How B2B Brands Actually Grow

Drew: Hello, Renegade marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome. If you're a regular listener, welcome back. Welcome to the CMO Huddles Quick Takes, our Tuesday spotlight series where we share insights you can use right away

In this episode, we're joined by Professor Byron Sharp, the legendary Hall of Famer, author of How Brands Grow, who shares his insights into the power of brand on your bottom line. Alright, let's get into it.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here's your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello Huddlers. I'm excited to introduce you to Professor Byron Sharp. He's a globally recognized marketing scientist and professor. We'll get to that scientist part in a minute, and the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, and Ehrenberg-Bass is going to come up a lot in our conversation. He is renowned for pioneering evidence-based marketing principles that challenge conventional wisdom and drive brand growth across industries worldwide. Good day, Professor Sharp.

Byron: Good day.

Drew: It's wonderful to have you here. It's a real honor. And you're in Adelaide, right?

Byron: Yes, yes. Adelaide, Australia.

Drew: Okay, so what time is it there, just so we get that straight?

Byron: Morning, 8:30. The sun is up.

Drew: Oh my gosh. So see, you're just starting your day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and we're ending it here in New York City at about 7:00 PM. So are you ready to dive into all things B2B?

Byron: Yes.

Drew: Okay.

Byron: Absolutely.

Drew: Alright, so it's been 15 years since the first edition of How Brands Grow and about 13 since you did the companion book, How B2B Brands Grow, came out. And of course, a lot has changed since then, including the rise of MarTech and, of course, AI, everything. And I'm really curious what you've been focused on lately, especially with respect to B2B marketing.

Byron: We're about to do some work on physical availability for B2B, so stay tuned for that.

Drew: And would you define what physical availability means? What's that concept?

Byron: Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, back in the day, it seemed pretty straightforward. Physical availability was, you know, people physically being able to buy something, but it confuses a few people because they're like, "But I'm buying it on my phone." We're like, "Okay, but you're still physically buying it." So, actually, a better way to think of it is, from a marketer's perspective, that physical availability is catching people who are about to buy. In B2B, it's usually a very small percentage of your customer base that are in the market today or this week or this month, and your physical availability, you know, if you're a 10% share brand, which would be great, right, pretty big brand, you want to catch 10% of those people who are in the market today, actually, you want to catch a bit more than your fair share. But that's what your physical availability is about, making it easy for them to buy. And so it's all sorts of things like just, you know, accepting their payment terms, providing credit. In B2B, that can be, you know, part of the thing that allows them, makes it easy for them to buy. Whereas mental availability is the stuff that we do for largely all the people who aren't in the market today, but we know they will be sometime in the future. And when they do happen to do that, because we can't predict when that's going to happen, we'd like them to notice and think of us.

Drew: So physical availability, and the Ehrenberg-Bass most quoted statistic that I know of, and, you know, the folks at LinkedIn talked about it a lot to the point it's gospel: 5% of your targets are in the market at any given time, 95% aren't. And if you only target the 5%, you are missing a large part of your market. I wonder about the source of that data. And I've now gotten to the point, it's so quoted so often.

Byron: Yeah, and it's largely true, but I'm not going to quibble whether it's, you know, 95-5 or 96-4 or 97-3, or, you know. But what Professor John Dawes, who coined that, was trying to just illustrate is a thing we, as a statistical distribution, which is the negative binomial distribution, which is terribly geeky and most people don't understand. So, you know, 95 versus 95.5, wow, everyone got that.

Drew: Right. It's an easy concept to grasp, whether it's not, whether, yeah.

Byron: The key thing is the vast majority of your customers are not going to buy this week. It doesn't matter what you do. They are not going to buy, they're not in the market. And you've got this vast amount, hopefully. I mean, if you're going to be around in 10 years' time, you've got this huge portion of businesses that could buy from you. And if you want to get bigger, well, absolutely. And so John's point is you can't neglect the 95 and just go, "I'm only going to concentrate on the people who are in the market at the moment." There are marketers who find themselves in that position, and it's a terrible position to be in. Some durables get this, like, people just don't think of things like vacuum cleaners until they're in the market. The great problem with that is, unless you're Dyson, because Dyson does get attention when people aren't in the market. If you are some other brand, the chance that when they are in the market, it's been that very brief time to actually go buy a vacuum cleaner, that they even notice you is very, very low. And you're absolutely also at the mercy of the retail network. So you may have paid a lot of money and spent a lot of sales force to get into the retail network, which is terribly important, right? That's your physical availability, but you are totally at their mercy of whether they bother to recommend you. You know, this salesperson bothers to recommend you on the floor. Whereas other brands, yeah, like Dyson, Dyson is, yeah, really stands out because it actually gets attention, actually gets into people's heads when they're not in the market for a vacuum cleaner.

