Transcript

Bennie F. Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for another episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episode today, we’ll explore life through a marketing lens delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our special guest is Ulli Applebaum.

In 2014, Ulli launched a brand strategy and training boutique firm. First the Trousers, then the Shoes. Prior to launching the agency, he helped senior roles in strategy at some of the world’s top advertising agencies, including head of strategy for BBBD Old Germany, Leo Burnett Chicago, and the Fallon Worldwide Group. He’s contributed to the successful awards of seven FEs and the Advertising Research Foundation Ogilvy Award for excellence in research.

His insights and strategies for Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Nestle, General Mills, I Can Go On, Hallmark, Harley-Davidson, many of the world’s leading brands. He’s helped to launch these brands in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the US. He is the author of the award-winning and best-selling brand positioning workbook and the brand positioning developmental method cards. Welcome, Ulli, to the podcast.

Ulli Appelbaum

Thanks for having me, Bennie. Great to be on your podcast and looking forward to this conversation. And thank you for this great introduction.

Bennie

Oh my goodness, thank you. We started off by saying, let’s get into some trouble today. So one of the things that I love was kind of the spirit that comes into the work that you’re doing, kind of this zest for marketing and zest for marketing impact. Let’s start off with your boutique firm. So you’ve been running it for about a dozen years. First the trousers, then the shoes. So tell me a bit about how you got to this point and why the name?

Ulli

So it took me a while to, it’s a true story, but it took me a while to understand why I chose this name. To be honest, it was the result of the outcome of a slightly alcoholic brainstorm with a couple of friends. And the next morning I looked at the list of the names and this one stood out. So I decided to keep it. And I realized in hindsight that it’s first, I do strategy only, I don’t do execution. And I believe that every successful brand is based on a robust strategy. So that’s where I start. And second, why this weird name is because I believe strategy is a creative problem solving exercise. So there’s creativity, structured creativity involved, which I try to express through the name, you know, first the trousers, then the shoes. I mean, I could have said Applebaum, you know, brand consulting strategy first. But that is kind of a bit, that was a bit boring. So I decided to keep that name.

A third reason was simply when I came up with the name. At the time there were all these rules and guidelines on global brand names, know, keep it short, non-distinct, et cetera, et cetera. And I was to believe, no, if you create an image in the mind, even if it’s a long brand name, it’s gonna work, it’s gonna stick. So all these reasons led me to that. And it’s just a pleasure to have my client introduce me to their teams, saying, know, the guy from first the shorts, then the flip flops, or first the trousers, then the shoes, et cetera, et cetera. It’s stuck.

Bennie

I love how the phrasing really speaks to strategy and action, right? And something that we can all relate to in our daily space. It’s essential. Some is commonplace, right? It’s essential, some is common sense, but still important because if you switch that around in the order, you’ve got a problem.

Ulli

I’ve got a big problem and the reality is you see that problem every day, day in, day out in any kind of organization. So I recently had a client, a potential client who said, no, he doesn’t want to develop a brand strategy. He would have had to pay, I don’t know, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand dollars for it, but decided that he wanted to redesign his packaging for half a million dollars instead. You know, I was like, well, if that’s the attitude, I can’t influence it, but I don’t think it’s the right order of things. That’s the That’s the shoes first and then the trousers, but whatever works for you

Bennie

So talk a bit more with your work about sequencing. When you think about the power brand positioning today, talk a bit about that kind of order of operations, if you will.

