Marketing Professor, West Chester University · Founder, Marketing Muscle
Episode #11 · November 11, 2026Born to Market, Called to Teach
Before Tom Elmer stepped into a lecture hall, he spent 30 years in sales and marketing. Now he teaches to the kid he used to be … the one in the back row who came to college for the fun.
With a 4.8 on Rate My Professors, 85+ real clients brought into his classroom, and nearly 100 guest lectures on YouTube, Tom's on a mission to convert every student he meets. And no more lazy first day of class. Tom spends the rest of "Day One" talking about life, death, and the question he thinks matters most: “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Marketing isn't his profession, it’s his calling. And teaching is how he answers the call.
** Content note: this episode includes conversations about suicide, cancer and loss. **
Worth a look
Some of the goodies mentioned, just one click away.Tom's Work and Details
Connect with Tom on LinkedIn
YouTube, Tom's guest lecture library
Reaching Out: How Caring Letters Help in Suicide Prevention, the CBS Sunday Morning segment behind Tom's Caring app idea
Books & References Mentioned in the Episode
Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt (Harvard Business Review)
How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp
Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing, Atul Minocha
Future Demand, James Hurman
Eat Your Greens, Wiemer Snijders (ed.)
Myths of Marketing, Grant Leboff
Marketing Management, Philip Kotler, Kevin Lane Keller & Alexander Chernev
Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins, Mark Schaefer
Ten Slides, Evidenza's ten-slide marketing plan
TenThousandTen for Ten Slides Marketing Plan, Prof. Koen Pauwels
I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down., Christopher Marquis, The New York Times
People & Thinkers Mentioned
Koen Pauwels, marketing professor whose LinkedIn newsletter Tom swears by
Baiba Matisone, brand thinker and industry friend, with her frameworks on Gumroad
Giulio del Bufalo, industry friend, guest in Tom's class
Mats Georgson, industry friend and fellow practitioner-professor
Jim Knapp, industry friend and Tom's "brother from another mother"
Mark Hadfield, Meet the 85%, and a past PO Show guest
Tom's Teacher Plumb Lines
Dead Poets Society, trailer
To Sir, with Love, trailer
Tom's Daughter's Favorite Three Films
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, trailer
In the Mood for Love, 25th anniversary trailer
Moonlight, trailer
2 Ways to Listen, Wherever You Already Hit Play
The Brand BuilderFrom selling greeting cards door to door in third grade to redesigning his prep school's varsity jacket, Tom always knew he was a marketer. It took a newborn daughter on graduation day to make him a student, and 30 years in the field to make him a teacher. This one's the full story.
The PO NotesThe whole marketing map in two minutes, why a desk is a dangerous place, what Tom thinks of your AI chatbot, and the knowledge that lasts versus the knowledge that spoils. If you've only got fifteen minutes, start here.
Show Transcript
Intro PHILLIP: Today's guest has a 4.8 out of 5 on RateMyProfessors.com, which is basically Yelp for teachers, and 95% of his students say they'd come back for seconds. Before he ever stood in front of a lecture hall, he spent 30 years in sales and marketing leadership, from consulting to the automotive market to building and selling his own promotional products business. He also runs a strategy consultancy named Marketing Muscle. His university calls him a pracademic. He calls it common sense: you can't separate theory from practice.
Since 2018, he's taught marketing at West Chester University, where he's won the Honors College Outstanding Professor Award four times. He's brought more than 85 real businesses into his classroom, from the local Chamber of Commerce to QVC to the West Chester Film Festival. When COVID hit in 2020, 55 of his 65 students volunteered to help 26 local businesses fight their way through it, and the local ABC station came calling to tell the story.
He's also built a YouTube library of over 100 guest lectures from talented marketers around the world, many of them friendships born on Marketing Twitter during some pretty dark days. It's a treasure trove of lectures you should definitely bookmark. When he's not teaching, he's advising the student marketing consulting group, the AMA chapter, and, naturally, the wrestling and boxing clubs, because marketing is a contact sport. Professor Tom Elmer, welcome to The PO Show.
TOM: Thank you, Phillip. It's an honor to be invited to The PO Show.
Dream Guests & the Caring App PHILLIP: Let's get into the appetizers. You've hosted over 100 guest speakers for your students. I was happy enough to be invited, thank you. If you could get one person in front of your class who hasn't said yes yet, who would it be and why? Anybody you want, there's no limits. We're making this up.
TOM: Well, if I could bring some dead people on the show, all right. I want to start with who I call the grandfather of modern marketing, Peter Drucker. Or then I'd bring the father of modern marketing into my classroom. That's Ted Levitt of Harvard, who wrote the wonderful Marketing Myopia. But if we're talking people that are alive, I'd have to say Byron Sharp, because when I read his How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know in 2010, it blew my circuit board. And if not Byron, if he doesn't want to come on, I'd say Mark Ritson, because I think he is the greatest marketing professor. He calls himself a part-time marketing professor. I think he's the best. So any of those would be wonderful.
PHILLIP: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it would be amazing to have them both on and let them duke it out on stage. That'd be a lot of fun. I think a lot of us would like to see that again. Tell me something about yourself that you feel everyone should know, but even the people close to you may not.
TOM: In 2021, I won West Chester University's first Social Innovation Competition, which, interestingly enough, tonight is going to be the latest version of. I was the first winner, for something I called the Caring App. I based it on the Caring Letters Project. You could just go to CBS Sunday Morning on Google and put in Caring Letters Project, and you can see the clip of the show that I saw. I saw Kevin Hines, one of the few to survive a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. And so I've created this app, which helps reduce suicide in young people age 18 to 24 using digital marketing tactics.
It all came about when I met with a student who had stopped coming to my class. Where are you? Where are you? And we sat down for coffee, and he said he didn't want to live anymore. I made sure he had an appointment with his psychiatrist, and we hugged, and he walked out, and I never saw him again. And so if I had this Caring App, I could continue to send him text messages today, because I still think about him. And I wanted him to know, I care. And that's what these caring letters did, by sending letters that say, hey, we care about you. People that had attempted suicide wrote back and said, not even my own family cares. So I have this app, but I cannot get it built.
PHILLIP: Wow. Okay. I want to make sure I understand. You created the app, but you haven't built it yet. Is that right?
TOM: Correct, because I don't know how to do that. I'm an idea guy, Phillip. But I think that would be helpful. Certainly as AI gets better, I might be able to just put a prompt together and spit it out, but I don't really feel that it's at that level yet. I've had students in my class that have talked about it, but it's never gotten close to being sent out into the world.
PHILLIP: Wow. Okay. If we need AI to help with anything, stuff like that, that's a brilliant idea. Well done. We'll make sure we get the story in the show notes and share more about that. I didn't know all of that story, so thank you for sharing that with me.
Wrestling Shoes, iPods & A24 PHILLIP: What are three of your favorite brands? How did you first find out about them, and when did you last buy them?
