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Hello Marketing Chroniclers. This month I want to talk about no one wants to talk about: should we really be using AI for creative thinking? New research coming out is pointing towards a dreadful direction regarding the impact AI is having on the range of ideas.

Additionally, I’ve been noodling with my intellectual diet for years, and I want to share how I’ve gone about building a system that improves my chances of coming across new and interesting things while building a long-term, resilient intellectual foundation.

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 and use my promo code PPA20 for 20% OFF your purchase → https://university.gotracksuit.com/

RESEARCH/

The first thing a marketer must be CRYSTAL clear on is whether they're competing in a repertoire market or in a subscription market.
If that isn't clear, you might be evaluating a fish's competency based on its ability to fly.

In repertoire markets (think consumer goods, cars, apparel, etc.) your customers are other brands’ customers who occasionally buy from you.

When people talk about "loyalty" they are often quick to describe what it is, but struggle to actually measure it.
For starters, loyalty is bound by a timeframe.

100% loyal customers are likely that way because of the timeframe in which that data was pulled. And they are also likely light category buyers.
Meanwhile, heavy buyers spread their purchases across more options, so while they might look less loyal from a share of wallet standpoint, they spend more on a per capita basis with you.

This is different in subscription markets, where customers are often solely loyal. Think insurance, utilities, telecom, etc.
(Interestingly, content streaming subscriptions are not in this market, because people often subscribe to several platforms - they're in a repertoire market!)

Therefore, loyalty metrics are largely explained by penetration and market structure, not something you can dramatically engineer.

There is almost no middle ground between repertoire markets and subscription markets - they're in opposite ends of the spectrum.
If you're trying to force a repertoire market brand behave like a subscription market brand, it simply won't happen.

Some markets are structurally designed for sharing. Others are structurally designed for lock-in - and brands cluster in these two extremes.

Therefore, trying to create exclusive loyalty in repertoire markets is inherently limited.
Growth in those markets comes from reaching more buyers.
This doesn't mean you should ignore the customer experience - on the contrary, you should treat CX as part of your product P. If it sucks, they will simply drop you from their repertoire.

On the other hand, if you're in a subscription market, retention IS critical.
Small changes in churn can have large financial effects - meaning, switching moments are critical battlegrounds.

So, the first thing you should do is identify what kind of market you're in.

If you're in a repertoire market, don't get discouraged - because your competitors' customers are much more easily accessible.
If you're in a subscription market, loyalty programs can be wildly effective, whereas in repertoire markets they might just be giving away margin.

In sum…

Treating repertoire behaviour as churn leads to overreaction.

If you want to dig deeper, check out this amazing paper from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It is a must read for all marketers.

If you want to listen to a conversation about this topic, Marc Binkley & Vassilis K. Douros had Dr. Nicole Hartnett on their Sleeping Barber Podcast episode No. 194. It’s a must listen!

OPINION/

What can a paper plane learn from a rocket?
That's the question small brands should be asking themselves when they're looking up to the giants in their industry.

The short answer to that question is: aside from a basic understanding of the laws of physics, not much.
At least not from their current (rocket) stage.
But there's a lot to be learned from them when they were still paper planes.

Small brands often study giants in their final form: Amazon’s logistics, Nike’s distribution, Apple’s ecosystem.
But those are rocket-stage advantages.

The real lessons are found much earlier: when they were lighter, faster,
more focused, still figuring out how to stay in the air.

But so many up and coming brands wrongly commit the same mistakes:

What makes small brands completely different creatures from giant brands is actually what gives them an interesting advantage: focus.

In a way the very constraints that slows down growth for small companies are blessings in disguise: they force these brands to focus, make choices, and outsmart their competition.

And that's what strategy is all about:

You don't need strategy when you can outspend others.
You need it when you have to outsmart them.

SYSTEMS/

Over the years I've tinkered with my "intellectual diet" quite a bit.
I'm a firm believer that the quality of our thoughts are highly dependent on the quality of what we consume. So, I've taken the formation of this "diet" quite seriously.

I've probably subscribed to every major publication there is, and have landed on the below system as of late.
Systems are interesting because once you've established your goal, all you gotta do is optimize for it and run it.

As a strategist I work with ideas. But that's a pretty broad term - in fact, ideas come in various shapes and sizes:

Through a process of self-reflection, I've decided that I wanted to cultivate the following:

Simply by looking at these, the "news" then become less about keeping up with current events, and more about identifying patterns that repeat themselves and how they influence existing systems we all live within.

This also means that books are the most important layer in my information diet. But not all books (we only have so much time in this Earth so we have to be super selective of what we choose to read!), more specifically: history, philosophy, marketing/business strategy, classic literature, and biographies.

Second to that, developing "taste" is also important to me - so I often turn to culture critics to understand how they're interpreting what's being pumped into our culture and their trained opinions of it.

While building an intellectual diet like this might seem "rigid", it is actually quite liberating. I've effectively expanded my "fishing net", so to speak, allowing for so much serendipitous discovery each week, all the while freeing up time for deeper thinking.

Most importantly, since I aim for about 14 hours of reading each week, knowing what I'm "fishing for" as I pick up a newspaper, or a magazine, or a book also puts me in a very specific mental mode which prevents me from spinning my wheels.

Each person will have their own intellectual diet, whether they're being intentional about it or not.
But I've found that being clear about what you want to get out of this ocean of information we live in is the most crucial part of not feeling like you're drowning.

A.I./

Humans' ability to create "something new" is still unmatched compared to AI.
Shocking - but predictable - new studies are coming out showing university admission essays pre vs post ChatGPT, where the latter consistently yields "better written" essays, but the creative range has been largely diminished.

This homogenizing impact is most felt among students furthest from the mean (aka, those with unique perspectives). This is a massive loss and risk to how the creative industries may deliver value in the near future.

Just look at the controlled experiment in the image below (original essays pre-GPT vs its AI-revised and AI-generated versions):

Post-ChatGPT essays were rated as more creative despite being less conceptually distinct.
This happens because in human writing, more varied language tends to correlate with more varied ideas. But in GPT-generated text, that relationship weakened or reversed.

In plain English: the writing got richer, but the ideas got more similar.

For brand and creative work, the biggest danger is not bad AI writing. It is good AI writing that converges toward the same competent middle.

Both studies I'm referencing are linked below:

INSPIRATION/

The gardening category is surprisingly fun.

The human truth in this space is that most of us nowadays live in cities, work in offices, and have lost all (or nearly all) ability to work in nature. This becomes fertile territory (hehe) for extremely fun ideas to emerge from.

But Miracle-Gro took it one step further and actually implemented marketing science to drive creative effectiveness (and surprise, it works really well):

It’s just fantastic work. Simple, fun, and highly memorable.

It got a 5.3 star rating on System1’s ad testing platform (in a category where only 1 in 200 ads cross the 5-star rating threshold).

Now, every time I look at my gardening gloves I’ll see them signing this damn song.

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.