenni: It was a pleasure.

Angela: Thank you so much, Jenni.