ep22 // unLearning with Tracey Follows - Inbetween Worlds

ep22 // unLearning with Tracey Follows - Inbetween Worlds

What does it mean to stay human in a world increasingly shaped by machines? In this episode of brandLingual, Baiba Matisone and Christopher Owens speak with Tracey Follows, futurist, author, and CEO of FutureMade, about the future of identity, strategy, AI, human agency, and the assumptions we need to unlearn if we want to see what is coming next more clearly. Tracey is known for her work on strategic foresight, emerging technologies, identity, and the social systems reshaping business and culture. Her work explores how people, brands, organizations, and governments can better understand the future before it arrives. The conversation begins with one of Tracey’s biggest career unlearnings: advertising often claims to be about originality, but in practice it runs on familiarity, consensus, and the human need to make the new feel safe enough to absorb. From there, the episode opens into a wide-ranging exploration of futurism, perception, transformation, AI, adaptability, and what happens when identity becomes increasingly data-shaped, machine-readable, and fluid. In this episode, discover: • why originality often fails when people are not ready to absorb it • how familiarity and consensus shape marketing, advertising, and organizational life • how Tracey moved from advertising strategy into strategic foresight • what “re-perceiving” means and how it helps challenge hidden assumptions • why transformation often fails even when leaders say they want change • how identity may be moving from something fixed to something more fluid and prism-like • what the “database self” means for people, brands, and AI-shaped systems • why adaptability quotient may become one of the most important skills for strategists • how brands may need to become legible to both humans and machines • what the future of strategy could look like in an age of automation and artificial intelligence This is a conversation for strategists, marketers, founders, creatives, researchers, futurists, and anyone trying to understand how brands and people navigate change. It is not a trends episode. It is an invitation to re-perceive the future. --- Chapters: 00:00 Tracey Follows: Futurism, AI and the Future of Identity 01:17 The Big Unlearning: Originality vs Familiarity 03:49 Why Marketing Runs on Familiarity and Consensus 07:45 How Tracey Follows Became a Futurist 14:59 Re-Perceiving: A Tool for Strategic Foresight 20:15 Why Organizational Transformation Often Fails 26:20 Future Self Continuity and Identity Change 28:18 Database Brands, AI and the Machine-Readable Self 32:39 Adaptability Quotient and the Future of Work 37:15 Why Strategists Need an In-Betweener Mindset 40:18 What Happens to Strategy in the Age of AI? 42:31 FutureMade, New Projects and Closing Thoughts

ep21 // Playground of unLearning

What if marketers do not need another framework to memorize, but a better place to practice? In this episode, Christopher and Baiba explore why play may be one of the most serious tools we have for learning, unlearning, and building better marketing judgment. Marketing often rewards confidence, fluency, and expert posture. But real growth usually asks for something more uncomfortable: curiosity, humility, and the willingness to question what we think we already know. That is the idea behind the new brandLingual Playground — a growing collection of marketing games designed to help people test assumptions, practice evidence-based thinking, and make abstract concepts easier to discuss. We talk about why unlearning can feel so exhausting, how games lower defensiveness, and why play can create a safer route back into beginner’s mindset. We also preview games like The Loyalty Test, where your intention to stay loyal meets the messy realities of buying situations, and Find the Growth Traitor!, where you have to spot marketing advice that sounds plausible but may quietly work against growth. You can also take the brandLingual Fluency Test, a playful diagnostic designed to help you reflect on how fluently you use the language of brand growth. Completing the test can unlock entrance into our free curated WhatsApp community of lifelong learners... a space for people who want to keep practicing, questioning, and sharpening their marketing thinking together. This episode is an invitation to step out of the theater of confidence and into a playground for unlearning. Play the new games and take the Fluency Test here [https://www.brandlingual.co/playground]

ep20 // Translation (with Prof Dr Sebastian Wolf)