Ulli

Well, to be honest, for me, it’s all about common sense. I often say marketing is 99 % common sense and then 1 % like cool words that make it sound sophisticated. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to decide what is it I want to be associated with in the mind of my prospective customers. That’s really how it starts. One thing I’ve learned also through my latest book is in a lot of cases, companies internally are not aligned. So you ask the CFO, you ask the CEO, you ask the sales director, what exactly do you want your companies to stand for? And they give you three different answers. So that’s often where you’re like, OK, you are not able to have a clear consensus. How do you expect your consumers to know what you actually stand for? So it’s really, for me, the starting point of everything because it then determines, and the way I look at it is really a positioning is sort of like the sum of the desired associations you want to create with your brand. And usually it’s like two, three, four brand associations. And once you have that clarity, then you can make decisions about new product development, communication, point of sale design. It’s clear what you’re trying to achieve. If you don’t have that, everyone just…guesses or provides their own interpretation. It gives you a clarity that really allows you to be efficient in the way you build your brand and in the internal alignment you have. So, yeah.

Bennie

Right. You know, in your example, there’s something that really stuck out. As marketing leaders, we have the opportunity to be executive brand whisperers, if you will. So what advice we have in our marketing roles, when we find ourselves in that position where there is some daylight and air between what the head of finance or the senior executives think about the brand and where we are and where we may have internalized. What advice do you have for marketing leaders to bring our colleagues along with us? Our non-marketing colleagues.

Ulli

It sounds, what I’ve learned. So when I moved to the US 20 or so years ago, I worked at Fallon in Minneapolis, a big agency at the time. And one thing I learned at Fallon is how to use plain English to describe what we do. So we didn’t use any buzzwords, anything like that. And I think that’s for me the key as well is to try to understand and bring the perspective of consumers and translate that into plain English. So, you have a brand of, I don’t know, eco-friendly detergents. The consumers know what you are, eco-friendly detergent, but they don’t know why they should buy you over a competitor. They don’t know why they should pay 10 % more for your brand versus another one. If you break it down in this type of language, then you can ask, so CFO, so commercial director, why should consumers buy you over anyone else? Well, it’s because we are eco-friendly. You mean like the other 20 brands in the category that are eco-friendly? That’s not a differentiator. You just break it down. At least that’s my experience into plain English. And most business people understand that if they want to stand out, if they want to charge a premium, they need to be different from the competitor. However, that difference is expressed. It sounds weird to say, but break it down into plain English and to its simplest element and most people will understand and will align behind it, so to say.

Bennie

Yeah, you know, I think it’s a point that is somewhat obvious, but not overstated because one of the challenges when we have surveys or we have conversations with other executives, one of the big challenges for them understanding our role as marketers is the barrier of language. Right? Right, the very so we think about.

Ulli

Yes, 200 percent. Yes, absolutely.

Bennie

Borders and language. If you have a really, really robust global background in the marketing that you’ve done. Now, talk to me a bit about what it was like to head strategy at BBDO in Germany. As you kind of think about the work you do now, you’re now in Minneapolis, right? But you’ve managed brands all over the globe. What is that translation like?

Ulli

So just to give you a bit of background, I was born in Germany. My mom decided to go back to Germany to give birth to me. I spent the first 10 years of my life in Africa, then spent the next 10 years in Brussels, Belgium. So I grew up in speaking German at home, French in the school system, schooling system. And then I moved to Germany for the first time for my studies, for the third year of my MBA program.

So the weird thing, Benny, is I’m more comfortable being a foreigner abroad than a German in my home country. So at the time when I graduated from school, in Germany, there were the best paying jobs and the most interesting jobs. So that’s how I ended up with a job in Germany. So I worked there for two years or three years and then was recruited to run the Leo Burnett office in Budapest. So immediately I was again brought out of Germany because I’m more comfortable being a foreigner. So when I came back to Germany, all of a sudden I was like, I’m not special anymore. I’m like everyone else here. I have this friend who has the theory that as a foreigner abroad, you feel 22 % more intelligent and 27 % more attractive simply for being a foreigner abroad. I don’t know if the percentages are correct, but the concept is correct. And so one thing I’ve developed, so even in Germany, even though I felt all my colleagues are so similar to me, because of my upbringing, I feel I always had this sort of like outsider perspective. So I never look at something saying like, this is me, my crowd, my community, or this is us as consumers. I always look at it as like I’m an outsider looking inside. And I did the same in Germany and I did the same in Hungary and I did the same in the, whether I work in Japan or depend, doesn’t matter where. So I’ve always had this ability to really step outside, be very naive. It’s like, why do we do things like that? Why do you have six brands of Cornflakes or cereals in your cupboard? It always given me the ability to ask very basic questions and have a very fundamental look at things without, and I think that’s for me the difference, without judging. And what I mean with that is basically the concept of empathy.

