The science behind measurable marketing impact

Steve Phillips (00:00): Welcome to Inside Insight, where marketing strategy meets consumer truth with your host, Steve Phillips.

Steve Phillips (00:07): Research from Paul Dyson in 2023 found that profitability multiplier for creative quality is 12x. We've seen the same in our database at Zappy, where we found a 30% greater ROI from ADS with strong creative effectiveness. Effectiveness isn't a dashboard, though. It's not a report. It's a system.

Steve Phillips (00:23): One that, when done right, changes how brands grow. Most companies say they want effective marketing, but very few actually measure it well. And even fewer operationalize that across teams, markets and creative processes. Which raises the real question: how do you build marketing that works not just in theory, but at scale? And how do you do it in a world where AI is rewriting the measurement playbook while fundamentals still matter more than ever?

Steve Phillips (00:52): I'm Steve Phillips, and joining me today is Sorin Patilinet, global marketing strategist and, interestingly, qualified Engineer, currently with PepsiCo. His new book, "Marketing Effectiveness: Applying Marketing Science for Brand Growth", is a guide to building the kind of scalable systematic marketing engines most brands talk about but rarely achieve. And I have a copy here. I thoroughly recommend you go out and buy it at all good bookstores. Today we'll chat with Sorin about what he's learned building global measurement systems, why marketing should be led by engineers, and how to drive effectiveness that really moves businesses.

Steve Phillips (01:36): So let's dive in. Sorin, let's start with a bit about yourself. Actually, it's really interesting how an engineer found himself leading creative effectiveness at some of the world's largest consumer brands, trying to solve the old Wanamaker question about advertising and which half of your advertising budgets work. So tell us, how did you end up there?

Sorin Patilinet (01:56): First of all, thank you very much for having me.

Sorin Patilinet (01:59): It's a real pleasure to talk to you, Steve, and I hope that my choice of color will bring some sun into much needed sun into the London vibe.

Steve Phillips (02:08): Absolutely.

Sorin Patilinet (02:09): I'm calling in from Brussels, Belgium, where I call home nowadays. And for the last 15 years, I'm an engineer who actually became a marketer by chance. I would say I was. I grew up in Romania under communist times. And if you would go back in the 80s in Romania, it was not really a pleasant place to grow up. I mean, I didn't know it at that time, but we had zero international brands. I mean, it was like a pure embargo on anything Western. There were ways into which Pepsi was found sometime at the seaside.

Sorin Patilinet (02:43): So there were some brands, but not that much. And immediately after the fall of the Communist regime. We were invaded by western culture and brands and movies and everything. So everyone in the culture there was this kind of like desire to basically try everything, try every product. So there were like events that were running the entire night called the Night of Ad Eaters where you were exposed to brands by, through advertising.

Sorin Patilinet (03:11): So that's how slowly I fell in love with, with brands. And it was a, a path to understand culture, other cultures than mine. But it was not really seen for me as a money making machine, let's say. I, when I was thinking about a career at that stage, the industry was not really developed and I was very much. I loved math, I love the systematic thinking.

Sorin Patilinet (03:35): So that's what led me to study engineering and graduate as an engineer. But to answer a long story, I think I immediately after graduating I realized that if I go into engineering, my entire career will be engineering. If I go into business, I would always be able to come back if it doesn't work. So, so I chose the, the second path. And I'm very happy because for the last 20 years I worked on amazing brands for global organizations like Orange, British American Tobacco, Mars and nowadays PepsiCo where I basically learned the marketing by doing marketing.

Sorin Patilinet (04:09): I always joke that my only marketing class was the mini MBA in marketing that Mark Ritson taught me five years ago. But that's it. I've done some classes at Wharton, but everything that I know is because of practical experience and I value it very, very highly.

Steve Phillips (04:25): Brilliant. Let's go into that.

Steve Phillips (04:27): Let's talk about this marketing effectiveness and I'm particularly interested. You talk a lot about systems and that feels like engineering thinking and applying that to marketing instead of looking at just one campaign or one activity, but thinking about effectiveness as a system that you manage over time, how, how did you come to that realization? And, and then what's the impact that you see that that has on brands?