TOM: Well, this is an easy one, because I actually do my second presentation in my Brands and Branding class about these three brands. The first is a brand that, when I was a high school junior, I called "Nikes" because I didn't know how to pronounce it. Earl Peretti [confirm spelling], my wrestling buddy from another school, and I found a store in Newark, New Jersey, that had just gotten a shipment of these Wayne Wells Nike wrestling shoes. Everybody else was wearing Tigers, ASICS. Me and Earl were wearing Nikes. Wayne Wells was the first athlete that Nike featured in an ad. And so that's how I became a fan of Nike and their great marketing through the years. It blows my mind that they've been kicked off the S&P 100, because they've fallen so far.
PHILLIP: Yeah, no kidding.
TOM: The second, I would say, is Apple. Because again, I experienced this company. I'm an old guy. The internet wasn't around when I was in school, so the internet was new to me. We got a Macintosh computer for myself and my daughters. And then I found the iPod: 10,000 of my songs, and I'm a music nut, that I can put in my pocket and walk around and listen to. So that's the Apple side of it. And of course I have Apple phones, and I like these buds in my ear.
And then lastly, A24, the entertainment company that produces and distributes films. If you've ever seen an A24 movie, you know you've seen it. It's bold and unconventional, their films and their television shows, and they have this incredible following for their storytelling and their creative marketing. My daughter works on the executive team of A24.
When she was a senior in high school, she came to her father and said, "Dad, I've decided what I want to do when I go to college." I said, "Well, what's that?" "I'm going to study film at the University of Pittsburgh." I said, "Fantastic. And what are you going to do when you get out? Manage a Blockbuster Video store?" Because I was a marketing communication arts major, and I knew that there were very few jobs. They're located in cities that cost a lot of money, LA and New York, and they don't pay much at all.
But my daughter, thank God, did not listen to her stupid father. She went to Pitt. She got internships each year, and her senior year she got a job with Rebecca Miller's film company, daughter of the playwright Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. The second week she's on the job, she's at Rebecca's apartment, where her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, is signing posters and making tea for my daughter and asking her about her life. Thank God she didn't listen to her stupid father.
She was there to win Oscars for Moonlight. That night I watched it happen, and they announced that stupid LA dance movie, and my daughter would have been on stage. But I got a picture of her in the Vanity Fair issue. And then she was there the night they swept every major award. So my daughter saw the future that A24 saw. I have a picture of her with about 30 other employees in the very early days. And I'm proud of what she's done with her career. So that's my other favorite brand.
PHILLIP: Yeah, that's awesome. What a great story. When did she start with them?
TOM: I'm going to say she's been there about eight years, something like that. She moved from Rebecca Miller's company to Sony Pictures Classics, and then that's when she saw A24, and she jumped on early. When A24 just started, that's when my daughter joined the company.
PHILLIP: Nice, very cool. Big fan of A24. You know what we should do? Will you ask her what her favorite three films are? It doesn't have to be A24. Ask her what her favorite three films are, as a cinephile, and then we'll put those in the show notes too, because we respect someone who's poured their life into the craft.
TOM: Sure. I will ask her. I know a lot of them. She certainly became a film fan through me, because I was such a film fan. I'm sure of that.
PHILLIP: Very cool. All right, before we get out of the appetizers, I'm going to go back a question and ask you something about Apple. Your 10,000 songs. What's the number one song in your playlist? If anyone doesn't know Professor Tom Elmer, if you haven't figured it out yet, you'll see it in his YouTube videos: the guy has energy for days. He has more energy than you and I put together. So I'm curious what's bumping in those AirPods that keeps you moving.
TOM: My all-time favorite band is Steely Dan. So I would say "Don't Take Me Alive" or "Dirty Work." One of those two songs would be my number one song. Certainly when Spotify would send me those lists, Steely Dan was always, always there.
PHILLIP: Preloaded with Steely Dan, got it.
From Cardone to the Classroom PHILLIP: Okay, so let's get into the meat. My man, you are not the typical professor. You spent many, many years in the industry itself, over 30 years in sales and marketing, including building and selling your own promotional products business. What pulled you into the classroom?
TOM: Well, I've always taught. I taught classes at Cardone Industries. We would do manager weekends, and I would always hold sessions. So it's something I like to do. I had a friend who was a teacher at one of these local colleges, and she asked me to teach one or two sessions on marketing to her management class, which I did, and I liked it. I spoke at my high school for a career day on sales and marketing careers, and I was told, "You missed your calling. You should be a teacher." So I always thought that in the back of my mind.
Then in 2017, I heard from Evan Curry [confirm spelling], who was just hired as the dean of a new business school. He reached out and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a good marketing teacher to teach strategic marketing to the MBA students." I said, "Well, I don't know if I'm a good teacher, but I've certainly got to check first with my wife," because I needed her support. I wasn't going to do it without my wife on board. And she said, "Absolutely, that's what you want to do. I'm behind you." So I taught strategic marketing at the MBA level first.
That summer, my good friend Paul Arsenal [confirm spelling], a teacher who taught me when I got my MBA at West Chester, reached out and said, "Hey, now that you've taught, would you want to teach at West Chester? I'm looking for Principles of Marketing teachers." I said, "Yeah, that sounds great." My wife was behind that as well. And I've been teaching at West Chester ever since. 2018–19 was my first academic school year.
PHILLIP: Nice. Haven't looked back.
TOM: And again, this wasn't what I was planning to do, but I always used two teachers as my plumb line. These are the teachers that I want to be: John Keating in Dead Poets Society, and, these are old movies, even earlier than that, Mark Thackeray in To Sir, with Love. I wanted to be a teacher that was more than just someone teaching the subjects. I wanted to teach them about life and equip them to succeed. And so my classes are not the typical classes that you'd find in a usual business school.
PHILLIP: You know, I've told you I'd love to fly up and sit in on a couple of your classes. I just think it would be so fun. I had a teacher in high school. She taught science, mostly biology. And she would stand on her desk, and she would jump down and hug students. She would grab them, not in a menacing way, but everyone laughed and chuckled. She would talk about chemical bonding and stuff like that, and she would really engage with students. Mind you, we didn't have phones.
TOM: That's just like Dead Poets Society. He's on top of the desks.
PHILLIP: Yeah, exactly. So when you've told me those stories in the past, that's what I think of. And my point of telling you my story is, that was 1993, and I still remember so much of not only what she taught us, but how she taught us. That's the stuff that cut through the noise and cut through the teenage bullshit that kids go through, and held our attention long enough so that we might learn. And that is so much of the job. I'm so grateful that you give those kids those chances. I do hope people will go check out your videos too. You can really see the personality come through, and the costumes and different things that you've done. So it's a lot of fun.
TOM: Yeah, well, that was the year I had my first class that I taught. I had two football tackles, the two starting tackles on West Chester University's football team. The last time we were in the playoffs, so we were good. Brendan and Patrick. These big boys come in, and they handed me a paper: "Hey, we're traveling to play a game." So that season, again, it was the best. We got to the national championship playoffs. I created a character to support them called Rama Jama. We have a mascot called Rammy, we've got two other mascots, but I created an unofficial mascot, so I would upload these little one-minute clips. You'll find those on my YouTube channel as well.
PHILLIP: Nice. Big fan of the brand characters. That's awesome.
The First Day of Class** Content note: this section includes discussion of suicide, cancer and loss. **
PHILLIP: Let's get into some of the important stuff about life that goes beyond just the subjects that you teach. You have day one of class, and I'd like for you to tell everyone what that is. You talk to students about mental health and resilience and grit, how fast time can fly by, and you talk about your own personal story with that. Would you share that with us?
