Happy Sunday, Everyone!

I spent much of this past week in Chicago (it was surprisingly nice…) at ShopTalk Fall. While there, I had the opportunity to share the stage with two fantastic marketers - Nick Hasselberg of Every Man Jack and Lauren Price of COS - for a discussion on Winning Brand Expression Across Platforms. That session had an exchange about both the purpose of marketing and how it ought to be evaluated…which dovetailed nicely into the topic I wanted to write about this week: what is marketing supposed to do, anyway?

The second bit of inspiration came from the ShopTalk creative team themselves: the theme of the conference was “Retail Alchemy” - the blending of the art of human connection and creativity with the science of data and technology to create something both novel and extraordinary. Not only did their team do a masterful job of bringing the theme to life at the conference, the organization and level of attention to every detail was second-to-none. If you are in commerce and don’t attend, I’d highly recommend adding ShopTalk to your Spring 2026 itinerary now. The insights, connections and experiences are worth the price of admission.

And with that, let’s get to it.

One of the common misconceptions about marketing is that it is deterministic: do a certain set of things in a certain way, and you’ll get a certain outcome. That belief tends to be prevalent among more technical + financial types – and for good reason. Most functions those types of people understand are (at least, at some level) deterministic. Structure code in a specific way, and you’ll get a predictable output. Budget in a certain way, and you’ll get a consistent outcome.

Deterministic systems are clean. They’re predictable. They’re akin to physics - if I drop a bowling ball from 10’ up, it’s going to fall at a predetermined velocity and impact the ground with a specific amount of force. It doesn’t matter who drops the bowling ball, or whether they’re standing on a ladder or leaning out from a window or just 10’ tall - the result will be the same.

But marketing isn’t physics. It’s messy. It’s unpredictable. What worked for one brand last quarter has little-to-no bearing on what will work next quarter for another brand. We all see it every day: what works for one brand often falls flat for another.

Marketing is, in a word, chaotic. The same inputs, with tiny variation (the brand, the time, the product, anything) can and do produce wildly different outcomes.

In ancient times, that notion - small changes in the mix can have profound effects on the outcome - was at the heart of alchemy - the ancient pursuit of transforming base materials into precious ones (like gold). To the ancients, alchemy was more than a science - it was a philosophy. It was a belief system. It was both spiritual and scientific.

Fundamentally, the alchemists believed the magic was in the mix. The right elements, in the right balance, under the right conditions, could produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s how marketing works.

Great marketers blend elements that behave differently, on different timelines, with different outputs, all with the goal of creating something transformative. Each element in the reaction has a role to play, but the true magic comes from how each interacts with one another over time.

On some level, that’s a deeply unsettling thing to hear for CEOs, CFOs, Investors, etc. – because it sounds like voodoo or hokum (depending on your point of view). And, for a long time, I would have agreed with that assessment. But as I’ve done more and had the opportunity to work with far more brands, I’ve seen it and I’ve created it and I’ve come to believe it.

Marketing is part science and part art. Part deterministic and part chaotic.

Here’s the problem: most organizations don’t treat it that way. They try to measure everything with a single yardstick. ROAS. CAC. Leads. Whatever metric the board or CFO is currently obsessed with.

And when that happens, the outcome is almost always the same: bad.

During our conversation at ShopTalk, one of the things I mentioned was that marketing - fundamentally - is comprised of four elements, with four different roles to play in creating the magical outcome we’re seeking:

• Earth: create demand by building the foundation (brand, story, positioning).
• Air: capture demand already in motion (search, marketplaces, directories).
• Fire: convert demand into action (funnels, offers, CRO).
• Water: foster loyalty and community (retention, advocacy, compounding relationships).

Each one matters. Each one interacts with the others differently. And none of them should be measured by the same metric.

When you flatten the roles of marketing into one metric, you break the system. You cut brand spend because the ROAS/CAC doesn’t justify continued investment. You underfund retention because it’s assumed that email + SMS will always convert. You ignore demand capture on the assumption that people interested will just find your brand. You assume that your brand can capture the demand created by others indefinitely.

The right way to think about marketing isn’t as a single element, function, campaign or channel, but as an alchemical combination of all of them. The goal should never be to maximize any one element, but rather to balance the mix so that transformation can occur.

