Marketing 201
The virtual marketing book everyone is asking for
Happy new year. I expect by this point you have had your fill of “year in review” articles. Rather than put you through that, I want to try something a little more ambitious. Over the years I am often asked, “What marketing book should I read to get up to speed on the function?” I generally answer two ways:
Read How Brands Grow. It is a great primer on how marketing works, but not very helpful in understanding things like how to think about paid search, attribution, SEO, manage affiliates, set up effective CRO tests, or any of the myriad of tools a modern marketer needs to understand.
Wait for Marketing BS the book to come out…
Marketing BS, the book, is still in progress. It is very very close.
But in the meantime I realized that I have written a VERY long book worth of content in this newsletter. This post is an annotated collection of those posts in an index of sorts that in aggregate should provide a grounding in the skills a modern marketer needs.
I call it “201” rather than “101”, because it is less about the basics, than an anecdote to those basics. I won’t tell you why to do a loyalty program, but rather why NOT do do a loyalty program, and how most loyalty programs have nothing to do with loyalty. If loyalty programs add value it is through levers like financial arbitrage or customer acquisition, NOT increased customer loyalty.
Marketing BS essays generally build off of something that was happening at a specific moment in time (i.e., The discounting essay starts with the question of why Amazon extended their “Prime Day” from one day to two in the summer of 2019), but the lessons here are evergreen. The good news about marketing is that while the specific tactics change from year to year, the overall strategy and “rules” stay far more constant than most gurus would have you believe.
So now when someone asks, “What book should I read to get up to speed about marketing” you can just send them to this page. Many of these essays are free to read. Some are only available for Marketing BS+ subscribers (marked with a $). Full members have access to all of these posts, and a new essay every week.
In addition to the essays covering the core marketing functions, there have been three reoccurring themes that have turned up on Marketing BS: “Marketing for Employees”, “Real Fidelity” and “Augmented PR”. They are each important ideas that are unique to Marketing BS - you won’t hear about them at any business school. Call them “Marketing 301”. If you are an experienced marketer and you want to internalize completely new ideas you may want to start there.
Note that this collection is too long for most email clients (including gmail). You can read the entire thing here.
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Marketing 201, by Marketing BS
Introduction
Everything is Marketing, May 2019 (Marketing is about growing a business, which requires looking broader than just the traditional marketing functions)
Brand Building
Investing for the Long Run ($), June 2019 (ROI tends to be higher for long term marketing investments, but they are much harder to measure)
Investing for the Long Run B2B ($), August 2019 (Expanding on Investing for the Long Run with data on B2B businesses)
Naming a Brand, September 2019 (Your brand name doesn’t matter as much as you think it does)
Peloton, Popeyes and Viral Marketing, December 2019 (Introducing the idea that more news is good news even if it casts your company in a negative light)
Brand Awareness, January 2020 (Why awareness is so powerful, using Royal Sussex and Casper as examples)
Celebrity Endorsements ($), October 2020 (The value of celebrity endorsements and how the industry is being disrupted)
Reach vs Frequency ($), November 2020 (Quantifying how much more valuable reach is than frequency)
Customer Service as Brand Building ($), December 2020 (How the impact of Zappos’s use of impressive customer service had impact on awareness and employee marketing)
HBO, Disney, Cannibalization and Synergy ($), December 2020 (Trying to estimate the impact of effects you cannot measure - particularly important for broad advertising efforts like television)
Advertising and Influence
Advertising, Propaganda and De-Radicalization, January 2020 (Exploring just how much impact advertising can have in changing minds)
The Superbowl and Adjacency ($), February 2020 (Does it matter what content your ad sits next to, or is it just the number of eyeballs?)
