Marketing Professor Kim Whitler Talks Positioning For Advantage
Kim Whitler is a Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and the author of "Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value".
Kim spent nearly 20 years in the private industry in strategy and marketing roles at Procter & Gamble, as the general manager of the Breakfast Division for Aurora Foods, as the CMO of David’s Bridal, the country’s leading bridal apparel retailer, and as an officer of PetSmart.
Kim has written over 350 articles as a Forbes senior contributor and has published in Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, Ad Age, and many academic journals.
She’s been interviewed, cited, or quoted over 3,600 times in places like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Times, NBC, ABC, and The Associated Press.
In this episode, Kim talks about how her first job pushed her to become a better writer, why she moved from private industry to academia, and how writing a book helped her academic career and goals to reach more people with her message. She also speaks about what surprised her in the publishing process (like having to wait two years for her book to be published, after she finished it), and Kim and Josh geek out a bit about the CMO role in the middle of the episode.
If you’re a marketer or need to know more about marketing, you’ll enjoy this episode.
Kim's Links:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Kim Whitler. Kim is a Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business and the author of "Positioning for Advantage: Techniques and Strategies to Grow Brand Value".
Kim spent nearly 20 years in the private industry in strategy and marketing roles at Procter & Gamble, as the general manager of the Breakfast Division for Aurora Foods, as the CMO of David’s Bridal, the country’s leading bridal apparel retailer, and as an officer of PetSmart.
Kim has written over 350 articles as a Forbes senior contributor and has published in Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, Ad Age, and a number of academic journals and other outlets.
She’s been interviewed, cited or quoted over 3,600 times in places like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, New York Times, NBC, ABC, and The Associated Press.
And that’s the short version of her bio.
Kim, welcome to the show!
Kim Whitler: Thanks Josh. I'm very glad to be here with you tonight.
Josh Steimle: I'm excited to do this interview. Kim and I have actually known each other for a number of years from the days when I was also Forbes contributor. I think that's how we originally met is that we were both writing for Forbes and she's in part of the CMO network. And I wrote a book about CMOs. And, so we've been connected for probably 5, 6, 7 years, I think at this point. And so my first question, Kim though, is with all this experience and all the writing that you've done in the past, why is this your first book? Because you've got so much knowledge and so much experience. So why now?
Kim Whitler: I would probably have never written a book had it not been that I shifted from the crazy world of being a practitioner to becoming an academic, where it's valued more. The 20 years that I was working in practice, who has time to actually go write a book and it never even crossed my mind.
Then I made the shift. I went and got a PhD in my 40’s. Don't do that. That is a crazy, very difficult move, but I got my PhD in my 40’s. And then I call this my fun career as a professor and as a professor you're supposed to create new knowledge. And so one of the things Darden, I work at the Darden School of Business at UVA. Darden's very unique in that it actually values what I call big academic impact, not just writing academic articles, which they value, but they value impacting practice, impacting students, and they actually evaluate and measure your ability to create new pedagogy.
So they want you to write cases. They want you to create new to the world courses. And it's one of the things they evaluate. It's rare for a school to evaluate that. And so early in my career here at Darden, they said, what new course are you going to create, Kim? So I went like a marketer and I did what marketers do. And I asked our recruiting partners, what are the things that our students were missing or business school students in general were missing? What skills were they a weak on? I talked to our students, what did they want? I looked at all the other courses that we offered and other top business schools offered and I said, what's the magic spot? What could I create that nobody else is really delivering?
And so what came out of that was a course on how to really create concepts that achieve positional advantage for a brand. How do you identify the positioning territory? How do you test it? How do you perfect it so that you have a better chance of getting the largest market share than somebody else? And so I started writing all the content for this. And after a couple of years, our head of publishing said, “Kim, this would be an unbelievable book.”
This is a longer answer, but the answer is I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to create new pedagogy for executive audiences, for MBA students. And then it just kind of happened that the head of publishing at Darden said, “Kim this would be a great book. I think it would sell.”
I went to Columbia. Columbia University Press said, “We love it. Go.”
And so then that's how it happened.
Josh Steimle: That's great. So take us back a little bit to the beginning of your professional history. Did you start out in marketing? Was that what you studied in college? Is that what you set out to be, was to be in the marketing?
Kim Whitler: No, but like most good marketers. We actually don't set out to be marketers. No, my father was a banker. My uncle was a banker. I grew up in a finance household. And so I just, I assumed I was going down the finance accounting route. So in undergrad, I was very close to getting an accounting degree. And then I spent a day with a grain auditor and I said, these are not my people. Accounting is out. So I was like two classes away from having an accounting degree.
So I'm like, okay, Business administration was one of my undergrad degrees. Psychology was the other. I love psych, but business administration was the practical one. Then I went to the MBA Program. I actually interviewed for financials. I had an offer from ConocoPhillips but I fell in love with this marketing class. My professor, Chris Pudo, I took the class and I said, “What is this? This is the most fun class I've ever had, whatever this is, is what I want to do.”