Sorin Patilinet (04:49): So I think systems thinking is a very complex way of understanding what are the, the second degree and the third degree effects of everything that you do. And it very fast puts people to sleep every time you talk about it.

Sorin Patilinet (05:03): So it's very difficult to understand but it's very important. We love to give the example of Uber and what it done to various industries and so on. And while I think it was while, while building the marketing effectiveness practice at Mars, I realized that we, we tend in marketing, in the conversation that's happening on LinkedIn, at events, in everywhere to simplify a bit too much that conversation. In other words, we tend to say marketing effectiveness is creative effectiveness or Media roi and that's it. And I was wondering why are we doing that?

Sorin Patilinet (05:37): And my only answer was because today's modern marketeers in large organization have become specialized in communication. Pricing is going to the finance department, promotions or any kind of in store activity are in the sales department. And slowly we've become like advertisers. While in fact we should be much more than that. And I'm trying with this book to basically reposition the concept of marketing effectiveness from a media ROI and creative effectiveness to a wider scope which includes marketing strategy, positioning, pricing, product distribution, even the effectiveness of research and the methodologies that we use.

Sorin Patilinet (06:16): So I'm trying to create a guide that looks through practical examples and not. I'm trying, I've created a guide that brings practical example across all those areas with the red thread or orange thread that, that every action or every decision that we make during our time in marketing should be always linked with the ultimate effect that we want to, to accomplish. So we should not do things because we think they're nice or because we like that color. I think we should do things because it will have an effect on the business and how we choose that effect differs. I mean it could be like share price, it could be brand equity, it could be penetration.

Sorin Patilinet (06:54): I mean I won't even go into asking people to which one is better. But as long as you choose one, make sure every decision follows that path.

Steve Phillips (07:01): Great. And the book starts out covering the basics of marketing effectiveness, looking at the structures of thinking all throughout the full. P.S., and you talk about, you know, how brands grow, how do you see when you're trying to create a sort of mathematical system structure. But the, you also have at the heart of marketing and to a certain extent innovation you have creativity. And creativity isn't necessarily the easiest to, to measure and manage. How, how do you see those two. There's two different sort of sides of the brain coming together.

Sorin Patilinet (07:36): So I'm going to pick up on something here. I, I think both of us know that creativity is easy to measure because we've been spending our careers doing that. What's not easy is to manage creativity. And I would love to double click on that one. But, but yeah, I mean it already becomes a platitude that what we do in marketing is art and science.

Sorin Patilinet (07:56): But it's really true. I think we, we tend nowadays to think more about the science part through large language models, through neurosciences, to any kind of like application of systematic thinking and, and, and science into, into marketing. But there will always be an element of Art that's, that's in there. I, I always go back to, to the example of sneakers. You're not you when you're hungry.

Sorin Patilinet (08:20): Yeah, it's a campaign that ran and still I think runs. I was involved in testing various executions of that campaign and it always failed pre testing. And we, I, I think if we would have gone only on the science, we would have not really executed that campaign at Mars. But we accepted that there is an art that you can't necessarily have. You don't necessarily need to have the logo in the first three seconds.

Sorin Patilinet (08:43): Maybe it's an exception. I don't want to be taken weirdly, but there was something about that campaign that basically had more art than science in it and we started to accept it even though it failed pretesting continuously. So yeah, there was always. The good marketeers are always the ones who are able to get the most of both areas, but without really over indexing on one and forgetting the other.

Steve Phillips (09:07): Yeah, it's an interesting campaign because it has a really nice core human truth at the center of it. And with any type of testing function, the context and the way and the type of testing matters so much in order to understand how that idea is resonating. You say it failed in the testing, but did you try different types of testing? Was it continuously failing? Could you not get people to understand that human truth?

Sorin Patilinet (09:32): So I think it failed when your testing was. When our testing was too very strict on yes nos. I mean, I think it mostly failed on branding, presence of branding. But the idea was so strong that even the joke became a distinctive asset for the brand. I mean, people were recognizing the brand not through the logo, but through the type of the change of characters that was happening from the start. And I always go back to that campaign to basically make the point that we as ad creators are much more worried about ad wear out than our consumers.