Corona - the beer and the virus, March 2020 (Why the Coronavirus did not hurt Corona the beer)
Bloomberg and what advertising does ($), March 2020 (Advertising drives awareness and consideration, NOT purchase decision making, which makes it less useful for presidential campaigns)
Performance Marketing
Sign-in with Apple, June 2019 (Follow-up: State of the Internet) (How performance advertising and tracking works circa June 2019)
Why are Customer Acquisition Costs Going Up ($), August 2019 (Why reducing friction and increasing scale drive up the cost of advertising)
Sort Order, September 2019 (Why Archery was the #1 viewed online sport at the London Olympics)
Unseemly Arbitrage ($), October 2019 (The advantage of advertising where other companies are afraid to tread - warning: pornography discussion)
Does Online Marketing Work, November 2019 (A considered counter to claims that is does not)
Coronavirus and Cohorts, March 2020 (The importance of cohort analysis in both marketing and public health)
Sweden, Facebook and Fast Feedback, May 2020 (Why it is hard to make decisions without fast feedback, and the ramifications of that challenge)
TikTok and New Marketing Channels ($), June 2020 (Marketing on TikTok and how to assess whether a new channel is worth it)
Programatic Advertising, Cookies, Tracking and Targeting ($), September 2020 (The history and future of programatic advertising)
Product, Product Marketing and CRO
Pizza Hut and Customer Acquisition through Product Innovation, November 2019 (Using product innovation to drive customer acquisition)
Remote Schools and Local Maxima, May 2020 (The difference between optimization and finding a new paradigm - and why the latter is likely to be negative ROI in the short term)
Apple, Bundling and Media ($), August 2020 (How bundling works)
Optimizely, CRO and Menu Design, September 2020 (Why CRO is over-rated)
Convenience and Distribution, November 2020 (The power of reducing friction and increasing distribution)
Loyalty Programs, Lifetime Value and Retention
Starbucks, Loyalty and Breakage, September 2019 (Why good loyalty programs are not about loyalty)
Transparency and Customer Based Corporate Valuation ($), February 2020 (How smart CLTV techniques can be used to better value companies)
Customer Heterogeneity, April 2020 (Why customer differences are a better predictor of future revenue than marketing activity)
Other Marketing: Email, Discounting, Promotions, Reviews and Market Research, Public Relations
Presidential Emails, July 2019 (Why email subject lines are less important than most people think)
Happy Double Prime Day, July 2019 (Good discounting is not about driving sales)
Tesla, Cybertruck and Market Research, December 2019 (Why market research is over-rated)
Augmented PR and the Future of Marketing, September 2020 (The concept of augmenting public relations with paid media)
Reviews and Ratings ($), November 2020 (How and when reviews affect conversion rate and customer acquisition)
People don’t care about your polls, November 2020 (What market researchers can learn from the failure of polls to predict elections)
Analytics, Machine Learning and AI
Google and Fake AI ($), November 2019 (Explaining AI as a marketing stunt)
Infections, False Positives and Personalization, March 2020 (Followup ($)) (Why personalization is over-rated)
Models vs Experiments, April 2020 (The difference between models and experiments)
GPT-3, AI Dungeon, and the future of marketing, July 2020 (The power of GPT-3 and how it could be used in marketing)
Strategy
Where Could This Go Part 1 and Part 2, August 2019 (Analysis of the Substack model after their fundraise)
Marketing Lessons from The Avengers, September 2019 (What marketers can learn from Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe)
The NFL and Scarcity ($), September 2019 (Using scarcity to drive monetization)
Pandemic and Plagiarism, March 2020 (Why copying other companies is harder than it looks)
Marketing During a Pandemic, April 2020 (What companies should do during economic downturns)
Marketing Careers, Leadership and Company Culture
Is the CMO Role Obsolete?, August 2019 (No)
WeWork and Vision ($), October 2019 (The two types of leadership a CEO needs)
Metric and Goals, April 2020 (When metrics become goals, they cease to be good metrics)
Pandemic Theater, May 2020 (Doing things for show rather than for impact)
Experience and Progressions, May 2020 (Why experience matters, and how to improve a skill)
When the Players are the Referees, June 2020 (The problem with any industry that is both the player and evaluator of success - including much of marketing)
Culture, Police and Nauseating Displays of Loyalty, July 2020 (Company culture and how to build it)
Harvard, Human Capital, Signaling and Selection Effect ($), July 2020 (Assessing the value of tying yourself to a brand like Harvard or Google)
Marketing BS Career Guide to $1MM compensation, July 2020 (My LONG guide to building your career and compensation the traditional (but ethical) way)
Inputs vs Outputs, October 2020 (The impact of two ways of measuring success, and why it means different management techniques and decision making)
Contra-Expertise, December 2020 (Building off of “Experience and Progressions”, when is hiring for expertise NOT the right choice?)
