Nino Carvalho: More Marketing, Less Guru
A History of Marketing / Episode 18This week, I'm thrilled to welcome Nino Carvalho, a professor, author, and marketing consultant based in Portugal.I actually discovered Carvalho and his work thanks to a podcast listener who brought him to my attention via a YouTube comment. After connecting with Nino and reading translations of his publications (he primarily writes in Portuguese), he has become an inspiration for me and my exploration into marketing history.Nino stands out as one of the few marketing educators I've encountered who passionately emphasizes the importance of marketing history in his teaching.Our conversation is packed with so much material, it’s like three episodes rolled into one. I'm especially grateful for this conversation; since Nino primarily creates content in his native Portuguese, there aren't many long-form English-language discussions like this one available.Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / YouTube PodcastsWe kick things off with Nino's book, Mais Marketing, Menos Guru, which translates to “More Marketing, Less Guru.” We chat about the history of so-called "marketing gurus" and how we should critically consider their role in shaping how people think about and practice marketing.From there, journey through marketing history in the Lusosphere, the Portuguese-speaking world. We start by examining how Portugal's early commercial and trade history laid the groundwork for early forms of business schools. Then, we fast-forward to the 20th century to uncover how marketing education emerged in Brazil during the Cold War and in Portugal following the end of the Estado Novo dictatorship.Throughout our conversation, Nino shares his valuable perspective on how learning marketing history can enhance a marketer's skills and strategic abilities. He even offers me a few tips on how to make marketing history more engaging for marketing students. (Fingers crossed that I can put these to work!)This episode is a bit longer than usual, but I'm sure you'll find it interesting throughout. I certainly did.So, without further ado, here's my conversation with Nino Carvalho.Note - I use an AI tool to transcribe the audio of my conversations to text. I check the output but it’s possible there are mistakes I missed. I have lightly edited parts of this transcript for clarity.The Spark: What Inspired Nino to Teach Marketing Through a Historical LensAndrew Mitrak: Nino Carvalho, welcome to A History of Marketing.Nino Carvalho: Thank you very much, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here.Andrew Mitrak: I'm so excited for this conversation. We have a lot to cover. I want to start with your book, which is in Portuguese, Mais Marketing, Menos Guru, or More Marketing, Less Guru. I love the title of this book. This is one of the few popular marketing books I've come across that talks about the importance of marketing history. What first ignited your passion for marketing history?Nino Carvalho: Well, I think it was like a spark that suddenly started. It sounds like a very emotional thing. I believe I was always curious about the history of things in general. When I started working with marketing and studying marketing, especially in the digital field where many new professionals and their digital gurus took things from the past and kind of reinvented the wheel themselves to have a new package and try to sell that to newbies and people who are just starting to study digital. So that, I think, took me on a journey to go deeper into what those concepts, those theories, or the practices they were talking about were all about, because it didn't sound quite reliable. So this was like a very instrumental motivation.However, during the search for those things and looking for the truth or the beginning, the origins of some concepts, I think we start discovering a lot of new things about marketing. Because marketing is so connected to society, you also start learning about society in general, other countries' histories, other cultures' histories. So, I think it's something that will either strike you straight away or not because it's very strong. And I think this motivates us to keep learning more about the past of our discipline. Of course, I also noticed that the more I learned about the past, the better my classes and my professional work as a consultant were as well. So, it was like finding my own personal Holy Grail, in a way.Defining the Guru: Marketer vs. Self-PromoterAndrew Mitrak: So we're going to talk a lot more about marketing history and everything you found, including your Holy Grail. But first, going back to the title of the book. The title is More Marketing, Less Guru. I think we've all seen marketing gurus on the internet and whatnot, but I'm wondering how you would distinguish a marketer from a guru.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, this is interesting because by studying our discipline, I found out that there will be different interpretations. For instance, what we in Portugal or in Brazil would understand about a guru is different from how North Americans normally would. So you say that Kotler is a very important marketing guru, and this is a positive thing. It's a positive adjective. When you use that in our markets, probably even in Europe, I think, but surely in Brazil and in Portugal, this has a more negative connotation.So, there will be important, positively speaking, marketing gurus such as Kotler, Peter Drucker, and so on. But I would say that the negative side of the word refers to those professionals who have a lot of fireworks, and everything seems so easy and magical. They try to give very simple solutions to very complex things. This is very captivating because, of course, people love to have simple solutions to complex issues in their lives. So, when I mention gurus, it's that negative aspect of people who have their own dogmas. They are mostly very superficial, and they are quite ignorant, to be honest, about things related to marketing and management, and so on. So that's the kind of professional I want to put on one side, and other gurus such as Kotler or very studious and hardworking professionals on the other side.Andrew Mitrak: That's right. Yeah, I understood, even though I'm an English speaker, what was meant by the translation. I think this idea of somebody who is almost self-aggrandizing or promoting themselves more than they are promoting the substance of marketing. And then it's almost more about this very high-level view where they appear to be smart, and their posts on LinkedIn and Twitter and all these things make them appear to be very concise and actionable. But then you look into the details, and you're like, that doesn't really make sense. That doesn't really pass muster.The Dangers of Oversimplifying Marketing AdviceNino Carvalho: One of the main things is that those gurus try to sell one-size-fits-all