Earth = Create Demand

Earth is the starting point. The bedrock. In alchemy, Earth represents stability, permanence and inevitability. In marketing, Earth is where you create demand where none existed. It’s the ads, stories, and narratives that take a product people weren’t thinking about yesterday and make it impossible to ignore today.

But Earth on its own is inert. You can spend millions on campaigns that “reach” people and create demand, but do nothing to build your business (just ask Quibi, Zune + TiVO).

Like soil, Earth compounds too slowly to notice, until it's too powerful to overcome. You won’t see it influence a dashboard over a seven-day window or magically bring a bunch of customers to the door tomorrow - but over a long enough time horizon, its impact is massive: Nike spends less capturing demand because the brand is already embedded in culture. Apple can run minimalist ads because buyers arrive pre-sold. Tesla has unpaid evangelists because its identity creates belonging no referral bonus can buy.

In financial terms, Earth is your core holdings. Index funds. Long-duration bonds. They don’t produce spikes in net worth, but they compound relentlessly. They stabilize the portfolio. They’re the ballast that lets you take bigger risks elsewhere.

No one evaluates their S&P holdings by asking, “Did this double in value last week?” Yet boards routinely evaluate demand creation investments with that level of impatience. Sell your core holdings to chase meme stocks and you might get lucky once, but more often you’ll get wrecked. Cut demand gen spend to juice short-term “efficiency” and CAC will dip....but in 6 months, your top of funnel + demand will be in a world of hurt.

The right horizon for Earth isn’t days or weeks. It’s years and decades. The question isn’t “did this campaign generate X leads?” Rather, it’s something like: “Are more people actively seeking out our solution than before?”

From a KPIs standpoint, you can’t evaluate demand creation based on demand capture metrics. Instead, focus on ones that align with the ultimate goal:

• Share of Search: are more people looking for your solutions/products?
• Aided & Unaided Recall: do customers name you without prompting?
• Branded Traffic Growth: is direct demand growing?
• Pipeline Velocity: are prospects showing up earlier and more ready?
• Brand Lift Studies: is perception moving in the right direction?

When Earth is working, the cost of everything else — clicks, conversions, retention — quietly drops. The paradox of Earth is that its absence hurts more than its presence helps. Strong Earth makes every other channel more efficient. Weak Earth taxes every one.

Earth is the long, unsexy work of building inevitability. And inevitability is what makes growth scalable. Without Earth, Air has nothing to carry. Fire has nothing to ignite. Water has nothing to nourish.

Air = Capture Demand

Air is - in many ways - the opposite of earth. Where earth is steady and stable, Air is always in motion.

To the alchemists of old, air represented agility and adaptability. It was the invisible current that carried energy forward. In marketing, Air is how you capture demand already in motion — search, marketplaces, affiliates, review sites, recommendation engines.

If Earth is where you plant seeds, Air is the wind that carries them. As a result (in part) of your demand creation, your potential customers/clients are already in motion - searching, comparing, exploring. The role of demand capture is to deliver those interested prospects to your brand as effectively and efficiently as possible.

The mistake most companies make with Air is reducing it to a set of numbers on a spreadsheet. Too many marketers (especially performance marketers) treat demand capture exclusively as a game of decimals: how do we shave a few cents off each click, how do we reduce the CPA by 500 basis points, where can we attain fractional gains in impression share.

That kind of thinking misses the point.

Fundamentally, demand capture is about showing up in the exact moments people are already searching, comparing or deciding. It’s about being the answer when demand is in flight. To borrow a phrase from a (now) decade-old Google deck, it’s about “winning the moments that matter”

The metrics that matter aren’t complicated, but they’re often ignored:

• Impression Share: are you visible where the demand flows?
• Click Through Rate: when you show up, do they pick you over the alternative?
• Coverage: are you present across the queries, categories, and platforms that actually move your market?
• Efficiency (CPC/CPA): are you capturing demand at a sustainable cost?

The paradox of Air is that it looks one-off and transactional, when in reality, it compounds. Every captured click strengthens preference. Every conversion reinforces trust. And over time, that preference makes the next click cheaper, the next conversion faster, the next customer’s loyalty easier to win. Air becomes a flywheel (or a cyclone): presence drives clicks, clicks drive familiarity, familiarity drives efficiency.

