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Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This month is all about untangling some of the narratives that have quietly taken root in our industry (and in our lives). Whether it’s the myth that more information makes us smarter, the over-glorification of retention strategies, or the illusion that creativity can be systemized — it’s worth pausing to examine the stories we tell ourselves.

Enjoy 🧠

WORDS OF WISDOM/

Formation versus Information

There's quite a bit of confusion nowadays about the difference between being "well informed" and being "well formed".

In a world with an overabundance of information people might confound the two, but they're actually quite far apart in the spectrum of knowledge.

For starters, a well-formed person has devoted TIME to make sense of information. They are not only avid readers, but they are also exceptional at connecting the dots between bits of knowledge.

Which is why a well-formed person more often than not is also a more experienced person. They have built a repertoire and network of knowledge in their minds and are able to lodge new information into the right places - which also increases retention!

This mental model of the world can only be developed with time and contemplation about what's being consumed. But the speed at which information comes at us nowadays becomes nearly impossible to concentrate at one thing at a time.

This lack of concentration is often labelled as "multitasking". Unfortunately this practice has been pre-packaged in modern business circles as a skill instead of a deficiency.

Now, is reading in decline as of late? Well, it depends on what you mean by decline.

200 years ago the levels of literacy were much lower, so there were less people reading. But those who knew how to read inevitably read more than the average person today, whose attention is often divided between TikTok, Netflix, and email pings no matter where they find themselves in the world.

This isn't to say that the increased access to information is a bad thing - it's actually the opposite, but only for those who are well-formed. Because being unable to concentrate and shield our attention from our omnipresent tech identities cultivates a convoluted mind that's permeated with shallow thoughts instead of well-formed opinions.

Seek formation first, information second.

THE INSTITUTE/

The Truth About Loyalty And Retention

"Brands with lower-than-average retention rates saw much greater overall revenue growth than brands with higher-than-average retention rates." What?!

A recent report from Klaviyo validated (once again) much of what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has been saying about loyalty and retention - and that is: every category has a largely fixed range of retention rates, with larger brands having higher retention rates than smaller brands (double jeopardy law).

This should come as no surprise by now, but it still must be said: impacting retention rates is incredibly difficult and largely yields worse results than focusing on acquiring new customers.

For some reason there is this false adage that permeates our industry that "acquiring a new customer is 5x more expensive than retaining one". For starters, that number was pulled from thin air and has not been validated by any study. Secondly, there is no discernment between which customer you're looking to retain - retaining the RIGHT customers is a far more important metric here, but still underperforms acquisition.

For example, one retailer in the report's sample had a 39% retention rate (high for the category), but those customers that stayed ‘loyal’ spent 46% less in 2024 than they had in 2023. That company’s total revenue declined 14% between 2023 and 2024. Meanwhile, a second retailer in the same category had a 14% retention rate, but those loyal customers spent 14% more in 2024. That company’s total revenue increased 130% between 2023 and 2024.

Another pithy insight from the report: the quality of customer service experience is critical to emotional connection. A great customer service experience is the leading driver of emotional positivity toward brands. And brands that scored higher on emotional positive connections saw 1.5-2.5x higher annual spend with the respective brand than those who just had "satisfied customers".

Interestingly enough, brands that did NOT have loyalty programs saw 33% lower retention but had an average growth 3X higher than brands that did have a loyalty program in place.

This is not to say that loyalty programs are counter productive, but as the report says: "Rather, it tells us that using a loyalty programme to increase retention and minimize churn is not nearly as commercially impactful as using a loyalty programme to incentivize spend increases from the customers you retain."

This all makes sense, and I always use the example pictured below to illustrate why acquisition is so important (and by that I don't mean performance marketing per se, but primarily by driving market penetration through long-term brand building). The scale at which acquisition plays is magnitudes higher than retention tactics.

I highly recommend checking out the report, particularly if you're in ecomm.

DEPT. OF HUMILITY/

Odds Are, You’re Wrong

There are many more ways to being wrong than being right. The key, however, is having a deep commitment to reality.

What I love about the field of marketing science is that it challenges the dogmatic thinking that has cursed our industry for so many decades.

This may not be an easy pill to swallow for some brand managers, but coming to terms with being wrong is actually refreshingly freeing. Because once you do, you are officially switching your mode of thinking to an inquisitive state.

Curiosity is what helps humans discover new things and make existing things better. Questioning previous assumptions, looking under the hood of our businesses, challenging one another - these are the tools of the trade for strategists.