solutions. That's pretty much against marketing because we talk about how important it is for us to prioritize, segment, and make very data-driven decisions, and to differentiate ourselves and our companies from competitors. So differentiation is key. On the other side, those people think that a one-size-fits-all solution will fit everyone.There are other issues as well. For instance, perhaps a problem that you, Andrew, solved in your own professional environment in the US with the companies you're used to working with, might serve well for similar contingencies. However, once you export it to Europe or to small companies even in the US, I'm not so sure. So, we need to take that into consideration, especially now when you see a very turbulent, very unstable, and unpredictable environment out there.Early Marketing Gurus: From Claude Hopkins to TodayAndrew Mitrak: I want to ask about the history of marketing gurus. When did they first emerge? Have they always existed as long as marketing, advertising, and sales have existed? Has this type of person always been around, or did they emerge later? Do you have any favorite examples of early marketing gurus?Nino Carvalho: So, looking at those negative examples, I honestly believe that they were always there, throughout history. I was never able to actually find out the primary source. But you have, in advertisement and sales, very old gurus in our history. For instance, especially in the beginnings of the last century, because of the connection with advertisement, sales, and those manuals that people were writing at almost industrial speed, just producing things, and everyone had their own manual, and so on. So, you do have quite a lot of examples back then.For instance, one of the guys that, up until today, is used as a reference by newer gurus is Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins, one of the things that we should be thanking him very honestly for, is because of so many bad things he did with marketing and with a company he had with an associate, a partner. They sold medicine. So, they sold miraculous medicines that cured everything. Because of that, there was a journalist in the US who started to dig into that story of a miraculous medicine and, of course, found out that it was a hoax; people were dying. This investigative, journalistic work was the starting point for a number of discussions in the US government that turned out to be the first regulatory aspects of communicating and selling to the health and medicine industry. So, this is a very strong example.Note: View my conversation with Mark Tungate for more context on this.Andrew Mitrak: I want to share more for listeners about who Claude Hopkins is because he's a great first example. He wrote this book called Scientific Advertising, and it's still somewhat widely regarded. The medicines, the 'miraculous'—I love that word you're using—often we might call them snake oil salesmen, or these patent medicines that are really of no value to anybody. These magical elixirs. We can almost laugh about them today, but that was really dark. It's selling people hope and cures, and it's doing nothing for them, for their illnesses. Medicine, in general, has come a long way, but this certainly wasn't helping. So, it's interesting to me that Claude Hopkins is somebody you cite, and he dresses himself up as a scientist. He calls it Scientific Advertising, which is almost kind of a red flag when you look at who might be a guru.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, and honestly, Andrew, they are still using this "science" sort of cover up until today. A couple of days ago, this weekend, I was browsing and talking to my students, and there was a new guru selling a "social media scientist" role, which was for someone to be prepared to post and edit copy, like those very basic operational things, calling them a scientist.Hopkins and Ogilvy: Gurus with Important ContributionsNino Carvalho: However, most of those gurus, such as Claude Hopkins, and I would also mention David Ogilvy—this could be a surprise to most people—but those guys had some important contributions. Claude Hopkins wrote about advertisement techniques that we still use today, such as A/B testing, using coupons to spread the word, writing different regular mail (today we use email or WhatsApp messages, whatever). So, they had nice initiatives. However, there are a lot of things that we should be questioning as well. David Ogilvy, for instance, again, had a number of positive examples. However, he, and I think advertisement agencies in general, tend to have this movement of taking an important yet complex concept and trying to package it in a way that is very easy for their own customers to consume, which sometimes are big companies. So things spread very fast. David Ogilvy, for instance, took a very important academic paper from the 50s, 1955, where two guys were proposing their view of what would be, years after that, the branding area. So they started to discuss branding. David Ogilvy read that in the Harvard Business Review paper, kind of gave it his own packaging, and then sold this to companies, professional markets. Up until today, we have this kind of war between branding and marketing.So, I think that we should learn more about those, let's say, "dark side of the force" gurus, because, yes, they may have some good contributions for us to think about and to study. But we cannot forget some of the damage that they will kind of leave, those scars, in our area. So it's important for us to know and to know how to balance.Andrew Mitrak: That's a really good point. I personally have been inspired by David Ogilvy. His were like some of the first books I read that were kind of historical, in that they were written more than 40 years ago; they covered a time well before digital marketing. And there was a lot of good advice, or there's a lot of—he's very witty, very memorable. But there are these sort of oversimplifications. Like he says, "Always print on a white background with dark text and never invert the two." And, well, is that really true all the time? I've had a client in the past when I was consulting who had read a David Ogilvy book, and he always insisted on his logo being really large on everything on his website and every little thing. It's like, "Oh, David Ogilvy says my logo has to be large." I don't even know if Ogilvy actually said that, but he's listened to this guru and he accepts it as a truism with no context and no nuance, which is kind of a dangerous thing to do. You want to take the good, but also make sure that, hey, it doesn't necessarily apply to every single scenario.Napoleon Hill & the "Think and Grow Rich" ParadoxNino Carvalho: No, and I think that's the big issue because those gurus, some of them, like Claude Hopkins and Ogilvy, still have millions of followers and readers and believers. So, they are very influential. People