Amazon is the perfect encapsulation of Air: they’ve invented virtually none of the products they sell….but they’re a trillion-dollar company (primarily) because they’ve mastered the art of capturing demand. When people start searching, comparing, or deciding, Amazon is omnipresent: the reviews, the product pages, the Prime benefits. They’ve gotten so good at predicting and redirecting intent that most of the time, they capture it before most other retailers know it’s there.

The challenge with air is that it is fleeting – either you capture it in the moment when it's in motion, or you lose it to someone else.

Fire = Convert Interest To Action

Fire is transformation. In alchemy, it’s the element that transmutes raw ingredients into something new. In marketing, Fire is where intent becomes action - the landing pages, offers, checkout flows, demos and conversations that transform curiosity into commitment.

If Earth is where you create demand and Air is how you capture it, Fire is the forge where it all pays off. Without Fire, the energy you’ve built dissipates.

The mistake most organizations make is reducing Fire to friction management.

It is - without a doubt - true that a broken checkout flow or a sluggish site will kill conversions. Too many form fields or terrible demos will send the demand you’ve created and captured elsewhere. But the true power of fire isn’t in removing friction; it’s in making the conversion feel both natural and inevitable.

The best-converting experiences don’t feel like funnels; they feel like natural progressions.

The headline reflects the search query. The offer matches the expectation. The lander makes the decision obvious. Each element - copy, creative, pricing, proof - feels aligned with the intent that brought the visitor there. Fire works when the leap from “interested” to “committed” feels effortless.

The metrics here are sharper and more immediate than Earth or Air:

• Conversion Rate (CVR): are you turning attention into action?
• Average Order Value (AOV): when people buy, are they spending more?
• Completion Rates: do customers finish the flows you start?
• Time-to-Conversion: how fast do they move from intent to outcome?
• CAC + Payback Period: how quickly are you recouping the cost of acquisition?

But numbers alone don’t capture the full story. Fire is psychological. It’s about trust, desire, momentum. A checkout button isn’t just a button — it’s a moment of judgment. Does the brand feel credible? Is the product worthy of the price? Is the offer compelling?

The paradox of Fire is that when it works, it looks simple. Great checkout design doesn’t feel like design at all - it just seems obvious. A powerful offer doesn’t feel manipulative; it appears like the right choice. That simplicity is engineered. It’s the product of iteration, testing and ruthless clarity about what your target customers actually want, need and value.

And here’s the risk: if Fire fails, everything else collapses. You can build demand with Earth and capture it with Air, but if you can’t convert, you’re running a charity for your competition. They’ll thank you for the awareness and attention you’ve generated while gleefully taking clients that should have been yours.

Think about Booking.com. Their site isn’t glamorous. But it’s engineered around Fire: urgency signals, social proof, transparent pricing, one-click paths. It’s not “beautiful,” but it’s brutally effective. It turns intent into bookings at scale.

The essence of fire is making the “yes” easy, fast and obvious. It is the ignition point where interest is transformed into action.

Water = Foster Loyalty & Community

Water is renewal.

To the ancient alchemists, water represented flow, adaptability and the ability to sustain life. In marketing, Water is where you foster loyalty, retention and community - turning one-time buyers into repeat customers, and customers into loyal advocates.

If Earth builds awareness, Air captures intent and Fire sparks transformation, Water keeps the system alive and growing.

Yet, too many brands treat it as an afterthought. They pour endless budgets into acquisition, but leave retention to the intern or whatever their ESP’s default template spits out.

To be honest, it’s pure, unadulterated insanity.

Acquiring a customer is the most expensive thing most brands do. Keeping a customer/client is among the most profitable. Joe Jaffe was mocked back in 2013 when he coined the phrase “retention is the new acquisition” – but time has proven him wise. While the costs of acquisition have skyrocketed in virtually every industry, the costs of retention have remained surprisingly reasonable.

That means retention - water - is where margins expand and where true competitive moats are built.

One of the things that stood out to me while talking to brands + tech platforms at ShopTalk was how misunderstood loyalty and community is among both executives and solution providers. So many conversations focused on how they can push more – more upsells, more cross-sells, more requests, on more devices - to your customers.

At the risk of sounding crass, virtually every solution provider treated retention like an extraction mechanism, engineered to separate your customers from their money as efficiently as possible.

That is the polar opposite of water’s role.