Strategy isn't a science - but it is informed by marketing science and it largely follows the scientific method of hypothesizing and testing. There is no "right or wrong" strategy, there are only trade-offs.

That's why I always like to start any strategy project with a hypothesis written in bold all caps letters on top of the page. That leads me down a series of rabbit holes that either validate it or disprove it. And this cycle of hypothesizing, validating, disproving, tweaking, hypothesizing again, with the aim to marginally and incrementally increasing the certainty that path A is better than path B, is what makes this profession so fun.

I understand that we live in a time where admission of being wrong has become so difficult. But the most interesting people in history are those who have changed their minds throughout the course of their lives.

Always assume you might be wrong, because there just are so many more ways to misjudge something than empirically and definitively getting it right.

CREATIVITY/

You Can’t Operationalize Creativity

I've been thinking a lot about AI lately (I mean, who hasn't). But up until this point it felt like so many of the warnings about AI world-domination kept coming up short. Now, I have a sense that we're officially entering a new level in this rollercoaster.

Recently I've been seeing a lot of smoke signals coming out of industry experts regarding a potential hockey stick model capability change. Like, CEOs sending emails out to their staff warning them about potential irrelevancy, startup incubators being able to identify a problem, ideate and launch an MVP all under 48hrs, tech companies announcing their "new found" capabilities to ideate, design and launch hyper-optimized ads within their platforms cutting the middlemen out, etc...

To this week's announcement of OpenAI merging with Jony Ive's design company in a $6.5B deal.

There's a lot coming at us right now, but despite all of this I still believe that creativity is escaping largely unscathed from this latest wave.

For starters, creativity in the commercial sense is really good at capturing and holding attention in exchange of something in return (which could be entertainment, learning new ideas, discovering something new, etc.).

Creativity is a close cousin to innovation, though they're not exactly the same. Sir John Hegarty has expressed their distinction as follows:

💭 Creativity: The generation of original ideas and perspectives, rooted in personal expression.

🧪 Innovation: The practical implementation of creative ideas to produce tangible outcomes.

AI is trained by previously thought of ideas - it always regresses to the mean. So, depending on the universe you're tapping into, the mean could be quite unremarkable (this typically occurs if you ask ChatGPT point-blank to ideate something new without any conditioning first).

Now, if you can find a way to "curate" what AI is tapping into, the mean could now become something exceptional in relation to total universe. For example, if you train an AI model on all of the Cannes Lions Grand Prix winners, then the mean of that will certainly be more impressive than an open-ended wander through the internet.

But since attention relies on novelty, creativity by definition is always a moving target. What was interesting yesterday will fall short in capturing attention today because people will have been conditioned to it.

Which is why it's so difficult to operationalize creativity. This would only lead to predictable outcomes - and since predictability gets relegated to background noise in our brains, I have yet to see AI making a strong enough case to replace the creative industry in any tectonic way.

Who knows what the next wave of AI innovation will bring, but for now I believe it will continue to come up short in replacing human creativity in any meaningful sense.

PS: could we expect AI to come up with ideas like this bidet ad below anytime soon?

GETTING YOUR FIX/

Escaping Optimization Culture

The self-help genre really began to take off 35 years ago. As with most things, it derives from ancient wisdom, mostly communicated through religious texts but then re-interpreted to our modern, productivity-forward society.

One of the originals - 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - was a business blockbuster in the 90s. But becoming a great manager wasn't enough, we needed more. We needed to learn how to become great husbands, great siblings, great parents, great lovers.

This overwhelming pressure to live a highly productive, well-balanced life has led many to burn out, develop anxiety disorders, and even fall into deep depressions in recent years due to our "always-on" media.

Which is one of the reasons why reality TV has done so well. It depicts people at the messiest time of their lives (20s and 30s) being held captive in some paradisiacal mansion in search of love. The deep psychological issues publicly displayed serve not only as an escape from reality, but also as reassurance that we aren't as bad as we might've thought.

In other words, reality TV creates a sense of comfort - one in which we can accept our flawed selves not because we have entered a journey of healing, but because our point of reference of how bad things can get has changed completely.

Cheating, fights, back-stabbing, drama. This is TV in 2025. But out in the real world, our lives aren't nearly as dramatic as what we're seeing on Netflix, so we end up feeling a bit better about ourselves.

As with anything that makes us feel good, we eventually need more to get our fix. Fights and chaos aren't enough anymore. We need things that cut deeper. And so I present you Showtime's "Couples Therapy".