will continue, such as Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill is one of the biggest hoaxes in the whole history of management or whatever you can think about. Even Peter Drucker. Peter Drucker has very important, several important contributions to marketing. I think Peter Drucker is one of the guys responsible for popularizing marketing, making it more popular amongst smaller companies. So, this is very important to marketing. However, he also took those important and perhaps sometimes complex theories in marketing and management, and even his own consultants worked with other companies. The solutions they proposed to huge companies, he said, "Okay, so now you just follow those three steps that I did with GM or IBM, and you can do the same in your laundry like in the corner here in your neighborhood." So, we need to take this very carefully.Andrew Mitrak: That's right. I think what's interesting also is you mentioned Napoleon Hill, and he wrote this book called Think and Grow Rich. And of course, that's also another red flag. Think and Grow Rich sounds like you're promising me a lot for very little effort. But I was listening to this interview with—are you familiar with Banana Republic? You'll see it in malls and stuff. I was listening to an interview with Max Ziegler, who founded Banana Republic, and I was shocked to hear he founded it because he was directly inspired by Napoleon Hill. That was his Bible that he followed. And I'm like, "Oh, Napoleon Hill, he always kind of seems like a guru," and I didn't ever really think to take him that seriously. But here's this person who founded this really large company who was inspired by him. So, it's this weird tension that gurus could be a little dangerous, they could be simplistic, they can lack nuance, they can have all these flaws, but they can also still have good to them. They can inspire people to do things. I guess you kind of have to take a balanced view of them and take them in context, that they're not either all good or all bad. They can have good things, and they can also have things that are overly simplistic as well.Nino Carvalho: I think there are two things. I fully agree with you. One thing is, sometimes it could be more difficult for, let's say, newbies in marketing to kind of separate what is what. So, this is something we should be paying attention to. The other thing is, more recently, those gurus, because of digital marketing, have access to educate, so they give their courses and hypnotic content to millions and millions of people. This is also an issue because when you have this power, such as the internet, to talk to and to influence so many people, you should be thinking very carefully about your own responsibility as an educator. So, if I just say, "Listen, I have this launch formula, and you just follow these steps, it doesn't matter even if you have a product or even an idea, just jump in, and I'll teach you and I'll guide you, and you will have good results." This is dangerous. So, I think we should be very careful, especially with this educational aspect of it. This is, at least in Brazil, I can say that because of the deficit, the difference in educational level, you cannot expect that the majority of the population, by hearing those gurus, will have the means to make this contrast between what makes sense and what is completely nonsense.Connecting Past to Present: Making Marketing History TangibleAndrew Mitrak: This is a good transition because you're talking about the responsibility of marketing educators, and you are a marketing educator. You are a professor, an author, a speaker. And also, as you're teaching people, you're also teaching about marketing history. When you teach marketing history and introduce—you're teaching a marketing class and you're including historical examples—how far back in history do you go? What are the earliest dates? What are the earliest milestones and historical artifacts that you reference when you teach?Nino Carvalho: This will depend. It will depend because I like, even if it's briefly, to go back to the first exchanges, like seven or eight thousand years ago. Just to talk about how, if you put marketing under a microscope, probably the smallest particle of our discipline will be "exchange." Then, with this, I try to bring in how marketing is connected to commerce. Therefore, the more cities and cultures develop and evolve, commerce also evolved with them, and then marketing was there as well.But I try to put that in a very brief space, bringing in some curiosities, such as talking about how you can see the same theories behind customer behavior that you see in major sports events today. You can also see those references in gladiators' games in ancient Greece, like organized groups cheering for different opponents in that fight or in that battle. You could have merchandising just like today, and you also had it in the gladiators' games several thousand years ago. So, I also make those bridges to kind of engage them via those curiosities. However, I think it becomes more tangible to them when you bring examples from the past and show them how those things are so important nowadays.“Marketing” in Ancient MarketplacesFor instance, in very old markets, such as in Greece or in old Rome, in ancient Rome, there was a group of merchants who got together in an organized way to complain to the local government. They said, "Listen, we have a huge market here, people from all over the known world come here to exchange, to sell, to buy. But we are selling our stuff, and we have people here dealing with meat. So they are killing pigs, they are chopping the heads off chickens, everything very close to where I sell my clothes or my jewelry." So, they made a movement for these people to go away to a different part of the city, to have their markets, the meat markets, separated because of the aspect of the smell, of the whole atmosphere. So, we work today with sensory marketing, for instance, concerning sounds, smell. Those bridges also make a difference. And I also think it's interesting to students when, of course, they connect their own history to our marketing history. So in our case, Brazil and Portugal's history, and also always making this kind of link with North American marketing history because it's the hegemonic view. It's important for us to have that in context so we can understand better how marketing works.Andrew Mitrak: I love this example of the merchants who organized in ancient Greece, ancient Rome, a very long time ago, to change where they sell. I think of how you could tie that to a current example; it sounds a lot like if there's a social media platform that has hate speech or violent images or things, you don't want to advertise your product right next to that. That could be—you don't want your product associated with that. It kind of strikes me as somewhat similar, where you don't want