TOM: Absolutely. Well, again, one thing that I do: I teach to the student Tom Elmer when I was in college, because I remember that dumb rear end sitting there.
PHILLIP: By the way, you can get a little sweary here. It's okay.
TOM: Okay, that dumbass that sat in that classroom. Because the typical first day of class is, okay, here's the syllabus, here's the book, any questions? Okay, see you next class. It's in and out in 15 minutes. No way I'm going to use that class time that way. I want to deal with things that I feel are critically important to be dealt with on day one.
So very early in that presentation, I give them a trigger warning. And I do that because I did not always do a trigger warning. I had a student pull me into the hallway, into the stairwell, and say, "Please, if you're going to talk about suicide, please give us a warning. Because this summer I tried two times, unsuccessfully, to kill myself."
PHILLIP: Oh my gosh.
TOM: And that was sobering. And so I don't talk about this without a trigger warning. I say, this class, I'm going to talk about life and death, suicide and mental health. I want you to be prepared. And I announce it again before I get into it. So that's an indication: this is not your typical first day of school.
You said we talk about life and death. We talk about how a hernia saved my life. We found out, before I went in for the surgery, that I had two tumors in my bladder that were both cancerous. In 2020 they came out. And then a year ago July, we found out the cancer had come back, and it came back as high grade. So a year ago this fall, I was getting chemotherapy for six weeks on Fridays. And I tell the students about that. I tell them about my lipoprotein(a) test this year and how bad it is, and how I'm now seeing cardiologists to deal with all that stuff.
But I introduce this concept that I believe, Phillip, really is behind all the things I teach. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love marketing, and those who don't yet know they love marketing. And my job as a teacher is to pull as many of them into the I-love-marketing side of things by the end of the semester.
Then on the next slide, you see me with my long hair. I graduated in 1979; this gives you an indication of how old I am. My long hair, my fraternity brothers. And up at the right side, you see a picture of me holding my newborn baby daughter on graduation day. Because I tell them I came to school for fun and had too much fun, and that's when I had to start learning marketing.
So we talk about resilience, grit, growth mindset, how many weeks you get in life, how short this time is on earth. We talk about their careers. We talk about these things on the first day that I think are very important, and I also talk about them on the last day. The first day and the last day of every class.
PHILLIP: Nice. I think that trigger warning thing was really smart. I'm glad you had that student come and talk to you. And I think it also shows how we're always learning. I need to make sure we put that trigger warning in the show description too, to help people understand that we're going to have some tough, important conversations.
TOM: Yeah, exactly. That we're going to talk about suicide.
PHILLIP: Yeah. Do you mind sharing the story about your sister?
TOM: Well, the thing is, in that first day of class there are three deaths that I talk about. The first is the death of my friend's son, a student at my college, who completed suicide that spring semester when we were on break. I looked at my phone, and she had a post: "Today I got the knock on the door no parent ever wants to receive. My beautiful boy is gone. #suicide." That day changed my life. It changed the way I teach. I will never not talk about this, because I looked for this kid every day on campus that fall. Never, ever had a chance to see him. I watched him grow up. And it just shatters me. Shatters me.
Then the same year, in 2021, I lost my best friend of 40 years, Conrad, who drowned over Memorial Day. He was an ocean swimmer, grew up in Jamaica, and the autopsy did not give us a cause as to what happened. And then my sister, that December. She had gotten mesothelioma from her time as a student in college. Of a hundred people who lived in that dorm, eight people would get it, and my sister was one of those unlucky eight. I never got a chance to say goodbye to either her or him.
And so in the class, I say: tell the people you love, every chance you get, that you love them. Because you don't want them to be gone, and be tortured with the inability to say those words, and why, and what they meant to you.
PHILLIP: Tom, thanks for sharing that. You must have told that story so many times, and it still cuts so hard. I appreciate you sharing that with us.
TOM: My pleasure. Well, I think it's important that we talk about this stuff. What I know about suicide is that young men are more successful in completing it, but young women make more attempts. And that's why I wish this Caring App was around, because it would just be one more thing. You meet somebody, you encourage them, and you reach out to them at intervals, like we do with emails for businesses. You know what I mean?
PHILLIP: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And I don't know a lot about mesothelioma. I need to go look that up and understand more about it, because I didn't realize that was such a high percentage of people.
TOM: Yeah, well, it's huge in Pennsylvania. It's huge. It's terrible. And there were no precautions taken. They were just breathing it all in. When she would go up to get her suitcase, she'd blow away all the fiberglass that was on her suitcase. But these are the kinds of lessons that I feel are important. I say the most important question I could ask you in my classroom today is: what are you going to do with your one precious life? You get one. Now is as good a time as any to figure that out. It's a question they ask every MBA graduate of Harvard, and they film them. But I say, man, it makes as much sense in my West Chester University classroom as it does anywhere else. What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?
PHILLIP: So it is obvious that you love marketing, and we haven't even talked about the Eagles yet, speaking of other things you love.
TOM: These are rough days, brother. And I'm wearing my hat in solidarity with my good friend John Lyons, the Hat in England. I'm Tom Elmer, the Hat in Jersey, USA.
PHILLIP: That's right. We'll give John a shout. That's great. But your students must feel that. They must feel how much you care. And if they don't, they'll realize it later, when they find out a lot of the world doesn't, to be honest with you. Which is one of the reasons you have such a high review rating on Rate My Professors.
TOM: Yeah, I'm not the typical professor, because I do care.
Trade a Grade PHILLIP: You do care. We compared Rate My Professors to Yelp. As a marketer, what do your reviews tell you about your own brand? And are there any reviews that stuck with you or changed your approach?
TOM: Well, I'm glad you bring that up, because in my branding class, I have an older slide which shows my tags. I say, this is my brand. My brand is inspirational, caring, amazing lectures, hilarious, respected. And I'm good with all of those. I'm thrilled that my students who have been in my classroom have said those things about me.
PHILLIP: Yeah, that's great. Have you had any reviews that changed anything?
TOM: The thing is, every semester I get reviewed by my students. We have evaluations, and I read them every semester and I try to make changes. I'm always updating my classes. I'm always trying to make them better because, as you know and I know, marketing changes every day. The fundamentals remain, but the perishable knowledge is always in flux.
PHILLIP: Yeah. In the real world, I'm surprised when I bump into a company or a business that doesn't read those reviews, or pay attention to social commentary on social media, where, boots on the ground, they can learn how people are actually experiencing them or what they think of them. Is their positioning right? Do people actually talk about you in the way you think they should? So I think it's just really neat that you have Rate My Professors, where you can do the same thing for your own product, your own classes that you're putting up.
TOM: Well, businesses that don't take advantage of that, I don't know how they keep going. There are a lot of those businesses out there. You're right.
PHILLIP: Sometimes they don't. It's just a slow burn. And they try to figure out what's wrong. Let's blame the sales guys, or where are our leads?
TOM: Yeah. They're looking for a market they can serve. They don't know what it is, but they're going to find it, maybe.
