Let me just start with this: Mr Ronaldo Carneiro is a legend.
And probably one of the main reason why I ended up working with Marketing.
He doesn’t know it, but throughout years of informal family chat, he has been feeding me knowledge that would not only instigate my interest in the area but also prove to be powerful lessons.
But before we jump into this goldmine a la Uncle Scrooge, I need to share a bit of the background story of this charming tall mulatto and how he went from being a youth security guard in a cereal factory in the middle of fucking nowhere in Brazil to becoming the Marketing Director of the country's second-largest chocolate company.
THE BACKGROUND
My dad Ronaldo worked in marketing for 30 something years before he retired. But this wasn't his original plan.
Born in a small town called São José do Rio Pardo (long name, I know), 260 km north of São Paulo, he didn’t have much in his childhood. Grandpa passed away when he was 6, and Grandma's wage as a public school staff was just enough to bring food to the table. That made young Ronaldo look for jobs as early as he can remember, and get going with things such as shoeshine boy and junior traffic warden.
Back then, public schools in Brazil were generally ok, and having got some good grades in high school made my he start playing with the idea of a career as an Architect. He was good with maths, but also loved drawing. Finding something that combined artistic expression with structured thinking sounded like a great option.
Quick pause here: How funny is that? I mean, I can trace so many similarities between architecture and marketing... probably my favourite one is the opening paragraph of How Brands Grow, from Professor Byron Sharp:
"Marketing is a creative profession. So is architecture: architects design masterpieces like the Taj Mahal and the Sydney Opera House, but architects use their creativity within a framework of physical laws. Architects must design buildings that will not collapse under their own weight or blow over in a breeze; they cannot choose to ignore the law of gravity, or hope their building is immune to the laws of physics."
Ok, back to the story.
The only issue with this plan was that all good universities were in the capital São Paulo: expensive as hell and a distant reality from São José do Rio Pardo. And from this point on... things could have easily gone on a downward spiral. Brazil is not a fair country, and inequality of opportunities is the biggest and saddest crippling disease holding it back from a brighter future.
It would take the expansion of a Swiss condensed milk company to an exotic tropical country 100 years ago and the need for cheap mailing to turn things around.
When he was around 15 years old, he took a job as a mail boy at what was at the time most prestigious institution in his town: a cereal factory of a multi-billion euros multinational company called Nestlé. As a mail boy, he would transport documents and parcels across the factory fields and across the city, and he got to know a few people in the way. As it happens in life, this was the random event that would steer Ronaldo away from his Architecture dreams, but take him to a good enough substitute.
He did that for a while, but some time after started working with sales at the small store Nestlé kept inside the factory for employees only. After another couple of years, he got an invitation to work in sales, but this time at the big city São Paulo. He moved and started studying business in an university close to Nestlé’s office, while coming back home every weekend to visit his girlfriend (which would eventually become my mum).
After another couple years, he applied for a new opportunity at Nestlé: a trainee program in marketing. He studied as hell for all the tests and interviews and got the position that would finally made him a marketer.
From there, he worked in categories such as ice creams and cookies and crackers, where he launched what would become the nationally famous Passatempo. Then he moved to cereals, managing power brands such as Neston, Farinha Láctea and Mucilon, and importing brands such as Power Bar to Brazil. Finally, he was invited to move to a city in a different region in the country, Vila Velha, and become the Marketing Director of Garoto.
Garoto was and still is the second biggest chocolate company in Brazil, acquired at that time by Nestlé. There, Ronaldo professionalized the company’s marketing management, launched new products and a completely new line of ice creams. In the meantime, he received several proposals to join other companies but stayed loyal to the one that employed him as a mail boy back when he was only 15.
THE LESSONS HE DIDN'T KNOW HE WAS TEACHING ME
All right, that was a long prep. But an important one for you to understand that the lessons are not coming from any fancy academic background, so-called expert advise or any other higher place. It’s coming from raw and real years of experience in marketing and sales.
Ok papa, let's see what you've got.
Lesson #1: Penetration is king
Back in those days, I just couldn’t get my head around the concept of penetration. Is it about making more people buy? Isn’t it obvious? Isn’t it similar to sales? What about frequency? What about price? Well, to be honest, the word was so sexually charged for a teenager that I hardly managed to take it seriously in a business context.
I remember as it was today: we were having pizza at a terrible place next to our house in Vila Velha* when Ronaldo mentioned that from all marketing KPIs, penetration seemed to be the most relevant one. "If you focus on penetration above everything, you should be able to carry a brand forward. You just need support and ideally expand those numbers every year, in different geographies and segments". Boys and gals, that was way before the Dark Lord of Penetration (as Mark Ritson calls Professor Byron Sharp) and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute investigated thousands and thousands of market share data and published How Brands Grow, the single most important marketing book of the past decades, concluding that penetration is the best strategy to focus on, every time. No brand loyalty bullshit. No brand love bullshit. Do you want to grow your brand? You better penetrate every single household of whatever vast country you are operating in.
*Growing up with the best pizza in the world - those from São Paulo - makes everything else taste like shyte.