It really wasn't tactical marketing. It was growth strategy. And for me, it was the puzzle of how do you architect growth, etc. So I went to them and I said, “I love this. Where could I do that?” And he said, go to Craft or P&G this is how things work.” I'm like, “Okay. Craft or P&G. So I ended up, the short version is I ended up at P&G, and I fell in love with it. I was an intern there. Everything was so interesting. You go from working on the financials of a business to sitting down and listening to consumers, to working on new product development, to looking at current business, the people I worked with were amazing. Very smart. I just loved it. I feel like I'm very blessed because many of my cohort did not love what they were necessarily doing out of school. And every day for me was magical because I felt like I was growing, I was learning, and the work I got to do mattered, it had impact. And it was enjoyable.
Josh Steimle: So now you spent, was it about two decades at Proctor and gamble? Is that right?
Kim Whitler: No. I spent about nine years at P&G. Most of my career was on the GM side. And then I had this epiphany. I was managing the breakfast division at a food company. I was GM of the breakfast division and I'm sitting in Mattoon, Illinois at the world's largest bagel bakery, trying to figure out how to get bagels up off the ground. And, save a quarter of a penny per bagel and battle with a plant manager over how to make this happen. It just seems illogical to me that we could put a man on the moon, but we could not figure out how to get bagels off the ground. And I said, this is not where my passion is. My passion is on really the gross side. How do we go engineer growth, not how do I save a quarter of a penny per bagel, getting it up off the ground?
It's just some people love that, that was not where my energy came from. It came from really being around consumers, trying to understand them, how do you create value for them? And so that's when I pivoted and I took CMO roles, but I always made sure that there was a P&L company. So it wasn't purely, I did not want a CMO staff role cause I come from the P&L side.
So that's when I pivoted and did more, what I would call growth engineering, just pure revenue growth engineering versus kind of the whole P&L side of it.
Josh Steimle: Got it. And so what were some of the roles that you held? I know that you were CMO at David's bridal. Do you want to walk us through some of that professional career after P&G?
Kim Whitle: Yeah, I worked at PetSmart. So the food company and then PetSmart, I was Head of Marketing Strategy for PetSmart, which is fun because it was the first category I've worked on or the first product, if you will, service I worked on where I actually was a big fan of it. I worked in laundry at Proctor & Gamble. I worked in fabric here in general, Beauty Care at P&G, but most of the products I worked on, I wasn't super passionate about. But pets and dogs, I was really passionate about. So that was a fun experience to for the first time work in a category where I really, as a consumer, enjoyed it. And worked at, as you mentioned, David's Bridal as well as CMO.
Josh Steimle: Got it. How's the CMO role changed during the years that you've been involved in that role, as well as covering it from a writing perspective?
Kim Whitler: As most CMOs, you have very little understanding of the tremendous variance. When you're in the role, you think a CMO role, as a CMO role, as a CMO role.
So somebody calls you up and they say, “Hey, take a look at this. What do you think?” They all sound the same. You presume that you have the same authority in every company. And you know that's not true, it's just simply not true. And so for me, it's hard to say how it's changed over time. What's easier for me to say is at a point in time, the variance is as extreme as you can imagine.
So in my research, I'll give you an example, a very well-known financial institution that is reviled by most consumers. I'll just leave it at that. Doesn't believe in branding, they had their first ever CMO. They don't even put the name on the side of the building because marketing is evil. And so what does the CMO do? She's a marginalized PR person, right? That's all she does. And by the way, the woman I interviewed with had no background at all in marketing, had never worked in it, but yet that's how little we think of what marketing expertise is. We'll put somebody that we like and is a good employee into that role. It's super marginalized.
All the way on the other extreme, you have the CMO who's driving Corporate Strategy and who's deeply involved in M & A work, who's identifying pricing decisions to manage the sales. And I could go on and on. So their big strategy and you have everything in between.
So when I talk to CMOs, I immediately start talking. I ask them, “What do you do?” And I can almost immediately pigeonhole them. Are they super tactical downstream marketers like social media? Are they upstream strategists? And then do they have a P&L? Do they have a bottom line kind of a sensibility to the way in which they think, or are they only on the kind of top line side?
But I did not know that when I was a CMO, I had no idea how to evaluate jobs. But I will say this because I've done an analysis and I'm hopeful that this research gets published, I've looked at CFO, CIO, CMO roles through job specs. The other two roles are not nearly as varied in terms of the breadth of types of responsibilities that they can have in their roles. So the CMO role, I just think is simply harder to understand. That also makes it harder to get right because you have variance in the training of the marketers and you have variance in the role, you put these two things together, you better get it right. Or it won't work.
Josh Steimle: Got it. Tell us a little bit more about that transition from private industry to academia and what that was like and what motivated that?
Kim Whitler: Yeah. So I think a lot of people have this very kind of romantic view of academia, as I did. I had professors were profoundly important to me in undergrad.