PHILLIP: So, last bit on the classroom. Well, that's not true, we're going to talk a lot about the classroom. But going back to Rate My Professors and the tags you talked about: your top one is caring. At the same time, some of your students say you're an easy grader, that you go easy on them with the grades.
TOM: I could care less about the grades, bro. I don't care.
PHILLIP: Well, it's not about the grades, right? What I'm getting to is, how do you find that balance of the rigor of pushing them, pulling them, but also making sure that what they're learning is what counts, not the letter?
TOM: I'm willing to trade a grade. What do they want from me? They want a grade. What do I want from them? I want their attention. I want their effort. I want them to try. Every semester, I'm going to get students that were just like me, that don't really care. They're there to get by. They're not going to try real hard. I'm trying to get people to fall in love with marketing and come over to my side.
So I have them read. Students today don't like to read. I have them read three books in my marketing strategy class. Lies, Damned Lies, and Marketing is the first, where Atul Minocha tells the story of why marketing matters to the CEO. And this semester I added Future Demand, James Hurman's new version of that book, because I love what he's saying about 95-5 and how that applies to businesses. I think that's really important for students to know. I haven't gotten that assignment turned in yet. I should get that next week, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they thought of it. And then they get to pick either Eat Your Greens, by our friend the banana man, Wiemer, or Myths of Marketing [confirm title and author]. They get to pick the last book, one or the other.
So there's reading, and then there's a lot of writing. My strategy class is a writing-intensive class. There are three strategy memos that they write. There are three reaction papers that they write. There's a marketing plan they do for the simulation competition, which they're working on right now. And there's a marketing plan for a client that they've used AI to build, which they're going to write at the very end.
So I have lots of opportunities for them to learn theory at the beginning of the class. That's where I lay down the theory. We start with market orientation. I do behavioral science for brands in between market research, because I think it's important to know how humans decide. Then we move into strategy: segmentation, targeting, positioning. Then we move into tactics, the four Ps. You do that right over time, you get the B of branding.
So I lay down the theory, and then for the remaining part of the semester, we apply it. To get a grade in the simulation, you have to give me at least an hour's effort per week. But if you want to win the game, you're going to give me a lot more work than an hour. I lay out the assignments. It's up to the students to benefit from that. But I'll give you a good grade if you give me a good effort. And so that's my deal with them.
PHILLIP: Yeah, exactly. Excellent.
The Marketing Land Map TOM: So we got into some heavy stuff there. It just worked out that way, dude.
PHILLIP: That's why it's a conversation, my man. I think we'll probably come back around to it, maybe even at the end, but it's important. And I think that's why this show is important to me. We talk about the long and the short. If you want the nuggets, here's 15 minutes, learn something great, fine, Bob's your uncle. But if you actually want to understand the person, if you really want to learn, you'll take a chance to understand the perspectives in life that gave this person their view and their experiences. The stories are where you actually get to learn.
TOM: And you said that you were inspired by Giles Edwards' show, and that's kind of what you get from Giles, in a different way.
PHILLIP: Yeah, absolutely. So, an excellent intro to theory meets practice. There are tons of people who read the books and want to apply them. Unless it's How Brands Grow, then they pretend they read it. But actually extracting what works from the theory and then putting it into practice is so different for different types of businesses, different industries, et cetera. How do you talk to students about that? I know you put them through so many different exercises and real projects, and you've brought brands into the classroom, which is great. But how do you prepare those students to understand the balance of being a practitioner versus the theory?
TOM: Well, first of all, the theory. The Marketing Land map [confirm: credit for the map is unclear on the recording], based on the Mark Ritson Mini MBA, is fantastic. But it finds its beginnings in the Harvard Business School marketing strategy formation map, which was the five C's of analysis: customer, company, competitors, context, collaborators. And in my classroom, category.
We start there, then we move into creating value. Since marketing is a value-creating business: segmentation, targeting, positioning, products, price, and promotion. Those things create value. Only price captures value. It brings the money into our firm. And then how do we sustain value? Through customer acquisition, through retention. You do that over time, you've got profit, because profit is what matters most, not revenue.
So if you can get them knowing this theory in their head, the Marketing Land map, we go back to that every class. We end every class with it, so the students get to know it in their heads. Because I want them to know this process of analysis, strategy formation, and then tactical execution. If they know that in the back of their heads, then they can add on AI, they can add on everything else. They've got the map that they need. To me, it's the best thing I can teach them in this class.
I say marketing strategy is the blueprint by which the firm plans to compete. That's a definition from, I think, what's the guy's name, Robert Davis [confirm]. Marketing strategy is the blueprint by which the firm plans to compete. That is this class in a sentence.
PHILLIP: Got it. Well, I really like the Marketing Land map. I know you actually have that on slides for your students. We'll make sure that we have it in the show notes too. And as much as we all want to be on Brand Beach, don't spend too much time there. You've got to leave the beach.
TOM: No, no, no. You've got to do everything right to get in the mind. Brands are in the minds.
A Desk Is a Dangerous Place PHILLIP: All right. So you went through the five C's plus one, so six C's. We've talked about value, the four Ps, profit being more important than revenue. I'm always surprised, going back to our C's, how few times we hear companies talk about the customer. Products, competition, themselves, what they want to put out into the world, but customers and customer experience, going back to our Yelp learnings? There's such an opportunity to get close to the customers. Go talk to the customers. Get away from the desk and go to the store or the conference or wherever it is, and talk to people you want to sell to. Why is that so hard to fix? Why is it so hard to get through to people?
TOM: Well, I think John le Carré said a desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. One of my favorite quotes. And I tell my students, you can excel beyond the people that you're going to be working with by having conversations with your customers. I was in the automotive parts aftermarket for most of my career. And so that meant talking to the people that are putting the parts on the cars, the service dealers. Talking to the people in the waiting room about remanufactured parts, talking to the warehouse distributors about their challenges. You know the customer intimately because you've been out there in the field. Those are the best marketers, in my opinion. And you as a young marketer can excel there.
Porter interviewed CEOs for Harvard on how they spend their time. Five percent with customers. Just five percent. That's a problem. Without a doubt, I preach against inside-out business, and so many businesses are just focused on themselves, man. Cardone Industries is no more. They went out of business. That's all there was: us, us, us, not them. Not outside in. Bring the outside world into our business. That is what a customer-driven company is. Too many companies are not that. They're product driven. They're competitor driven. They're themselves driven. They're not customer driven.
PHILLIP: My favorite little metaphor for all that is that the busboy knows more about what people like in the restaurant than the chef, because he's the one who has to scrape the plates and throw away the food they don't eat.
TOM: As well as, he's hearing what they're saying at the table.
PHILLIP: Exactly. Get out of the kitchen if you want to see what people enjoy on the plate, right? Speaking of getting out amongst them, you've brought more than 85 businesses into your classes, from QVC to the film festival. What happens to those students when they see the work actually becoming real?
TOM: Well, again, I'm speaking in generalizations here, but small businesses, from my days of consulting with them as a SCORE volunteer: when a small business would come into the meeting room, okay, let me see your marketing plan. "I don't have a marketing plan." Okay. How much budget do you have for marketing? "Well, I don't have a budget." Okay. All right. So who is doing the marketing for you? "Well, I do it once in a while. Or my clerk." So let me get this right. You don't have a plan, you don't have a budget, and you don't have anyone doing this. And you want to talk about Facebook ads?