We may disagree on a bunch of issues, but I try to understand how you feel about it and why you feel this way. But that doesn’t mean that I embrace it. I’ll you an example. My in-laws are small town Minnesotan, very Republican, very MAGA, you know. And yet I’m able to have a great, you know, Sunday lunch or dinner conversation with them when we speak about family, hunting, know, pickup trucks. I don’t know what else except for politics. So there is a way to relate and to understand and they are good people and you know they want the best for their children and all these kind of things. I think it gave me the ability to really look from the outside in without judging which turned took me a while to figure it out but it turns out to be a strength overall. 

Bennie

Right. I think that to your point, that ability to have an objective outsider view when examining a bit of kind of culture anthropology that comes in is a really, you know, I think undervalued skill that marketers have or marketers should look to develop. Right. Should have, you know, in some ways your life story gave you a forcing function. You were outside of it.

Ulli

That’s absolutely true, yeah.

Bennie

But if we think about it, when we look at our marketplaces in there, that’s the best way to describe it. I often tell my teams that you are not the target audience. And I tell them again, that even when I’m sitting there, I am not the target audience. Even if the target audience are people that live in my house named Benny, right? To force yourself to be out of that, to give you that on-ramp to the work that you have.

Ulli

That’s exactly right, yeah. Absolutely.

Bennie

When you think about the challenges today, so when you started working with brands, as we mentioned a few years ago, our world seemed less connected. What are the challenges you see today when your brand moved to the left and to the right aren’t separated by space and time anymore?

Ulli

Yes, so I think the fundamentals become more important. I think in the last 20 years, we’ve lost touch with the fundamentals of marketing. I think it’s coming back now. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think the evidence is I think with everyone has an opinion, everyone can share their opinion. It’s true about society. It’s true about marketing. It’s true about these kind of things. I remember when I started in this job long, long, long, long time ago.

The key sources of authority were American academics, Porter, David Aker, and these type of people. And the companies you followed or you learned the most from were Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Philip Morris even, like the big global package good companies and the big agencies like McKennan, BPDO. Since then, literally everyone can develop their own philosophy and framework around successful brand building and can find evidence to support it, right? I mean, you’ve seen the world became digital. Then we talked about sort of like the long tail. Then we talked about social media, we started to look into, you know, it’s all about community, it’s building relationship with your consumers. So as the technology and the environment evolved, new thinking came. A lot of it good, some of it not so good. But I think now we are at a stage where we’ve learned there’s an awakening what I’m seeing at least where evidence-based marketing is slowly but surely coming up and rising up again. And the interesting thing is there, know, companies like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute or Qatar or Ipsos or System One, you know, you have catalysts like Mark Ritson, et cetera, et cetera, that sort of like crystallize this evidence-based learnings and that becomes more and more popular.

At least my clients are those that seek out this sort of like evidence. So, you know, don’t BS me. Don’t sell me a social media strategy. Don’t use big buzzwords, but help me define how I’m going to grow my brand. What are my growth levers? What are the fundamentals? It’s almost like a return to the basics, but we have now the data and the evidence to support those basics.

Bennie

Right, it’s amazing. You said that, you know, we go back to the basics, but we have the tools and the frameworks to be able to accelerate that. We talk about the kind of connections in our research to neuroscience and cognitive psychology, which were there before, but we didn’t have the ability to actually turn that into actionable insights.

