Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A monthly dose of strategy and creativity for brands, agencies, and businesses — delivered on the second Wednesday of every month. If you like what you see and you’re not already a subscriber, join us for free.

Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This month I’m sharing two fantastic reports, one of which is making the rounds in the industry (The Creative Dividend). Additionally, I want to dig a little deeper into the meaning of a “challenger brand.”

Drop me a line on LinkedIn if anything stands out to you!

Enjoy 🧠

This edition is supported by Tracksuit, a beautiful, affordable, always-on brand tracking dashboard that helps marketers and agencies prove the impact of brand building.

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RESEARCH/

"If a brand is looking to maximize the return it gets over a full year, then nothing comes close to Linear TV for scale."
I know this isn't news to media folks, but for some reason it's always received with a ton of pushback by marketers.

Looking at the graph below, if you remove the orange (carryover effects, 13 weeks) and red (sustained effects, 2 years) columns, Linear TV doesn't look that much better than Paid Social, and at first glance PPC provides bigger immediate returns.

But as you introduce results past the 13 week mark, all the way up to 2 years, it's not even close.
Yes, I get it that TV is expensive, but if you're a challenger brand looking to minimize risk with your investments, then TV still is your best bet.

Just look at the second graph showing the standard deviations by channel.
Linear TV is the least risky (largely because of the quality of creative, reach, and length of attention), whereas paid social is the riskiest (largely because of the various formats, channels, and low attention nature).

Meanwhile, Generic PPC may seem surprisingly volatile to many. But that's because it runs on auctions, meaning CPCs swing by term and position, creating a wide range of outcomes. It also appears easy to track day to day, but that linear tracking only captures online sales.

As I've said before, I'm not a media strategist, but I believe all brand strategists should have a good grasp of these things!

Link to full report below.

OPINION/

Last year we inducted Gatorade into the Brand Hall of Fame at The Gathering, and Mark Kirkham gave us a glimpse into the journey that it took to get there.

For starters, iconic brands aren't built overnight.
Brand managers are sitting on the shoulder of giants - previous brand leaders who touched the brand, and most importantly the brand founders themselves.
In the ahistorical world we live in today, it can be tempting to forget the past and reinvent the wheel, but we must not forget what got us here in the first place.

Secondly, creativity is a game of risk-taking.
Innovation and risk are siblings - if you want to disrupt the category you better get comfortable with taking big swings (and potentially striking out, too).
What we're seeing with the Pepsi Taste Challenge this week is a masterclass in infusing a successful past campaign with a big a*s swing.

And last but not least, commercial pragmatism.
Every Super Bowl the marketing industry is showered with the best of the best taking big swings. But as students of the game we must look under the hood to understand why they're doing what they're doing, and what allowed them to get there.
Brands aiming for the moon need to understand how brands grow and how to make money. Without revenue, profit and market share, their runway will be cut short.

As a PepsiCo alum, I am always in awe with what my colleagues continue to do year in and year out. The learning never stops!

DEPT. OF CHALLENGERS/

We often label mid-sized brands as "challenger brands", but the literature on challengers is actually much deeper than just company size.
Adam Morgan from eatbigfish distilled them down into these 10 archetypes that help us expand our thinking around challenger brands.

What's fascinating about this framework is that challenger brands don't always have to challenge the category leader to earn that badge.
There are actually several "things" they could challenge and position themselves around.

The important word here is "position."
Far too often brands will say they challenge something but don't go all in.
These days, if you really want to go for it and build something beyond a lifestyle brand, you must have a challenger mentality.

But the moment that a challenger brand starts to tip toe around their positioning, the whole thing comes apart.
As they grow, they will eventually shed their challenger badge and potentially even become category leaders, but until then they must walk the talk of being true challengers.

RESEARCH/

I was once asked what would be my advice to a brand looking to "take on Apple?"
My advice was simple: don't take on Apple.

The harsh reality of free markets is that the bigger you are, the more customers you have and the higher loyalty (how often customers buy from you) you command. This is known as the Double Jeopardy law.

So the intuitive sidestep to this challenge is to find an underserved audience and target them through a strategic deployment of the 4Ps. The logic here is to slowly grow your influence from there, expanding your offerings as you gain share, until one day hopefully you become big enough to experience the positive effects of the Double Jeopardy law.

But the problem here is that "targeting" isn't a strong profit multiplier. Meaning, it's really difficult to grow a brand by focusing your resources on a target audience.

Industries universally see similar patterns of light category buyers driving the lion's share of sales. These are those people who might buy you once at most in a sales cycle (sometimes even less!).

And given that small brands don't have big enough budgets to buy broad reaching media, they're left with a single key to achieving escape velocity: CREATIVE QUALITY.

Creativity is often treated as a risk to be managed in business, but the equation doesn't add up if companies don't invest into building strong creative cultures.

And by creativity I don't mean just beautiful and attention-grabbing creative.
But creative that's grounded in strategic rigour: how will you build the desired CEPs, which DBAs to invest into over time, how to coordinate the other 3Ps the create leverage, and so on.

This doesn't come from a marketer doing this off the side of their desk.
If your brand is stuck, but your business is courageous enough to invest in creativity that will build market share through strategic rigour - send me a note on LinkedIn, I’d love to help.

PS: if you're on the fence and want to understand this more, read System1's & Effie's "The Creative Dividend" free PDF linked below. This is your sign!

INSPIRATION/

Adidas has a formidable competitor in Nike. But while Nike commands greater market share, Adidas has established itself as a streetwear icon over the years.

Due to its simplicity and timeless design, Adidas shoes and clothing consistently show up in street style content and fashion collaborations.

In Adidas’ latest campaign they brought Samuel L. Jackson, Kendall Jenner, James Harden, Olivia Dean and several other cultural icons in a broader effort to treat the Superstar original shoe as a cultural franchise rather than just a product line.

The cinematography and attitude of the ad gives us a hint as to what to expect this Spring.

BRAIN FOOD/

QUOTE/

PPA

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing strategist with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across North America. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.