You see a lot of small businesses just flying by the seat of their pants. What they know about marketing, they've learned from Gary Vee or Neil Patel, the absolute worst advice you've ever heard. It's influencers.
PHILLIP: Yeah. Just make more content. Come on, Tom, just make more content. Got to 10X that.
TOM: That is terrible. And AI just pushes the crap out faster. So I think that's the thing they learn. They've studied theory, but applying it to a small business is hard. That is one of the truths, man. Philip Kotler, who some people argue is the father of modern marketing, I'm not the guy that says that, but Kotler is quoted as saying it takes a day to learn marketing and a lifetime to master it. And it is hard, because something that works stops working, or something that you're convinced is going to work doesn't. It's a lot of A/B tests. It's a lot of experimentation. Marketing is a tough business. It is a hard business. But without it, you don't stay in business. Customers are the lifeblood of our business. Without customers, we are done.
PHILLIP: You know, I don't know if you've used this phrase, or if your students recognize it, but there's something called the curse of knowledge, where we assume the person we're talking to knows as much as we do. And I think the more you talk to those customers and potential customers, you realize there's a giant gap. It's not just about, like you said, ads. First of all, unless they're trained, they probably think marketing is just advertising. But there are so many gaps where marketing can plug in between the product and the price and the market and the customers, and all the Ps and all the C's and blah, blah, blah. You can have a great product at a great price and do just great for a long time. And then that stops working, or your business plateaus, and you don't know why. And talking to someone who can figure that out, drop the curse of knowledge and say, our marketing job right now is to figure out what's going on, what's broken. That's such a wonderful thing for those students to learn when they actually have their hands in it. I think you've done follow-up consultations on the students' recommendations for those businesses too.
TOM: Yes. That offer, first of all, I've kind of moved away from that. That was a huge part of my classroom. Now I've moved that into an AI project for a client of their choice, because I was restricted to the people that the local chamber would send me. I've used two different chambers, and quite frankly, the last time, I didn't have enough clients for my two classes, and I said, I can't do this anymore. So I moved it to: you pick your client, and I will teach you AI, and we will use it to build a plan. That's where this has morphed into.
In order to do this in my classroom, it was just a part of it, a project. The then-dean said, "Well, let's do this for the whole semester." Well, I teach the capstone class. It's a part of my class. I'm not making this the focus of my entire class. So they spun it off, and I think it's being offered in a different form.
PHILLIP: Okay, got it.
Free Marketing Help, 2020 PHILLIP: So, ten minutes ago you talked about how marketing has to constantly change, and you have to be on your toes and understand what's happening. And now you've made the change where you're using this new thing available to us, AI, to teach your students in a different gear, which is wonderful. But before AI was available, we had something else kick us in the face, and that was COVID. Got us all in the chin, right? Some people made out better than others. But you used it as an opportunity to help local businesses. I think you had 55 students or so jump in with you. And then a local ABC channel came in and told the story. You talked about the opportunity to fight back and actually just help the small town you're in. And the reporter said that this is so important that other universities should model it. Can you tell the audience about that story and what came out of it?
TOM: Well, as you can well imagine, I said goodbye to the students as they went away on spring break, and they never came back. They didn't come back for three whole semesters and one summer. And again, I teach the capstone course. This is the last class they take before they graduate. So there would be no graduation that semester. There'd be no parties at the end of the year. There'd be no opportunities to have one more fun time with their friends. That was all gone.
At that time, I was having these clients come into my classroom, and needless to say, I had to shelve that. And I said, what can I do to help everybody? So that was my idea: free marketing help. I put together killer resources, a Dropbox with 50 different tools and articles. If you signed up for what I called Free Marketing Help, I'd send those resources to you, no questions asked. But if you were going to participate, I required some things from you. We had a good number of businesses who participated. Some did it all the way, others a little bit. But we put some plans together, and I know that it helped. These clients told me it helped them, because they hadn't thought about marketing. We outlined the process. And the students felt good that they could do one more positive thing, despite being off campus and being forced online.
PHILLIP: Have you heard of any other groups doing that outside of West Chester since?
TOM: Well, the thing is, the chamber project exists in a different format now at West Chester, so I guess it is still alive in some form. It's a small number of clients. But I think more schools should do it.
TenSlides for the Price of a Few Pizzas TOM: I know Koen Pauwels, in his wonderful review of the 10 slides for $10,000, in the wonderful newsletter that he publishes on LinkedIn, made a comment. He proposed this benchmark against the Evidenza 10 slides: "I propose a good team of good marketing students deliver this exact 10-step sequence over a semester for the price of a few pizzas. And they'll even talk to current and potential customers."
So I am offering two tracks: the one-page business plan, the marketing plan textbook which I've used for the last couple of semesters, or this Evidenza 10-slide model. And I'm going to award pizza pies to the teams that I feel beat Evidenza's example, the Tabasco in Canada plan that I shared with the students. So that's just another way to try to make some more fun in the class.
PHILLIP: Yeah, that's nice. So you and I are familiar with Evidenza, and we know that Ritson's involved with those ten slides you talked about. For people who may not know it, and this is not a commercial for Evidenza, can we touch on that? Because synthetic research, I imagine...
TOM: Synthetic research is huge. I talk a lot about it in my module on market research. And I do not feel synthetic research is at the place where we can gain an advantage by reading about these synthetic people. Everything I've read says it's just not there. It's getting better by the day, but it's not there yet.
And so Evidenza, I love Evidenza. I love the company. I love the two guys that run it. Their podcast is hilarious. They dress up like these Renaissance characters, and the topics they deal with are pretty good. And so they've made an offer. They'll produce a marketing plan for any company, mostly B2B, I would guess, and they're going to use Evidenza's synthetic research to back it up and create this plan for you. And if you pay enough money, they'll get Mark Ritson himself to present the plan to your management team, which I can't imagine what that's going to cost, but that would be fun, I would think. I'd love to see that happen. If I were still working in corporate America and Cardone Industries had a lot of money, I'd pay for it, just to see how it looks.
PHILLIP: Yeah, I'm with you, mate. I'd actually like to see it. A synthetic research thing, I imagine, is going to be beneficial, especially right now, for B2B. Because it's one thing to go to a supermarket and talk to customers about why they pulled something off a shelf, or talk to the guy changing your oil to figure out the headaches he's going through and why he would recommend one thing or another. But you're only going to get so much time with executives or CEOs of frankly any size business, not just large corporations. They're not filling in surveys for an Amazon gift card, and it's going to be hard to take them to lunch as a group. So being able to get the information and feed it in is better than nothing. Because we talked earlier about how many people aren't talking to customers at all, or trying to wrap their heads around what the customers' needs are at all. So first of all, it's a lot better than nothing. And second of all, I imagine B2B would be a good place for it.
TOM: Right, right. I agree with you. A lot of businesses don't do any. And so I would think some is better than none, even if it is synthetic. But I've got to give a shout again: Mark Ritson called Koen Pauwels the greatest marketing academic on the planet. He's a sharp dude. I love reading his stuff. He's a really excellent American marketing academic.