Drew: Right, because they just have a long history of innovation, and their products look different. They sound, you know, everything about it. Even the Dyson Blades that, you know, cool, you dry your hands in the restrooms are different than, yeah. So, but going back to B2B, what's so difficult for a lot of CMOs is they're told, you know, we need revenue this quarter.

Byron: Yeah, sure.

Drew: We want to spend money on what will create so-called demand, right? So you put all your budget in this thing called demand generation.

Byron: Which is just physical availability. It doesn't actually generate much demand. Well, I mean, it does in the sense that if you open your store for more hours, you'll get more sales. But usually, you know, there is an optimum point where, you know, most stores don't open 24 hours a day, and you go, "Why not?" I go, "Well, because, you know, for like eight hours of the day, it costs a lot and we don't get many sales," and you should have optimized your physical availability. Because you can do experiments, you can turn bits off, turn bits on, you know, you can buy a search word, not buy the search word, you know, and see whether it works, and you should optimize that. And so there should be no... If someone comes to you and goes, "Well, we want extra," you know, you should, it'd be like, "We've optimized it. There it is. Not really, you know, this is profit maximizing. There's not really much more we can do." Then you should be spending on your mental availability. If you only spend on catching people when they fall, as I said, it's a terrible position to be in. You over time, you find you're having to spend more just to stay where you are.

Drew: Well, and you know, there was a period of time when you could make SEO and SEM, and you could buy the keywords, and you could do it efficiently in B2B to the point that you could get these folks that were physically available that were in the market. Right now, that's getting harder and harder.

Byron: Yeah, it was a brief period when you, you know, compared to, you know, not many people were playing in the space, but it is a bit, you know, it is like physical availability. It's a bit like you're the only person in the store and you're like, "Whoa, this is fantastic! Yay!" And then other people arrive.

Drew: So help me with this, and I want to come back to this. And then this may make you laugh. I mean, after all, your book is How Brands Grow, but we have a lot of CMOs, not just a few, a lot of CMOs in our community whose CEOs or investors have told them, "Do not use the word brand. Do not put budget that says brand to it." And for these CEOs and many investors, brand spending is like fluff, and they want their dollars. Again, I'm going to use the term demand to generate pipeline, if you will, things where people are raising their hand and saying, "Yes, I want to buy your product. I'm interested. I have a budget," and so forth. "Do those things and only do those things," in the classic watermark, sort of just spend the money. And so I'm curious if you could get these CEOs and investors in a room, or we could just get the CMOs here, how do we help them with this? And this is really true in PE land for a lot of companies.

Byron: Okay. Well, actually, I find private equity tend to understand things a bit better. But anyway, first of all, I have some sympathy for the distaste for brand expenditure because in the B2B world particularly, you see some terrible stuff, right? I mean, it is just so uncommercial. You know, it's like, "We, no, this is brand, it's not meant to drive sales." So that gives us a free ticket to just do anything. And it's not very brand because usually it's not very branded, right? It's usually some fluffy generic campaign, you know. The classic as a bank, you know, doing these, you know, heartfelt, emotional sort of, you know, things that say things like, you know, "It's not about the money," which, sorry, you know, I find this just bizarre, right? Yeah. Because it is about the money, right? If you're a small business owner and you go, "Well, actually, I come to a bank, you know, it is about money, right?" Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. And so, you know, you get a lot of rubbish spend there. It's very badly branded. Actually, its brand advertising is very badly branded there. So actually, when banks ask me how much should I spend on product advertising versus brand advertising, I say it should all be product advertising because no one cares about banks. If I'm running a business, I care about my business. A bank is like a necessary evil that I have to have. I do not care about banking, but I do buy products from the bank, right? So I do buy, you know, systems and, you know, POS and, you know, things, and you've got to tell me about that stuff you sell. That said, every product ad should build the brand. It should be unmistakably you, and that's what branding is. It's about being unmistakably you. Forget about this. There's a lot of stuff probably still taught in American universities that branding is some sort of mysterious thing that makes people sort of fall in love with it. No, it's not. It's just looking like you, so people know, you know, they can't be loyal to you unless they know, you know, what brand do I actually buy? So look, I have some sympathy for that fluffy, awful stuff. But if you think about it, there's physical availability catching people when they fall, and then there's mental availability, which is all the people that, you know, aren't buying our brand at the moment, who aren't in the category at the moment. We need both, and it's very easy to explain to a CFO. You know, you point to every single, outside of maybe mining, valuable company in the world, and they are built on their mental... they're valuable because they've got a lot of mental availability, a lot of physical availability. They might also have some patents and things like that, but you know, that stuff doesn't actually last. They have mental availability and the physical availability. And if you spend money on broad reach communication, publicity, advertising, whatever, and it reaches the brains of buyers, even if they're not in the market yet, that's valuable. So you may not, you don't see an instantaneous, you don't see a sales response. They're not in the market at the moment, right?

