4. The burger flaming problem with marketing.tl;dr: There’s so much BS. Let’s look for the evidence. One of the things that drives me utterly insane about the marketing world is the sheer amount of bullshit thrown around by self-aggrandizing blowhards. (Which I guess includes me now that I write this, ha ha). It’s like the days of MadMen never really ended, they just moved to Twitter and LinkedIn. Let’s start with “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek, over which the rhetorical battles-lines are drawn daily on LinkedIn. Typically someone will state that its utter bullshit, and then others will pile on that not only isn’t it bullshit but it’s the single most compelling idea in business history. But he wrote the book in 2009. We have 11 years of evidence to look at to make an informed choice about whether to follow this path or not. Either the approach works or it doesn’t, so why on earth are we allowing this to devolve into little more than he said/she said in 2020? (For the record, I’ve looked and found little evidence to support it as the foundation for a successful brand strategy. As an approach to leadership and organizational inspiration it might have more value, I don’t know). Then we get into the ideological world of “what is a brand anyway?” which has become equally absurd. On several occasions recently I’ve heard folks in the business stating that “Amazon isn’t really a brand”, occasionally qualified with the followup statement “well, not my definition of a brand anyway.” And that’s the thing, we seem to be taking a kind of choose your own adventure approach to branding. Of course Amazon is a brand, and an extremely powerful one at that, but hey, if you can just choose your own definition then you can claim that it isn’t, not really. Then we get to the nature of people themselves. I’ve seen many variants recently on the meme that “all strategists are empaths” or that “empathy is the sole qualification necessary to be a great strategy leader,” which gets lots of head nods but is nonsensical on its face. First, all strategists aren’t empaths at all. I’ve met many who’ve had the empathy gene surgically removed and plenty of them are still effective. Second, what the empathy as the prime qualification argument usually boils down to is “don’t hire asshole egotistical strategy leaders,” something I’d wholeheartedly agree with, but it’s a completely different point. Creative services has a really bad history of enabling aggressive sociopaths who are good at selling. Fixing that is a structural problem that frankly should be table-stakes irrespective of role. While empathy certainly matters, I’d place curiosity, critical thinking, ability to inspire, ability to cut-through, and an actual understanding of what strategy is ahead on any list of key attributes for a strategy leader. So finally, let’s talk burgers. Why burgers? Well, for two reasons. First, because it’s become one of the most intense and ridiculous ideological wars on “advertising Twitter” (yeah, that really is a thing), and second because comparing the commercial results of Burger King to those of McDonald’s is probably the closest thing we’ll ever get to a lab experiment of what happens when two very similar businesses take two very different approaches to the same task. Here’s what it basically boils down to. On the one hand, there are those who laud Burger King for “punching above its weight” through award winning advertising creativity that enables them to compete harder and stand out as a smaller business with smaller advertising budgets than McDonald’s. On the other, we have those who laud McDonald’s commercial results, superior same store sales growth, and advertising that’s more effective at impacting the business. The first group poo poo McDonald’s as merely benefitting from its scale. The second poo poo Burger King as commercially naive. So who’s right? Well, like many things it isn’t as cut and dried as that. McDonald’s does benefit from scale, this is true. And it’s also true that Burger King needs to do something to stand out in order to offset its lesser scale, which does point you toward emphasizing greater advertising creativity. But, and this is a really big but, the results don’t lie. Burger King consistently compares poorly to McDonald’s when we look at same store sales. So really, this seems less of an example of creativity versus scale and more a question of execution. McDonald’s are simply executing their strategy much more effectively than Burger King are executing theirs. This shouldn’t be so hard to figure out, but of course it doesn’t work out that way across the flattened context and ideological battle lines of social media. Anyway, my point really is this. Don’t just blindly accept what you are told, no matter who is telling you and how much you might respect them, and especially if that person is me. Instead, be critical in investigating what’s being said, connect the dots, look for the evidence and come to your own conclusions.
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