PHILLIP: Yeah, he's a smart cookie. We'll make sure we get a link to his newsletter in the show notes too, and give him a shout. Thanks for bringing him up.
Shame on You, Chatbot PHILLIP: So if you could cut or rebuild one thing in education from scratch... We've talked about AI. We've talked about how you've changed. If you could just take something out and say, we don't need this anymore, guys. Or, you know what, we've not been teaching this for a while, this needs to come back in. What is that? What does that look like?
TOM: My thing is customers, customer centricity and the customer experience, because I don't think enough businesses think about that stuff. If they did, there wouldn't be an AI chatbot on the planet. Nothing says we don't give a crap about you like an AI chatbot that's the only way I can communicate with a company.
PHILLIP: No kidding. Well, and not to mention, stop popping up on every screen I click on your website. I will abandon your website if that thing chases me around.
TOM: If you outsource contact with your customers, shame on you. Shame on you. How can you be in business? That is an abdication of your job. Finding and retaining customers is why you are here.
PHILLIP: Yeah. So there was a show, and I don't know if it's still on or not, called Undercover Boss. Did you ever watch it?
TOM: Yeah, I'm familiar with that show.
PHILLIP: What I took from that show was, how many of these people are not talking to their boots-on-the-ground people? Walk the floor, walk the store, get out into the bullpen and be amongst the people who are talking to your customers, and then actually go out and talk to the customers. You could learn so much by sitting in a call center. Even if you don't hear the customer, listening to how your people are responding to your customers... And to your point, if you're outsourcing that, you don't get that opportunity. I'm sure someone's uploading recordings and you can listen to them, but it's different than being there live.
TOM: Exactly. And to have those stories to help communicate. Because you're communicating up and down and across. So that's one of your big jobs as the marketer on the team. You are the voice of the customer.
PHILLIP: I'm going to refill my coffee too.
TOM: I like the coffee cup you've got there, The PO Show.
PHILLIP: Thanks. I haven't asked you this yet, but send me your address and I'll send you one. I usually just do it as a surprise, but since you called it out, I'll make sure I send you one.
TOM: Awesome. I will do that. Well, here's a thought, dude. In the future, send it in advance, so I'm drinking out of it at the same time.
PHILLIP: It is a great idea. It's exactly the way it should be done. We're a small team, and I can't tell you how many times I've gone, shit, why didn't I get that mug out? It's so hard to get stuff done for ourselves.
TOM: I hear you. It's a shame you can't have an AI bot do it for you.
PHILLIP: That is definitely one of those things that's hard to automate, right? Have you read or listened to the book The Art of the Pitch, by Peter Coughter [confirm]? It's a good book. If you have time, I want to hear about pitching. I'm not going to get into the details of the pitch itself, but they were pitching something about an old airport, turning it into a mall or something like that, and they were talking about how to change what's around it. They went out into the community and talked to people who engage with this property. And I want to say there was a group of guys who came and played basketball every afternoon, because there was a basketball court in the parking lot. I'm screwing up the story. But the point was, instead of putting up a slide with bullet points saying 50 people use this a week, et cetera, he actually brought one of those guys into the boardroom.
He was doing his pitch, talking for 10 minutes, and he said, "But I want you to hear something." He opened the door, and this nervous man walked in, wearing a suit that didn't fit him very well. And the guy told the story about how he and these other young men would come and play basketball there, and why it was such an important part of the community, and that people would come there to use the property that way. And please don't take it away. And then he left. And that was such a moment. I love the pitch, by the way. I love the story. But the chance to say, I'm not just going to play your recording, I want you to hear it from the customer themselves...
TOM: That's awesome. Dude, I'm a huge fan of it as well.
PHILLIP: It's so different than looking at a marketing dashboard and trying to figure out where someone clicked. So I think we should take more of those moments and bring more of that back in, especially as the world's constantly pushing AI down our throats. It makes a big difference.
Built on Marketing Twitter PHILLIP: All right. So going back to 2020 and COVID and what you did for West Chester, which is such a great story. COVID changed a lot of things, but it also introduced a lot of people. You and I connected on Twitter through Marketing Twitter then, along with, man, it must be a couple hundred people. Thousands, mind you, but a couple hundred people where it's like, I haven't heard from this person in a while, I'm going to shoot them a DM and see how they're doing.
TOM: Amen.
PHILLIP: And frankly, The PO Show wouldn't exist without Marketing Twitter from COVID, just to call it as it is. You bring in a lot of people to guest lecture to your classes. And that social feed we just talked about has turned into tons and tons of free learning for anybody who goes to YouTube and watches your channel of over a hundred practitioners, by the way. You and I know how important that is. How do your students respond to having all these people? It's literally global. There are people from all over the map with all kinds of different backgrounds. How do they respond to these guest lectures?
TOM: Well, the thing that I've learned is that each section I teach is a different experience. It's a different group of students. I don't know what is going to come into my classroom. And I'm also dealing with the fallout of the pandemic. Because, as I said, those students that were in my classroom before we went away on spring break in 2020 have never come back. They have never come back. These kids don't ask questions. Getting them to speak in class is really hard. So, man, it was different in 2020, and I'm dealing with that fallout in the classroom today.
So in my Brands and Branding semester, for the first month, I like to bring in practitioners on Thursdays from all around the world to talk about real-world marketing and real-world branding, and starting your career in the age of AI. Because I teach theory. I want them to hear from men and women that are out doing this at a high level. And they are so generous. As I've told you many times before, without their generosity, giving up their time and sharing their hard-earned knowledge, this doesn't happen. And to have so many, over a hundred, that have done that, it just makes me so happy inside. It is such a gift. It's making my students better marketers, better brand builders, and quite frankly, giving them better careers, from the advice that is passed down to them from these men and women.
PHILLIP: You're giving them access to people they would be lucky to study under, or be mentored by. It's incredible.
TOM: And that's the light bulb that went off during COVID: hey, we'll do this over Zoom. I remember I started with my friend who does interview coaching, how to get hired during COVID. And I had a friend who wrote a big digital marketing book talk about digital marketing. That 2020 spring semester, I did three or four talks, and I said, this is good, I think we should expand on this. And it's grown into all those wonderful people that have agreed to do it and agreed to let me put it on my YouTube channel.
The first speaker that I asked to do this is a friend who I miss so much. His name is Samuel Brealey. He's a small business marketer who ran into some personal issues, it looks like, and he's disappeared from Marketing Twitter. He's not on LinkedIn anymore. I think of him often, and I still use his wonderful article, "Marketing for the Little Guy," about his friend's lawn-cutting business. I'll make sure you have that to put in the notes, because it's one of the best articles I've ever read about marketing for small business.
PHILLIP: Thank you. And same. I've reached out to him a few times, but he does seem to have just stepped away.
TOM: He's cut us off. Something's happened, and it breaks my heart.
PHILLIP: Yeah, same. He picked up the sword and shield to fight against things like HubSpot for these small businesses. First of all, you don't have a budget. Second of all, why would you spend all your budget on SaaS or marketing software that you don't know how to use, and now you're going to have to pay someone to use it? If you have a hundred customers, use a spreadsheet. It's free, you probably know how to use it, and you'll be closer to the customers, because the technology won't be between you and the customers. I think it's a great idea to add that article to the show notes. We'll make sure we get it in. And I'm going to poke a few of our friends in the UK and see if they've talked to him.
