Revamped Marketing Chronicles 2025

Evolution of the newsletter, water isn't wet, modern day Trojan horse, and Daniel Kahneman

Author

Pedro Porto Alegre
January 15, 2025

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, join us for free.

Happy New Year my fellow marketers!

Over the Holidays I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to do with this newsletter in the new year.

Over the past 2 years I’ve written a 1,500-2,000-word “evergreen” column every week. Meaning, I wasn’t commenting on current events or marketing news, but instead I was writing about marketing concepts that had stood the test of time (the 4Ps, research methods, briefs vs briefings, the strategic planning process, portfolio management, etc.).

However, by the end of last year I noticed that these “evergreen” articles were starting to become tougher to write.

Not because I had run out of opinions and things to talk about (those who know me in person know that I can talk for hours…), but because I felt that I had started to repeat myself a bit. While with each new article I felt I was able to go a bit deeper into the topic (e.g.: the various brief columns I wrote), I just wasn’t getting excited about writing them anymore.

My vision for this newsletter had always been become a repository of marketing knowledge that people on the internet could return to access high-quality content to help them in running their brands, agencies, and businesses.

With that being said, I’ve never wanted to send out a newsletter to your inbox without delivering significant value (those are the very newsletters I unsubscribe from).

So, here’s how Marketing Chronicles will evolve in 2025:

  • Reduced frequency (from weekly down to monthly)

  • Shorter, more digestible commentary (instead of 2,000-word essays, expect 200-300-word mind-bites

  • Ad hoc long-form columns (expect it once a quarter on average)

As a strategy director in the marketing and advertising industry I end up reading a lot of things, talking to a lot of clients and consumers, and debating marketing with fellow pros on a weekly basis.

There is no shortage of interesting things I could be sending to your inbox, but I want to make sure that you’re getting QUALITY over QUANTITY.

If you’re new to Marketing Chronicles, don’t worry — all my past columns are available for free on my website. Feel free to browse and let me know if you would like me to talk about anything specific from the world of marketing that’s on your mind! (Simply reply to this email with your question).

Marketing is undergoing a lot of different pressures to perform, but this industry is comprised of some of the coolest individuals on planet Earth and I have no doubts that we’ll continue find ways to kick-ass in 2025. Let’s make it a great year folks.

OPINION/

Common Sense Is The Opposite Of Science

One of the most interesting raisons d'être for strategy is its ability not to fall prey to "common sense" heuristics. Let me explain...

I was recently listening to Paul Feldwick's book "The Anatomy of Humbug", and he wrote something that struck a chord with me: common sense is the opposite of science.

☀ If it were for common sense, the Earth is stationary and the Sun moves across the sky.

🧱 It it were for common sense, an object is heavy because it has "a lot of weight."

🔵 It it were for common sense, the sky is blue because it is inherently colored blue.

Most things are not exactly what they seem. The scientific process of investigation is what led humans to understand the distinction between "manifest image" and "scientific image".

As in, what things appear to be based off our human perceptions versus what they actually are based off scientific theories.

Decoupling the two is something strategists do quite well for a living.

Accepting the brief at face value without further investigation (aka, skipping the strategic process) is what has led to so many apparently obvious solutions to fall flat, because they were solving the wrong problem all along.

Sometimes common sense will get you there - but more often than not it's what's hidden behind our knee jerk reactions that will uncover interesting challenges that have not yet been solved for.

And that's the sweet spot where creativity and innovation thrive.

OPINION/

Water Molecules Aren’t “Wet”

There's a concept in philosophy that us in business should all learn about: emergentism.

It's the theory that certain entities are created by other entities, but are not reducible to them.

For example, H2O molecules aren't "wet". But when you put many of them together you get wetness.

Or you can go even more metaphysical and say that consciousness is a form of emergentism. Our neurons on their own don't carry "consciousness" within them, but through their highly complex combination in our brains, we get this mysterious thing we call consciousness.

If we now take a lateral step into business, the value we generate through the combination of people, tech, systems, creativity, etc. could be interpreted as a form of emergentism.

The same goes to advertising campaigns - there's a lot of evidence that layering on more channels into your comms plan drives stronger results. And that creativity is the single most important thing for marketing effectiveness (after size of brand).

When you create an interconnected comms plan that doesn't just retrofits creative into new mediums, but that works in tandem to complement each other with the aim to enter cultural (and subcultural) consciousness, we end up creating more value than the sum of its parts.

Emergentism in business might sound like a stretch, but the similarities with what we are trying to accomplish are striking.

OPINION/

Reasoning Is Self-Serving

There's this theory that "reasoning" was an evolutionary adaptation to humans' social nature. Meaning, since our species is so interdependent, the strength of our social bonds in a way is our number 1 priority.

When you think about it, most other animals have done pretty well for themselves without "reasoning" capabilities, just relying on intuition.

Now, in the case of humans, we know that 95%+ of our decisions are made emotionally, succumbing to our intuitions about whatever we're needing to decide on.

We also know that the act of system 2 thinking burns a lot of energy, so we naturally rely on our system 1 brain (aka, the fast, intuitive, emotional mode of thinking) to form opinions, make decisions, and in general act towards most things.

So, this theory that "reasoning" was developed from an evolutionary need explains the following: we make decisions emotionally (oftentimes without noticing) and only then do we use logic to explain our choices to our peers and ourselves.

But in business, we do this backwards. We largely ignore intuition, and instead look for logic (aka, data in most cases) to make decisions. It's not a bad approach because humans are prone to make intuitive errors, particularly in the face of complex challenges.

However, when it comes to marketing communications brands have fallen prey to this backwards mode of thinking. "Let's give them reasons to believe, and they will buy".

No no no... big mistake. Instead:

Make them them feel something, and when they need to justify their intuitive inclinations to themselves and others, give them the logical reasons to do so.

In other words, brand-building first and foremost; performance and direct response second (and at much lower investments than the former).

INSPIRATION/

DHL: Trojan Mailing

Pranks — when good natured — can go a long way in improving brand perceptions. Too bad this couldn’t have been done on a larger scale.

BRAIN FOOD/

Strategist’s Delight (What’s On)

QUOTE/

System 1 Thinking

The main function of System 1 is to maintain and update a model of your personal world, which represents what is normal in it. The model is constructed by associations that link ideas of circumstances, events, actions, and outcomes that co-occur with some regularity, either at the same time or within a relatively short interval. As these links are formed and strengthened, the pattern of associated ideas comes to represent the structure of events in your life, and it determines your interpretation of the present as well as your expectations of the future. A capacity for surprise is an essential aspect of our mental life, and surprise itself is the most sensitive indication of how we understand our world and what we expect from it.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

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Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional 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.