Question 1

What is the 95:5 rule and how should you apply it?

Accepted Answer

Developed by Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, it observes that roughly 5% of potential buyers are in market at any time. Dale Harrison calls it a parameterised rule: you calculate your own figure from how often buyers replace a product, such as about every 60 months for CRM, and how long the buying window lasts. If your customers' buying cycles match the industry benchmark, as they usually do, your marketing is capturing demand, not creating it.

Question 2

What is the 'sea of sameness' in B2B marketing and what causes it?

Accepted Answer

Finastra's head of marketing Joerg Klueckmann once clicked a competitor's ad thinking it was his own company's, because the colours, stock imagery and copy were nearly identical. He argues that heavy A/B testing and data-driven decision making have squeezed out creativity. New ideas are easy to kill in meetings because nobody can prove in advance how much pipeline an untested idea will produce.

Question 3

What is marketing's job, stripped to the essentials?

Accepted Answer

Rachel Fairley says the customer has a need and you are there to solve it, which takes three things. You must be in their mind before they shop, because it is too late to 'show up at the altar'; you must be easy to buy from; and you must help them get the most from what they bought quickly, or they will churn. She suggests CEOs ask CMOs who the buyer is, what we want to sell them and how, and measure against those questions.

Question 4

Why is marketing so full of jargon, and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Brand strategist Sarah Robb says marketing is unregulated, so agencies invent proprietary frameworks and terms like 'brand onion' to look distinctive in pitches, and textbooks add more. The result confuses marketers, who then feel unable to challenge outside experts and lose control and confidence over their own brand strategy. She notes models are sometimes designed to lead to the work the agency makes most money from.

Question 5

How is marketing jargon linked to imposter syndrome?

Accepted Answer

Sarah Robb notes about 70% of adults experience imposter syndrome and it is often linked to high achievers. In her Brand Strategy Academy, about 75% of more than 250 students say jargon, models and frameworks are what they find most confusing about brand strategy. She felt it herself for a decade as a senior agency strategist, and advises marketers to challenge anyone using jargon to explain it, since they may not understand it either.

Question 6

What are the signs that a company's positioning is weak?

Accepted Answer

April Dunford says prospects cannot work out what the product does, wrongly compare it to something else, or understand it but do not see why anyone would pay for it. For services firms, a common sign is clients saying they like you but do not know when they would hire you, because the positioning is too broad. She defines the problem as the gap between what existing customers understand and what new prospects can figure out.

Question 7

Where do you get the information needed for good positioning?

Accepted Answer

April Dunford says B2B tech companies with a sales team usually already know most of the answers. Sales knows the real competitors and the status quo in accounts, the product team knows how capabilities compare, and after a reasonable number of deals the organisation knows what customers value. A cross-functional workshop can often do the job without heavy research; companies without a sales team or deal history need to do research first.

Question 8

Can marketing really create demand?

Accepted Answer

Dale W. Harrison argues no: demand emerges from needs inside a buyer's organisation, and marketing can only capture it. He says terms like 'demand creation' grew up to avoid talking about brand marketing, which CFOs asked to measure. When pressed, most 'demand creationists' actually mean brand awareness or winning share from competitors, both legitimate goals that already have names.

Question 9

How can marketing work in a heavily regulated sector like fund management?

Accepted Answer

Liontrust CMO Simon Hildrey argues regulation is not the barrier people think. Marketing should be simple, understandable and truthful anyway, and working closely with compliance means problems rarely arise. Digital and social channels can even help, because targeting professionals only lets you tailor more technical messages to that audience.

Question 10

Why can't price promotions increase real demand?

Accepted Answer

Discounts can raise buying temporarily but not the underlying need. Dale cites Australian research on online mattress brands during the pandemic: heavy discounting caused a sales spike followed by a dip below the long-term average, because future demand was pulled forward. As he puts it, buying six boxes of half-price detergent does not mean you do more laundry.

Question 11

Why doesn't the traditional positioning statement work?

Accepted Answer

The fill-in-the-blanks positioning statement assumes you already know the best answers for market category, competitors, value and target customers, and only need to write them down. April finds the obvious answers are often wrong because customers see you differently. At IBM she wrote a deliberately silly statement to prove her point, and nobody ever read it.

Question 12

How can marketers explain brand work to finance colleagues?

Accepted Answer

Guest host Rachel Fairley uses category entry points: telling a finance leader there are, say, eleven reasons people come to buy in a market and the brand is not linked to any of them, so buyers do not think of it. That lands far better than talking about redoing the brand essence, which makes people switch off. Sarah recalls being made to pitch a 'visual brand driver' to Novartis Oncology when the real issue was brand architecture.

Question 13

How can a marketing leader make room for creative innovation?

Accepted Answer

Joerg reserves a set percentage of his budget, around 10%, as a playground for testing new creative, content formats or channels. The key is giving each innovation enough time, often one to three years, before judging it, and then being bold enough to kill it if it fails. Creative ideas must still connect to sellable products and feed middle and bottom-of-funnel campaigns.

Question 14

Why did a fund manager sponsor Oxford United, and did it work?

Accepted Answer

Liontrust took a three-year shirt sponsorship to build awareness beyond the financial pages, and it was a big success: Oxford beat Premier League Swansea in the FA Cup and appeared on national news and back pages. The team treated it as a partnership, producing exclusive content with the club and engaging fans without pretending to be supporters. It also reinforced the brand with professionals who already knew Liontrust.

Question 15

Didn't the iPhone create a new market?