to be selling jewelry or textiles where it smells like meat or people are seeing animal blood, and it's upsetting. So it seems like there's just a connection between those two.The Etymology and Evolution of the Word "Marketing" ItselfAndrew Mitrak: In our email exchange prior to this, you shared a marketing manual that dates from 1767, and it uses "marketing" in the context of a shopper visiting a market to purchase things. Your book also highlights that the first use of, quote, "marketing" dates all the way back to 1561. So, when you teach, do you teach about the evolution of the word "marketing" itself, and how do you tend to describe the evolution of the word "marketing"?Nino Carvalho: This is something that I think is very important because, even today, I believe one of the main things that prevents us from developing, from evolving in our own discipline—either in the academic way or in the practical environment, the market—is that there's no consensus about what marketing is. So, you will see, you hear people in the streets say that marketing is advertisement, sales—those are very common. But sometimes even marketing is kind of a lie. So, "Nino, do you believe in Andrew, or are the things he's saying actually true, or is it just marketing?" "I know he's just very good at marketing." So, he's a guy who knows how to influence. This is an issue. So, I think it's important for us to understand that there's a history behind it.However, if you go to people who write about marketing online, several of them do say that marketing is a verb because you have the "ing" part, the suffix "ing," behind it. So it's a verb, it's continuous, so it represents movement, and so on. Interestingly enough, those people are repeating something that I see where they are coming from, but it's not a verb. It was a verb in the past. So, yes, "marketing" in 1561—this is a reference from the Oxford Dictionary, so that's the one I use—they say that a lawyer in the UK, when translating a piece (and I never found whatever piece this was) from French, he chose to write "marketing" translating something, and I never found out what this "something" was.However, marketing for centuries was indeed—it has the meaning of buying and selling in a market. That was why it was a verb. And you can see, I sent you a couple, you can see some very old books from the 1800s, perhaps even a bit older, using the word "marketing" just trying to make it sound like "buying the marketing," "selling on the marketing," or "preparing your product to be purchased" or "to sell your product," and so on. This continued until the beginning of the last century, so the 1900s, when this guy, one of our grandfathers in marketing—so Kotler is our father, or one of the fathers, we had, we have grandfathers.So, Ralph Starr Butler, probably in 1911—and this is probably because I don't think anyone, and there are people looking for this Holy Grail again, so like the very first use of the word "marketing" as a noun. So, Ralph Starr Butler, he mentioned in a letter to another historian, a marketing historian, that he needed to conceive a course for the University of Wisconsin, a course that mixed promotion, sales, distribution, and he was trying to figure out a title for this course. Then "marketing" came to his mind, and then he started using "marketing" since then. In 1914, he eventually published a book, it was like a textbook used in correspondence courses in the US, and probably he is the father who baptized our word as a substantive.However, the concept continued to change. We had some very important changes in the word "marketing," such as after we have "marketing" as a noun in the beginning of the last century, in the 60s, especially in 1960, we were presented with the Four Ps, the marketing mix. So, you had since then a different understanding of marketing. A few years later, 1969, with "broadening the concept of marketing," again, you broadened the concept of marketing. Then, services marketing, relationship marketing, branding, so, digital marketing nowadays. We keep changing the concept, it keeps evolving, which is great. But it's important for us to be very—I would say that as a professor, not with my clients in terms of as a consultant, but as a professor, I am very orthodox about those concepts because we, at least we who are marketing professionals or marketing students or professors, we need to be very demanding about what those words really mean. Because this, if in our own midst, in our own métier, we do not have our own agreement about those concepts, this prevents us from developing. So I think this is an issue.Andrew Mitrak: I think this is so important because as marketing professionals, we need to be very specific about our language. Any campaign we're doing, any strategy we're writing, you need to be very precise with your language. And if you're not even precise about the word "marketing" itself, it just seems like we kind of need to follow our own instructions there. So, thanks for that history.Marketing in the Lusosphere: Portugal's Commercial FoundationsAndrew Mitrak: I want to shift to something you mentioned earlier, which is the history of Brazilian and Portuguese marketing. You are Brazilian, and you primarily educate in the Portuguese language. This is a topic that I just haven't discussed on this podcast very much yet, and I'm grateful that you're here so we can discuss how marketing evolved in the Lusosphere. When you were educating marketers, either in Brazil or in Portugal, where do you typically begin as far as connections to their own marketing history?Nino Carvalho: This is very interesting, Andrew, because marketing, as you know, how it was kind of "born" in different countries or markets will differ. So, we use North American marketing because of the importance it has throughout not only the marketing world but the business world in general, in the whole world, of course. But it's interesting for us to see those particularities in different countries. So, if I want to really go to the origins of marketing in the Lusosphere, of course, I would start with Portugal, as Brazil was a colony, a former colony of Portugal.This actually, Andrew, was the reason I decided to dedicate and kind of invest myself in studying the history of marketing. It was the following premise: I thought, okay, so I'm learning by reading about the history of marketing in the US, in the UK, for instance, that marketing is kind of one developed stage in the commercial history of that country. So commerce will start to evolve, evolve, evolve. At some point, marketing will be able to appear as a science, and so on. So, if that was right, there should be some history in Portugal because of the commercial history that Portugal had several centuries ago—Portugal, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and so on. So, that was my motivation. And I was right. I was right, but I