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Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This month the newsletter might be a bit too long for your email software due to links and videos embedded—so part of it might get cut off from your view. Make sure to click on “see full email” to read the full thing—or simply read it on the Marketing Chronicles site.

• The Harsh Reality of Word-of-Mouth

• The Case for Creativity in B2B Marketing

• The Marketer of The Future report

• How to Approach Marketing Data Sets

• Why Fame and Waste Matter in Building Brands

• Why I Still Use the Infamous Funnel

• Tracking Your Brand’s Health Properly

• Bring Me Problems, Not Solutions

• Revealing Insights From Firmographic Analyses

• Upcoming event with WARC, Inspiration, Brain Food and Howard Gossage

Enjoy!

OPINION/

The Harsh Reality of WOM

Word-of-Mouth. The 'holy grail' of marketing. But is it really? Advertising is often seen as the less attractive sibling of WOM, but let's look at the data to see if that's actually true...

For starters, WOM can be defined as when someone talks positively (or negatively!) about your brand to someone else.

That means that your brand, or the opportunity to talk about your brand, must come up in conversation - what trained marketers would know that this is a rare thing. Most people don't think about brands in their daily lives - they are thinking about paying their bills, what's for dinner, and planning their kid's birthday party.

This means that, if the opportunity to talk about your brand comes up in conversation, it's naturally skewed towards someone who is ALREADY considering buying your brand. Why? Because the WOM giver must perceive that who they're talking to has an established interest in the category or brand to begin with.

This fact alone dismantles some of the falsely perceived 'large effects' we believe WOM has. To calculate the effects of WOM on sales we need to account for this higher baseline, meaning that advertising - which reaches a non-skewed audience in much larger scales via TV, radio, OOH, etc. - when adjusted for its lower baseline, has a much greater impact than WOM.

Finally, studies done on the effects of WOM show that positive WOM can have significant effects on driving action - but not awareness, since it's a 1-to-1 medium - but the caveat is that it often fails to reach enough of the right people to impact sales in any meaningful way (see below - the highest impacts are on less than 8% of category buyers).

Now, what are the tangible benefits of WOM? They reside in the WOM giver, not the receiver.

When someone recommends a brand to a friend, it does a pretty good job at reminding them of the brand they previously bought. While someone reading a tweet might pay scant attention to it, the composer of the tweet has spent considerable effort writing it! This small act can help brands secure future sales from EXISTING customers (which, while that's a nice thing, we know that's not how brands GROW).

OPINION/

The Case For Creativity in B2B Marketing

The state of creativity in B2B marketing has been precarious for as long as I can remember. Most B2B marketing is a download of facts that make even 15-year-olds buzzing off 3 cans of Monster energy drink yawn uncontrollably.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

If anything, if you are a B2B brand and you're reading this - this is your sign to capitalize on the opportunity in front of you.

Standing out in B2B has never been easier than it is today. But we are often the biggest obstacles standing in our own way in attempting to do so.

Common things I often hear when "out of the box" creative is shown to B2B leaders:

• How will this give me leads?

• Why aren't we talking about XYZ feature in this idea?

• Why would this appeal to a business?

Businesses are made up of people. And whether they're shopping for Frito-Lay chips or Intel chips, we still need to appeal to their emotions first and foremost.

Otherwise we don't stand a chance of making them curious about how might our offerings help their business grow.

Check out some interesting statistics in the deck below 👇

REPORT/

The Marketer of The Future

Recently, the WFA published a report about the "Marketer of the Future", and it's a must read for all brand leaders. The title of the report could have easily been "Return to the Basics", as the findings show how re-learning the fundamentals is the key for future functional leaders.

At a high-level, we can see a clear gap between high-performing marketing organizations and the rest:

• Only 39% of under-performing companies have strong brand, strategy and creative foundations, compared to 63% of competitive leaders.

• High-performing marketers are 11% less concerned about short-term pressures than others, signalling a shift towards long-term, sustainable growth.

• 43% of high-performing marketers see C-suite influence as crucial, compared to just 23% of struggling marketers.

If your team doesn't have a strong foundation in place about the "laws of marketing", how brands grow, and creative effectiveness it's a sign that you should be over-investing in training ASAP.

There's no shortage of great options out there - between the MiniMBA, System1's and the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising)'s Advertising Principles Explained course, and all the books from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, there is no reason why our profession shouldn't be at the height of its powers.