Accepted Answer

Dale says the iPhone entered a smartphone market already worth billions, with BlackBerry and a dozen other players, and grew in its first decade mainly by draining demand from competitors. By contrast, Apple's Newton was an explicit attempt to create a market: Apple spent about $1.2 billion and sold roughly 200,000 units in a decade. Colgate toothpaste similarly replaced existing tooth powder rather than inventing tooth brushing, and the switch took about 50 years.

Question 16

What is a 'brand enemy' and why is it often not a competitor?

Accepted Answer

Rachel says the brand enemy for most buyers is inertia: sticking with the existing supplier feels safer than the personal and political risk of change. For Just Eat, the enemy was the phone call to a regular takeaway. Another type of enemy is a completely different use of the same budget, so marketers should understand what drives people into market and what the alternative to buying from them is.

Question 17

What questions should you ask customers to understand why they chose you?

Accepted Answer

April calls customers 'experts in pain', not in solutions. Instead of asking what they love or hate about you, take them back to the moment of decision: what they were doing before, what made them decide to change, how they built a shortlist, who was on it and why they picked you. Answers like 'great support' usually describe retention features they discovered after buying, not reasons they chose you.

Question 18

What four questions should every brand strategy answer?

Accepted Answer

After studying 182 of the world's most valuable brands, Sarah found they use inconsistent labels but answer the same four questions. Why do we exist (usually called mission or purpose)? What do we do (positioning or value proposition)? Who are we and how do we do things (values and behaviours)? How does our brand look, feel and sound (personality or attributes)? The label matters less than using language the CEO will actually use.

Question 19

Why does it matter whether we call it demand creation or demand capture?

Accepted Answer

Dom argues the belief shapes behaviour: if you think you can create demand, you treat customers as targets, chase dashboard numbers and over-use promotions that damage pricing or steal future sales. If you see your job as capturing demand and building awareness, you ask where demand would otherwise go, what change you are asking customers to make, and you market to them very differently.

Question 20

What makes good company values and a credible purpose?

Accepted Answer

Research shows the most overused values are integrity, honesty, teamwork, innovative, accountable and customer satisfaction, which wash over people. Leading brands use short commands that show behaviour, such as Meta's 'move fast' or Airbnb's 'be a serial entrepreneur'. A good purpose is credible and linked to how the company makes money, like Microsoft's aim to empower every person and organisation to achieve more, rather than an unrelated promise to save the planet.

Question 21

Why is ROI a poor measure of marketing, and what is a better way to show value?

Accepted Answer

Dale says cost and rate metrics measure how fast budget is spent, not whether it works, and most marketers divide this period's spend by this period's revenue even though effects lag two to five quarters. Even accurate ROI can mislead: handing 50% coupons to diners who already booked would score brilliantly while bankrupting the restaurant. He compares marketing to a factory building with negative ROI that makes everything inside more productive, raising close rates, shortening sales cycles and reducing discounting.

Question 22

What are April Dunford's five components of positioning?

Accepted Answer

The components are competitive alternatives (what customers would do if you did not exist), differentiated capabilities, differentiated value, best-fit customers, and market category. They are all interdependent, and she starts with competitive alternatives, then works through capabilities, value, best-fit customers and category. Repositioning a failing 'spreadsheet on steroids' as an embeddable mobile database turned it into a product that eventually earned more than $1 billion.

Question 23

What are the most common positioning mistakes?

Accepted Answer

The first is misunderstanding the competition, such as Googling 25 rivals when sales says the real alternative is a spreadsheet or an intern; you cannot beat an intern on ease of use. The second is talking about features without explaining the value, especially for innovative features. Services firms often claim capabilities they cannot prove, and April argues they do better by specialising where they can claim leadership, as she does by only working with B2B tech companies that have sales teams.

Question 24

How do you build a distinctive brand when your product looks homogeneous and intangible?

Accepted Answer

Simon says brand is not just imagery; it is the words, tone, messaging and everything the company does, applied consistently over time. Liontrust has never done a rebrand, preferring to evolve the brand gradually and take clients and staff with it. Each fund team's distinct investment process is presented as part of the corporate brand rather than competing with it.

Question 25

What practical advice does Sarah Robb give marketers running a brand strategy project?

Accepted Answer

Make sure you can answer the core questions of why you exist, what you do, who you are and how you work, and how the brand should look, feel and sound, using whatever labels fit your CEO and culture. Avoid overlapping terms, such as a brand vision alongside an existing company vision. Do not outsource the whole project: take control, and tell agencies to answer the questions using your labels rather than their proprietary models.

Question 26

What is Finastra TV and what did Finastra learn from running its own streaming channel?

Accepted Answer

Instead of hosting videos on YouTube, where ads and competitor content distract viewers, Finastra built its own Netflix-style channel for financial services, with series of about ten episodes of no more than 20 to 25 minutes. It gives first-party cookie data and integrates with the website, and users register once for the whole channel. Filming full 45-minute stage talks failed, so speakers now re-record condensed studio versions, and consistent release planning a year or more ahead is essential.

Question 27

Why is churn often decided long before a customer cancels?

Accepted Answer

With subscription models, customers effectively decide every day whether a product is still useful, so by the time they cancel their mind was made up long ago. Dom describes cancelling a dog food subscription after a call centre told him his order was 'just one' of thousands, breaking the brand's promise to make his dog feel special. Rachel argues brand promises must be delivered consistently across the whole business, and share of wallet may matter more than churn.

Brand, positioning and differentiation

15 episodes on brand, positioning and differentiation

Questions about brand, positioning and differentiation