Water should create gravity - the pull that keeps people coming back, engaging and evangelizing. Communities don’t form around discounts. Loyalty isn’t earned through generic nurture flows or bombarding inboxes until your customers can’t take it any longer.

Retention is the inevitable result of showing your customers care, love, attention and respect.

It’s really that simple. Add value for your customers. Treat emailing them (or texting them) as a privilege, not a right. Help them get the most from your solution. And in return, they’ll stick with you. They’ll tell (and sell) their friends and colleagues. They’ll buy more.

Retention, loyalty & community are not instantaneous processes - they take time. Evaluate them as such:

• Retention Rate: are customers sticking around longer?
• Lifetime Value (LTV): is each customer worth more over their relationship with you?
• Churn Rate: are fewer people leaving, canceling, or disengaging?
• Referral & Advocacy: are customers recruiting others into the fold?
• NPS or CSAT: are you building satisfaction that translates into word-of-mouth?

The paradox of Water is that it doesn’t seem remarkable, but it quietly builds empires. Most “growth hacks” are just clever ways of buying time. Water is how you build staying power.

Netflix isn’t dominant because of its signup funnel or its demand creation; it’s dominant because subscribers stick around. Apple isn’t one of the most valuable companies on the planet because of one campaign or product, but rather because they’ve created such a strong community around their products that wait lists are filled the instant a new product is announced.

For the brands that treat retention and loyalty like an exercise in extraction, acquisition becomes the Sisyphean task of filling a bucket with no bottom: every customer you acquire slips away (usually into the hands of your competitor).

My favorite case study in the importance of water is Peloton: their early growth was explosive - earth, air & fire all working together to create stunning growth. But none of that mattered when their annual churn rate eclipsed 90% (yes, 90%) back in 2022 - the stock went into free fall from the $150s in 2021 to $2.40 in 2024, and still has not recovered (currently $8.27).

Contrast that with brands like Patagonia or Harley-Davidson, where loyalty runs so deep, customers willingly become evangelists who defend the brand as if it’s part of their identity.

Building retention isn’t glamorous. It’s not a Super Bowl ad or a viral TikTok. It’s not going to win you awards or dazzle on the speaking circuit (trust me on that one). It’s the patient, thankless, boring work of building belonging. It’s making sure that when a customer/client says “yes” once, they have a hundred reasons to say “yes” again and again and again.

Without water, every sale is a one-off. With it, your brand flourishes. Customers don’t just buy. They stay. They tell others. They defend you when critics appear. Water sustains the ecosystem.

Aether = Brand

The ancients believed in a fifth element, Aether - the invisible substance that bound the others together, filled the space between things and gave coherence to the cosmos.

In marketing, Brand is Aether. It’s not just another channel or tactic. It’s the force that animates earth, lifts air, fuels fire and deepens water. Without brand, the other elements are disconnected, even contradictory; with it, they combine in magical ways to produce astounding results.

Here’s the truth most marketers avoid: you can run paid search without a brand, but it will be expensive and forgettable. You can build a remarkable post-click experience without a brand, but conversions will be fragile. You can launch a loyalty program without a brand, but it will feel like bribery or extortion (depending on which platform/tech partner you choose).

Brand is the magical ingredient.

It makes every other part of the mix work harder, cheaper and longer.

The mistake most CMOs make is treating brand as if it is Earth - a bucket of demand-creation spend. That reduces it into awareness campaigns + brand plays.

The reality? Aether is ambient. It’s everywhere.

It shows up in trust, preference, conversion, credibility, belonging. It’s why Nike spends less to capture clicks, why Apple commands premium pricing with minimalist ads (and disappointing updates), why legions of Swifties defend Taylor as if she’s their sister.

Put another way, Aether is near-impossible to see, but its effect is unmistakable:

• Does Earth take hold faster? A strong brand makes awareness campaigns stick
• Does Air get cheaper? A strong brand raises CTRs + lowers CPCs
• Does Fire burn hotter? A strong brand increases CVR, reduces objections and accelerates decision-making
• Does Water flow deeper? A strong brand extends retention, lowers churn and builds communities instead of relying on coupons

The paradox of Aether is that it’s invisible until it’s gone. Companies only realize its value when they strip brand investment to chase “efficiency,” then wonder why demand capture gets more expensive, conversion rates falter and their loyalty/retention goes the way of Peloton.