never would have been able to guess the whole history.The thing is, it's very interesting because in the mid-1700s, so in the 18th century, Portugal was kind of feeling they were losing their global power. You had, in the UK, several discussions about the future of the economy, and Adam Smith in 1776 would publish the milestone of our current liberal economy. Portugal was kind of feeling aside, left behind. And they were, a few years before that, a huge global potency in terms of commerce and discoveries, and so on. Because of that, the king, King José, what he did back then was to start exchanging some ideas with a, let's say, a sort of ambassador, a Portuguese ambassador in the UK. This guy was looking at, probably in the pubs, people drinking their whiskeys and talking about Adam Smith, the future of the economy, and so on. You had the commercial class with more money, so buying political power, getting closer to the noble people, to the church as well.So, this guy, his name was Sebastião. Sebastião wrote to the king here in Portugal saying, "Listen, King," like a WhatsApp message, "Listen, King, that concerned me. Something like that is scary. Things here, they are not looking great. We need to think about having our own managers and commercial cast as well because this will change. Mercantilism is going down the drain. We need to move on to the future of times," and so on. So, King José invited Sebastião to come back to Portugal and titled him. He gave him the title of Marquês, Marquis probably in English, isn't it? So, he was a very important figure in Portuguese history. Marquês de Pombal is his name. He was a dictator, to be honest, Marquês de Pombal, but he invested a lot in kind of revolutionizing the educational system in Portugal. With that, they created, Marquês de Pombal and King José, they created the first commercial school, the first public commercial school in the world. So, this was very important in marketing. They, like, students learned what was important for marketers back then, such as the difference of laws in different countries, weights, different measures, the ways of measuring and weighting things, exchange, how to write commercial letters, and so on. So, that's the very origin of marketing in the Lusosphere.Andrew Mitrak: Was this called the Aula do Comércio?Nino Carvalho: Aula do Comércio, yeah. It's like, in the sense, if I were to translate it, it's like "Commerce School." That was the main thing. It was a technical school. It's not a university, but it taught some profession, some trade. People learned some trade.Andrew Mitrak: Your book also, I think, cited that they taught things like bookkeeping, accounting, and double entry, which are foundational to having businesses today. And here it was, being taught to the commercial class back in the 1750s.Nino Carvalho: Yeah, especially Andrew, because up until then, this commercial knowledge was pretty much masters and apprentices, like the medieval guilds several years before. So, they kind of made this in a more formal, more structured way. So you start to have more commercial managers. And the students, they would become managers of the Portuguese companies. That was the main goal: to prepare them to manage Portuguese and, of course, private commerces and companies back then.Andrew Mitrak: Aula do Comércio, seemingly a lot of things like a business school. Business schools teach things like accounting as well. And all the things to make you a business manager were established in Lisbon as the first state-sponsored school. So it just really seems like a very important milestone that came out of Portugal.Nino Carvalho: You are very right. And actually, if you look at the genealogy of Aula do Comércio, they kept alive, they changed their names, then they merged with other schools. But they are still alive today. The name of the school nowadays is ISEG, which is an acronym for Institute, like Superior Institute of Economy and Management, something like that. And they teach marketing and management. Aula do Comércio also exported this educational system to the colony in Brazil. So, Aula do Comércio was present in three different states and cities in Brazil, and of course, was also very important to fast-track the whole background for commercial managers and business people in Brazil as well. So, this was, of course, 300 years ago, almost.So, jumping a bit more into the future, more recently, so I think like in the 30s, Portugal had a dictatorship here, a military dictatorship. One of the things they did was to isolate Portugal from other countries, especially the US. There were some countries that they liked less, so the US, UK. So they were very isolated. It was forbidden in the country for several years, from the 30s to the 70s, it was forbidden, for instance, even to use foreign words. So, you couldn't even write or say "marketing" anywhere. This was, of course, very damaging to the development of marketing and the whole market scenario, the ecosystem here in Portugal. So, only once the dictatorship came to an end in 1974, so a few dozen years ago, what they did was they started to gradually, very slowly, be more open to business in general, the country. So in '86, Portugal joined the European community, and this helped a lot. So, more international companies, and with more international companies, you need to have better professionals in the market, and so on. So, only in 1984, so pretty much 40 years ago, there was the first actual marketing course here in Portugal. The name of the school is IPAM, which is the Marketing Management Portuguese Institute. I give classes there. I'm a professor there, and of course, I'm very happy to teach and to tell students that history. I think they would be proud. So, they were the first course here in Portugal. And this was 30 years after marketing started in Brazil. And of course, if you like, I also can talk a bit about the Brazilian side of the history.Fernando Pessoa: Poet, Writer, and …Marketer?Andrew Mitrak: Yes, we will. Let's jump to Brazil in just a moment. But one other individual I wanted to highlight is that your book has a chapter on Fernando Pessoa. I read a translation of this book, and it translated to Poet, Writer, and …Marketer?. Could you share who Fernando Pessoa was for listeners who aren't familiar with him and what his relationship was to marketing in Portugal?Nino Carvalho: Fernando Pessoa, probably—of course, I'm not an expert in this—but probably is the most important and well-known Portuguese, specifically from Portugal in this case, but probably in the Portuguese language, writer and poet. So, he's actually extremely important, and he wrote using a number of different names. So, you see Fernando Pessoa in several different personalities writing poems and texts, and so on. Fernando Pessoa was educated in a technical school as well, a technical commerce school in South Africa, in the late 