Ulli

Yes, absolutely, absolutely. That is exactly right. So my latest book is called The Science of Brand Associations. And it was basically me diving into brand associations. And I was very interested by the subject. You know, we always say, you know, products are made in factories, brands are created in the mind of the consumers. And I wondered, what does that actually mean? You know, what happens in the mind of the consumers? And I came across this term of brand associations and I’ve been using it for a while. But what I realized is everyone at least I respect and follow is using this term. So we all use brand associations. Then I thought, you know, people probably have written 20 books about the subject. So I searched on Amazon books about brand associations and I realized zero, none. There is not one single book that either has brand associations in its title or that focuses exclusively on that. And then I realized that there is, to your point, so much science in the last 20 years that explains how brands are created in the minds of consumers. So much evidence by these large research companies that proves the point. So there’s so much data available, but no one has ever bothered curating this content or thought it was time to curate the content, which is what I did in this book. But it’s interesting because you don’t have to make anything up. You can literally look everything up, see what is evidence based and get the principles very quickly and very effectively. It’s mind blowing.

Bennie

So we’re gonna talk about moving into your books. What was the impetus to move into writing? So you’re working in agencies, you’re doing strategy, and for some it may seem like a natural step, but I’m curious into what precipitated that first step to move into this space with the Positioning Workbook and there the methodology as well.

Ulli

Great question. One, it’s a desire to teach and to share basic knowledge that I know works because I’ve been using it for many, many years. And the second stream, a succession of bad timing and mistakes. And what I mean with that is when I started my company in 2014, I decided I want to put all my knowledge, especially the one around this positioning methodology, for free on the website. At the time it was an open economy, shared information and all these kind of things going on. So I thought I’m going to put all this knowledge on my website for free. People are going to read it and think, my God, the guy is brilliant. I’m going to hire him. The problem is that’s at the time when the world switched from web-based to mobile-based. So all of a sudden people were reading headlines, not body copy anymore. So this long form blog articles, no one was interested in that.

People wanted little tidbits of information. So from there I decided, okay, I want to do these method cards. So I took all this knowledge and turned it into method cards, which basically each card capture one of the principles of my positioning methodology and one of the sources. And I was using that as a merchandising tool for potential clients. And then I sold it down the road because people were requesting it. I realized, okay, the world moved from long form to short form, so I need to adapt to that. And then I decided, okay, I have the cards out there doing actually pretty well. They were doing pretty well on Amazon, but I never explained the philosophy behind the card. So I decided to write a book about brand positioning and the positioning methodology. Basically, me explaining why I had my cards out in the first place.

And the book was fairly successful as well and well received around the world. But then I realized the book focuses on 26 sources of brand associations to position your brand that you can explore to position your brand. But I never really explored what a brand association is. So then I decided to write the book about brand associations. So I basically always put the cat before the horse. And that’s how I felt and stumbled into explaining this. But it’s also driven by this desire too. The knowledge is available. We know how to do things right. Let’s make it available to as many people as possible. A guy, a person I respect recently told me, one of the biggest global barrier to spreading marketing knowledge is the language. Because a lot of the marketing books are written in English and studies show that if you’re Hispanic or…your native language is German or Japanese, even if you speak English, you prefer to read in your home, in your mother tongue, and you learn more and better in your mother tongue. So I decided to take the positioning book and I now translated it into five different languages to make it available around the world, to spread that knowledge.

Bennie

Which is really powerful, think. I remember doing global work, we talked a lot about there’s one space of having common language for base level communication in which English is fine. But when we start to process and deal with complex topics and themes and strategies, we naturally come in and would prefer to have it in, in effect, the mother tongue that you have in there, that kind of like depth that goes in which makes that really important for these complex spaces. So speaking of complexity, I’m going to bring up consumers again. Because one of the things that we know is while our structures and forms we can build to kind of a standard, consumers are always the wild card. Our consumers, our engagement, our desires constantly change and are re-informed by the work we do. So what advice do you have for our marketers listening to keep up with that evolutionary cycle of the changing. I love your story. Like you built out all this content, you’re super happy. And then consumers appetites and technology shifted right at the same time to make what was hip and digestible last week is now obsolete this week.