Drew: Well, that's the part, you know...

Byron: But you can see it, you can see, you should, you can see an impact on your share price, your stock price. Yes.

Drew: So I mean, I think that there's a notion that you could just spend money on people who are in the market.

Byron: Yeah, but the problem is everyone else does too. And if some of them have a, you know, like the Dyson example, right? So you go into a store for a vacuum cleaner and you see the Dysons, like that, it fires off stuff in your head immediately. You know what they are? It's a lovely old ad, a print ad, print B2B ad. It was McGraw Hill or something. It's got this py grumpy, you know, the grumpy looking chair...

Drew: I do, where it's like, "I don't know who you are. I don't know who you've been. I don't know what you know. Lots and lots and lots." I don't know that. Yeah. "Why should I talk to you?"

Byron: No, no. Yeah. But I think like, you know, yes, but come in and take an hour of my valuable time.

Drew: Exactly.

Byron:  It's not going to happen. Right. I used to work for Dun & Bradstreet in sales. Right. And you know, you ring up business people and you say, you know, you're from Dun & Bradstreet. Most of the time they've heard of you. Right. So that's a huge advantage. If they haven't heard of you, your chance of getting an appointment is very low.

Drew: So, awareness is another one of those terms, because awareness is the getting past the 5% who are in the market to some percentage of those others. And obviously you are talking about more than just awareness.

Byron: Well, yeah, I—we use the term mental availability because awareness has been hijacked by these market research measures, you know? Right. Saying, you know, so, you know, have you heard of—you know, have you heard of these CRM systems? You know, and you tick which one? But that doesn't mean that you'll think of those at the right time. That's just mere, you know, it's like—and it leads to the problem that companies say, oh, yeah, we've got awareness. It's like—

Drew: Right, because they're just equating that. So how do you measure?

Byron: It's not a one-off battle. You have to do this every single day. Yeah.

Drew: So how do you measure, so if we're talking about mental and physical availability, and we're trying to grow our mental availability, what kinds of—when you're consulting with companies and so forth, what are you advising them to track?

Byron: Okay, this is covered in, I'm not sure if it's in How Brands Grow Part Two or whether it's in, it's certainly in one of Jenni Romaniuk's books, probably Managing Distinctive Brand Assets, but it talks about you have to use multiple questions. I mean, it's not expensive. You just have to survey people who are not in the market. Probably the biggest thing is you have to survey people who are, you know, light buyers of your category who aren't going to buy for quite a long time. Yeah, because I know they make up most of the market. So, the killer is when people go, you know,  let's do a focus group of just our most heavy regular buyers or people who bought in the last quarter. Then you're talking to, you're talking, you know, you're missing out on most of the market. So mental availability is understanding all the different cues that might fire in a buyer's head that might lead them to your product category. And for most B2B, you know, you're selling something that's usually fairly complicated. It can do lots of different things for different companies. And they might have—they're thinking about a different thing. It's not just one thing. They're not usually thinking, I need a CRM system. They're thinking of some business problem. And you've got to understand all these to understand what makes your brand potentially mentally available, that you know, that you link to those things.

Drew: Okay. So we're tracking, we're talking to folks that are not in the market as opposed to people who just bought, which is a very common thing. Is there anything specifically that we want to know from them that will help us sort of say, oh, you know, we're making some headway on the other 95%?