I'm still close to one of my professors from undergrad. I'm very close to one of my MBA professors. They dramatically impacted my life. And so we have this kind of reverence for academics. And actually also, for me, there was something very romantic about going and investing in my own brain for five years.
You get to a point where you manage a lot of other people and you feel like you're constantly trying to help other people, which is terrific. But selfishly, at some point you start saying, am I growing? How am I becoming a better person? And so for me, I had this very romantic vision of being able to think and ponder big, important questions, that you did when you were an undergrad. Philosophy, let's sit and talk about philosophy and let's talk about Ukraine and Russia and what's going on and let's spend three days thinking about that. I had a bit of a romantic vision, like many people actually now in my cohort who call me and say, “Kim, it must be wonderful to be an academic.”
I knew that it probably wasn't as great as I had envisioned it to be. So I spent five years considering this path. I knew I wanted to retire at 40, but I did not know what I wanted the second half of my life to be. And so I considered a number of different things. This ended up being the thing though, that excited me. I could learn, I could personally grow. I could give back. I could help young people. But I interviewed over a hundred people and I really wanted to know what was not to like about this path. I needed to understand completely the decision because the cost for me was millions of dollars. It was millions and millions of dollars for me to go take five years to make no money in your forties, to get off of the C-suite, I'm in the C-suite, to step aside, to go make no money and then to come out the other side to making a much smaller amount than I was making when I left.
And so that's five years in a PhD program, you come out the other end to make a third of what you were making when you left practice at best or a fourth. And so I needed to know that this was the right thing to do. So I did some guest lecturing. I talked to people like what's not to like about this. I did a lot of research and then I just basically sat down and said, “You've made a decision.” I have a belief, no regrets, make a decision and then throw 2000% at making it the right decision. So don't sit here and second guess yourself, you did your due diligence. Here's the reasons why you wanted to do this.
When it gets bad in a PhD program, which it does, there'll come a time when you're like, “What am I doing?” You look down at your piece of paper and go, “No, you're doing this for a specific reason. Keep plodding forward.” So it never got that bad for me. I was prepared because everybody told me, “You'll have this moment where you want to pull the ripcord.” And I never had that because I think I had so thoroughly thought about the downside that it never got to be as bad as I thought it was going to.
So anyway, the PhD program is five years, it's not easy. There's a reason why 20 somethings do that and not 40 somethings. And then you come out the other side and you're on the tenure track and that's a bit of a grind. So it ends up being about 12 years of climbing, if you will, another Mount Everest. And my sister said to me, wasn't one Mount Everest enough? Why do you have to do a second one? And I really didn't intentionally plan to do that. But once you go tenure track, you're in the cycle where that's the name of the game.
Josh Steimle: Now you wrote a book you've written a lot of articles. Have you always been a writer or seen yourself as a writer?
Kim Whitler: Look, my mom was a really good writer. My sister's a very good writer. They're both better writers than I am. At P&G, interestingly P&G trained me to be a writer. I've always gotten good grades in it, but did I ever have a passion for writing? Not per se, but P&G the way that you communicated was through writing. The way you influence was through writing. That was the one-page memo. And so my first summer, when I interned at P&G, Rick Thompson, my manager, I remember I had redone one reco 77 times. I re-read this 77 times. You know what, my grades the second year were far better. I was a much better communicator.
So just that exercise, that investment that he made in me every day to ask me questions that I hadn't thought of, which forced me to go get the information and revise the document and strengthen the wrecking recommendation. That investment over three months was tremendous. But, you spend almost a decade there and you learn how to write.
And then when I was in the PhD program, I had an executive recruiter say, “Kim, you're never going to make it.” He said, “You will never make it through a PhD program.”
I was shocked. I thought, “You think I'm dumb? Why won't I make it?”
And he said, “You have a very high need to accomplish things. And the PhD program requires that you don't accomplish anything for years.You get through the classes, but then you're spending years on a dissertation.” He said, “It's going to drive you absolutely nuts.”
And that stuck with me. Cause I thought, “You know what? I think he's right. I have a high need to get things done, to feel a sense of accomplishment.”
And so what happened early in the PhD program is I've written an article for Ad Age. And the person who managed that was moving over to come up to start the CMO network at Forbes. And she talked to me about possibly writing and I thought maybe this will scratch the itch of feeling like I am accomplishing something. So I started writing. And it's the first time I wrote an article, it took four weeks to write one article. And then the more I did it, the faster I realized it was actually helping me with my academic writing, because the more you write, I wouldn't sit and agonize over, where do I start? I just start writing. And then I perfect it and I improve it. So the more you write the greater facility you have with writing, and then once you become an academic, they actually do want you to write a lot. Whether it's cases or it's academic articles or it's an HBR.
And so I actually think in a weird way, what started off was a need to fulfill this kind of sense of accomplishment, turned into something that helps me become a more facile writer that allowed me then to just write much faster. Write in a more prolific way. So it ended up benefiting me, but it was not the purpose.