19th century and the beginning of the last century. So, when he was a young person, his high school was pretty much a commerce school in South Africa. South Africa was a colony of the UK. So, he knew, of course, English probably as well as his Portuguese, I would say so. And probably he had contact with English commercial literature, which probably also came from the US.So, I believe in this link, and this is something that I'm trying to kind of dig into much further with a colleague who is a history of arts professor, because I believe that Fernando Pessoa had contact with the sales and advertisement literature in the US in the beginning of the last century, such as Claude Hopkins. Because when he got back to Portugal, he had to work in an accounting office to earn his bread every month. Just to kind of add up to his salary, he did some kind of freelancer jobs, such as producing advertisements and slogans for companies here in Portugal. So, he did the first ever slogan for Coca-Cola in Portugal. I wouldn't be able to translate it, but it was pretty much, "At first, it's strange, but then you get in love with that." Something, just to say that the taste was a bit different—soft drink in the late 20s, 1920s—but then you get kind of crazy about it. So, this was the first slogan for Coca-Cola. He wrote a lot about commerce, management, and the practice of marketing in the 20s and the 30s as well. This was very common both in Portugal and in Brazil. Several well-renowned writers and poets today, they had to do those freelancer jobs as advertising or salespersons just to pay their bills. So, you see a number of cases of very famous writers who also produced several slogans and advertising pieces back then.Andrew Mitrak: That's an amazing story. I'm always interested to see where marketing and advertisements can also support the arts. You see a lot of film directors and such who got their start doing commercials. Here you have a renowned, beloved poet and author who also was supported by commercial activities like marketing and Coca-Cola advertisements.The Birth of Marketing Education in Brazil and PortugalSo, moving to Brazil, marketing came to Portugal in 1984. I was looking at your YouTube channel, and you had a commemoration of 70 years of marketing in Brazil, starting in 1954. Your video was published last year, so 70 years, now 71 years of marketing education in Brazil. My understanding is this involved a cultural exchange between professors in Brazil who visited Michigan State in the US, and then American professors from Michigan going and visiting São Paulo. Can you tell the story of this exchange, why this happened, and how it brought marketing to Brazil?Nino Carvalho: This is very interesting because marketing started formally in Brazil because of, let's say, one of the consequences of World War II. After the World War, as you know, we had the Cold War. Both of those two main groups of influence, the US and the Soviet Union, were trying to influence more countries to spread their ideological views after the war. This was known as the Cold War, as you know.Brazil kind of benefited after President Truman in the US wrote a document where they would transfer technology, investments, knowledge, know-how, and so on, to countries in Latin America, just to spread this influence. One of the countries was Brazil. In the 50s, Brazil started to join forces with the US on a number of different fronts. One of them was in the Brazilian University, the name is Fundação Getúlio Vargas. This was, they just created that foundation, that also they were looking at developing management, bringing companies to Brazil, kind of trying to stimulate industrialization, and so on, with the help of US investments.So, as a part of a number of initiatives during this period, some professors in this Fundação Getúlio Vargas went to the US, to Michigan State University, to learn more about management, about marketing, sales, and of course, then to bring this knowledge here to Brazil and to spread it throughout Brazilian students and professionals, and so on. So, they did that. They went to Michigan State University. They also brought back a number of American professors who would give classes and courses in Brazil. Actually, the library at this foundation in Brazil, the library up until today has the name of one of the professors who came from Michigan State University and then was kind of, carries the name of the library now. So, they made that exchange. So, in 1954, there was the first formal marketing course in Brazil. And so the story goes.What I'm trying to, it's interesting because more recently, I saw there is a very kind of timid dispute between another school here in Brazil with a potential history that they were the first, several years before. So I'm trying to dig into that. However, what we do know so far, in terms of clear documents, and this is the hegemonic view here in Brazil, is 1954 with Getúlio Vargas and Michigan State University. Since then, Andrew, since the 50s, I would say that our way in Brazil, especially, of doing marketing, doing digital marketing as well, is very much influenced by North American professionals, professors, culture, and so on. This is, of course, we have all the pros and cons of that, but the influence clearly is there.Andrew Mitrak: It's interesting. You mentioned how there's another school that says, "Hey, we were first." This is something that's so funny about history: you have to be cautious saying anything's the first because then there's always something that comes before it. Also, with something like marketing that can, as we were talking about, the definition of marketing and what's included and what's not, it's cool like, okay, you can see arguments for it being even earlier. So that's interesting.One person, one name that comes up in your book is Raimar Richers. Could you share a bit about who Raimar Richers was and what his contributions were to marketing in Brazil?Nino Carvalho: Raimar Richers is actually someone, he's a guy from Switzerland. He's a Swiss citizen, Swiss/Brazilian. He's important because he was the Brazilian professor kind of in charge of this pioneer group from the Fundação, the foundation that I was mentioning to you, Getúlio Vargas, that went to the US and brought back marketing and management techniques. So, he was the leader of that movement. He also was the first professor who mentored, let's say, the first masters and doctors in marketing in Brazil. He was one of the supervisors, let's say. So, he was also important in sharing and just rolling out his knowledge in this sense.He made a book trying to propose, and this was quite interesting, it never went anywhere, but it was very interesting. He tried to propose a kind of Brazilian version of the Four Ps. He called it the Four As. That was interesting because this local flavor is important in marketing. Of course, however, it's very