Byron: Yeah. I mean, well, you want to understand their lives, their business. The problem is, you know, a lot of us are, wow, naturally sort of quite production-led, and we think of, you know, this thing has this amazing one feature for that. No, you got to understand the complexity of other people's businesses and why they might think of you, and then you, you know, you communicate that, get that into their heads that you are a solution or, you know, for that sort of thing. And then you get more chance of being able to have a buying conversation with them when they come into that, into the market. Or you start to stimulate that sort of thinking. I saw a good presentation from I think it was DocuSign. And they're like, you know, most businesses, if you ask them, say, oh, yeah, we would like to move contracts to completely online. Yeah. Systems, yeah, we're going to do that. Yeah. Mm-hmm. But they've got other things to do. So you have to work out what are the little triggers that might suddenly make them go, oh, yeah, maybe we should, you know, we've been planning to do that. It's on the agenda in the next decade, but maybe we should do it now. And it could be a legal risk thing, it could be an ease thing. It could be a, you know, could be, it could be a whole lot of things. And so you need to understand these cues that fire in people's heads and they suddenly say, John, I think you should go and investigate, you know, moving the contracts to being digital.

Drew: Yeah. It's funny because they have an advantage as a sort of product-led growth because suddenly DocuSign shows up in your thing, somebody is using it, and next thing you know, you are, and so they have—

Byron: That helps massively with getting some massive wins.

Drew: So even because you suddenly are aware of it. And as a result, you know, they are one of those brands that are as close to FedEx as that, you know, they kind of own the category.

Byron: But still businesses find a million reasons, you know, to put it off. Because I mean, this is a particular thing in B2B. You know, you're selling to people who are running it. Well, I suppose it's like consumers. They've got lives, right? They've got their businesses, and you'd love to go and tell them about the advantages of, you know, digital contracts, but you know, they get the contracts signed at the moment. It sort of works. So, yeah, you have to understand how can we come up, fire in their brains. How can we get some attention, and how can we fit easily into their lives? If they say, okay, let's have a look at that. How do you make it? And this is the physical availability. How do you make it really easy for them to buy? And B2B, that's often not easy, right?

Drew: No, I mean, again, if you are in the DocuSign, they have that advantage of where a single user can start to do it. And the next thing you know, it takes over the company. And so it's easy because you can buy it on an individual thing. When you're selling to an enterprise and you've got a million-dollar contract, it's much different, absolutely. And it's hard for these folks to find, particularly if you have a buying committee of 14 people with different sort of considerations of what buying easily means.

Byron: Yeah, yeah. I mean, often in B2B, you end up buying not from, you know, it may not be the best provider. You're probably pretty sure it's not the best provider, but you're like, yeah, but this provider has gone through our procurement system and is on our list and I'm allowed to buy from them. And that is a lovely example of physical availability, right? Once you've done, once you've gone through that pain and gone onto someone's, you know, preferred buying list, that is an asset that is worth money.

Drew: Yes. And it is why, in at least here the companies that, unless they're really like an AI company that are surviving in the last year and a half because they have a huge installed base and they're able to continue to sell different products and services to that installed base. Yeah, actually getting a net new customer right now in B2B in the US, it's pretty darn challenging.

Byron: Yeah, it's always hard for B2B. I mean, there's a lot of similarities actually, B2B, B2C, it's still marketing. In B2C, people moan about the fragmentation of media, you know, that there isn't just a simple, you know, I pop it on TV and I reach everyone. Right. But like B2B, it's always been like that. It's possibly got a bit better in that we now have LinkedIn, which is like an online, I don't know, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, or something. Right, yeah, there's not much else, right? Of trade shows. Oh, God, they're expensive. Sending sales reps individually, oh, my God, that's expensive. You know, we don't have any cheap, broad reach, media. And even the ones we do, like LinkedIn, they top out. Most media have this problem. You get a bit of reach immediately, and then it's very hard to get more because there are some people who are on LinkedIn every single day. You can reach them quite easily. Right. There are some other business people who are on LinkedIn once every couple of years when they update something on their CV. Wow. They're really hard. You know, you can advertise a million dollars a day on LinkedIn, you're still not going to reach those people. You're going to have to wait. And so, yeah, this is a tough thing that B2B marketers—they don't have these broad reach things, so you can't build mental availability quickly. So, yeah, time is your friend, right? And so don't think you can spend lots of money. Just doubling the budget will double the reach. It won't.

Drew: Right. That won't necessarily solve the problem either. So more money isn't necessarily the trick, but I'm sort of...

