First principles thinking in marketing
Why the biggest marketing opportunity right now is questioning everything you already do.
👋 Hey, I’m George Chasiotis. Welcome to GrowthWaves, your weekly dose of B2B growth insights—featuring powerful case studies, emerging trends, and unconventional strategies you won’t find anywhere else.
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In 2002, Elon Musk wanted to buy a rocket.
The cheapest option he could find was $65 million. Instead of accepting that price, he asked a different question:
What is a rocket made of?
The answer was aerospace-grade aluminum, titanium, copper and carbon fiber. He checked commodity prices.
The raw materials came to about 2% of the sticker price. The other 98% was margin, middlemen and process debt accumulated over decades of “this is how we build rockets.”
Within a few years, SpaceX had cut launch costs by 10x.
That story gets told a lot. But I do not think we have applied its lesson where it matters most for the people reading this newsletter.
Let me explain.
The Pattern
SpaceX is the famous case, but the same logic played out at Tesla.
In 2012, lithium-ion battery packs cost around $600 per kilowatt-hour. The entire auto industry treated that number as a given.
Tesla’s team broke the pack down to its raw inputs: nickel, cobalt, aluminum, carbon, polymers, a steel can. The material cost on the London Metal Exchange was roughly $80 per kilowatt-hour.
The gap between $80 and $600 was not physics. It was process, packaging and industry inertia.
Tesla rebuilt the manufacturing chain. They went vertical, sourced raw materials directly, optimized cell chemistry and designed their own assembly process.
Musk later called the old approach “reasoning by analogy.” You look at what exists and try to make it 10% better.
First principles reasoning asks:
What would this look like if we built it from the ground up?
The distinction matters. Reasoning by analogy produces incremental improvement. First principles reasoning produces structural change.
Why This Matters for Marketing Right Now
Marketing is being disrupted. AI is changing how content gets produced, how search works, how buyers discover products and how campaigns get built.
But here is the part I keep coming back to:
The disruption is happening to marketing. It is not happening from marketing.
Marketers are reacting to changes in the environment. New algorithms. New tools. New platforms.
The playing field is being reshaped by external forces, and most marketing teams are running to keep up.
If marketers applied first principles thinking to their own discipline, the disruption would come from within.
The new playing field would be set by marketers, not by macro conditions and platform shifts. The people doing the work would define what the work becomes.
That is the argument I want to make in this note:
Marketing needs its SpaceX moment.
Not a tool upgrade, but a structural rethink of why we do what we do and whether the way we do it still makes sense.
The Marketing Version of $65 Million Rockets
Most marketing activities today are built on inherited assumptions.
We do things a certain way because the industry settled on that way years ago.
Nobody questions the premise. Everyone optimizes within the existing frame.
Here is what first principles thinking looks like when you apply it to four common marketing activities.
Author’s Note: I picked these because every B2B SaaS team runs them, and because each one is ripe for a structural rethink.
1. Writing a piece of content
The inherited assumption: You start with a keyword. You check its search volume. You look at the top ten results in Google.
You write something similar but longer or more detailed. You publish, build links, wait for rankings.
This has been the default content playbook for over a decade.
Author’s Note: I wrote about how that playbook is shifting in my note on the old vs. new way of doing content.
The first principles question: What is the actual job this content needs to do?
If you strip away SEO conventions and start from the reader’s need, the process looks different…
The job might be to change how a buyer thinks about a problem
It might be to make a complex decision feel simple
It might be to give a practitioner something they can use tomorrow morning
None of those jobs require you to start with a keyword. Some of them require you to ignore keywords entirely.
Ahrefs does that well. Their blog posts often start from a practitioner question rather than a search query.
Some of their highest-performing content targets topics with low or zero search volume because the content itself creates demand for the topic.
The keyword follows the content, not the other way around.
First principles reframe: Start with the decision the reader is trying to make. Build the content around that decision.
Let search volume be a signal, not a starting point.
2. Bringing a new feature to market
The inherited assumption: You build the feature. You write a changelog entry. You send an email to existing customers.
You publish a blog post
Maybe you run a webinar
Marketing supports product
The first principles question: What actually needs to happen for this feature to change customer behavior?
Most feature launches are announcements. They inform people that something exists. But informing is not the same as activating.
The first principles version asks: What would it take for 30% of our existing users to adopt this feature within 60 days?
That question produces different work. You might realize the changelog is irrelevant because the real barrier is not awareness but adoption friction.
You might find that the best “launch” is an in-app experience, not an email campaign. You might discover that the feature only matters to one segment of your base and that segment does not read your blog.
Slack's approach to feature launches is worth studying. When they rolled out Huddles, the real activation driver was not the announcement.
It was the contextual prompt inside the product that appeared when someone was already in a channel conversation. The launch strategy was the UX, not an announcement email.
First principles reframe: Define the behavior change you want. Work backward from adoption, not from announcement.
3. Running Retargeting on Paid Social
The inherited assumption: Someone visits your site. They do not convert. You retarget them with ads on LinkedIn, Meta or both.