Sorin Patilinet (10:09): People were watching that ad every year, multiple times, and they were still laughing at it while we were busy looking for the next and the next variant. So that's another element that I've tried very hard to infuse in the organization.

Steve Phillips (10:24): The nice thing I liked about the marketing effectiveness is you talk a lot about, of course, advertising and the change in the media environment, et cetera. But you also talk about product and you discuss the sort of debate between distinctiveness and differentiation at a product level, which I thought was an interesting angle. How do you see that, particularly in CPG, FMCG brands? How do you see managing that, that innovation process?

Sorin Patilinet (10:51): So you picked up on something that I really wanted through this book. I didn't want to have extreme points of view. I think the truth is always in the middle. Now we know that there are two heavyweights standing on those corners of the ring on one that proclaims that it's all about distinctiveness, one, it's all about differentiation.

Sorin Patilinet (11:10): I respect them both equally, but I think it very much matters. What category are you playing, what type of product are you selling and what type of brand do you want to build? And depending also on the life stage of your brand, maybe in the beginning you want to be differentiated. Maybe that's the strategy for startup brands or seed brands. Maybe once you are becoming of a certain scale, your next goal is to be as distinctive as possible.

Sorin Patilinet (11:34): Because differentiation becomes a little bit complicated when you are the category. So I think we are fighting that debate daily. I would say on Lays, because we are the category. It's very difficult to be differentiated in that category because you are the category. So building distinctive assets is really the key there when your brand is at that scale.

Sorin Patilinet (11:56): So I don't know if that answers, but I'm trying. I wrote the book to help marketeers that are maybe starting maybe don't have the opportunity to work in large organizations that know it all, to understand a little bit the principles and the lay of the land. Now which side do you take on those two battles or on personalization versus like reach? It's really up to your intellect, knowledge and what works best for your brand. Because I don't think there is a single solution working for all brands across the board.

Steve Phillips (12:25): And if you were giving some advice to mid sized companies, even larger companies, and particularly now when they can be so siloed. You talk a little bit in the book towards the end about the approach to teams, the approach to people to create. Again, going back to that word of system, how do you get these disparate teams to work together in one system?

Sorin Patilinet (12:49): That's a golden moment that you want to aspire to. I was very lucky to see that in action both today and both in my, in my past career. If I had, I don't know if I give the answer in the book, but I think I'm, I'm playing around it a little bit. I think ensuring that your company has a strong focus on what it tries to achieve, on what's that effectiveness definition, and ensuring that absolutely everyone from the board, the CFO to the CMO and everyone in the marketing organization agrees that that's the measure of effectiveness, that that will be the ultimate goal of the organization—that unlocks a language, that unlocks the ability to build a culture around that, that effectiveness metric. And not changing that every time a CMO changes helps as well.

Sorin Patilinet (13:32): So, so I don't know how to. I think I was lucky maybe that, that there was a. I worked throughout my career with amazing CMOs like Jane Wakeley, Bruce McCall were very much thinking on a very kind of a mid to long term growth trajectory and therefore there was not this desire to completely change everything, every single process once you, you get into a place. So consistency is key, language is first.

Steve Phillips (13:58): When you're talking in the book about effectiveness, you're describing all of these different strands within the organization, these different types of media, the fact that you've got to looking at product. We talked about distinctiveness versus differentiation.

Steve Phillips (14:11): We have to get to it. I'm obsessed by the role of AI and how that is changing the role of marketing. And you talk at the back of the book about some of the sort of scenarios that you can see playing out. AI will have a role in helping create marketing activity, but also measuring activity, but also changing the role of marketing. So I've been writing recently about the role of agents and particularly consumer agents.

Steve Phillips (14:38): And if you have consumer agents in the world of, you know, grocery products where the agent is creating the, creating the grocery choice, how does that impact the way you think about marketing? And I had to go back to it, but the way you think about distinctiveness versus differentiation, it seems to me that it may push in one direction or the other. So where do you see the role of AI?

Sorin Patilinet (15:03): AI is something we can't escape and we need to deal with it. I think if I look at the marketing function or even if I would zoom in into marketing research, which is the function that I am part of, I think we've been playing a big catch up game with technology. The pace of technology is outpacing us clearly. And I think it's not that technology is in support of what we do, but it's we need to get up to speed with technology. If not technology will eat us.