Platforms, Regulation and Privacy
Facebook Currency ($), June 2019 (What Facebook was trying to do with Libra)
Facebook, Free Speech and Adidas ($), October 2019 (Trying to understand how Mark thinks speech and censorship on his platform)
Airbnb, Scale and Fraud ($), November 2019 (Why scale leads to fraud and what to do about it)
NYTs, Location Tracking and Privacy ($), December 2019 (Do people care about privacy? And why does the media talk about it so much?)
Spotify and Podcasts ($), February 2020 (How Spotify is building a defensable platform with podcasts)
Joe Rogan and Podcast Advertising ($), June 2020 (More on Spotify and podcasts - specifically their advertising platform)
Amazon and Managerial Incentives, August 2020 (Why individual incentives often matter more than the goals of the company)
Marketing 301
Marketing for Employees
This is the signature “Marketing BS” idea that customers don’t care much about your product, but employees care a lot. The result is that much of marketing should (and is) targeted at the employee base even if it pretends to be about the consumers.
Marketing to Employees, June 2019
Marketing for Investors, July 2019
Bad Companies, October 2019
Marketing to Regulators, October 2019
Brands Are Deeply Saddened, May 2020
Advertising Boycotts and Mascots, June 2020
Stripe and HR as a marketing function, August 2020
Real Fidelity and Marketing to Employees, September 2020
Employees vs Customers, September 2020
Coinbase and Mission Based Companies, October 2020
Viral Marketing and Augmented PR
A second idea developed over the years at Marketing BS was the idea that “earned media” (Public relations) can be used to “augment” paid media (advertisements). By making paid advertisements different, controversial, weird or topical it is possible to increase their reach by orders of magnitude beyond what was paid for.
Peloton, Popeyes and Viral Marketing, December 2019
Tesla, Cybertruck and Market Research, December 2019
Augmented PR and the Future of Marketing, September 2020
Customer Service as Brand Building ($), December 2020
Real Fidelity
The third Marketing BS signature is the concept the “fidelity” matters. The more sensory elements in an experience the more memorable and impactful it is. This is taken to the extreme when the media is “real life” - attending a live concert or lecture is very different than watching a YouTube video.
Concerts, Zoom and Real Fidelity, January 2020 (I introduce the concept which becomes very important two months later when the world goes into isolation due to the global pandemic)
Real Fidelity and Marketing to Employees, September 2020
COVID-19
In H1 2020 it was hard to talk about anything EXCEPT COVID-19. I produced a series of essays linking how we should think about marketing to how we should think about COVID-19. These essays are mixed in among the others in “Marketing 201” but are collected here for convinience:
Corona: The Beer and the Virus, March 2020
Coronavirus and Cohorts, March 2020
Pandemic and Plagiarism, March 2020
Infections, False Positives and Personalization, March 2020 (Followup)
Metric and Goals, April 2020
Customer Heterogeneity, April 2020
Models vs Experiments, April 2020
Marketing During a Pandemic, April 2020
Sweden, Facebook and Fast Feedback, May 2020
Pandemic Theater, May 2020
Experience and Progressions, May 2020
Remote Schools and Local Maxima, May 2020
When the Players are the Referees, June 2020
Keep it Simple,
Edward