And Ted was not like, “Oh, I really want to write. This is my wife’s dream.” It just so happened that the opportunity presented itself. And I thought, this might be a way to feel like I'm accomplishing something and I'm in a world where publishing matters. And so maybe they will respect and value it later.
I found out they don't, not at all, but at the time I thought maybe it would be a value on the professional side as well.
Josh Steimle: That's interesting. I can't remember if it's one of Cal Newport's books, So Good They Can't Ignore You or Deep Work, but in one of the books he talks about rather than doing what you're passionate about, being passionate about what you're doing. And he showed research that showed that people who do something for 5, 6, 7 years end up enjoying what they do, even if it wasn't their passion to begin with. So I'm just curious now that you've been doing so much writing for this length of time, do you feel passionate about it or is it more just a means to an end?
Kim Whitler: So I think I'm passionate with the outcome. So I'm on a mission, when I came into academia, the marketing space, there had been an article that had been published that was on the front page of Ad Age about why CMOs don't matter. And I'll never forget it because my CEO came in and dropped it on my desk. And was like, “Nah, you don't matter, Kim.” And I'm like, thank you so much academic community. I really so deeply appreciate that you are seeking to understand what you're publishing.
So when I came here, not only do I really want to help future aspiring business leaders. But my passion is really to try to help the people who are now in my former seats who are struggling, we're trying to figure out how to make this work. We're trying to get their roles right. We're trying to figure out how to drive influence at the strategic levels of the firm. We've got two papers coming out about the relationship between boards and CMOs. So my passion is in helping them, the conduit through which I do that is writing. Sometimes I do speaking. I'll conduct early workshops. Very rarely do I do keynotes, because I don't like keynote speaking. I like engaging. I like creating experiences for folks but that's a conduit through which I can have that impact.
And so do I love writing, like in my free time, do I sit down and go, “Let's write”? No, but is it a way to have impact and to help in the way that I wish I'd been helped. I wish that the academic community had sought at a deeper level to try to understand the challenges that CMOs are going through. So let me give you an example. Most of the research right now talks about how CEOs are disappointed in their CMOs. There's a bit of a sense of kind of blame that the CMOs are doing wrong. I'm looking at this from a very different angle. The very different angle is well, who designs the roles, who staffs the roles, right? Who provides the managerial discretion and how can we help them do a better job of setting the CMO up for success? So same problem. I'm just looking at it through a slightly different prism, trying to help both the CEO, in this case, and the CMO get better outcomes through deeper, greater understanding of let's assume both parties are good people. What are the things that are affecting the inability to make this work?
In my research CMOs, aren't thrilled with their roles. Three-Fourths of them are unhappy with their roles. 80% of CEOs are disappointed in their CMOs. Maybe it's not the CMOs are failing. Maybe there's something else going on here that perhaps I can help shed some light on. So I tend to try to be the advocate for marketing and for CMOs to try to be a voice in the academic community to support them,
As another example, I was reading an academic paper and there was a bit of a spin that was maligning CMOs, and as a reviewer, help them see that if we want the practicing community to engage with our research, we can't indict them. So we've got to think differently about it. And it's a slight positioning shift in the writing, but you could see a bit of the bias and the presumption that there's something wrong with the practitioner.
And so again, my hope is to be their advocate, their champion, a voice for them in this community in a way where we can actually be more productive, more helpful, more impactful. And then of course writing is the way in which I typically do that.
Josh Steimle: So this is an interesting point you bring up. CMO is just a label. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. And like you said, the CMO at one company does not do what the CMO at another company does. They do whatever people decide that role is going to do at that company. And so to say the CMO role is dead or something like that.
It's like, but wait, which CMO? Because there are lots of different CMOs out there. And to say the CMO role is failing or something. Maybe it is at one company, but that's one instance. What about the other company in every other of the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of companies out there? And if the CMOs failing, whose fault is it? Is it the CMO? Is it the CEO? Is it the board? Who set that roll up and decided what that CMO was going to do? And there's so many factors there to consider that to make a blanket statement, that the CMO role is dead. It just doesn't make any sense because it's whatever we make that roll out to be.
Kim Whitler: No I think you're absolutely right. And the all or nothing kind of statements. There's a Forbes article on that. That was, I don't know, maybe nine years ago that article came out. I remember it because I talked to the person who wrote the article and it was based on two or three anecdotes.
And to your point. Let's step back for a second. What do you think the CMO role is? So if you think it's setting up brand strategy, if you think it's setting up a growth strategy, it's driving an innovation pipeline. Okay. Are you saying that nobody's doing that in your firm? Who's doing that in your firm? “Oh, it's the Chief Growth Officer.” Okay. You renamed the title, right?