The ads remind them of what they saw. You measure ROAS and call it a day.
The first principles question: Why did this person leave without converting, and what would change their mind?
Retargeting defaults assume that the problem is forgetfulness. The visitor saw your product, liked it and just needs a reminder.
But in B2B, that is rarely the case!
The visitor left because they were not ready, did not understand the value, had objections you did not address or were not the decision maker.
A first principles retargeting strategy would segment by reason for non-conversion or intent, not just by recency.
Someone who visited your pricing page and left needs a different message than someone who read an informational blog post and bounced.
The pricing page visitor might need a case study showing ROI. The blog reader might need a different entry point into the product entirely.
First principles reframe: Diagnose what someone is actually looking for. Match the retargeting message to the intent, not the page visit.
4. Building a Brand Narrative
The inherited assumption: You define your brand positioning. You craft messaging pillars. You create a brand guide.
You push that narrative into every channel and piece of content. Consistency is king!
The first principles question: What does our audience already believe, and where does that belief need to shift for our product to matter?
Most brand narratives start with the company.
What do we stand for?
What makes us different?
First principles brand work starts with the audience.
What do they believe today?
Where is there tension between what they think and what they experience?
HubSpot’s original inbound marketing concept did not start with product positioning.
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah identified a belief shift that needed to happen:
Marketers believed outbound was how you grew.
HubSpot argued the opposite. The brand narrative was the belief shift itself, not a description of the software.
The result was category creation.
HubSpot did not sell a better CRM. They sold a new way of thinking about growth.
The category came first. The product followed.
First principles reframe: Start with the audience’s current beliefs. Identify the shift your product requires. Build the narrative around that shift, not around your feature set.
The Framework
I have been thinking about how to make this actionable.
As something you can apply to whatever marketing activity lands on your desk next week.
Here is the framework I use. Four steps, applied in sequence:
Step 1: Identify the inherited assumption
Every marketing activity carries at least one unquestioned premise. Content starts with keywords. Launches start with announcements. Retargeting starts with reminders. Name the assumption you are operating under.
Step 2: Ask the base question
Strip away the industry convention and ask: what is the actual outcome we need? What job does this activity perform? If we had never done it before and were designing it from scratch, what would we build?
Step 3: Map the gap
Compare what you are currently doing with what the base question suggests. Where are you spending time on activities that do not serve the actual outcome? Where are you missing steps that would?
Step 4: Rebuild from the outcome backward
Design the activity starting from the desired result. Let the process serve the goal, not the convention.
And here’s the framework as a visual:
This is not a one-time exercise.
Every quarter, pick two or three marketing activities and run them through these four steps.
You will find assumptions hiding in places you stopped looking a long time ago.
Why Marketers Should Lead This, Not Follow
Here is the thing:
AI is going to reshape marketing whether marketers lead the change or not. The tools are here. The platforms are shifting.
If marketers wait for the disruption to happen and then adapt, the new playing field will be defined by the tools and the platforms. Marketers will inherit a structure built by people who think about marketing from the outside.
If marketers apply first principles thinking now, they get to define the structure themselves. They get to decide what marketing becomes, not react to what it is becoming.
This is what Musk did with rockets.
He did not wait for the aerospace industry to lower prices. He asked why the prices were high in the first place and built a different system.
The same opportunity exists in marketing today. The inherited playbooks are showing cracks.
SEO is not what it was two years ago
Content marketing is being reshaped by AI search
Paid media is getting more expensive and less transparent
Positioning and messaging are broken in most organizations
These are not just problems to patch. They are invitations to rethink.
Final Thoughts
First principles thinking is not about being contrarian for the sake of it. Questioning every assumption without a clear goal just produces chaos.
It is about asking better questions. Starting from the outcome, not the process. Designing the work around what needs to happen rather than what has always happened.
SpaceX did not build a cheaper rocket by finding a better supplier. They rebuilt the supply chain.
Tesla did not make a better battery by negotiating with manufacturers. They redesigned the manufacturing process.
Marketing will not get better by adding AI to the same playbooks. (I made a version of this argument in my note on content engineering.)
It will get better when marketers question the playbooks themselves.
That is the opportunity. And it belongs to the people doing the work, not the people building the tools.
Thank you for reading today’s note, and see you again next week.
Research Disclaimers and Limitations
GrowthWaves and its author are not sponsored by or compensated by any company mentioned in this note. This is independent editorial analysis and does not constitute investment, financial, or legal advice. The author may have relationships with, work with, or hold equity in companies referenced; however, no content in this piece was influenced, commissioned, or incentivized by any such relationship. AI tools were used as a research assistant in the preparation of this piece. All claims are sourced and linked throughout.
Sources
James Clear, “First Principles: Elon Musk on the Power of Thinking for Yourself”
Harvard, “SpaceX: A First Principles Company”
Zetetikos, “How Tesla Reinvented the Auto Industry with First Principles Thinking”
UNSW BusinessThink, “A marketing code red: When AI broke HubSpot’s inbound engine”
Markhub24, “Building Marketing Moats Through Community and Content: The HubSpot Playbook”