In this reality show, couples have their therapy sessions recorded, edited and made available in the form of 30 minute episodes for the world to see. Deeply traumatic events are discussed - like the gentleman who effectively had memory-induced physical pain during an ayahuasca trip when reminded of his traumas. It's so traumatic that eventually he breaks the fourth wall and asks to leave the room.

It makes for deeply intense and raw TV, yet vulnerability at that scale makes the viewer feel like they're overstepping a boundary with their curiosity.

I suspect that this comfort-seeking escapism from the pressures of optimization culture will continue to get more extreme - there are now podcasts where people's therapy sessions are broadcasted, books specifically being written for certain types of modern traumas -, and we're already seeing brands surfing this wave - take the following:

• Recess (CBD brand): They’re not selling productivity; they’re selling slowing down and zoning out.

• Calm / Headspace: they're normalizing emotional fatigue—with sleep stories, celeb narrators, and less “fix yourself” language.

I'm not sure if we'll continue to reach new levels with this, or if we've reached the cusp.

MARKETING METRICS/

What Metrics Should Actually Matter

Over the past decades marketers have been inundated with new metrics that derive from digital platforms. I believe this has created quite a confusion about what is signal versus noise, so here are my thoughts on what SHOULD matter to most marketers.

❌ For starters, social media engagement metrics are largely useless. I know - most of us have been chasing likes, shares, and comments, but from a business standpoint there's plenty of evidence showing that these have zero correlation with business results.

📈 If you're running performance marketing campaigns, then yes you should track cost per acquisition (CPA), click-through-rate (CTR) and frequency. Make sure you're crystal clear on what the ideal reach should look like for your campaign (aka, what's the size of the target audience you're going after) and keep your campaigns short and punchy.

To calculate your ideal CPA, take your average customer lifetime value (LTV) and divide it by 3. This should give you a pretty good ballpark of what an acceptable CPA should be for your business.

🧠 Now, on to the good stuff - measuring brand.

Brand health metrics move at a glacial pace, so you don't need to measure these all that often (once, max twice per year), unless you're in scale up mode and are investing heavily in brand comms (then a brand tracker is better suited for your needs).

While there's some debate about whether brand awareness and top-of-mind (TOM) awareness (aka, first to come to mind unaided) are relevant metrics, I'd say that measuring these things when you're growing is valuable. Large brands need more sophisticated metrics, which I'll get to in a second.

If you're small and growing, chances are your unaided awareness will be insignificant. Lead with aided awareness (aka, have you heard of brand X?), and as you scale up start measuring unaided awareness metrics (such as TOM).

If you're scaling up or are a larger brand, you should be measuring salience more so than awareness. This means, you're tracking whether your brand comes to mind in buying situations.

Measuring mental market share (MMS) is a fantastic way to do so as you're tracking the proportion of category buyers who think of your brand, relative to how many think of any brand in the category.

This type of survey will also give you a mental penetration (MPen) KPI, which measures what percentage of category buyers mentally notice, recognize, or think of your brand in a buying context. Additionally, this study should also give you network size (NS), which measures the number of distinct memory associations a consumer has with your brand.

🏪 And that's it for mental availability. If you're also tracking physical availability, then this opens up a whole new conversation for another time, where you track distribution coverage, share of shelf, search rankings, and other metrics. Not to mention brand advocacy metrics which are a world of their own.

Checkout the full pamphlet breaking down the metrics mentioned above here.

INSPIRATION/

Morrisons Fresh Market

Close your eyes.

Now imagine you’re responsible for creating the most memorable advert in the market to advertise your grocery stores’ fresh counter.

What did you picture?

I can almost guarantee it was great, but not as great as this.

This is British comms strategy at its finest — showing us that emotion is the best builder of long-term memories, that there are more ways than just humour to grab someone’s attention, and that sticking to a single key message in an ad is the best way to make consumers’ remember what you said.

BRAIN FOOD/

Strategist’s Delight (What’s On)

• Book: Hegarty On Advertising: Turning Intelligence Into Magic (John Hegarty)

• Podcast Episode: Is Brand Purpose Dead—Or More Alive Than Ever? (The CMO Podcast)

• TV Series: Seinfeld (Netflix) [yep, oldie but timeless—still funny to this day]

• Film: Conclave (Amazon Prime)

QUOTE/

The Times They Are A-Changin'

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Follow me on LinkedIn

• 🗣 For speaking engagements, you can reach me at [email protected]

• 💌 In case you missed it: The Only Mathematical Path To Meaningful Growth—The Multiplier Effect, brand loyalty, the "Maple Leaf Premium", and Brian Cox

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 Canada. 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.