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The MSIX 6: Brent Vrdoljak – ‘It’s easy to get caught up in a lot of bullsh*t in our industry’
The Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSIX) returns to Sydney in September. Guest speaker Brent Vrdoljak will explore the bottom line impact of brand redesigns.
Taking place from 4 -5 September at Ovolo Woolloomooloo, the Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSIX) will hear from a range of industry leaders, including marketing consultant and creator Brent Vrdoljak.
Vrdoljak’s talk explores the prevalence of ‘purpose-driven’ messaging on packaging, how shoppers make decisions and ultimately, the final bottom line impact of brand redesigns.
Mumbrella spoke to Vrdoljak about his upcoming talk, and all things marketing science.
What is the role of marketing science in what you do?
That’s pretty foundational.
You know, I have a business degree and, you know, I kind of got to understand a little bit about business and did a marketing major, but it really sucked, right? And that was about 12 to 15 years ago. So since then I’ve kind of been on this journey of really trying to learn more and how it comes to life for me is, you know, sort of day-to-day with clients and really around the idea of distinctiveness and distinctive assets. You know, I specialize in packaging design and brand identity strategy, but I’m not a designer, you know, really just trying to bring the principles of marketing science to brands and really at the more like startup and medium-sized company, the ones that can’t afford the, you know, Ehrenberg Bass Institute subscription.
So, you know, the kind of idea for me is like I’m really fascinated by the idea of context, right? Like brands live in this, you know, busy, messy world and often alongside, you know, 10 other brands. So when it comes to like building identity, getting context right is super important because, you know, distinctiveness kind of really existing in context. So that’s sort of how I like try to practice it.
There’s a couple of other things, like on a practical level, you know, we kind of use some tools like eye tracking that help us, you know, have a more data-driven approach to decisions, but really trying to be more evidence-based in the like principles of marketing science that we can leverage to deliver better results for clients.
What makes effective marketing?
For me, it’s really about simplicity. Like I think it’s easy to kind of get caught up in, you know, a lot of bullshit in our industry, but I think the best marketing is just simple, like simple messages, single-minded, easily understood propositions, you know, visuals that communicate things faster than words, colours that code things in our minds, you know, just being fanatical about simplicity, I think makes marketing more effective.
What is the role of creativity in marketing?
I think about creativity in kind of two ways. Like first up, I’m really like big on the idea of like marketing, not advertising.
Like I’m way more product, you know, than comms. Like my background is product management and NPD development. And so for me, it’s like product is the whole thing around this business.
It’s pricing, distribution, supply chain, like all that boring stuff. And I think like creativity comes into like solving problems. Like we need to understand consumer problems and their needs and coming up with like creative solutions, but then also business problems.
Like you’re often marketing and you end up, if you take full ownership of it, like you end up trying to solve like, you know, manufacturing in China is stuff and we have to find a different solution. And, you know, you kind of end up owning these problems, but you need the, you know, creative solutions. So I think that’s super important, but like when it comes to comms, you know, I like the kind of idea around, you know, inspiration, like where does your inspiration come from? Because I think like, if you look at, you know, the latest like Liquid Death campaign and that’s your like source of inspiration, you’re already a little bit far to like at that point, you know, you’re just following like people who are actually creative.
But the idea for me is like, what’s inspiring them? Like what are Liquid Death looking to? Like they’re not looking at other ads, they’re looking at like, you know, probably watching 10 year old office, like episodes of The Office and coming up with 50 creative ideas, you know, to make entertaining content. And so for me, like, you know, the idea of creativity, like you’re very much led by inspiration and you know, where you can find that. But again, like it’s a funny spot, like I’m not an ad person, right? And I don’t make ads, you know, we do a lot of creative work, but I think that’s kind of like problematic in the industry as well, like people title other people creatives and then they outsource it and delegate it and say, well, I’m not creative, like I might be a marketing manager, but the creative people over there, they’ve got the title.
So I think for me, it’s like super important that everyone embraces the idea of creativity. And on the other side, like the ones that do have the title, you know, are open to people from the marketing team, like having, you know, importing to creative without rolling their eyes. I mean, that’s kind of a separate brand.
What will you be speaking about at MSIX?
My talk is called The Life, Death and Reincarnation of Brands, How Redesigns Actually Work. And it’s an exploration into, you know, what makes communication effective, you know, using a couple of different frameworks and a bunch of case studies.
You know, I think like we can learn so much just from observations. And, you know, over the last sort of five years, I’ve become like a little bit obsessed with packaging design and just branding in general. And I’ve been building this like public bank of case studies on LinkedIn, talking about, you know, rebranding and the reasons behind that.
And now this talk kind of brings to life some of the actual results from those brands, some data behind it and, you know, what’s actually happened from like a sales perspective. So I think it’s gonna be lots of fun.
MSIX is a genuine exchange of ideas. What questions would you like answered at MSIX?
I’m really, at the moment, fascinated by this idea that like brands don’t exist on a website or on a piece of packaging material that like they really only exist in our minds, but our minds are super messy. We all have like these different associations and attachments to the elements that make up brands.
So like colours and words and icons and shapes and sounds. So like my fascination is like, how do we make stuff that actually sticks in people’s heads? Like how do we attach to their memory structures in a way that makes what we do more effective? So I’m interested, like I know there’s gonna be hints about AI and stuff, but I’m really interested in understanding like the kind of fundamentals of like coding memories and how do we kind of better leverage that in marketing, you know, to just make everything we do more effective. Yeah, excellent.
If you were attending the MSIX workshops, what would you work on?
Matt Plant from Thinkerbell’ is doing one on pricing. So for me, I thought that was like probably the most interesting space. Like I said, I’m a product person.
I’ve spent heaps of time just building out like different pricing models in spreadsheets. And, you know, it’s very complicated in the space for grocery because you’ve got this really like dynamic pricing structure because you add promotions into it. And so I’d be very interested to kind of understand more around the behavioral principles of, you know, pricing and how you present pricing, because often it’s, you know, relegated to a spreadsheet where we say like, okay, we have to put, you know, five, 20% off promotions a year, and we get a two times uplift.
And it’s not really like thought through from like the consumer perspective and kind of just end up in a model, right? And so I think that would be like a really interesting session for anyone that’s, you know, more kind of product and business focused than just like ads and cogs.
The Marketing Science Ideas Xchange (MSIX) takes place 4-5 September 2024 at Ovolo Woolloomooloo. Get your tickets here.
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