Byron: The trick, and there is a trick, it's take your budget and spread it out over time.

Drew: Everyday low price kind, and we're just gonna keep it in sort of 52 days a week. This is 52 weeks a year. The sort of old P&G strategy.

Byron: Yeah. Whatever your budget will, can tolerate, you know. But don't blow it all in January, right? Because you'll be buying... Well, you won't get much reach, and if you'd spent half the amount, you probably would've still got the same amount. And if you'd spent half of that, you probably would've still got the same amount. So the answer is, oh, I should take my money and be in February as well, in March as well. Yeah.

Drew: So we're emphasizing reach over frequency in this.

Byron: Oh, that's true. That's always true in all media, but in B2B, you just have to acknowledge it's a slow burn, right? Everything is a slow burn. There's no Super Bowl for B2B, so you know, well, unless you buy the Super Bowl, but you can reach a lot of people, and you do see this, right? You do see this in B2B, in maybe management consulting. Maybe their margins are so fat that they can afford to do airport advertising and things. We had 99% of the people who walk past the billboard are not in their market, and they can still justify that. But most of us can't.

Drew: What they can, and part of it's because there's a recruiting thing, there's value to that. 'Cause they hire, so if you're Deloitte, you're hiring 75,000 people a year. You know, I mean, ridiculous numbers like that. So there's the recruiting value, there's the customer value, there's the prospect value, there's the partner value. So...

Byron: Yeah. Okay. That's part of it. Yeah. Yes. And, and, and because they're so big, and this is a classic B2B thing, because it takes so long to build mental availability. Those that have are in a phenomenal position. Right, right. And so, you know, what is the Big Five sort of accounting firms? I, we can pretty much predict in 50 years' time there's still gonna be the Big Five accounting firms, and there's what, a million small accounting firms in the world that would like to get bigger. That's really, really hard. They could, you know, they can do the physical availability, you know, open another office somewhere. But building mental availability in B2B takes time. So, amazing creativity.

Drew: And I, this is the fundamental challenge. This is why there's so much turnover in B2B, is that they are not given time. And so there's this, like, if you, if the pipeline isn't full like this and sales doesn't have enough coverage, CMO after 18 months, and ironically, the CMO after 18 months is just getting through whatever the previous CMO did. Yeah. It's just having its impact then. Right. So, I am trying to figure out...

Byron: This is true, this is true in all marketing, right?

Drew: So help us understand how we build... I need three years 'cause it's gonna take time. There are gonna be early signals 'cause it feels like you need to be able to make the case that there are early signals that we're making progress, right?

Byron: Yeah. This is, yes. And so this is where you need survey data on the people who aren't buying at the moment but to show that you are building mental availability with those people, and there, you know, you don't need a lot of metrics. You just need ones that are justifiable. One of the metrics we, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, right, is a B2B. You know, we're a scientific institute, but we're entirely funded by businesses, and so we're a B2B brand, and one of the, one of the, we track things like how many people are talking about us in the media. Good. It's very cheap, right? You just Google and tell it to track, you know, mention Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, and, and, and so very simple metric that tells you that what we're doing is building global fame. Another qualitative measure is can they say Ehrenberg-Bass? Do they say our name? Right? Because it's a weird name. Right? Right. We did some, years ago looking at relationships in B2B, and one of the researchers came out with a really simple metric that you could do if you, you ask you, we, we have a sales rep allocated to you. What, what's their name? If they can answer the name instantly, you go that's a pretty good relationship. Yeah. If they're like, oh, yeah, I've got his business card here somewhere, that's not so good. Yeah. So you can, you can track these things that show that you are building mental availability, and when they come round to being in the buying cycle again, you're gonna be hopefully on the list. B2B is just like consumers, they don't buy all the brands. They do not look at all the brands. They go back to a small list. Gotta get on that list.

Drew: And you gotta get on the list. And do you, so one of the things that, you know, the, a lot of the conversations that CMOs have are with CFOs, and they're having to justify any dollar in any spend in any way. And where you see your work show up the most is the brands that are the biggest, that have the most, you know, mental availability, if you will, are the ones that have the best close rate, and by the way, have the strongest pricing power, those two things, close rate and pricing power. So if you're weak in your market, you're the third, fourth, fifth, your close rate's gonna be less. And so it feels like that if you are making progress over time, one of the two of the places that it should show up is pricing power. You're able to hold your prices, or raise your prices and, or at least close rate.

