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Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This month I’m bringing you some lessons from my trip to Japan, sharing a thought-provoking deck about falling in love with problems (not solutions!), and what we can all learn from the San Antonio Spurs.

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

Enjoy 🧠

If you care about making marketing make sense in the boardroom, this is worth your time.

Tracksuit just launched a course led by James Hurman that cuts through the usual noise and gets to something more useful: how to actually communicate marketing’s value in a way a CFO will understand.

I took it myself, and it’s 90 minutes packed with insight and resources you can take beyond the virtual classroom. The kind of material you’ll come back to when you need to defend your work, not just execute it.

If that’s a gap you’re trying to close, you can check out the course here → https://university.gotracksuit.com/

OPINION/

"Never go 'Ready, Fire, Aim.' If you do, you'll always shoot yourself in the foot. Instead, consider the more familiar cycle 'Ready, Aim, Fire'." Ed McCabe

Today's "fast paced" business environment (or how some business gurus like to call it "VUCA"), it's fashionable to have an unrelenting bias towards action.
But boy has that bias cost people a lot of money.

I'm not saying that having a bias towards action is inherently bad. But it's terrible advice when taken out of context.
One must first diagnose the situation before making choices about what to do. And only once that's in place, should you begin thinking about how to do it.

Strategy isn't a sprint. It takes time, reflection, and deliberation.
Jumping straight into "this is what we'll do" without first doing the work is the encapsulation of "ready, fire, aim."

Ed expands on this idea further, and I just love how relatable it is:
"'Ready' takes a second.
'Fire' takes a fraction of a second.
But it's the 'Aim' part that's most crucial, that can seem interminable, with all the squinting, steadying, and just when you think you've drawn the exact right bead, you waver and have to begin all over again."

If you ever get recommendations from your advisors without them first doing the "aiming" part, seriously reconsider who you're getting advice from!

OPINION/

The mantra “bring me solutions, not problems” has done more damage to businesses than most would like to admit.
Think about it: When was the last time someone in your company was recognized for identifying the right problem?

Typically we put problem-solvers on the pedestal and I think that's a shame.
I am not saying that we should stop rewarding great problem-solvers. They are a key part of the equation, though only half of it.

For some reason we feel uncomfortable sitting with a problem for long without trying to solve it. And what we end up seeing are managers frenetically running around solving “problems”, under the illusion that they’re being productive for their organizations.
But nothing could be further from the truth.

When we think about the strategic planning process, what we have is a series of steps that lead us to a game plan, which include: diagnosis of the situation, a series of choices, and recommendations on what to do.

Where things typically fall apart isn’t at any one particular phase, as there is no shortage of cases leading back to bad research, poor choices being made, and terrible tactics being developed.

The common thread of bad plans typically connects back to the organization solving the wrong problems to begin with.

Below is an overview of the "solution trap", and here is a deep dive I wrote unpacking it further.

CULTURE/

Over the past few weeks I was in Japan on a family trip searching for our roots (my family immigrated from Shizuoka to Sao Paulo in the early 20th century), and in the process I became enchanted by how the Japanese approach most things in life.

For example, whenever the Japanese hand you anything (change, a pamphlet, your hotel keys), they do so with both hands, and bow. It's a disarming gesture of intent and attention that is completely alien to westerners.

Below are 4 pictures that capture the same point: doing things with intent and undivided attention.

Sounds simple, but for us in North America it has become incredibly difficult.
When a culture values the ability to multitask and being hyper-productive, slowing things down becomes the antithesis to our goals (at least on the surface).

🧘🏻‍♂️ Picture 1 is at a secluded temple in Kyoto called Shisendō. It's dead quiet (no tourists, unlike the other parts of town), only the sound of the rain and a bamboo that fills up with water, then drops making a thumping sound - making the silence even more prominent. We sat here for a while doing... well, nothing.