difficult to compete with and replace "marketing mix." So, and it's interesting, Andrew, because this won't make sense to your audience because it's a very local Brazilian thing. But there's another curious thing about Raimar Richers: probably his brother is much more famous in Brazil. Because his brother is the owner, or was the owner (they both are deceased), was the owner of the main translators company for American movies in Brazil. So, of course, we have here thousands and tons of American movies and TV shows, and so on. And they translated. So, when you said like "Brazilian translation," then they say the name of Herbert Richers, which was his brother. So, everyone in Brazil knows Herbert Richers, but doesn't know Raimar Richers.Bridging Marketing Practices in the Lusosphere and AnglosphereAndrew Mitrak: So, thanks for this tour of the history of Portugal and Brazil. We only spent 20 minutes or so on it, but I'm sure we could spend hours just looking more, looking just into this topic. If you were to look at the Lusosphere, marketing in the Lusosphere, and its relation to the rest of the world, how do you see the work of Portuguese and Brazilian marketers influencing marketing beyond the Lusosphere? Or do you feel like it's more the other way, of marketers in North America or in the English-speaking world sort of influencing Portuguese-speaking marketers? How do you see the relationship between the two and the impact on marketing more broadly?Nino Carvalho: This is a great question for a number of reasons. On one hand, I believe that it's very recent, in a number of areas, this movement of trying to look at local histories via a different lens than the hegemonic view. So, we are starting really, very, very recently in Brazil and Portugal to try to see what is the Brazilian management marketing history, the actual Brazilian or the actual Portuguese, the Portuguese people, the Brazilian people. We do practice marketing here. It's not only via the US, or we do have influence from the US, but also from Europe because of our past, our colony past. So, this is a movement that's very recent. I think in several countries.So, this is one aspect. The other aspect is, I think that Brazilian and Portuguese markets, they are, they were, and they still are very different. In Portugal, Andrew, just for you to know, there are 10 million, perhaps 11 million inhabitants. In Brazil, we have 222 million. So, that difference is huge, not only in the numbers, but when you have 200 million people in your country, then you have more companies because they have a huge market to sell. You have more money circulating in the economy. Brazil is a hub for the entire Latin America and also a hub for other countries as well. And because you have so much money circulating in the economy, you have great universities, multinational companies, great advertisement agencies. So, it's like a very positive cycle that you have over there.In Portugal, you have only 10 million people. You have a very recent democracy, even more recent than in Brazil. You have a huge influence from Europe because they are one of the smallest countries in the European Union. So, you have different influences, and I think that those have pros and cons, as in anything else. However, when you look at the Lusosphere in Africa, such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, you'll be able to see that they have much more educational influence, even in marketing, with Portugal than from the US or Brazil. So, when they started their universities, even because they were colonies as well, Portugal went there with universities and courses. So, the first marketing course, for instance, in Cape Verde, and I have students from there, they graduated only in 1997. So it's very recent. And it was a local university in partnership with a Portuguese university.So, I think that this influence is starting to change a bit. But the reality is, in our universities, both in Brazil and in Portugal, students will learn marketing, 90% or more, is still North American marketing. This is difficult to kind of challenge. And I don't think that we should kind of just deny it. This is completely nonsense. But we should kind of incorporate a UK view because they also have a lot to contribute, even in the beginnings of marketing. The Nordic view, services marketing, relationship marketing, and so on. The local flavor. So, a broader view would be richer for all of us. But currently, I think that if we do have a Brazilian or Portuguese professor that influences the market outside the Lusosphere, in my mind, I can only remember the Portuguese Luís Moutinho. He wrote the forewords in my newest book. He was the first doctor in marketing in Portugal. Of course, he's retired at this point, but he has a lot of books with Philip Kotler, a lot of books, very new things such as neuromarketing. However, he was a professor in the Suffolk University in Scotland for 40 years. So it's a Portuguese outside our environment.But things are changing. And I think also, to be honest, that American intellectuals, such as Philip Kotler, they are, I believe, or some of them, they are incentivizing or stimulating more people from other countries and other backgrounds to contribute with marketing kind of discussion in general. So, they are also helping this movement of looking outside the US to have a more diverse view and enrich our discipline. Kotler is doing that brilliantly the last few years. And he's not the only one. So I think that new things are coming, and this is very important to everyone, I believe.Making Marketing History Engaging for Today's MarketersAndrew Mitrak: I want to come back to the idea of the value of marketing history. You and I both clearly see the value of it. And kind of coming back to this idea of students who may not see the value, or may want to just learn about marketing today, or be a little more myopic, or "what's in it for me?" If you were to say, what is the selfish reason for marketers to learn marketing history? How can learning marketing history make someone a better marketer or more effective at their jobs? What would you say to that? Does anything come to mind?Nino Carvalho: I would say, I believe, that in a short answer, to learn the history of marketing protects you as a professional and gives you a competitive advantage. Of course, there will be explanations for that. But I think the bottom line is, the more you learn about the history of our discipline in this broader way, as we are discussing here—just look at the local context, a bit of history in general—this will protect you from so much nonsense, lies, fakes that are happening nowadays. We need to be more critical. This historical view helps us to be, to question things and to be a bit more annoying in a way that, "No, listen, Andrew, I'm not buying that. I'll look for it." So, I think this is very positive.And also, as a competitive