There's a great quote from Cristina Diezhandino on the report about marketing fundamentals:

There's also this new term I hadn't heard before called an "M-Shaped" marketer, which is a departure from the ole "T-Shaped" fella. "M-shaped" skills profiles are marketers who combine expertise in a few ‘skill spikes’ (e.g. brand, analytics, community management) with the ability to influence and integrate across functions. This means that doing roles outside of marketing can be a huge advantage for marketers of the future.

Finally, if your board of directors doesn't have a marketer in it, RED FLAG.

Marketers are responsible for driving growth in an organization, but if all you see in your board are functional leaders whose main focus is in driving efficiency, there's very little hope that your brand will be in a significantly better place in the future.

Check out the full report here (FREE): https://wfanet.org/knowledge/marketer-of-the-future/download-the-marketer-of-the-future-research

OPINION/

How to Approach Marketing Data Sets

As a strategist, a sizeable part of my job involves looking at large swaths of data and information (quant and qual) and make sense of what's going on. This is typically done during the research phase of any project when we're diagnosing the 4Cs.

It's the part of the process that usually takes the longest, since once you've collected your raw material and made sense of it, making informed choices becomes a lot easier and quicker.

But I often get asked how do I approach a quant dataset or even a qual study. While there's no one-size fits all, there are a few tricks I've picked up along the way between my data analyst days and now that will typically get you 80% of the way there.

For starters, analyzing a qual dataset has historically been a lot more difficult and and time-consuming, since there are no "numbers" for computers to work with. For ages it took our internal computing powers (our brains) to assess what the hell we're looking at and taking observational notes as you went along.

But nowadays with recent LLM's advancements, we've gotten a lot faster at doing this because now I can upload my notes or open-ended survey answers into an AI model that will help me with identifying patterns. This isn't fool-proof, so it still requires a baseline hypothesis of what's happening, but it can serve as a fantastic "research assistant" to help you get to insights faster.

When it comes to quant data analysis, there are 2 fundamental things that every strategist should be looking for: patterns and outliers.

Similarly like there are "laws of marketing" that govern much of what happens in the market (i.e., double jeopardy law, duplication of purchase, etc.), with every dataset, if it's representative enough, there will be PATTERNS.

Patters are the "rule". They are predictive and can help you identify what's the norm in what you're looking at. Oftentimes, the norm is a fantastic source of insights for positioning and comms planning, since understanding what the mass market is doing is the key to tapping into growth.

Outliers are the "exceptions to the rule". These are fantastic sources of insight particularly for advertising/comms planning because they inherently come with some level of differentiation to the norms. And since advertising must capture and hold attention, leaning into the "counter-intuitive" can be an effective way to drive intrigue and memorability.

The obvious downside with outliers is that they might not resonate with the mass market. So you must be clear about who you're looking to talk to before pushing your chips into this approach. But if you're going broad enough, oftentimes outliers become sizeable and resonate with a lot of people. This is is what comedians do so well - they find something that stands out when they're observing people (aka a hidden truth), analyze it from a variety of different angles, and write a joke around it.

What other data analysis tips for marketers are out there?

OPINION/

Why Fame and Waste Matter in Building Brands

"What the heart feels today, the head will understand tomorrow." James Stephens This quote perfectly captures what (most) marketers have NOT been doing over the past decade.

Big Tech has spent the better part of the past 15 years convincing us that performance marketing is the hot game in town. But sitting here today, we can say with a high degree of confidence that this was a losing game all along.

While most brands spend most of their time outbidding each other in CPMs auctions, the ones that have been focused on entertaining and connecting emotionally with their customers are the ones people actually want to engage with.

Another drawback from this performance marketing spiral perpetuated by the "SaaS MQL ideology" is the idea that targeting is a smart usage of one's budget.

A key metric for brand health is FAME. Fame, not to be confused with "celebrity", is defined as "public renown, great esteem".

When brands go for fame, they are effectively growing the proportion of category buyers who, when they experience one of their brand assets, think of THEIR brand. This is obviously imperative to shorten the decision-making process that takes place in a hugely competitive world where all manner of products and services are seeking your attention.

But to achieve fame you need to go BROAD. You need to go BEYOND your target audiences. Because even though a person may not be in your ideal customer profile now, they might be in the future.

So, the fact these "out of market" folks also know about what you're selling today, effectively adds value to your brand in the long-run.

(And no, this doesn't only apply to luxury brands who need to create "out of market" desirability. This applies to ALL brands).