So you see this with Coke. I used to love it because Coke would have, first say the CMO, then they have the Chief Marketing and Commercialization Officer when Joe Tripodi was CMO or sorry, was that CMCO or whatever. And then they changed it to the Chief Growth Officer. I'm like, they just keep rotating people and they can't quit and they just changed the name. And then everybody talks about, “Oh, the role is changing.” And I'm like, that's a title. What has changed down here? What is it that role owns? What are the responsibilities and duties? Cause the title doesn't mean anything. I can come up with a really sexy title to go get somebody. But if all they're managing is promotional materials and collateral or PR, I don't care what you call it. That's a marginalized role. So I completely agree with you there. You have to look beyond the cover, below the title to try to understand what the role really is.
Josh Steimle: And that's why I love that question you brought up that you said you ask CMOs, “What do you do?” Because to assume that you know what they do, just because they have the CMO title. The CMO title might be one of the more malleable titles out there because CFO, maybe I'm making an unfair generalization here, but I feel like I know what CFOs do and I feel like that's a little bit more predictable than what the CMO does. And the same for CTO and CIO. Not to pigeonhole anybody or to disrespect any title, but those seem to be a little bit more solidified. Whereas the CMO title seems to be one where people just make it into whatever they want to make it into, depending on the need that manifest at the moment.
Kim Whitler: No, you're absolutely right. So like I said, we took a traunch of CFO, CIO, CMO job specs, converted them into analyzable data and then start analyzing them. So to confirm what you're saying, the CFO role is the most, of the three, consistent from company to company to company. There's less variability in the types and nature of the responsibilities assigned. The CIO was closer, actually. They're in-between, but they're closer to the CMO and I didn't do any of the other C-suite, but my bet is the CMO is the most varied. Guess who has the shortest tenure? Guess who has the second shortest tenure? The CIO. Guess who has, outside of the CEO, the longest tenure? The CFO.
And so at least at first blush, there tends to be a bit of a correlation between tenure and and the variance in the role. Why does that matter? Imagine a pitcher in baseball, that has such a wide range of how you could use them. That's not how the pitcher is. The pitcher’s role is the same from team to team. The marketer chair point is not. I can call a PR person, the Chief Marketing Officer. I can call a general manager, the Chief Marketing Officer. Those are two completely different roles. Completely different. And to make this very vivid, an example is I was talking to a guy who had been a country manager. He was a GM, he was a mini CEO and he took a CMO role at a very large food company. And I was talking to him and he was miserable. He's miserable.
I said, “What are you working on?”
He goes, “Well I’m trying to change the real estate. And I'm trying to change the menu.” And he's going on and on.
“But that's not your role. You're no longer the country manager.” And I wasn't telling him this, but I'm thinking the guy is going to tick everybody off because he is used to being a CEO. He's not used to being, “The don't touch the menu. Don't touch the real estate.” Just figure out how to promote the product. And so what ended up happening is he left in short order because his experience, the type of responsibility he had in the past, prepared him for a different type of a job.
And you look at the title and you go, that's an awesome title. The job specs are written in a very sexy way where every job feels like it's the most important job in the company. That's how they write these things. And so one of the things that I've done is I created a tool that allows you to basically pull all that sexy writing out and to really try to analyze the core pieces of a job. This is again for my CMOs to try to help them do a better job of picking the right roles for themselves. They have to be honest. If you've never had a P&L role, you probably shouldn't step into one late in your life. It's a different type of a role.
But it's also designed to help CEOs better hold their executive recruiters accountable. To design a job in a way that makes sense for the company.
Josh Steimle: And was that tool part of your book?
Kim Whitler: That's not. I've got an article coming out in Sloan actually this summer, that is on this. So they've well, knock on wood, they've conditionally accepted it. We're going through the revision rounds. And they're hoping to publish it this summer.
Josh Steimle: Let's go back to the book for a second. Tell us a little bit more about the framework of the book. What's the basic overview for those listening?
Kim Whitler: Yeah. Here, I'm going to, I'll just put this up. So right now I'm teaching my elective, which is How to Create New Brand Strategies. And so I've got a student who's from Germany. He said, “Kim, I sent this book to my dad and everybody in Germany now knows about your framework.” It’s so cute. Here's essentially the framework. And so the first chapter is really about how is it that marketers have impact? Like why do marketers exist? It really is an ode to marketing.
So when I teach at Darden, I'm guessing 90% of my students don't want to go into marketing. So my job is not to teach them to become marketers. My job is to help them understand why they should respect and value marketing and marketers. And so what I start with is why do marketers exist? What's our point? What is our reason for being in the company? What changes if you remove marketers? Guess what? You do not have the growth that you want. That's really where the growth engineers. So the whole point this core framework for the book is really thinking about how marketing affects the firm.
And it really is at the heart of it, through positional advantage, setting up and positioning a brand, a company so that it can win in the marketplace. And so that's the early framework. Then each chapter provides a tool.