Lesson #2: Stupid differentiation matters
This one happened when he was the Marketing Director at the chocolate's brand Garoto, and we were crossing by car the massive bridge that connects Vila Velha to its neighbour city, Vitória: “dad why the fuck are you putting little nice love messages inside the Serenata de Amor bonbon’s packaging? No one gives a shit, they just want to buy an ok quality, cheap chocolate!” (I obviously didn't ask like that). His response was simple and obviously eye-opening: “well, all that competition is doing is the ok quality, cheap sweet. We need to create something slightly different and try to stand out and give consumers a little nudge to choose us and talk about us”. Legend. Although we know now that differentiation is not as important as your average brand consultant believes, he was talking about distinctiveness, which is in fact key. The move was also super aligned with consumer's associations with the Serenata de Amor brand, which is all about love and romance, so a little story about coherent brand building right there as well.
Lesson #3: Marketing is not just about making consumers cry
I loved when dad brought home spare merchandising, new packaging for us to give an opinion, product tests for us to try, and magazines that Nesté was sponsoring. I especially remember some Cannes VHS with a collection of the best advertising of the time, ads that would make a man, women and even a psychopath cry. Many of those bugigangas* were created or sent by friends Ronaldo made on the agency and media world, which were always super interesting, trendy and fun.
But not all the bonds he made were with the cool marketing kids: many dinners I witnessed were with salespeople, distributors and suppliers. One of those meetings I remember vividly, as it was the first time I tried Japanese food (quite a wild experience back then). Despite not being as sexy as talking about the next ad, those conversations were deep and filled with sound "street" knowledge, touching on entrepreneurship, business ambitions, product quality, and price negotiations. What I got from those memories is that marketing isn't all about fireworks: a lot is actually about understanding distribution, supply, purchase, pricing and negotiation. And more: creating B2B relationships is vital, and really demands focus and effort.
*I can't find a good enough English word for this one, sorry. Suggestions welcomed.
Lesson #4: Consumers are little pieces of lying shit
That’s a good one because dad sweetly dismissed a whole lot of bollocks I was throwing away after I discovered a new piece of customer analytics which (in my head) was revolutionary. This one happened just a few years after my business graduation when I was working at a brand consultancy in São Paulo, and research techniques were an important part of my job. I was fascinated by this speech from the NY office MD, at the time talking about how he solved the post-M&A brand situation of SBC and at&t with a single slide. The content of the slide? The results of a beautifully designed research study applying Discrete Choice Modelling. I won't go deeper into DCM here, but it's a pretty decent research technic to predict demand for different offers. It even got a Nobel prize in Economics for its inventor.
So during a regular call with my dad just to check-in about life, I've dropped this mundane, light topic: “Dad, have you heard of Discrete Choice Modelling?? NO??? Wow. So, listen, it's really cool, ..... statistics.... simulations….. Nobel prize....solves all problems of the universe..." and I went with this for God knows how many minutes. Ronaldo, always obviously very educated and gentle, replied “Son, that's really cool. The only problem in my view is that respondents in research have this terrible habit of talking about stuff that they won't do later". I've worked a lot in my career with research, and it is at the core of my work today. This is probably one of the most important lessons you need to understand if you have any hopes of making research useful: people's attitudes and perceptions don't necessarily drive behaviour. More often than not, it's quite the opposite. And Ronaldo, seeing sales results over and over again contradicting even the best research-based piece of strategy, knew it in his core.
Lesson #5: Brand Managers need external strategy help
I don’t know if this one was just to make me happy and confident as I worked for a long time as a brand consultant, but this advice has been one of my favourites. When you are on the agency/consultancy side, it’s sometimes easy to undervalue your work. It’s the consultant’s dilemma: the strategic and creative work is awesome, motivating and makes you feel like you are fucking Einstein when presenting your slides to the client. But if you do that for long enough (and have a minimum of self-awareness) you will undoubtedly start to question the value you bring relative to the money you charge. That’s where dad came in again when I was talking about my projects: “This is really cool work! Companies and managers need this so much... they just don’t have time to think about it in their day-to-day job!" So, the lesson here is : consultancy is really important because it brings structure, external world view and specialism to a world of looking at next week’s sales performance with no proper time to think ahead with clear eyes.
FROM CEREALS TO CHOCOLATE TO COFFEE BEANS
I never knew it back then, but dad Ronaldo was giving me a propped MBA: Marketing Bullshit AdvancedDefence. I kept it to five lessons, but there are many more.
And what really impresses me is that the more I read, study, accumulate and share experience, the more true and important those learnings become.
Which makes me conclude two things, and with this, I get to the end of this article:
Experience is really important, mainly in marketing. Listen to them. Hire them. Pay them really well.
My dad is a fucking legend.
After a few more years as a teacher, consultant and a brief passage as Communications Secretary for the government of the Brazilian state Espírito Santo, Ronaldo is now retired. He is back to the small town where he grew up, taking care of my mum's father little coffee farm and having a great, relaxing time.
And guess what his current project is? Designing and building a new house for him and my mum to live... and playing the architect of it.
You deserve every single bit of this happiness. Thanks, dad.
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