Everyone says they want evidence-based marketing. But in most marketing rooms, “evidence” means a dashboard, “strategy” means a deck, “brand” means three different things, and “creativity” gets treated like either magic or decoration. That’s the problem. Not a lack of theory. A failure of translation. In this brandLingual Expert Series episode, Baiba Matisone and Christopher Owens sit down with Prof. Dr. Sebastian Wolf, Professor of Advertising and Strategic Brand Management at Stuttgart Media University, and former strategy and creative director at Serviceplan Group and Territory. Sebastian has lived on both sides of the fault line: the academic world of concepts, empirical generalizations, and marketing theory, and the practitioner world of briefs, clients, KPIs, dashboards, politics, and “can we make this actionable by Monday?” The conversation explores one of marketing’s most expensive hidden problems: people often use the same words while meaning completely different things. Which means the meeting can sound aligned while the thinking underneath it quietly fractures. We discuss: * Why evidence-based marketing is not the same as data-driven marketing * How “precision fetishism” turns dashboards into false comfort * Why KPI stacks need hierarchy, not just more metrics * Why academic language often collapses before it reaches practice * The “Gavagai problem” of marketing translation * Why “brand” may mean company, perception, or legal asset depending on who’s speaking * Why salience still lands awkwardly even in English * Why creativity may be more than originality plus relevance * How artistry, craft, emotion, and attention shape advertising effects * Why AI can accelerate misunderstanding as easily as understanding * Why the real expert move may be keeping a beginner mindset This episode is for anyone who has ever sat in a marketing meeting and realized too late that everyone agreed because nobody was actually talking about the same thing. Reading the theory is not the hard part. Using it without mangling it is the hard part. And the real work of evidence-based marketing may be translation. For more on brandLingual and Strategy Pints: brandlingual.co linkedin.com/company/brandlingual https://podfollow.com/brandlingual/view [https://podfollow.com/brandlingual/view] Chapters 00:00 Prof. Dr. Sebastian Wolf on Marketing Translation 00:45 Why Evidence-Based Marketing Breaks in Practice 02:43 Evidence-Based Marketing vs Data-Driven Marketing 04:15 How to Build a Better Marketing KPI Hierarchy 07:48 Why Academic Marketing Language Fails Practitioners 10:22 The Gavagai Problem in Marketing Translation 14:27 Salience, Mental Availability, and Brand Recall 17:53 What Does “Brand” Actually Mean? 23:17 Rethinking Creativity in Advertising Strategy 30:11 Why Artistry Signals Quality in Marketing 32:42 AI, Innovation, and the Future of Marketing 36:26 Using AI for Meaning, Learning, and Strategy 42:04 Critical Thinking, Dunning-Kruger, and Marketing Confidence 46:11 Beginner Mindset, Unlearning, and Better Strategy 50:02 What Professors Still Need to Unlearn 53:31 How to Connect with Prof. Dr. Sebastian Wolf 56:15 Closing Reflections on Evidence, Creativity, and Translation #brandLingual #EvidenceBasedMarketing #MarketingScience #BrandStrategy #Advertising #CreativeStrategy #MarketingStrategy #ProfDrSebastianWolf

ep19 // Marketing Needs a Periodic Table

What happens when a marketing team uses the same words but means completely different things? In this episode of brandLingual, Baiba Matisone and Christopher Owens explore one of the industry’s most overlooked problems: marketing language. Words like awareness, mental availability, brand love, loyalty, insight, and differentiation sound familiar, but they often carry very different assumptions depending on who is using them. That is where strategy starts to break. When teams share vocabulary without shared meaning, they create false alignment. Briefs look polished. Decks sound strategic. Everyone nods. But the work drifts, decisions get vague, and the market remains unmoved. This episode introduces the idea of a Periodic Table of Marketing Language — not as another glossary, but as a way to discover how marketing concepts connect, conflict, and quietly shape the decisions teams make. Baiba and Christopher unpack why marketing has become overloaded with recycled frameworks, why academia and practice often talk past each other, and why AI may amplify the problem rather than solve it. When AI repeats familiar industry myths with fluent confidence, the real skill is no longer collecting more models. It is learning how to diagnose the language, assumptions, and mental models already steering the work. This is a conversation about marketing strategy, brand strategy, advertising effectiveness, evidence-based marketing, creative strategy, mental availability, client briefs, AI, marketing frameworks, and the hidden cost of unclear language. If you have ever sat in a meeting where everyone used the same words but seemed to be solving different problems, this episode will help you hear the room differently. Learn more method and less myth at brandlingual.co. Bring us your messiest questions. We like those the best. Chapters 00:00 Cold Open: Why Marketing Language Breaks Strategy 00:19 Why This Episode Matters for Brand Strategy 02:26 The Academia vs Practice Gap in Marketing 04:06 The Marketing Career “Splash Party” Problem 05:10 The Periodic Table of Marketing Language 09:13 Language Diagnosis, Not Marketing Policing 11:00 Relabeled Concepts and Framework Cosplay 16:51 Client Briefs Under Pressure 18:36 The Real Cost of False Alignment 21:51 BrandLingual Learning Paths and Practitioner Training 24:15 Evidence-Based Marketing Reading and Research 25:37 Transformation Through Marketing Fluency 29:47 Third Intelligence: Translating Between Marketing Worlds 39:37 AI, Framework Hype, and Marketing Myths 43:21 Four Questions to Test Any Marketing Concept 48:29 BrandLingual Community and Closing Thoughts