Byron: Yeah, absolutely. Your physical availability works better when you have mental availability. I was with one of our sponsors in Sydney just the other day, and yeah, they have, they have, they're a big established brand, particularly in pharmacies and things. They have the ability to launch, you know, extra variants at any time. And they have, you know, they said they've done it so many times. They've launched some new things. They've got, you know, instantly the, it's on shelves, and no one sees it.

Drew: No one sees it. And so what?

Byron: Yeah, so that the return on that physical availability is terrible, right? Because, right, there's no, there's no mental availability. You can be buying all these search terms and other stuff, but, people don't know what you are, and you're not. Yep. Then you get a terrible return on it. So increase the mental availability, you get a better return on your physical availability. The two have to overlap. The idea that businesses can just do one or the other, or is, is you have to have both. And, well, if you want, if you want to grow and if you wanna be valuable, generally, yeah. But if you don't, if you don't want to grow, I mean, seriously, yeah, it's, it's perfectly possible that you just, you know, you have some physical availability. You catch some people when they're falling and, and, you know, and, and each year you probably get a little bit cheaper or a little bit smaller. You can do that if you want.

Drew: So you've highlighted the gap between B2B buyer expectations and sort of brand experiences in seeing this gap. What do you advise B2B brands to sort of, to meet and sort of measure, meet and exceed these expectations?

Byron: So they have to think about the two assets, mental and physical availability, and, and, and distinguish. Is it what we're doing now, is this to catch people who are in the market now? In which case we should evaluate it on sales, right? I mean, we can, as we turn things on and off, we should immediately see a sales response, and we should optimize that, and we should be doing that. Or is this to, is this to build mental availability, which is reaching people who aren't in the marketplace, which we, that means we cannot see it in sales. So if we go and tell the CFO, we're gonna spend this money and you're gonna see it next month, we are shooting ourselves in the foot, right? 'Cause it's not gonna happen. And they're gonna say we failed. So we've gotta give them other, we've gotta explain that's not gonna do that. It is going to, it is gonna drive sales, but the little bit of money we're spending now is gonna drive sales over the next 5, 10, 15 years. So you're not gonna see it in, you know, a tiny little effect next month. But, you know, but way, way, way into the future. But it's gonna make us more valuable and I was with, I won't say the name of the company. They're a digital platform. They're selling B2B, and they've got themselves in a position where they're just spending entirely on search words and catching, you know, and, right. And they're just spiraling, you know, they're just, don't buy shares of them, right. And their share price. I mean, it's showing in their share price more than anything, right. So they think if only next quarter, you know, we hit our numbers, right, that'll be great. It's like, but the share market's just like, no, we don't. We don't care. Yeah, we managed to cut some costs and make some money next quarter. We don't care. We don't think you've got a future. Now, if they spent on some broad reach mental availability, that would be the best thing they could do to support their share price 'cause people go, you know? Yeah. Oh yeah. You're expecting, that's you're, you're investing. You have a future. Yeah.

Drew: Right there. This expectation. This is CMO managing expectations of short-term, long-term, short-term metrics, long-term metrics, showing progress over time and saying, you know, we are not going to be Apple tomorrow. We are not gonna get that kind of awareness. We are not gonna have people, or we're not gonna be Dyson, but we can be, no overnight.

Byron: But, but you immediately are showing we are getting more reach than we used to, right? Right. We, we, you show these metrics I talked about before that, that we are getting to people's heads, and we tell the share market if you're, you know, privately listed where you are, you tell people we're doing this, and that is a fantastic signal to investors that you have a future. Right. So that's an immediate effect, right? Okay. Our sales didn't go up, but our share price did. That's an immediate effect. Yeah. There are lots of companies on the US GMO who, who, who've, you know, they're not making profits yet and they've got staggering valuations. Why is that? 'Cause the stock market says this company is building mental and physical availability. It's got a great product, it's got a future.

Drew: That's a wrap on this Huddle's Quick Take. Catch the rest of my conversation with Byron Sharp, where we talk about AI disruption, market-based asset theory, and why using acronyms is the sign of a big problem. On the CMO Huddles hub on YouTube, I'm Drew Neisser, and we'll be back soon with another Huddles Quick Take. Until then, keep on sharing, caring, and daring each other to flocking awesomeness.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that's me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I'm your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!