Episode 97 – What American Marketers Get Wrong w/ Emmanuel Probst, Part One

July 1, 2023

Dr. James Richardson:

Welcome, everybody. Got a special guest this month, Emmanuel Probst. Actually, Dr. Emmanuel Probst. He has a PhD just like yours truly, but in a slightly adjacent field, and he may even talk about that. He’s the Global Lead of Brand Thought Leadership at Ipsos, the largest publicly-traded market research company in the world, I believe, correct?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

You got it.

Dr. James Richardson:

Emmanuel, thank you for joining us.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

James, thank you for having me and for a great introduction.

Dr. James Richardson:

So tell us a little bit about your background because it’s quite interesting.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

I’ve been researching brands and advertising effectiveness for over 17 years now. Really, what’s most important to our listeners is, I’m curious about people. Why do people do what they do? And from there, how can we create better brands that are more meaningful, more important to people? Ideally, how can we go beyond just selling goods, but also make a positive impact on people and the world around us? That is really what I’ve been doing ever since I started in our great industry around 2004. Now today, as you said, I’m Global Lead for Brand Leadership at Ipsos, which originally is a French company, but we have offices all over the world and 17,000 plus associates. And I also teach Consumer Market Research at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA. And as you said, I write books, and my latest book is called Assemblage: the Art and Science of Brand Transformation. But again, really my mission is one, to understand why do people do what they do, and two, to share this knowledge with my fellow marketers and the world at large. That’s what I’m here for.

Dr. James Richardson:

Awesome. We have a juicy topic. What is wrong with American marketing? And I’m curious to hear what Emmanuel thinks, so I’m going to toss off some questions, and this is a palate cleanser, the first one. So what are the differences between European and American approaches to marketing? If you could make crude generalizations.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

What has been wrong with American marketing is this relentless intention to force-feed people with more products, more brands, and more advertising for products and brands they don’t need and has been wrong for a number of years. And that problematic advertising and definitely social media put on steroids is blasting people with advertising messaging every two seconds of the day. And in that process, we forget what is really important to people. We forget that most people don’t care about most brands, that most people don’t seek more products. In that process, we also forgot to make a positive impact on the world. And don’t get me wrong, we’re here to make a profit. Brands are here to move products, and that’s completely fine. We have the opportunity to do so, though, in a more responsible fashion, people, to take them from who they are to who they want to become, and that’s what I mean by transformative brands. I want the brand to transform me from who I am to who I want to become, and I want the brand to help transform the world around us and the world at large.

Dr. James Richardson:

Is it known in the advertising research world that in the American market especially, we are so signal oversaturated that that itself, the volume of the signals themselves, is enough to reduce the effectiveness of any one ad? Is that what the research is saying?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Absolutely.

Dr. James Richardson:

Okay.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

There is absolutely no doubt about it because…

Dr. James Richardson:

So that means that it was simply easier to get lift in the ’80s because there were fewer ads.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Exactly.

Dr. James Richardson:

Okay.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

There were fewer ads. There were also fewer media channels, and that’s how you see the impact of each and every channel going downhill. And the ones that stand out, the ads and the brands that stand out, are the ones that mean something to people…

Dr. James Richardson:

Right.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

And help them once again become who they want to be.

Dr. James Richardson:

Are there bad assumptions that you think a lot of American marketers tend to make about their craft? Have you noticed?

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Yeah, I think most American marketers need to wake up to a fact that they no longer fully control the brand, and they have to let go of some of that control. What this means is American marketers, or marketers in general, can establish the foundations of a brand. What is the big idea? What does the brand stand for? What does the product do? And then need to let go some of the creative control to the audience, content creators of all sorts. I’m not just talking influencers doing TikToks, but really everyday people. And marketers have to accept that we live in a world where consumers, audiences, people, have leverage and can react very quickly and, candidly, can do a lot of damage if they want to, and in fact, even when they don’t necessarily want to.

Dr. James Richardson:

Yeah, I think the issue of control is important to bring up. I actually preach that to my own clients, believe it or not. I tell them to learn from their fans as early as they can because they usually don’t understand their business as the owner the way that their fans do. It’s surprised me, Emmanuel, I find the same cognitive dissonance amongst founders that I saw amongst marketers at big companies. I didn’t expect that to be the case. In other words, having a weird off-centered frame of what their brand really meant to consumers versus what it does.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Yeah.

Dr. James Richardson:

It’s odd.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Well that comes from a limitation of being bubbled and no, what I mean by this is if you…

Dr. James Richardson:

Yeah.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Well besides the fact that you have your original idea for the brand for its products, you also know way more about the category than anyone else does.

Dr. James Richardson:

Yeah.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Nobody thinks that much about sparkling water or an energy drink or toothpaste…

Dr. James Richardson:

Right.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Or any of your products that, candidly, feels functional to most of us. You see this when you do shop-along in grocery stores, James. You see that people spend an average of 1.13 seconds staring at a shelf to choose among 150 SKUs of popcorns and you know that people spend a few seconds in a given aisle, if that.

Dr. James Richardson:

Yeah.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

And we also know that people tend to buy almost always the same 150 items…

Dr. James Richardson:

Yep.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Versus the 12,000 items, different SKUs you might have in a grocery store. So it is very hard to stand out, and it is very hard to differentiate. But again, I think a risk for all of us in this industry, and in all humility I include myself here, is to say we are bubbled, reading the same publications and listening to the same great podcasts, and traveling to the same great conferences. That’s not how the real world operates, starting with the fact that people think a lot less about products than we do.

Dr. James Richardson:

It’s that bubble mentality, or tunnel vision, that I think leads people to not listen to the signals that the market’s telling them. But the difference is that the founders don’t know that they should. Your clients know they should because they have massive budgets to do it. Doesn’t mean they’re doing it well.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

Yeah, in Assemblage, in my latest book, The Art and Science of Brand Transformation, I look at those financial implications. So bottom line is, it is not the brand with the greatest budget that makes the best impact and that necessarily wins.

Dr. James Richardson:

Yeah.

Dr. Emmanuel Probst:

You think in the water category right now, there is a brand called Liquid Death that doesn’t even come close to the likes of Nestle in terms of, or Dannon, in terms of budget, and they’re really making an impact. They’re really coming up with a product, a value proposition, and a message that’s very different. Reflect on Dollar Shave Club. A few years ago, Dollar Shave Club started with a YouTube that was produced with $5,000, which is a drop in the ocean if you consider the budgets that the likes of Unilever and Procter & Gamble are going to deploy in the same category. So it’s this David versus Goliath story, and it is not necessarily the brand with the biggest budget and the largest executive team and the biggest advertising agency that’s going to win in the long run. And in fact, most of the time, it just simply isn’t, period.

(Part Two of this interview will go live July 15.)