When it comes to brand building, WASTAGE is a good thing. You want everyone to know about your brand. This is how the greatest brands of the 20th century were built. But our obsession with efficiency in the 21st century has held many from achieving a similar fate.

OPINION/

Why I Still Use the Infamous Funnel

It's become quite common to criticize "the funnel" in our industry as something that doesn't capture the nuances of modern consumer buying behaviours. While I agree with that, I STILL find the funnel to be quite useful.

For starters, it's important to get it out of the way that the funnel isn't a "catch-all" model.

If you're looking for a framework that captures all of the nuances of consumer behaviour, you'll likely end up with a diagram from hell that doesn't simplify reality to a comprehensible metaphor, and instead leads marketers into further confusion and contradicting territories.

Marketing doesn't have an E=MC2 formula. And this is where I believe a lot of marketers get tripped up.

Instead the funnel can be exceptionally useful for a few things:

• Contextualizing research: where is our brand underperforming relative to the category?

• Setting objectives: where should we focus our resources on to address our biggest weaknesses?

• Measuring progress: are our initiatives moving the needle year over year?

• Setting budgets: how much money will we need to invest to improve X metric by Y%?

• Balancing the Long and the Short of it: are we over-doing one or the other?

Note that these aren't brand equity metrics - no perception data enters this model. Instead, it's about understanding our strengths and weaknesses along the customer journey so that we can invest the right amount of resources in the right places.

• If our TOFU metrics are underperforming - Do we have enough mental availability? Do enough people associate our brand with the category?

• If our MOFU metrics are underperforming - Is our pricing strategy off? Are we overlooking certain customer touchpoints? Is our CRM data useful?

• If our BOFU metrics are underperforming - Do we have enough distribution? Is our website easy to navigate?

I've recorded a video addressing my view of the funnel and uploaded below - in it I also address common critiques such as: it doesn't track repeat purchases, the consumer journey isn't always linear, it doesn't account for salience, it overemphasizes the role of advertising, etc.

Do you find the funnel useful? Why or why not?

RESEARCH/

Tracking Your Brand’s Health Properly

Category Buyer Memory (CBM) tracking is something that marketers oftentimes gloss over, but it should actually consume much of their thinking every year. Not because researchers can't do it themselves, but the inputs that go into it require strategic thinking beyond research deployment expertise.

For starters, far too often marketers will measure things that can't be traced back to brand performance whatsoever - such as "something new to give my kids", when in fact such a measure would require prior knowledge of what has been previously bought; or worse, traits such as "irresistible", which frankly are impossible to effectively measure and don't mean anything for the brand.

Secondly, this portion of every tracker is often lumped with Distinctive Brand Asset tracking, which is where we ask consumers to identify a shape, colour, tagline, logo, etc. and measure how often it's correctly linked back to your brand. This should be reserved to a separate section of your diagnosis.

Thirdly, we attempt to measure things like TOM awareness, unaided and aided awareness - which are largely misunderstood by most brand managers, since mental recall is highly variable depending on when you deploy the survey and, for the most part, is useless unless it's correctly attributed to a relevant buying occasion and it doesn't weed out non-buyers in the responses (since they're the ones that will drive market share growth — but you'd be surprised with how often trackers will screen out out-of-market buyers from their responses).

Now, on to what we SHOULD be measuring:

• CEPs: category entry points are the "locations" in consumers' minds where they store brands. If you were to start from a blank slate every time you needed to retrieve a brand to buy (e.g., I want to travel to a culinary city - what cities come to mind?), your brain would be toast by noon. Pick the top CEPs in your category and measure how often your brand is associated with each of them. Avoid niche CEPs as they reduce your chances of being remembered.

• Category membership: if your brand isn't even associated with the category, then there's no chance you're ever going to be considered. Additionally, if your brand doesn't even pass the baseline tablestakes of the category (e.g., reliability if you're selling cars) then consumers will reject you. Finally, CSR associations (e.g., cares of the community) have historically shown to not have high relevance for consumers' decision-making (despite what they say in surveys, there's minimal evidence to support they follow through) - keep them to a minimum.

Lastly, a word on "negative associations" (e.g., poor quality). These are largely attributed by former buyers, with a few existing ones and a scant fewer non-buyers repeating what they've heard. Since these are formed mostly after a buyer has left the brand, they're post-hoc rationalizations to justify prior behaviour - rather than drivers of brand defection.