Sorin Patilinet (15:33): So I'm very conscious of that. I struggle to write that chapter on AI because immediately after I finished the chapter I realized maybe it's already updated. I hope it, I try to make it as general as possible, looking towards the future on what is possible, not necessarily what's available at that stage. I think when I wrote the book last year, probably around this time, we didn't have like the latest version of ChatGPT or Gemini 3. Today we have it and we can create videos and we can create amazing storyboards in video format that basically killed the entire like storyboarding process in agencies. So, so I, I think the, what I see today is that AI plays a huge role in driving efficiencies across the marketing landscape, across various kind of work streams I have yet to seen or I would love to see AI to play a role in getting more effectiveness from, from what we do in marketing.

Sorin Patilinet (16:36): So yes, it's easier to write a brief, it's easier to generate content, it's easier to, to match that content to an audience and to deliver that, that content in an authentic way. But I always go back to a quote, I really love that that says something like, and I don't know even who created it, but it says something about just because you can doesn't mean you should. So yes, we can do all those things, but will that solve a broad problem? Will that be diffusing our basically resources and get to like, personalization of one? Are we able to scale something?

Sorin Patilinet (17:15): Those are the questions that I would love the current state of AI to answer. And so far I've seen a lot of work on efficiencies like doing, doing faster. The processes that we do today. I have not seen like real innovation in how marketing works. And I like to ask questions and also give answers.

Sorin Patilinet (17:39): So I think. You didn't ask, but I'll answer. I think it's because we try to fit AI into the current or card structure. And I think there must be something happening, that there must be an organization of tomorrow that we should be aiming for where the agentic world will fit much better than in solving the, the speed, power, the speed challenges of today. So it's not just the speedboat.

Sorin Patilinet (18:04): I think it's, we need to make an intelligent machine out of it.

Steve Phillips (18:09): That's fascinating. And right at the end of the book you talk about lifelong learning and I think that resonated very strongly with me, particularly in the world we're living in right now. Right. AI is changing everything.

Steve Phillips (18:22): And it's, it's not changing every couple of years, it's changing every, every couple of weeks or months. How do you go about making sure that you are continually learning continuously staying up to date continuously trying to change the ways you work and the things you do?

Sorin Patilinet (18:41): So I'm doing stuff and I would recommend everyone to do stuff. And I'll give you one example. I was, I was heading to the PepsiCo offices last week in from New York City to Purchase. I had 30 minutes and I heard so much about Vibe coding and I mean my website is created by the way on a Vibe coding platform and I loved it, but I was like, how can I go deeper and how can I go into maybe creating an app? So I started creating apps on the train first I started to create like a memory game on a Square with the PepsiCo brands just to see what the tool is available.

Sorin Patilinet (19:16): And then my next idea which was for the return trip was to, to make it a bit more useful because a memory game, it's nice, but I always thought like what's the single thing that I want to teach my kids nowadays and how can I teach them through an app or through a game? And that's critical thinking. So I'm, I've started Vibe coding an app that basically teaches kids critical thinking. So but I'm so amazed about the ability of the technology now to basically transform a simple idea into like a finalized product. And there are like app stores of apps nowadays.

Sorin Patilinet (19:51): You can easily go get lost in that, in that space. But yeah, I think it's hands on that. I learn and I pick up ideas from various places from, from podcasts, from, from articles, from books, from people. I, I do that. But I think any idea doesn't have a future if you don't actually act on it.

Sorin Patilinet (20:13): So if there's one thing from this podcast that you take, just open Lovable or Bold New and try to do something.

Steve Phillips (20:20): So great advice and I, I'd back you up on Lovable. Okay, so now let's move on to our lightning round where I'm going to ask you a few quick hitting customer insights related questions. So first of all, why should marketing teams be led by engineers?

Sorin Patilinet (20:35): I think marketing teams should be led by engineers because if you look at the top 10 companies by market capitalization in the world today, nine out of 10 are led, their CEOs are engineers. So if you want to be able to talk to your boss properly, you need to really understand the, the way of thinking. I'm not saying everybody should be an engineer. I think it's more about how engineers think systematically through experiments, testing hypothesis and so on. But using that language will get you much better relationship with your boss if your boss is the CEO.