ep18 // unLearning with Prof Ram Rao - When Theory Meets Reality

You know Ehrenberg-Bass. But how much do you know about Bass? In this episode of brandLingual, Baiba Matisone and Christopher Owens are joined by Ram Rao, Founders Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas at Dallas, long-time collaborator of Frank Bass, and someone who has spent five decades studying how markets actually behave (not how we wish they behaved in a deck). This conversation sits right where theory hits reality. Ram shares what marketers often have to unlearn, why marketing is fundamentally empirical, and how Frank Bass changed the course of his life by seeing something in him early. We also get into the uncomfortable bits: loyalty is usually overstated, advertising is often defensive, new products mostly fail, and markets move in probabilities, not certainties. Ram’s core shift is simple, but it punches: marketing isn’t something you theorize first. It’s something you observe first. Along the way, he shares inside stories about Frank Bass, the data turning point in marketing science, and why some of marketing’s most persistent beliefs keep surviving despite the evidence sitting right there. Rude, but useful. Including this one: what people say is right… is often wrong. This episode is for strategists, marketers, researchers, planners, founders, and anyone trying to move from intuition to evidence, theory to reality, and “that sounds right” to “does it actually work?” If you’ve ever felt the gap between what you were taught and what you see in the market, this conversation lives in that messy middle. --- Chapters: 00:00 Meet Prof Ram Rao03:44 What Ram Rao Had to Unlearn04:11 From Theory to Market Reality08:04 The Frank Bass Turning Point11:29 How Data Changed Marketing Forever15:14 The Myth of Brand Loyalty18:11 First Movers and Market Dominance22:47 Advertising as Competitive Defense27:05 Why New Products Really Grow29:42 Influencers, Observation, and Social Proof34:16 Can Marketing Actually Predict Growth?36:53 The Limits of Forecasting37:40 Craft Beer and Demand Signals38:53 Why Academia and Practice Drift Apart40:10 A/B Testing and the Cost of Being Wrong42:59 Why Research Often Fails to Pay Off45:08 The Role of the FORMS Conference45:30 The Famous Discussant Ritual49:18 Why Marketing Keeps Renaming Ideas50:51 Teaching Marketing in the AI Era53:30 AI, Creativity, and Marketing Teams57:03 The Legacy of Frank Bass59:47 What MBAs Should Actually Learn01:02:21 The Periodic Table of Marketing01:06:43 Final Reflections and Where to Learn More Learn more about Prof Ram Rao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-rao-6 [https://www.linkedin.com/in/ram-rao-6]... Explore the Frank M. Bass UT Dallas Frontiers of Research in Marketing Science Conference (UTD FORMS): https://jindal.utdallas.edu/annual-ba [https://jindal.utdallas.edu/annual-ba]... About brandLingual: brandLingual is a platform for navigating the messy middle between intuitive marketing and evidence-based thinking, including our co-learning community, online courses, custom training, eBooks, articles, Substack, games, and yes… this podcast. Less myth. More method. Explore more at https://brandlingual.co [https://brandlingual.co/]