MarketingDojo #71: The Growth Mindset
Planning for growth, Sweet Kintsugi, Heinz x Marvel and more.
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the 71st issue of the Marketing Dojo! 🎉
This week is crazy—a guest lecture at a B-school, a couple of in-person marketing events, loads of work, my birthday, and mom duties! 😅 Phew. During the weekend, I started feeling exhausted in anticipation.
I hope your week is more forgiving than mine.
Here's what we will cover in today's issue of the Marketing Dojo:
🌱 3 Sources of growth
🦸♂️ Marvel is learning from Barbie's playbook
🍪 Creative excellence: Oreo's Kintsugi
🔗 Friends and foes of LinkedIn unite
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With that, let's dive right in!
3 Sources of Growth.
Marketing planning for 2025 has taken over my calendar. While it's a hectic time, it's also an opportunity to step back and bring structure to everything we do. Marketing is the growth engine for most organizations, but where does this growth come from?
Essentially, there are three sources of growth: future customers, in-market customers, and existing customers.
Future Customers: Not all your prospects are in the market to buy your product right now. But when they do enter the market, only 3-5 brands make it to their evaluation set (Gartner). For these out-of-market customers, the focus is on driving top-of-mind recall—or, as the folks at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute call it– Mental Availability.
In-Market Customers: A fraction of your prospects are actively seeking solutions. They are content-hungry. According to a Google & CEB study, B2B buyers consume an average of 12 pieces of content before making a purchase.
Existing Customers: Upselling is 68% more cost-effective than acquiring new customers (Forrester). Allocating resources to engage existing customers to drive wallet-share expansion is a no-brainer.
The marketing strategies for each of these customer segments differ dramatically. If you're in your marketing planning cycle and would like the complete deck for reference, comment on this post, and the deck will be on its way to your mailbox.
Claws, Anti-hero and Some Sauce: Mad Genius of Collaborations.
Movie marketing is always a blast.
This time last year was all about pink. Barbie had just been released and left infinite collaborations in its wake. There was a shocking pink version of everything, from shoes to bottles to watches.
This Friday, Marvel's Wolverine vs. Deadpool hits the screens. While I don't see the world turning red and yellow (thank God for small mercies), this collaboration with Heinz is one of the most bizarre and memorable.
As More About Advertising puts it, this campaign is "the ultimate co-branding mash-up of every ingredient known to marketing."
The collaboration is so good and intuitive- just as this video from Marvel shows, you simply cannot unsee it.
Creative Excellence: Oreo's Kintsugi.
Instead of jumping on trends, why not jump on a 16th-century Japanese tradition? In their latest campaign, the marketers at Oreo gave their iconic brand a Kintsugi twist.
Oreos are my guilty indulgence. But these sweet treats are easy to break, and while broken biscuits still taste yummy, the experience isn't the same.
Enter the genius team at Oreo, who took inspiration from the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi. This art celebrates imperfections by repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold.
Oreo launched Kintsugi kits, complete with a tube of vanilla cream, on Amazon. The kit allows customers to creatively mend their broken cookies, transforming potential disappointment into a fun activity. The kits sold out in a day!
Clearly, this campaign was created for award entries, but I adore the idea of blending ancient art with a ubiquitous product to make something delightful.
Meme-time: AI-Generated Posts Are Taking Over LinkedIn.
Despite its shortcomings, I love LinkedIn, even though some people find everything there cringe-worthy.
I don't know about you, but my LinkedIn feed increasingly feels like it's covered in AI slop – low-quality, AI-generated material.
This meme is a nod to the one thing uniting both platform’s fans and critics—the endless stream of bland long-form posts generously sprinkled with emojis and hashtags.
Short Stuff:
Taboola will sell ads for Apple news & stocks (Taboola’s upgrade from clickbait).
TikTok partners with Eventbrite to promote offline experiences (Making it easy for TikTok creators to host events).
All restrictions on Trump’s Meta accounts have been lifted (Nothing is permanent, not even social media bans).
That’s a wrap on this week. Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked this week’s newsletter or found something interesting, please give me a like ❤️ or drop a comment🗨️. Your support helps drive the newsletter's discoverability.
Once again, thank you for your time. See you in your inbox next Wednesday.
Regards,
P.S: Sports have been on my mind lately. For a good reason – I've finally become a soccer mom. At least for the next couple of months!
My little one was selected for the SG government's Junior Sports Academy program. Over the next two years, she will learn a new sport every quarter.
I'm incredibly thankful – sports are fantastic for physical and mental health. She is learning a range of sports from professional coaches who are also helping her develop an athlete's mindset.
On a more sobering note, I came across a Vox media video about how most tennis players struggle to break even. The sport's payment structure is so ridiculously broken that only a few at the top can survive. Give this short, data-dense video a look – it left me feeling a bit sad but enlightened.
Hello my dear friend! Your articles are always so great - I anxiously wait for them every week and always learn a lot. I would love to receive the deck you mentioned. Have a wonderful week!
Would love to have the deck