differential, Andrew, because I believe that as soon as artificial intelligence surpasses our human intelligence—and I think this is right around the corner, it has already replaced very operational functions such as producing content, editing videos, and so on—the more we move that way, the more important it will be for professionals to develop a more critical, analytical, and holistic view. This will only be possible with a multidisciplinary background. I think that history is important to kind of give some pillars to help us build stronger, more reliable knowledge and expertise from there. So I think that's pretty much it: protect us and give us a competitive differential, an advantage.Making Marketing History Engaging for Today's MarketersAndrew Mitrak: Those are both great examples. If you were to share some tips with me on how to make marketing history more appealing to marketers—I guess this is a very selfish question. I'm trying to share this podcast and help others be more interested in marketing history. What tips would you have?Nino Carvalho: I think that one of the things that will capture, in my view, first of all, people's attention—and this is, of course, important if you look at the AIDA model, isn't it? Attention, interest, desire—is to capture them via the curiosity aspects. Such as the history of Spam, that food from the UK, which is quite interesting. In my own reality here, looking at the commercial aspect of Portugal being a huge potency worldwide, and so on. These things about old advertisement gurus such as Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy. So I think those curiosities usually capture the users', the students' attention.The other thing is for us to show them, and this is also very effective, that, okay, so you are talking about how important it is for us today to have a funnel here in our marketing team. Right. So, let's have a look at how and where those funnels started appearing in our discipline. So taking those things and bringing them back to the past. I think this is very important as well.I believe that because, Andrew, we can see that out there, in the whole world, those discussions about truth, lie, what actually happened in history, because this has become more blurred, more and more, isn't it, with different narratives, and so on. And also discussions about DEI—I think it's the same, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion in the US is the same. So, DEI, these discussions, diversity, for us to be a more plural society. Those discussions, some people are very averse to those ideas. However, I think that to learn in a broader way about history will help us to make those connections. Marketing, I also think this is important to show students, marketing is a very active and important agent in society in making those changes—bad changes, good changes. Marketing helps tell what is, how your look is accepted or not, what is a beautiful woman, what is the role of a man, what's. So those things, marketing influences that a lot.So, I believe that because of that, we as marketers have kind of a superpower. And as Uncle Ben told Spider-Man, with superpowers also come great responsibilities. So, I think that when students discover that, well, this is actually true because if I work in a huge company, I will affect perhaps thousands, millions of people. So, this perception, I think, changes how people think and how they will operate in their day-to-day lives. Those are things that, in my own experience, I can see when I start having this conversation: a group with a shine in their eyes, and a group just waiting for the bell to ring so they can leave the class. We need to be very resilient, very patient, to focus on changing those fewer people's lives, I believe.Finding Nino Carvalho OnlineAndrew Mitrak: Wonderful advice. Thanks for all of those ideas. And thanks for all of your time today. Where can listeners find you online?Nino Carvalho: I will have some content in English often on my LinkedIn, so just type Nino Carvalho over there. There will be a few lectures, presentations, and classes in English on the YouTube channel, again, Nino Carvalho. But in addition to those two, for my Portuguese students and listeners, I'm also on Instagram, of course, where my username—and I lost this battle—is Nino Carvalho Consultoria, which is "consultant" or "consultancy." And of course, my website, ninocarvalho.com. And my courses at marketingelevation.org. They are in Portuguese at this point only. And my books, again, only in Portuguese. Perhaps at some point, Andrew and I will be motivated to get together to write some History of Marketing for Beginners in English and in Portuguese as well. Andrew Mitrak: Well, I'll post links to all of those on the blog and in the show notes to make sure listeners can find them. But Nino, thanks so much. This has been such a pleasure to meet with you. Also, prior to this episode, you shared so many great resources with me and have just been such a huge help and source of inspiration. So, thanks for all of that, and thanks for your time today. I've really enjoyed talking to you.Nino Carvalho: Andrew, thank you very much. And not only for inviting me, of course, it was extremely pleasant, especially because I have a very good reason now to just send to my father. I never told you this, but he was an academic scholar here in marketing in the past. He's retired, of course, and he's quite old. But I will forward to him, "Listen, you know those guys, Aaker and Sheth and Kumar and Kotler? And there's your son over there!" So this, I have to thank you for it.But much more than that, because this would be a bit selfish, but so much more than that, I think, Andrew, that the work you are doing—and this is very honestly, I'm saying this very honestly—is extremely important to marketing professionals, to marketing students, and to the future of our discipline. Because we are being bombarded by those fakes, those gurus, and it's difficult to fight against it because it's not a fair fight. So, you took the initiative, and you put this huge constellation of legends in one place. When I mentioned to you that I want to translate those to Portuguese, I'm being very honest because this, I think, will help to spread your work. And this will kind of elevate, I believe, the level of our market. So, I have to thank you as a professor and as a professional as well. Because if you never did that, other people didn't either. So, you took your time, you took the initiative, and you are investing yourself in that. So, I do have to thank you. And I'll make my best to spread your channel and your podcast to as many people as I can. Thank you very much.Andrew Mitrak: Oh, thank you so much, Nino. That's so nice of you to say, and I really appreciate that.Nino Carvalho: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org
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