TOM: I just want to know he's okay. I just want to know he's okay. I miss him a lot. He really was a wonderful, smart small business marketing consultant.
PHILLIP: He's a smart character.
Questions from Industry Friends PHILLIP: So that's a wonderful transition into the next segment, which is something we call Questions from Industry Friends. I go out and find someone, often from Marketing Twitter, who knows both of us and would love to have a conversation with you, and give them the chance to ask you a question as if they were sitting in this seat.
Our first question comes from Mats Georgson, who has also presented to your class. He's been a practitioner for over 35 years, worked with some really big global companies, and been a professor for 15, and those overlap, just like yours. He wanted to push us a little bit. His question is: why do you think so many marketing students see theory as something totally different from what they'll do later at work? And, chillingly, are they right?
TOM: All right. Well, first of all, Mats has spoken to my class at least twice, possibly three times. And I love the distinctive assets of cartoons that he uses to tell the marketing truths.
The way we do things at West Chester University, a marketing major only has to take four classes. One class every business student has to take, and that's Principles of Marketing. The other three classes that a marketing major takes are Marketing Research, Consumer Behavior, and then the capstone class that I teach, Marketing Strategy and Planning, also called Marketing Management at other schools. It's where you teach the student how to become a practitioner.
They've taken a lot of electives. We have a digital marketing minor, which I recommend highly. We have a sales minor, a sales management minor. Those are two paths that I encourage students to consider starting down. The third path is AI expertise around marketing. That's the new one. It's in the same boat as TikTok: if you can teach a business how to use TikTok for their marketing. These are the opportunities that I encourage students to look for in jobs.
To speak to Mats' point, they don't really grasp all this stuff, and I'm giving them a lot more than they can take in. Because again, I'm trying to get them to love marketing before they walk out of the classroom, because it's really something that starts in the classroom.
The line that I love is: when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, because that's how it happened to me. When I sat in that classroom, I was not ready to learn. I was ready to get a good grade. I was ready to go have some fun. It wasn't until I had a young daughter and had to go earn money that I started thinking, hey, I'd better know this stuff. And then the second half of that quote is: when the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears. And so you become the teacher. You teach yourself, you teach others. And that is my hope and prayer for my students: that they leave my classroom becoming teachers as well, of this discipline, of these topics that they started in my room. Does that answer the question? I hope it does.
PHILLIP: Yeah, nice. I don't know what Mats was after, but it was your answer, and that's what counts.
Our next question comes from Jim Knapp. Jim admits he can be a little snarky, so he wanted to provoke a little bit too. First, a definition, just to get us rolling. A profession is generally an occupation that requires specialized knowledge gained through formal education, a credential or license to practice, an enforced code of ethics, and a governing body that can bar you from practicing. Now, we don't really have that in marketing, right? It's not like being an attorney or a physician. So Jim's pushing: by that definition, is marketing a profession? And he also says he's asking for a friend.
TOM: Okay. Well, Jim spoke in my branding class this semester and did a fabulous job. Jim's a brother from another mother, as I call him. We're of similar age, and we've done similar things in our careers.
To me, marketing is not a profession, it is a calling. It's certainly a calling on my life. When I was a kid, I would sell greeting cards door to door, around grade three. And then I got a newspaper route that I doubled. I would win all the contests. And so I knew I could sell, and I always was going to have a career in selling. I was also a wrestler, so I understood the importance of having the mental prep, the mental toughness to go out and sell, because it's a really tough job, hearing no, no, no, no, no, as many times as you have to push through it.
In high school, my senior year, this is the thing that I think changed my life. I had an elective at Delbarton School, this all-boys Catholic prep school that I wouldn't get into today, that my dad couldn't afford today, but I was fortunate enough back then to be able to go there. It was taught by a professor who had just graduated from the Wharton School of Business. An elective on marketing. So back in high school, I read David Ogilvy's book and I wrote ads in David Ogilvy's style. I did a marketing research study on the varsity jacket, and we made changes that are still in effect today. I saw these jackets that I redesigned back in 1975. That's what they're wearing today. And so I said, that's what I want to study.
I studied at LaSalle University. I was a marketing communication arts major. I knew I would do either selling or marketing, and I've been doing that my whole life. To me, it's my avocation. It's my vocation. I love it. I absolutely was put on this earth to be a marketer and to teach marketing. That's just the way I see it. So to me, is it a profession? For me personally, it's been my life's calling.
PHILLIP: It's a lifestyle. You don't turn it off, right? You don't leave the practice and leave the patients after they've gone home. It's constantly cranking.
TOM: Yeah, you don't turn your computer off. You're constantly reading LinkedIn, reading journals. Everything's changing. And as a teacher, you need to stay on the forefront, because I want to teach what's most important, what's most relevant, to help my students.
PHILLIP: Ideally, the people listening to The PO Show will be curious people. That is one of my foundational tenets. If you're curious about marketing, or about where business and sales are boosted by marketing, I hope you'll follow Tom on LinkedIn, because Tom is constantly sharing things he finds interesting and relevant. It's stuff he would teach to MBA students. And I'll call it out: I think your students should be following you on LinkedIn and reading everything you post, because you're pulling stuff from lots of smart people from all over the place. There's no fluff and no waste. You're sharing stuff that's worth reading. So thank you for doing that.
Our next question comes from Baiba Matisone. She admires how the videos from your classes have brought together some truly brilliant minds from across the industry, and she has been writing about the meaning and value of degrees. In her view, education has narrowed to serving the labor market, the diploma has become a product universities sell, and students are taught the ABCs of how to do things instead of how to think. With AI now helping write course programs and textbooks, she's worried we're heading toward something like the IKEA instruction manual. It goes back to The PO Show too, right? Not to talk about the podcast, but here's the short bullet-point version, and here's the bigger version where you get to feed your noggin full of things that'll make you think. Her question is: if the thinking skills aren't being developed, what's the value of a diploma? And how do you teach students to think, not just follow a manual?
TOM: Well, she makes a good point. In fact, it's interesting: two weeks ago in the New York Times, there was the op-ed, "I Teach at a Business School. It's Time to Shut Them Down." That has gotten a lot of attention, and I shared the best rebuttal to it on my LinkedIn, as you graciously suggested people follow me for, because I felt it was worth sharing.
I agree there is some truth to what she is saying. First of all, she is an amazing expert in branding. She spoke to my students this semester, and I was just so blessed to have her talk to them. She actually watched, I think, most every session before doing her lecture, which blew me away. And she's also a big advocate, encouraging others to tune into the channel.
So what I can address is how I deal with it in my classroom, to try to help students think. I teach a writing-intensive class, which means the students are instructed to write in many different ways and means. I assign those three books we talked about earlier, and they do reflection papers on them. I assign strategy memos; there are three of those. There are two marketing plans, one in the simulation competition and one in the AI client project. So there's a lot of writing and reading and thinking. There are videos they're required to watch and readings they're required to read, and I test them on these things.