🪨 Picture 2 is at Hojo Teien. What you're looking at is a Zen rock garden with 15 stones, representing mountains or islands in a sea of stillness. But the actual precise meaning of it is still a puzzle to many, what makes it even more interesting.

🥢 Picture 3 is a meal we had near Kyoto's bamboo forest. The food was deliberately paced, course after course, in small bits, forcing us to focus solely on absorbing what we were consuming. This is a common practice - not to speed through meals so that each dish gets the contemplation it deserves, giving it so much more depth to what you're eating.

🍵 Finally, Picture 4 is at a tea ceremony we did in Tokyo. This 1,200 year old ritual has so many meanings and layers to it (the original ceremony usually takes 4 hours to drink 2 cups of tea), but what drew my attention was that you do each movement with extreme intent - from pouring the water, to mixing the matcha, to eating the Yatsuhashi, and turning the tea cup around.

I won't even attempt to draw some deeper meaning into business here because that would completely bastardize it, but these were some of the things that I brought back with me from Japan.

Intent. Undivided attention. Focus. Slowness. Patience.
Are any of these principles compatible with what we do in N. America?

LEADERSHIP/

The Spurs organization needs be studied by every company looking to build high-performance cultures.
Recently, Wemby was asked if seeing Duncan and Robinson in the stands made him "anxious", and his reply revealed so much behind what makes the Spurs so successful.

For starters, "building culture" doesn't happen overnight.
It's a series of deliberate decisions made collectively and consistently over time.

When one joins a new company, the culture is self-evident.
But for those in it, not so much. It's like asking fish to describe water.

So, the first step in "directing" culture is treating it like a strategic imperative.
So often companies will write elaborate strategies with no mention of what it should feel like to be in the ship.

Secondly, it's simplification.
What's currently in place that's redundant, no longer true, making things more complex than needed, getting in the way of getting things done, etc. Trim the fat.

Thirdly, it's leadership.
Do we need new people in place to embody the culture we want to direct. What are the behaviours you are seeking out of your people. Once you know that, ensure that the leadership team leads by example.

Finally, it's continual reevaluation.
If one doesn't prune the branches, they can get sick and even potentially kill the tree as a whole.

When you look at the San Antonio Spurs organization, since Gregg Popovich took over head coaching in 1996, the vision of the organization has remained laser focused:

So Wemby's answer to the question was: "No, I don't feel anxious. I feel safe. Feels like if you trip, you know there's a lot of hands that are ready to catch you... from day one it's felt that way."

It's an absolute masterclass in culture building.
If you want to learn more about the Spurs I highly recommend you watching the NBA Coaches Association episode below that coaches all around the league recorded about Gregg Popovich. It will give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

BRIEF WRITING/

Most marketers don't get trained in writing briefs.
So briefs end up becoming "something that just needs to get done".

But these documents are arguably the most important pages any marketer and strategist will ever get to write.

It's the place where all the thinking, strategy, rationale, insights, get distilled into a single page.

That's part science and part art. Because great briefs don't only have great insights.
They're also written well.

I've seen single sentence briefs.
I've seen 10 page briefs.
And I can tell you - the clarity of a sentence is far more effective in getting creatives to fertile ground than throwing 5,000 words over the fence for them to parse through.

So if you're entrusted with writing one... here's a simple heuristic to think about:
Is your brief a strong enough jumping board to send your audience (agency folk if you're the brand manager, or creatives if you're the strategist) into deeper, more interesting waters?

Click on the image below to dive deeper.

INSPIRATION/

One of my favourite types of advertising are ones that show a wide range of category entry points for their product — without coming across as disjointed (a rare feat).

My second favourite type of advertising is for products that target everyone. Meaning, the product is used by the largest possible cross-section of a population.

So, how do you create advertising that resonates with everyone, and every occasion, without coming up with something vanilla?

Moen, a faucet manufacturer, achieved just that (h/t Quality Meats Creative!).

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.