The ancient Greeks referred to aether as the quintessence - the unseen force that makes alchemy possible. It’s what makes earth productive, air efficient, fire effective, and water enduring. That’s what brand is to marketing - it’s the enabling layer for alchemy.

The challenge is that Aether moves slowly. It compounds over years and decades, not days or weeks. That reality is why it's (generally) one of the first things to arrive on the chopping block when budgets tighten. But strip it out, and the whole system falls apart.

Blending the Elements = Portfolio Theory

Alchemy was never about a single element; it is about combining all of them in the right way, at the right time, to create something magical.

Marketing works the same way.

No single channel or tactic delivers sustainable growth in isolation. The system only works when the elements complement and reinforce one another.

• Earth is the foundation: the stories and positioning that make your brand difficult to ignore
• Air is the current: the channels that capture intent already in motion
• Fire is the ignition: the experiences and offers that turn curiosity into action
• Water is the renewal: the loyalty and community that keep your customers delighted + coming back
• Aether is brand: the invisible force that makes every other element stronger and more effective

The mistake most CMOs (and CEOs + CFOs) make is trying to reduce the entire alchemical process into a single number or metric – rather than evaluating each element individually alongside the whole.

That’s like evaluating your brand story through the same lens as a landing page or performance creative, or a loyalty program by the same metrics as a search campaign.

It misses the point.

And when you do it, the inevitable outcome is skewing the entire system toward one element, rather than maintaining a balance between all five.

None of this means that each element should not be evaluated (it should!), or that balance is equivalent to equality (it sure isn’t), or that once you find the right balance, your work is done (far from it). Don’t mistake anything here for an argument that you shouldn’t cut channels or tactics that aren’t performing the job they have to do, based on the metrics relevant to that role.

Rather, when a channel, tactic or creative inside an element isn’t performing, the answer isn’t to abandon the element altogether. That’s like saying “our search ads aren’t working, so demand capture doesn’t matter” or “our retention emails suck, so loyalty is irrelevant.”

That’s both wrong and incoherent.

The underperformance is a signal that what you’re doing within that element isn’t working. Your job then is to refine, adjust and re-engineer the execution - not to remove the element from the system.The subtle but crucial distinction: you cut bad tactics, not the role itself.

The beauty of alchemy is that it is a dynamic, chaotic system – just because you do the same things that you did before, does not entail that you’ll get the same results that you achieved previously.

The right mix is always shifting - and the marketers who find it won’t be the ones chasing shiny objects or reducing everything to ROAS; they’ll be the ones who focus on the whole.

The magic isn’t in reducing marketing to a deterministic process or a single number; it’s in finding the right combination of elements for your brand at each moment. It’s an equation that can never be solved, which is (if you think about it) why it’s so damn fun and interesting.

At the end of the day, marketing isn’t deterministic. There’s no generalized, closed form solution, no set of constants, no guarantee that repeating yesterday’s playbook will deliver tomorrow’s results.

It’s chaotic.

And yet, like alchemy, it holds the possibility of transformation when the right elements combine under the right conditions.

Every element has a role to play and different signals to watch. Each needs a different time horizon. None should be judged by the same metric.

The mistake is pretending marketing can be flattened into one number: ROAS, CAC, leads, whatever happens to be in vogue with the powers-that-be.

That’s not a strategy. That’s delusion or theater (or maybe both). And it almost always leads to imbalance - cutting demand gen to chase efficiency, underfunding retention because it’s quiet, ignoring conversion until it’s too late, assuming demand capture will always “just work” because it has in the past.

The truth is both simpler and more difficult: marketing is alchemy.

The work is in balancing the elements and knowing that no single campaign, channel or tactic is the answer, but that together, they can create outcomes bigger than the sum of their parts.

That’s what separates the brands that endure from the ones that flame out. Not the tools. Not the hacks. Not the dashboards. The discipline of respecting the role each element plays and managing the combination through an evaluation of the performance of each one.

And when the inevitable question comes - “What’s our marketing strategy?” - you’ll have an answer that isn’t a deck or a demo, but a system. One that makes your brand harder to ignore, easier to find, more compelling to act on and stickier once customers are in.

That’s the real magic. That’s marketing alchemy.

Enjoy the week ahead.

Cheers,

Sam

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