OPINION/

Bring Me Problems, Not Solutions

The concept of "problem gestation" came to me after reflecting upon the countless briefs I've had to write for my creative teams. I captured these thoughts in a recent article I wrote for the Calgary Marketing Association where I unpack the process from client briefing to creative briefing.

The time of a strategist in creative agencies is largely consumed by this period from client briefing to creative briefing. And while there is no one size fits all approach to writing a really good brief, there is one critical ingredient that I've found to be indispensable.

That ingredient is TIME.

Yes, time is money and those who can run through this process faster will naturally flourish in the fast-paced agency environment, but that is something that comes with experience.

Sitting with a business problem and letting your unconscious mind chew on it is actually a highly productive usage of one's time.

But to set your brain up for success, you first need to feed it with relevant information. Secondly, you need to have an airtight note-taking system to capture ideas that emerge from the depths of your mind.

This period where you're working through a problem with the aim to uncover an interesting angle for your creatives to look for solutions, is what I've been calling the "problem gestation" period.

Good work habits, voracious reading, great sleep, exercise, and a healthy dose of artistic consumption is what will keep the strategist's mind sharp.

Check out the full podcast interview below.

RESEARCH/

Revealing Insights From Firmographic Analyses

I've always found doing firmographics to be an illuminating exercise when segmenting the B2B market. A typical finding across the majority of industries is that over 98% of all companies are small businesses (0-99 employees) - with a massive skew towards the 0-4 employees portion of the curve.

But as you dig a little deeper you begin uncovering some interesting insights:

1. How can a business have zero employees? Simple: the majority of these are solopreneurs, aka freelancers. These can be counted as 1 to 1 (business to person) when thinking about decision makers.

2. Though most businesses in Canada are small businesses, the majority of the labour market is employed by mid to large businesses. This is where segmentation can really pull you out of the "law of the averages" and you begin seeing how a small group of firms (<2%) commands the majority of the people whom you need to talk to (>53%) and the majority of yearly revenues (>59%).

3. This means that in B2B, the two-speed targeting approach makes a lot of sense. Mass market messaging to hit everyone with your brand's positioning, and targeted messaging if you can identify signals that show a business is "in-market" to buy at any given point in time.

The challenge with targeting remains though - if only 2% of businesses generate nearly 60% of all revenues, but 95% of them are out-of-market at any given point (meaning, they're not looking to buy, and their procurement process is quite sophisticated), how do you stay top-of-mind across 54% of the population who is employed by them?

That's where mass marketing and "waste" in your media plan covers up all the holes.

Targeting, particularly in B2B, can be quite expensive. So you must be very intentional with whom you're targeting and not let that eat up any more than 30% of your total marketing budget.

In B2C, where buying cycles can be much shorter, it makes sense for targeted media to command a bit more of your budget (40-50% depending on category), but still - don't let short-termism get in the way of building mental availability across 95% of the market who is not looking to buy right now.

VIRTUAL EVENT/

“The Multiplier Effect” with WARC

What if I told you there could be a way to increase revenue ROI by 90%? You’d be interested right?

In this month's Grow Your Brain, I’ll be hosting Ann Marie Kerwin from WARC to talk us through their latest report called "The Multiplier Effect" where she'll unpack how brand and performance work together to drive stronger results for brands.

The event will be FREE for live attendees. Recording will be available for APG Canada members in the portal afterwards.

Register here!

April 10, 12-1PM EST, on Zoom

INSPIRATION/

Coors Light “Cold Activated Announcers”

Advertising innovation in the radio medium is not something that often gets talked about.

Mainly because it’s rare to see a brand coming up with something that turns the medium on its head.

But this past week Coors Light did something genius — they made voice actors read a Coors Light radio ad script while submerged in an ice tub.

This is brilliant in two key ways:

• It further reinforces Coors Light’s cold can technology and how the beer tastes better at certain temperatures, and;

• It cuts through the noise of audio advertising because of the rawness of spot — shivering voices attempting to get through a script.

Bravo!

BRAIN FOOD/

Strategist’s Delight (What’s On)

• Book: Better Brand Health (Jenni Romaniuk)

• Podcast Episode: Life After Agency Life (On strategy Showcase)

• TV Series: Adolescence (Netflix)

• Article: EFF BOMB - Issue #9: Insight: The biggest grift in advertising? (James Hurman, WARC)

QUOTE/

Wallpaper Adverts

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Follow me on LinkedIn

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

• 💌 In case you missed it: It's Not A Principle Until It Costs You Money — Canadian pride, purpose marketing, tourism case study, data strategy, creative effectiveness

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.