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 we’re covering from marketing basics all the way to marketing culture wars. I hope these reflections equip you with additional thought-provoking angles for your upcoming meetings and discussions about our craft.

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.

I’ve always found that setting SMART brand objectives to be difficult without having a clear baseline of where my brands stand — until now. The folks over at Tracksuit have developed an elegant tool that helps you understand how your activities are impacting your brand's health metrics without breaking the bank.

You can check them out here.

PLANNING DEPT./

Why Starting Late Is The Biggest Killer Of Great Plans

Yearly marketing planning can seem daunting (I remember always being the most stressful part of the year when I was client-side!), but over the years I've learned a few ways to make it more manageable AND effective.

For starters, if you're managing a brand you should start thinking about next year around 7 months prior to the new fiscal year.

Why? Because to do so properly you'll need to:

• Commission new research

• Complete a prior year review of what worked vs not

• Circulate the strategy internally between all departments

• Formally present it to the leadership team

• Pitch a compelling story to secure the right level of budget from finance (this is super important!!!)

• Make the necessary adjustments based on feedback

• All before officially gaining sign off of the plan, budget, and work backs for a fast start.

Setting the strategy takes thinking time, so don't rush it. But the better your diagnosis of the situation, the easier it will be to write a home-run plan.

If you're managing a big brand, you'll have loads of information to tap into: category data, consumer sentiment, brand equity metrics, revenue and profit contribution performance, media ROI, MMMs, and more.

But if you're a smaller brand (and by that I mean, $5M-$100M), chances are resources will be limited.

And this is where brand trackers can be super helpful (the folks over at Tracksuit know a thing or two about this - and no, I'm not talking about running laps outside in the depth of Canadian winters, though I also recommend that).

Brand management doesn't end at execution. You have to be able to track progress and quantify performance for ongoing conversations about your brand's growth plans and, most importantly, to secure more budget for future years.

CULTURE WARS/

We Study Consumers, But Consumers Don't Study Our Ads

Over the years I've come to notice how disconnected marketers can become from reality. Case in point are all these endless LinkedIn debates about campaigns crossing certain lines, which in reality - down here on planet Earth - the vast majority of consumers don't even blink an eye at.

This probably shines a light onto how marketers are trained to begin with.

Most of us start up as interns, maybe a couple of co-ops, then if one's lucky get hired into an org with an established marketing department in it.

If you take a step back looking at this journey, marketers appear to spend their entire careers surrounded only by other marketers. This has got to have a negative effect on consumer-centricity (the no.1 cardinal rule of marketing).

I was lucky to have had certain experiences along my career that, at the time, seemed to have no connection to marketing at all - but that looking back now were incredibly formative in my marketing education.

In my early days I've worked as a shovel boy, gas station salesman, grocery stocker, truck driver, sales manager, analyst, and key account manager - all before my first marketing role.

Hardly will a marketer ever get this breadth of experience which teaches the realities of where the rubber meets the road and exposes you to different folks from all walks of life.

This type of formation will regulate your sensibilities and stop you from having misguided ideas about what your consumer is like (research is also critical here).

As a private individual of Canadian society, I agree that that American Eagle campaign was kinda weird, but I also work in marketing and was highly tuned into what was happening.

Most consumers didn't even get the jeans/genes thing to start with. It was entirely fed to them via news articles chronicling our infighting on LinkedIn.

Then one weekend I visited the mall, and saw a big window "good jeans" ad at an AE store, with crowds of people - from teenagers to adults - walking in to buy a pair (which btw, were buy 1 get the second 50% off). Jeans were flying off the shelves.

Though this is anecdotal, there has also been signs that the LinkedIn blowback was out of touch with the market reality. Like most ads, the effects will be thinly spread over a long period of time - and all stock market speculation is just that, speculation.

This is what makes our profession so interesting - we, marketers, are highly in touch with culture, but most people are just part of a few sub-segments of it.

We study consumers, but consumers don't study our ads. Always keep that in mind.

SEMANTICS/

Facts, Insights, Ideas, Executions: What Are The Differences?

I'd be already retired if I got a dollar for every time someone mistook a fact for an insight. But it doesn't stop there - oftentimes ideas are measured by execution standards (directional vs granular feedback), and this can cause a whole slew of problems.

For starters, facts are all around us. The Sun rises every morning. That's an observation - not an insight. These can often be found in research studies and involve some level of hard evidence to them - meaning, the magnitudes of something (i.e.: percentages) matter.

Insights are derived from these factual observations. A single observation can yield many many insights. Here one tries to dig deeper into why a fact is what it is. This is not an exact science, and often involves some level of creative thinking to uncover it - you want to draw connections with different fields and come from unexpected angles, but in such a way that makes people think "aha, of course".

Ideas are creative solutions to a problem the insight is alluding to. Here the waters get even murkier because by nature ideas are a form of risk taking. They require some level of innovation, otherwise they will pass like a ship in the night. Meaning, it's difficult to predict with confidence whether they’ll work. They are high-level and don't yet get down to the details - they point us to a few directions based on the insight being used as a launching pad.

Executions are how an idea comes to life. Here we want to see how the idea materializes across the 4Ps of the marketing mix, and more specifically if we're talking about communications planning, how the medium can elevate the concept and vice versa. This is the land of details, and the picture should become crystal clear at this stage.

As you can see, two competing companies can have wildly different ideas derived from the same insight, and even more distinct executions of the same idea.

Oftentimes we get caught up on trying to uncover the "first of its kind" insight when in fact, sometimes, a more creative idea and more effective execution to an old insight can yield wildly successful results.

DBAs/

Why Differentiation Is Difficult To Own And What To Do Instead

Brands often obsess about differentiation, but this is a losing game. The old debate about differentiation vs distinction can be summarized in one (made up) word: ownability.

Can you truly own your point of differentiation? Let's say you have uncovered some great philosophy for how to deliver your services. And let's pretend it really works.

What's stopping your competitors from stealing it and making it their own?

This is what often happens with "good" differentiators. Unless they're protected by IP, they're up for grabs. But if they're "not good" then nobody will steal it - meaning, it's likely not worth much to you either.

Distinction, on the other hand, is fully ownable. Take your brand logo, mascot, sound effects, creative style, etc. These things are often random - like Dior's star.

One day, Christian Dior found a loose metal star on a Parisian street, which he interpreted as a sign of destiny to establish his own fashion house rather than joining another's brand. Now this star is part of their identity.

People lead their lives largely on auto-pilot, responding to emotional nudges. We identify with random things - like my unexplainable obsession with Dodgers' ball caps, or the brand of coffee I drink because of their logo, or the brand of cereal I grew up eating because it was sold by a toucan.

Don't overthink differentiation. Instead, think about what will people remember your brand for.

And I can tell you right now, that it won't be because of that feature or benefit of yours. It will be because of how you make them feel about themselves.

BRAIN FOOD/

Strategist’s Delight (What’s On)

• Book: The Conservative Sensibility (George F. Will)

• Podcast Series: The Hunt for Austin Tice (The Economist)

• TV Series: Platonic (Apple TV+)

• Substack: Superiority Complex (A Benign Conspiracy)

QUOTE/

The Strategist’s Ego Death

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram

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

• 💌 In case you missed it: Can We Stop Talking About Apple and Nike, Already? Why Challenger Brands Are Playing a Different Game

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.