Gary Vaynerchuk And Mark Ritson Are The Same. Yes, this is absolutely a clickbait-style headline designed to rile up marketing nerds. Yes, I can demonstrate a fundamental similarity. Yes, there will be some caveats.
First, a disclaimer: I am not a marketing professional. Simply someone with an interest in the field. So by all means be critical of what I have to say. Cunningham’s Law is a great way to learn.
Lets start with Gary Vee. GV describes himself as “Serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk is the Chairman of VaynerX, CEO of VaynerMedia, CEO of VeeFriends, and a 5x New York Times bestselling author.” He has a legion of adoring fans on the internet. He also has some detractors. Mark Ritson (whom we will come to shortly) says: “his wrongness echoes around marketing and media circles like a giant, ongoing thunderstorm of bullshit”. I like to think of GV as Red Bull Tony Robbins (actually, I don’t like to think of him at all as neither over-caffeination nor revivalist self-help agree with me).
But rather than dwell on the GV of now, I want to go back to the start. Back before he was Gary Vee. Back when he took over his Dad’s wine store and changed its name from Shopper's Discount Liquors to Wine Library. This initial move already shows some savvy. It’s not a booze dollar shop, it’s a library, for wine. A move upmarket and out of the commodity space. Let me be clear, this is not mockery on my part, it is respect. Things really take off when he starts Wine Library TV on YouTube in 2006. Much has been made of his use of a new media (YouTube). But less is said of the sound grasp of marketing principles that underpinned this business. Wine has traditionally been the preserve of snobby people using their knowledge and money to separate themselves from the hoi polloi. GV looked at the market and (consciously or intuitively) recognised that blue-collar men were an underserved segment of the American wine market. So he developed an offering explicitly aimed at them. His segmentation, positioning and targeting are top-notch. The show is him and a bunch of buddies just hanging out, talking sports and tasting wine. His spittoon is a football helmet. But don’t be deceived, his tasting notes are spot on and he has a well-practiced knack for identifying bargains that will appeal to the slightly more adventurous members of his audience (“if you like pinot, you might like this great value gamay”). In a non-showy, brilliantly conceived way, GV set himself up as a challenger brand to the likes of Robert Parker. Then he used his money to become fabulously wealthy with a mix of tech investments and self-promotion.
Mark Ritson is “Leading authority on brand and marketing” and – as we have seen – a critic of GV. And let me start this section by saying that I have an immense amount of respect for his knowledge and experience and I have learned a great deal from his videos, podcasts, and articles. He is also a marketer/academic who has applied marketing theory to his own career (doubtless in his attic is not a Dorian Gray-style painting but a segmentation analysis and a positioning statement). And he chose exactly the same approach as Gary Vaynerchuk (but executed in a different manner). After years doing brand consulting, it seems like MR decided to set himself up as a challenger brand. He picked a series of public fights with brand valuation companies, technology obsessed marketing gurus, and the brand purpose movement. I am not saying that any of his statements are confected, he genuinely believes them and I mostly agree with him. I am definitely not saying that after a hard days’ swearing at a conference, he goes home to curl up with a cup of cocoa and a well-thumbed copy of “Start With Why”. However the style was deliberately confrontational. Critically, he wasn’t against everyone – he harks back to traditional marketing skills, the greats of marketing and advertising, and the evidence-based marketing movement (although even there, he had a public debate with Byron Sharp that he gleefully claimed to have won). His Marketing Mini-MBA has been very successful.
Now lets just take a detour to talk about challenger branding. This is typically used by smaller, new entrants to market to explicitly position themselves as alternatives to the market leaders. Brewdog, the UK-based craft brewing company, is an example of such (and one that MR has written about extensively). Their most recent challenger effort was to pick a fight with the World Cup and the government of Qatar. However there is a challenge that, er, challenger brands face. If your marketing strategy is based on punching up, as you get bigger, you run out of people to punch. Who is left for Brewdog to punch? Well, probably only God and the Laws of Physics. Expect a Brewdog ad with the tagline “The Strong Nuclear Force is a dickhead”. However there is another problem for challenger brands. As you get bigger, what you think is punching up may look like punching down to others and you come off as a bully. MR got into a public spat a woman in tech marketing about a misunderstanding of the 4Ps. While both their positions had merit, MR is no longer a cheeky chancer. He is now a heavyweight.
So there we have it. Gary Vaynerchuk And Mark Ritson both used sound marketing principles (esp. those associated with challenger brands) to advance their careers. In that, they are the same.
Wine Library TV: https://tv.winelibrary.com/
Mark Ritson Mini-MBA: https://mba.marketingweek.com/
I applaud your provision of evidence that click bait works.