I try to push them out of their comfort zones. Certainly the simulation competition does that for many of these students, especially the straight-A students who are so used to doing things and getting the A. The simulation requires a whole different set of thinking, and it's constantly changing. That is tough for A students to absorb. So all I can do in my class is try to come up with ways to force them to think about the things we're looking at each week. And hopefully at the end of the semester, when they leave here, they are in love with marketing, and they want to continue to teach themselves. Because the learning doesn't stop on the last day of class. It goes on forever.
PHILLIP: She loves to research, and she loves to write and share and reflect. A couple of years ago, she put out something on Gumroad. It was only a couple of bucks.
TOM: Yeah, I've purchased some of her products on Gumroad. They're fabulous. Absolutely put her in the show notes. She's a phenomenal brand thinker.
PHILLIP: A good thinker. And what I was getting to is, one of the things she sold was a deck of, whatever framework you can think of, it's in the deck. And part of that is: here's the framework, but the framework is just a tool to distill and communicate what you've already done. All the thinking and the research and the conversations that go into it, that's the magic. So you must have some critical thinking skills. And going back to what you keep saying about writing, which we haven't said out loud: good writing is clear thinking. Getting things shorter and still communicating the message is hard, which is where the framework comes in, so it's not a hundred-page deck that doesn't communicate anything. Anyway, she's got some great stuff. I'm glad she was able to jump in and give us a question.
TOM: Very nice.
PHILLIP: Our last question from friends is from Giulio del Bufalo.
TOM: Oh man, I love the guy. He's spoken three times in my class. He's a friend of the classroom.
PHILLIP: I haven't seen all three. That's great. Now that I've stumbled over his name, I send him DMs in awful Italian, so now I've had a chance to mess up his name too. So I have to pull in what Giles Edwards lovingly calls him on social media. We'll just call him Jimmy Buffalo.
TOM: Yeah, that's Giles.
PHILLIP: So Giulio says: AI is now doing the tasks and work where junior employees used to build their skills. How do you help students start their careers on the right foot? And how do you help them keep hope, and not be discouraged by a system that seems to have taken the ladder away?
TOM: Well, I'm going to focus this on my marketing strategy class. We've talked about this a lot. I want them to leave with the theory in their heads, the process, the Marketing Land map, so they know the three steps to do this, and when they leave here, they can do that. Application. Again, I want them to leave with durable and perishable knowledge. The durable knowledge is segmentation, targeting, the P of product, the P of price, all those things that are durable, and market orientation. That will stay forever. Perishable knowledge is AI. What we're studying today in AI is going to change tomorrow. That's the fastest thing that's changing. So I try to fill them with the perishable knowledge that they need today, knowing that they'll keep on learning.
And the simulation competition runs over the whole course of the semester. It's eight decision quarters. They're essentially building their own company. They learn how to create value through branding, through building products that meet their target segments, through distribution around the world, through selling and sales training, through promotion, digital promotion and ads, through pricing. They learn how to do all these things week by week. The company that I work with, Marketplace Simulations, has coaching reports that I can share with the students. So they come through there learning how to apply all this theory that we studied. And by the way, you can't be a random person on the street and do the simulation. You have to be under the instruction of a professor who can support what's being learned in the simulation.
So my hope is that I'm teaching them the AI that they need to know to use in marketing through the final weeks of the class, teaching them the theory they need to know so that once they leave, they can take it with them forever, and leaving them with the lessons they learned through the simulation competition on how to do it themselves, doing the same things real marketers are doing out in the world today. I'm hoping those things give them a leg up when they go out to start their careers.
PHILLIP: Yeah. I really appreciate your answer through the lens of where you are at West Chester. I really like Giulio's question, because it's something I've thought a lot about. I think about the first ten years of my career and how much my career changed. I started as a designer in advertising, and through constantly, frankly, just taking stuff on the chin sometimes, in a meeting with a client, or seeing something fail that we knew was going to be great. Failures aren't the only place to learn, by the way. You can learn from wins. But it's not just pulling up the ladder. If all those opportunities to learn from experience are gone, there's got to be a new avenue to build experience.
Going back to the Evidenza stuff, you can read the synthetic research, but it's not the same. Do you know Mark Hadfield, by the way? From Marketing Twitter. He has something called Meet the 85%. They do ethnography, proper ethnography, where they get in a car with video equipment and go sit down with people in their living rooms, in their kitchens, and they ask them questions. You and I know reading something out of a report or a focus group is so different than sitting down and letting someone talk about their life, and watching the nonverbals, how they cut their eyes away when they say something that probably isn't quite the truth.
He was on the show early on, and he has a story about someone saying that they don't use plastic, because plastic's bad for the environment. And then he says, "Can I go look around in your kitchen?" And he opens the fridge, and it's full of plastic. In that person's eyes, what they were doing was valiant, but they were still just going about their messy human lives, right? They weren't fibbing. That's just life. They were overlooking all the plastic in their fridge that they buy every day, because they've been doing it for so long.
The reason I'm sharing that story about Mark is, you need that messiness. You need those human moments to solidify yourself and build your arsenal for becoming the best version of you. Back to Giulio's question, yes, the ladder's being pulled up on getting into those entry roles. But at the same time, even if you do get in at a senior role, I'm concerned about losing all those human, messy moments that allow us to become something unique in the future.
TOM: I agree with you.
Closing Question: The Most Human Company Wins PHILLIP: Okay, so, closing question. If you, Tom, could communicate one thing to every marketing channel around the world at the same time, what would that message be?
TOM: Well, I think we mentioned how AI chatbots suck, and you're not doing your customers any favors. That was what we said. But I think of this often. Philip Kotler, whose book Marketing Management was first published in 1971: across all 16 editions, the core principle of customer centricity is central. It's remained the key theme of all these textbooks: customer centricity. And so, to the channels of marketing: never lose sight of the customer. Finding and keeping customers is the lifeblood of your business. And in this world that is obsessed with artificial intelligence, it is the most human company that I believe will win.
To jump on Mark Schaefer's wonderful quote from his book, Marketing Rebellion: marketing is about psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It's about all things human. And that, my friends, is where the future of marketing lies: in the humanness of our customers.
PHILLIP: I love it. That's great. The most human wins. I want to go back to your chatbot thing, and I meant to mention this earlier. A no-reply email is such a terrible idea for these brands. And maybe this is a place where AI can help. Never send me a no-reply email. You've got me in a moment where I've learned something, maybe good or bad news. Let me reply to it, and use AI to route that to the right human who can help me. I despise no-reply emails.
TOM: I agree. I agree.
Sign Off PHILLIP: Tom, thank you. Most human wins. I love it. How can our listeners find out more about you? How can they contact you?
TOM: Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Hopefully we'll put a link on there. I'd be happy to connect with anybody.
PHILLIP: Absolutely. And we've got your YouTube channel. We also have lots of links from all of our guests. We mentioned a lot of our friends from Marketing Twitter, so we're going to have a bunch of tags. We'll tag them, whether they like it or not, in the LinkedIn comments as well, to make sure they have a chance to hear you. And a question: you mentioned TikTok earlier. Are you on TikTok?
TOM: Yes, yes.
PHILLIP: You should be on there. We need to get you on there. I think that would be awesome. Tom, thank you for spending so much time with me. It was so good to see you. We'll talk soon. Cheers.
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