Ulli

Correct. Correct. I think the starting point is really to understand what is it you want to stand for, again, comes back to the positioning. And just to describe that is a positioning or the way I describe a brand is nothing more than the sum of the memories a consumer has about your specific offering, right? And that creates emotions, that creates feeling towards the brand. if you don’t memorize aspect of an offering, you don’t have a brand. That’s very simple. Knowing that, I think, is key because then how you bring it to life and how you decide to engage with this changing environment, it becomes your decision. And what I mean with that is, for example, there’s more and more research that shows that consistency is the key to brand success. So if you determine these are the three associations I want to build, I want to stick with them for the next 10, 15 years. I may express them in a different way, I may bring them to life in a different way, I may execute them differently based on the channel I use, but I want to stick to that. A typical example is Snickers. Snickers platform is really about hunger and satisfaction. It has been for the last 30 years. The last 10 or so years it’s been expressed as hungry, you’re not yourself when you’re hungry.

So it’s just a different expression of the same strategy. The ability to balance consistency of meaning and timeliness of execution, I think, is the of like balance that most companies need to create or need to try to create.

Bennie

But what advice do you have for those marketing leaders when the company gets amnesia? We talk about this collection of memories, but what happens when you come into a brand or you come into a story brand, something that’s been established, and the company’s lost the connection with those memories?

Ulli

Well, then you go back to the consumers and remind them of what those memories should be or are or what they have been. So part of my diagnostic phase is always to look at the history of the brand and see what made us successful at a given period of time. Now, in the 70s, we exploded. Why? Well, because we introduced a new media channel or use the new media channel to promote the brand. Or we started to use sampling, whatever it is.

So for me, it’s always part of looking at the existing equity that helped the brand become successful in the first place. And it’s really also often reflecting, trying to reflect the internal perspective with the consumer perspective. It’s really this, you think your brand is like that, the consumer has forgotten your brand. So for example, many, many years ago, I worked on Hallmark, the greeting cards.

Everyone knows Hallmark, right? So that awareness, brand awareness, like 99%. But most people didn’t know what Hallmark was actually doing. They knew that they’d had greeting cards, paper greeting cards, but they didn’t know that they had customizable cards that you can where you can record your own message and leave a personalized message as part of your greeting gesture.

So here there was a case for me where there was this latent awareness, yeah, I know of Hallmark, but where you forgot what they actually do. And in that case, it’s well, we’re going to refresh them, know, re-inform them about the offering, the value of it, blah, But so it’s really about identifying what the brand is associated with. Is that helping you build your success or are the elements that your brand is naturally associated with that need to be brought back to life or refreshed, etc. So it’s really about playing with making sure there is an alignment on what memories you have, what memories you want to create and how you want to create those memories. It’s I said, basic but really not easy to get brands or large organizations to buy into this simplicity.

Bennie

When can we over complicate things for ourselves? That’s the question, right? Can we, can we.

Ulli

Absolutely. Yes. And we love to, right? To be honest, we love to. So why? Because it makes us sound smart. You know, I’d like to charge $10,000 a day for my time. You know, maybe I need to use vocabulary that no one else has. I know, maybe I need to make it sound. It’s ridiculously simple to say, well, we should offer consumers something that no one else offers and that they really want. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re doing. But you’ve to package that in 20 page PowerPoint slides to justify $100,000, $200,000 in consulting fees. It’s insane.

Bennie

Right. So since you’ve started the business, what have you seen change in terms of strategy, in terms of people’s embrace of strategy, right?

Ulli

So it’s sort of like the ups and downs of my own business. So what I’ve seen in the last 10 years, it’s an increased interest of B2B, of the B2B sector, and especially the IT and software sector in marketing principles. So a lot of my clients became sort of like either B2B companies or technology companies that wanted more professional marketing. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed. The second thing I’ve noticed is a decrease in education, marketing education. Because everyone can have an opinion on what good marketing is, the fundamentals are often lost. And I grew up in an agency world, I was lucky, where they would send you to another country for three days to train you for $5,000. Nowadays, if your boss lets you sign up for an online course at $50, you are lucky.