So let me just step back for one second. Most practitioner books tend to be stories and they're fabulous stories. Most academic books tend to be vocabulary books. Like here's a whole litany of vocabulary. What I found in my research is what students wanted is how to do marketing. They said they would walk into a decision sciences course and walk out learning how to program in R, they go into finance and walk out learning equations, and they said, “We walk into marketing and we get theory and two by twos.”
And so what they wanted was, “Okay, I get that a differentiated brand is really good. But how do I go create a differentiated brand?” And so the whole class, it started from the class, was designed to show them what the tools are that the Cokes of the world, the Pepsi's of the world, the Unilevers of the world, the Proctors of the world, the tools that are fairly common that actually enable you to identify, test, and then achieve positional advantage. So each chapter then becomes a different tool. What's a positioning concept? What is it? How do you use it? What's its role in achieving positional advantage? What's a creative brief? What's a MarTech blueprint? What's an influencer map? And so each chapter is not just theory, it's literally a tool and an opportunity to go practice so that you can gain proficiency. So this whole book, I talk about the theory doing gap that academics have theory but what a lot of individuals, especially younger folks want is to understand how to do something, to develop skill and proficiency.
And so the book is really set up to be more of a skill builder, not a knowledge builder, a skill builder. In terms of how you practice and then become proficient at doing some of the things that lead to achieving positional advantage for a business.
Josh Steimle:So as you were writing the book, who are you thinking of as the ideal audience or reader for it?
Kim Whitler: So it's interesting because I teach at Darden, we have this thing called the executive program, which is a bad name, but the executive program. It's our flagship C-level program. So people come from all over the world. It's a four week program. It is very, very, very expensive. And so I teach the marketing curriculum. And I teach stuff out of this book. So most of them of course are going to be CEOs, we have CFOs, we don't have a lot of CMOs. And so most of the people that I'm working with don't know a lot about marketing. So for example, this year I took concepts related to positioning strategy. And we talked about it in the context of your employer brands, right?
What's hot for all CEOs right now? Talent, talent acquisition, talent management, talent retention.
So we use the concepts and the tools and we applied them to positioning an employer brand. So the audience was really high level, if you will, MBA students, executive MBA students, which I teach. And then I've gotten feedback cause individually different individuals have read it and sent me notes. I've had CMOs read it, and say, “Thank you.” I've had senior level marketers read it, but it's really designed for those people what I would call it roughly 10 years out, type of timing.
So more that EMBA kind of executive MBA audience.
Josh Steimle: What was your dream vision of success when you wrote the book? What did you want to see happen from it? Did you have anything concrete in mind that you were going for as a goal?
Kim Whitler: No. The only thing I wanted to do was to be able to make this easier for the people that I taught, to give them some ability to better understand what I call the black box.
A lot of the marketing curriculum, it's just very opaque. And so if you don't end up at a top marketing company, what are you going to learn? Because the marketing curriculum at most schools is until you get into the tactical stuff. So if we're talking about promotions, you'll get a lot of good content on how do you create an ad and so forth.
But I'm talking about at the strategy level, at the growth engineering level, how do you drive brands? How do you build brands that are differentiated now? Not, how do you create an ad? I'm talking about the bigger picture. Most of the academic programs are more theory heavy. And so then the students come out and then what they learn is based on where they go to work in terms of what marketing is.
So if I have a student who goes to work at Google and she's working in an advertising area, she's learning how to create an ad. That is not like the person who goes to Pepsi and is managing a business. And by the way, if you're going to go and learn about creating an ad, you might want to go to an ad agency because they're probably better at it than perhaps, Google, is it at creating an ad for Google?
And I say that because Google has tremendous capability. And if you're an engineer go to Google, but if if you're trying to learn the best and the brightest, if you're trying to learn the best kind of techniques from a marketing standpoint, I would send my child to Pepsi over Google.
Josh Steimle: Was there anything unexpected or surprising about the book writing or book publishing process?
Kim Whitler: Yes. It started with Steve saying to me, the head of publishing, “Oh, Kim you've written everything. This'll be easy. Okay. So you've already written all of these technical notes. This won't be that hard.” And that was like two years or three years before I finished the book. Look, there are many things that were difficult. I think what shocked me is I turned in the final edit two years before it was published before it was printed. I had no idea that it was going to be that long. So that's the first thing.
And then the process was painful because this book has a ton of images and because it's tool heavy, so it's got a lot of figures and tables and images and stuff. Oh my gosh, that was a bear because they have to pull everything apart. And then when they put it back together, It was all wrong. So I gave it to them. And it's really quite laborious. So that was something that surprised me.
The other thing that surprised me was you've now got to publish.Now you have to go promote it. And I'm like, “What? I thought I just had to write it. I'm like, promote it. I don't want to promote it.”
And they said, “No, you have to go promote it.”
