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

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/]

ep17 // Memory (with Edmunds Vanags)

Most marketers talk about memory as if the brain were a storage box. Say the message enough times. Repeat the brand enough times. Add emotion. Wait for memory. But what if that metaphor is incomplete, or maybe even wrong? In this Expert Series episode of the brandLingual pod, Baiba Matisone and Christopher Owens speak with Edmunds Vanags, clinical psychologist and researcher at the National Center for Mental Health in Latvia and Riga Technical University, about what memory actually is, and why that matters for marketing, advertising, brand, and creative strategy. Edmunds explains why the brain is not passively waiting for information to enter. It is constantly predicting what will happen next, comparing those predictions with incoming signals, and updating its internal models when reality does not match expectation. That changes how we should think about brand memory. A brand is not simply “stored” in the mind. A brand becomes part of a learned prediction. A distinctive asset is not just a logo or sound. It is a cue that helps the brain recognize, categorize, and act with less effort. This conversation explores: • Why surprise helps create memory • Why recognition is easier than recall • Why low-attention repetition often fails in real life • Why emotional advertising is harder to control than marketers assume • Why emotions are not universal • Why unlearning is difficult for adults • Why novelty, motivation, and energy matter for learning • Why brain fatigue and burnout are so hard to notice • Why memory-first marketing may need to become prediction-first marketing For strategists, marketers, researchers, planners, educators, and anyone working in the messy middle between intuitive marketing language and evidence-based marketing, this episode is a deeper look at what we actually mean when we say: “people remember the brand.” The uncomfortable takeaway: Marketers do not put memories into people’s heads. We create conditions that make brands easier to predict, recognize, and retrieve. brandLingual is where we practice the language of brand out loud, bridging the gap between marketing theory and real-world practice. Explore courses, seminars, articles, eBooks, and our co-learning community at brandlingual.co Chapters 00:00 Meet Edmunds Vanags 01:28 The Brain as a Prediction Engine 03:08 Why Surprise Creates Memory 05:10 Working Memory vs Long-Term Memory 07:07 Repetition, Survival, and What Sticks 09:29 Attention, Distraction, and Multitasking 12:31 Recognition Is Easier Than Recall 14:03 Why Repetition Alone Often Fails 17:31 Skinner, Behaviorism, and Lab Conditions 20:30 The Limits of Reinforcement in Real Life 23:57 Why Emotion Is Not Universal 27:10 The Problem with Emotional Saturation 28:11 What We Actually Remember Most 30:12 What Emotions Are For 30:51 Predictive Coding and the Free Energy Principle 31:36 Feelings as an Energy Budget 33:23 Emotions as Signals 34:02 Why Emotions Point Forward 35:05 Can Positivity Be Induced? 38:08 Why the Mind Is Future-Focused 39:36 How Memories Are Continuously Formed 40:56 Helmholtz and Predictive Vision 44:22 Novelty, Learning, and Neurogenesis 45:14 Why Unlearning Is So Hard 47:54 Adult Learning Motivation 49:57 Brain Fatigue, Mental Hygiene, and Burnout 53:39 Resources and Wrap Up

ep16 // unLearning with Jelena Veselinovic - Losing the Shield

What happens when what you know no longer works? In this episode of brandLingual, we sit down with Jelena Veselenovic for a conversation about unlearning, and what it really takes to grow when experience stops being an advantage. After more than two decades leading global marketing across brands like Coca-Cola, Danone, and Jim Beam, Jelena stepped into a completely different world at Miro, a high-growth B2B tech company. And something unexpected happened. The foundations she had built her career on began to fall apart. Her words: “I lost my shield.” What follows is a candid exploration of discomfort, doubt, and the kind of pain that comes with letting go of certainty, and rebuilding how you think from the ground up. • What it means to lose the “shield” of expertise • Why unlearning is often more important, and more difficult, than learning • How success can quietly become a plateau • Why most strategy doesn’t fail on paper, but inside organizations • The idea that your first customer is internal • Why “brand” can become a dirty word in B2B environments • How identity has shifted, and what that means for branding today • Why language shapes, and limits, how teams think and act This isn’t a conversation about tactics. It’s about what happens when the models, frameworks, and instincts that once worked… no longer fit the world you’re operating in. Because growth doesn’t always feel like progress. More often, it feels like losing your footing, letting go of certainty, and sitting in the discomfort long enough to see something new. If you’ve ever felt stuck between what you’ve learned and what you’re experiencing in practice, this episode will give you a different way to think about it. Follow Jelena Veselenovic: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jelena-veselinovic/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jelena-veselinovic/] Substack (Rewire Your Mind): https://rewireurmind.substack.com [https://rewireurmind.substack.com/] brandLingual is where we practice the language of brand out loud, bridging the gap between marketing theory and real-world practice. 00:00 Introduction: Jelena Veselinovic on Unlearning in Marketing 01:59 Early Career: How It All Started in Marketing 03:57 Philosophy Background, Protests, and Critical Thinking 06:29 From Advertising Agency to Coca-Cola 08:42 Global Marketing Roles and Moving to Atlanta 10:49 The “Angry Girl” Mindset in Leadership 13:55 Miro and the Shock of Unlearning Everything 17:42 Why “Brand Building” No Longer Works 26:33 Internal Alignment: Why Strategy Fails Inside Organizations 29:57 Coke vs Miro: The Language Shift in Marketing 33:18 The Marketing Language Gap (Why Teams Don’t Understand Each Other) 34:57 What Is “Classical Marketing”? (Reach, Growth, Byron Sharp) 35:47 Brand vs Product: The Real Tension in B2B 38:19 East vs West: Identity, Culture, and Career Tension 41:34 Corporate Lingo Explained (Why It Says Nothing) 44:04 Being the Outsider: Leadership, Conflict, and Growth 48:43 Critical Thinking in Marketing (Beyond Frameworks) 52:17 Empathy and Lived Experience as a Strategy Tool 56:14 “Know Thyself”: Philosophy and Recommended Thinking 57:55 Plato’s Cave, Reality, and Closing Thoughts