Steve Phillips (21:09): Next, what's the most misunderstood concept in marketing effectiveness? The one people consistently get wrong?

Sorin Patilinet (21:16): I would say that some people, not everyone, get wrong the idea of media ROI or ROI and confusing that with effectiveness. I think my first manager at Mars always told me that the best way you can grow your ROI is to spend less because your first dollar is always going to give you a better ROI than one video. Yeah.

Sorin Patilinet (21:40): So since then I took that to heart and I embodied this kind of concept of effectiveness. Because what you want is the, to increase the, the number above the fraction and not necessarily to decrease the number below the fraction in the ROI calculation. I think you can do, if you increase your effectiveness, you can both do a great job on your ROI at same time, the same cost level. So too much focus on ROI, I would say is the, the one thing that it's. I would love to change in the world.

Steve Phillips (22:10): Brilliant. Okay, thank you. And next, what's a marketing myth that drives you absolutely crazy because the data proves otherwise?

Sorin Patilinet (22:18): I would go back to what I said previously. Ad wear out.

Sorin Patilinet (22:23): Right? We are completely obsessed about new as marketeers, we want the new shiny toy. But there are many brands who are using the same ads for years and years and years. I was working on M&M's and I can tell you no customer or no consumer called us to say why don't you change the Christmas ad? We've used the same Christmas ad for M&M's for seven years in a row and it just became a little bit outdated.

Sorin Patilinet (22:55): But because the TV became outdated. The TV of India. But I would say we, we get tired of our ads much faster than consumers are because we see them more often than consumers are and we see them with more attention and with more scrutiny and we think they're front of. For us they're very important because it's the product of what we do and it's our emotions in there. But for consumers, those are fleeting seconds in the sea of many other things.

Sorin Patilinet (23:22): So yeah, if the ad is great, just run it for years. It's going to save your non working media, it's going to save your time and you can concentrate on something else.

Steve Phillips (23:29): Great. And what's the biggest mistake teams make when adopting AI for measurement?

Sorin Patilinet (23:37): I think there is a false belief that generative AI is the solution to every single problem you have.

Sorin Patilinet (23:44): My experience is that generative AI was a great catalyst for non technical people to basically understand AI and allow more technical people to continue improving their machine learning models. And like traditional under the radar AI which are actually fueling regression models, they are fueling allocation models and everything that we call today data driven marketing. So we think that generative AI or LLMs are the answers to everything. But they're just the, I would say the rich vehicle for AI to become like a buzzword in the organization so that each element of the AI landscape is used properly and it's basically invested on.

Steve Phillips (24:19): Great. And finally, what's one engineering principle you wish every marketer would adopt tomorrow?

Sorin Patilinet (24:27): If I go back to, to the principles in the book, I, I would say the one that's closest to my heart is the one that Toyota embodies, and that's the principle of Kaizen or, or constant optimization. I, I see a lot of test and learn. We are in love with test and learn. But I think there's an art in doing test and learn. And the simplest thing that you can do is to ensure that you only change one variable at a time when you, when you do an optimization, because that's the only way you can find out that single variable is the, is the reason for the change in the results.

Sorin Patilinet (25:06): So every time we do a test and learn, we change platforms, creative, brand, and so on, and we then try to magically take results. While the principle of iterative learning that Toyota embodies so well is that you basically change one small thing. You test, you re-jig your approach, you then change one more thing until you get to, let's say, perfection. I think we would all be very in a better stage if we would be not so impatient about changing absolutely everything and then blaming the methodology that it doesn't give us causality, it just gives us correlation.

Steve Phillips (25:44): Great. Thank you. Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Inside Insights podcast. Thanks again to Sorin Patilinet, guru of Global Marketing Effectiveness of PepsiCo, for joining us and for writing this book. Excellent book, "Marketing Effectiveness." Do seek that out.

Steve Phillips (26:01): If you'd like to contact Sorin, you can find a link in his LinkedIn profile on the show notes or at InsideInsightsPod.com. For more information on PepsiCo, please visit PepsiCo.com. And if you haven't subscribed yet and want a regular stream of research and insights knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, your customers always have the answers. Thanks very much.