So what's interesting is I've got another book that's coming out and I'm doing it completely different. It's much faster because you learned the first time and I'm publishing directly through Darden so that it can cut a lot of this time. And the individual who runs Darden publishing is spectacular. He's really good. And so he's helping try to figure out how to cut time, because the next book that I have coming out is time-sensitive. It's on a hot topic. And so months matter, this book is going to be evergreen, right? Positioning. The tools in here are generally evergreen, but the next book is going to be timely. So we have to move quickly. I'm doing things differently. I'm parallel pathing different work, where we finishe the edit at the same time we're working on the design of the book. But the thing that I think people who say to me, “I really want to write a book.”
“You do understand you're going to make no money writing a book. You don't make anything. If you're interested in money than it comes from consulting or other things. But the actual book sales itself are nothing.”
Josh Steimle: So what's motivating this next book?
Kim Whitler: This was to help students. So what happened was this book is on how to help college athletes understand how to build their professional brands in a way that enables them to monetize it. So it's picking up on the NIL issue, the Name, Image, Likeness Ruling for college athletes. And what happened was our deputy athletic director came to me like two years ago and said, “Kim, we're getting inundated with agencies. How do we think about this?”
He and I started talking and both of us were like-minded. We were worried that people would swoop in and then try to take control of an 18 year old’s brand. And they're just trying to figure out how to adapt to college. And both of us were interested in trying to figure out how do we protect the students. And frankly, knowledge is the way you protect them. It's knowledge. Help them understand brand, building the basics of brands, and how to protect their brands. And so he said, “How can you educate all 850 of our students?” I’m like, “I can’t. It's not like one 1-hour course. If it were that easy, we'd have a lot more successful marketers up there.” And so I finally sat down cause I agonized, how do I do this?
And I said, “Well, I'm just going to sit down and write basically a workbook.” It's 14 chapters. And on this one, I went and found somebody that I really like, who's a really good editor. And I said, “Will you co-author it with me?”
I'm going to write chapter one, you edit chapter one, I'll be writing chapter two. So we wrote this really quickly. The writing of it because, it's what I work with people in the military. I work with executives and how can they build their professional brands? So now just applying at a simpler level to an 18 year old's life to try to help give them agency and empower them to design the brand that they want to then lead agencies to manage it effectively.
So this one is a passion project. This is purely a passion project. It's to help. I'm a former college athlete. I'm very grateful to have had that. It helped pay for all my education. And so this is a little bit of a give back and it's to help UVA, but it's going to be a book for any collegiate student.
So this has been a passion project for me. That’s all this is.
Josh Steimle: That sounds fascinating. Is that a book that you think will be applicable to other athletes outside of just US college athletes who are in that system? Or is it very specific to that matter?
Kim Whitler: No, I think it can help any athlete. What's interesting is I've done a little bit of speaking with some college athletes and I'm learning a lot, right? This is a space that I need to learn. I don't know a lot about it. And so I've brought on board different sports individuals who have been working with me, undergrads and grad students who are athletes, former managers who have been basically helping make sure that everything I'm doing is aligned with the student athlete.
I'm learning a lot. Like young people, especially female athletes. What's interesting is that there are many female athletes who have high value. If you go look at the top athletes, half of them are roughly, in terms of value, dollar value, half are females. And they oftentimes come from not top schools and not necessarily top sports, and yet they're doing a lot better. So I started digging into it and I started seeing that a lot of the female brands are building eyeballs and building followership in a way that they might not necessarily want to, if they're trying to align with a beauty care brands or grocery store brands or fashion brands. A lot of the way that the young girls are building their brand is very sexually suggestive. And that's my kind way of saying that. I was shocked when I started looking at it, the students were bringing it to my attention cause they said, “Kim, what's going on here?”
And so then I ended up talking with some different groups and I realized that young people think that followership is all that matters. And I said, “No, marketing is really about building awareness of what are you building awareness of?”
Paris Hilton built awareness in one way, Taylor Swift built awareness in a different way. And so when you're trying to build a brand that you can monetize, you have to think a little bit longer term. You have to think who your target is. If you're trying to get to the pros, how does your behavior affects how the Scouts might see you? How the coaches might view you? That there is a right way to build your brand. I'm not telling you that there's only one right way, but I'm saying depending on what your goals are, you need to think about the way in which you build your brand so that it helps you achieve your goals.
And what I started seeing as you can imagine, the male version of this is very different. The male version is a lot of partying shots, right? Drinking, fun, party, et cetera. And then you have the version like Paige Bookers. If you go look at her, her Instagram is spectacular. This is the model. It's a ton of shots of her playing basketball. You can see the passion of the sport. It's not a bunch of shots of other things. It's a lot of different shots of her playing basketball. Girl Next Door. Very natural. You could see a Dove. You could see an Olay. We're wanting to work with her brand, right? When you just pull up the Instagram and look at it, you can see that this is a brand. There's a reason why a lot of brands want to align with her.
Josh Steimle: Yeah, a lot of this really sounds like long-term versus short-term thinking, right? Short term is I need followers today. That's the immediate metric. It's easy to focus on. It's easy to get the dopamine hit when you get new followers. But like you're saying there's these long-term things, is this meeting my long-term needs? Because yeah, if you just go after the followers, maybe you can get the modeling gig or something less savory, but if you really want the athletic career then you've got to have that longer term focus, right?