You know what I mean? So the fundamentals we were taught sort of dissipated over the years. So what I see is a lot of people, a lot of smart marketeers that haven’t learned the fundamentals. And I’m not saying that the fundamentals are the holy Bible or anything like that, but I believe that when you work in marketing, you need to know what a net promoter score is. Whether you agree with it or not, you need to know what it is.

So what I’ve seen is a decrease in these fundamentals, but luckily also a resurgence of an interest in those spaces. And that’s for me the last point is a revival of marketing science and evidence-based marketing principles. is, we’re still at the beginning. The first 5 % of marketers are starting to embrace this. But I think it’s a wave that is coming and that’s going to be bigger and bigger the next 10, 20 years or so.

Bennie

So you think about that and we talk a lot about the future of the practice. What advice would you give to my students who are undergrad, are MBAs listening to us today? With that in mind, how do they think about fundamentals as an accelerant or part of their trajectory?

Ulli

Yeah. Well, I think the first look at try to find sort of like people you admire or authorities in their field and try to follow them and learn from. It’s like I look at marketing, Betty, as a craft. If you’re a painter, you first need to learn the basics of painting, know, color, dimensions, all these kinds of things. Once you’ve learned all that, then you can ignore everything and do your own stuff. And I think marketing is the same. Learn the basics. Learn what works and what doesn’t. A couple of days ago, I literally just went to Claude and they have sort of like this deep search feature now. I told it, I asked it, the assignment was, give me a list of all the evidence-based marketing principles you can identify. And within 20 minutes, I had a list of 30 marketing-based principles. The knowledge is easily accessible if you ask the right questions.

You know what I mean? So learn those basics and then decide to ignore them once you’ve learned and acquired and integrated those basics into your understanding of what we’re trying to do. And don’t go for the flukes. That’s my other thing is like, don’t go for the snake, how do call that? Oil snake, snake oil vendors, whatever they’re called and stay away from those guys.

Bennie

Right, right. Well, you I can’t believe we’re almost at the end of our time. I’m gonna ask you this question though, my friend. So first the trousers, then the shoes. What’s next?

Ulli

Yes. Great question. So my next ambition is, you know how there’s this book called The One Page Marketing Plan, sold millions of copies worldwide, absolutely mind blowing. Because of the way I look at brand associations and the scientific principle I use, I’m at a stage where I’m able to break down the audit, the assessment of a brand to a list of 20 questions that gives me a very clear picture of where the problems are at the brand level and what needs to be fixed. So my sort of ambition is to continue to spread this knowledge by sharing my books around the world, but also to give people a sort of like one-pager might be a bit exaggerated by, but a simple list of 20 questions packaged the right way that would allow them to really diagnose a brand, identify where to develop your strategy, where to focus your strategy on, and then build a brand. So it’s just sharing this knowledge, continuing to spread it in a format that I hope I’m not constantly running after technology or after sort of like the shade of the season, and that once I’ll be hitting the right spot with the right format and the right content. So that is my quest.

Ha ha ha.

Bennie

What a great way to end our conversation, my friend. Learn, grow, share, repeat. Which I think is so much a part of your inspiration and the work that you’ve done. Thank you for sharing as we navigate what it means to be a marketing executive, a marketing manager, a brand steward, that we know that learning, growing, and sharing, my friend.

Ulli

Absolutely. No, thanks for having me. I love it, great way to summarize it.

Bennie

So, and thank you all for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. And once again, I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. I encourage you to check out Ulli’s books, Brand Positioning Workbook, Aha! The Ultimate Insight Generation Tool, and his Brand Positioning Development Method Cards. Please check out the work of the AMA and we look forward to welcoming you to our next podcast. Thank you.