My guest this episode is Chris Burggraeve. Chris is a practitioner scholar of the art and science of marketing. His corporate marketing career culminated as the Chief Marketing Officer for AB Inbev from 2007-2012. In 2013 he founded Vicomte, a marketing advisory and micro-ventures firm. He is also a former Capstone Project Director for the TRIUM Global EMBA.

In this episode, we discuss his latest book, Marketing is not a Blackhole. For Chris, if you have a business model based on a branded product or service, then marketing is at the heart of everything you do as a company – or at least should be. Great marketing gives a firm the ability to consistently raise prices without losing market share (pricing power). Pricing power, in turn, is a key to long-term profitability and growth. If you could effectively rank the marketing excellence of the firm, then you could use this as a predictive tool of the future profitability of the firm. Chris has created just such a marketing excellence rating – αM 2.0. He hopes/dreams that this rating will be as useful and used as other, more established ratings (think Moody’s, Fitch, FICO scores, Altman’s Z score, ESG ratings, …etc.) when analysts are valuing a firm. Join us to find out more!