Kim Whitler: Yeah. I think you're right. There's another “Aha” I had, because I'm working with another student. And so I went to his Instagram, I went to his Twitter. I went to his LinkedIn profile. And one of the shots was him with I don't know, 10 or 12 guys, everybody had their arms around each other, alcohol, shirts off, bare chested, sitting on what looked like a fraternity house steps. And so I asked him, “Just for a second, you want to get to the pros,” He's a baseball player, “So you want to get to the pros and if you don't do that, then you want to go have a career. So look at this picture through the eyes of an employer who's hiring you or through a scout. What do you see?”
And what fascinated me is he said, “What I see is somebody who has a lot of friends.” And I thought, that's really interesting because what it showed me is that he's seeing it from a peer-to-peer perspective. He's actually, I think seeing it from the perspective of his friends. He's not actually able to think about what a pro, what a scout might want. I said, “Don't you play baseball? I don't see any shots of baseball. Why? Do you not like baseball? I'd love to see a bunch of your baseball shots.” But within 24 hours, he went and changed it and it looks fabulous, much better.
But it's just look we're 18. We think about the world from our own perspective. We don't know what it's like to be a scout. We don't know what Scouts are looking for. We don't know what employer is looking for. And so that's why this whole space, what's happened now that they can monetize their brands, now they're changing their pictures because they think that every Instagram shot has to be a modeling shot. You can see it. They're always by themselves, just like 30 pictures. Look at me, posing, doing different things. Here I am in a bikini, here I am in a different pose. And the opportunity to make money has flipped a switch that has caused them to think about Instagram in a different way.
And I think the ability to help them see this through a kind of a strategic brands perspective will be helpful. One of the things in the new book that I talk about that's tough to talk about and I had multiple students read it cause I wanted to make sure I was on the right side of this issue, is do you engage in activism? Because they're being told as young people, a lot of older people say go forth and be activists. And I always find that interesting that the people promoting that are themselves not activists. Because they recognize the career and personal risk of going out and saying things that are unpopular and yet they push young people to do this.
And so I talk about what does that mean? What can that mean? Why does Zion not really speak up? Why was he not really vocal when everything happened over the past couple of years? Did he not care? And I talk about it a little bit from my own perspective. Most of my followers are men. Do I not care about “Me too”? Do I not care about women's issues? Sure. But that's not my lane. My lane is marketing and my followers don't write me to hear about golf. They don't follow me to hear about golf or for cooking or where I'm eating or my thoughts on “Me too”.
And so I said, that's how I look at it, that I'm building a brand around my expertise and I try to stay generally in that lane.
Josh Steimle: That's an interesting one, but if you think about it, think about as an author writing a book, it would be very easy as a business author to interject your opinion on politics and putting the subtle little jabs at the people you don't like in your book or something.
But again, that's not why people are reading your book. That's not what they're coming for. And it's going to turn off at least half of your audience. It might even turn off the people who agree with you because they say, “You know what? I agree with you, but I'm not coming here to get this.”
Kim Whitler: It's interesting because I don't know how other people feel by this but I’m so exhausted from politics that any of my entertainment, if I'm watching sports, I love NCAA Men's basketball. It's my sport. But if it became political, I'd stop watching it because that's my entertainment. Politics are not my entertainment.
And then if I'm going to learn about the news then I want the news. If I'm going to learn about marketing, then I don't want the news. I don't want politics. And so now to be clear, what I just said is somewhat controversial. There are plenty of people who say you have to bring your whole self, et cetera, et cetera. And I respect that. That's just not the way I look at it. The way I look at it is I know who follows me. I'm not just US-based. A lot of people in the UK and Australia and India. So I try to be cognizant of that. Like I said, 60% of my audience is male. I'm cognizant of that, and they're following me because of marketing.
And so I try, I have ventured out a little bit lately. Like I went out and I talked a little bit on LinkedIn about the M&Ms belonging, that whole thing. And that was actually risky for me that, because that pushed me out of my comfort zone, but I thought, you know what, I'm going to go out a little bit, go out a little bit on a ledge.
But my point of view is not one that everybody shares, but that is my perspective on this. And I tried to respect my audience and what they're interested in and try to stick, as I say, in my lane.
Josh Steimle: I'm excited for that book to come out. I think that will be helpful for a lot of young people out there. Kim, thanks so much for talking with me today about your book journey, your author journey. If people want to reach out and connect with you, where's the best place for them to find you?
Kim Whitler: Twitter, LinkedIn. And the great thing about academics is all of our information is public. So if you go to the Darden website, my email's there, but Twitter, LinkedIn, Darden website, any of those are fine.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Kim, thanks so much for being my guest here today on the Published Author podcast.
Kim Whitler: Thanks so much, Josh.
