How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know | Byron Sharp

I started to work with Jalal İbrahimi who is my mentor and he recommended me two books in our first mentoring session. The first one is How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know by Byron Sharp. As a finance professional, it has been a while since I haven't read a book purely on marketing since my MBA graduation. There were many "aha moments" while I was reading the book and connecting the learnings with the ideas in the weekly commercial team meetings. So, let me share my highlights from the book. 

The most important knowledge contained in this book: No marketing activity, including innovation, should be seen as a goal in itself, its goal is to hold on to or improve mental and physical availability.

As Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everybody lives by selling something”. Poor marketing wastes an incalculable amount of resources, and it prevents and slows the uptake of life-enhancing products and social initiatives.

As Mark Twain wrote in his notebook in 1898: “Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned”.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones. John Maynard Keynes (quoted in Drexler, 1987) 

When marketing is successful in delivering more sales and market share, it does so by giving the brand more heavy buyers, more medium buyers and a lot more light buyers. This means that for maintenance or growth, a brand's marketing has to somehow, at least over time, reach all the buyers in a category.

The good news is that your customers are just like your competitors’ customers, and their customers are like yours. This means their buyers are up for grabs. So, target the whole market – all sorts of different people.

As Winston Churchill said, “Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.”

The only problem is that you have competitors who are trying to do the same as you.

Duplication of purchase law says that all brands, within a category, share their customer base with other brands in line with the size of those other brands. In other words, everyone shares a lot with big brands and a little with small brands.

A marketer shouldn't worry about their company having similar brands. If a new soft drink company could choose to own and market any two global brands, should it choose Coke and Fanta? No, it should choose Coke and Pepsi, because these are the biggest brands globally, with the most valuable market-based assets. What marketers should worry about is whether or not their brands are distinctive. Are they easy to recognise and distinguish from others? If they are not, the brand's advertising won't work – and consumers won't see the product on the shelf.

If brands grow they will always steal from the other brands in the same product category. The exact amount of cannibalisation that will occur between brands can be predicted by the duplication of purchase law. What you need to watch out for is excessive cannibalisation. Companies tend to be good at stealing sales from themselves because their brands go through the same sales force, the same distributors, etc. Marketers need to acknowledge and accept this, but to also be on the look-out for excessive cannibalisation.

Loyalty certainly exists, but it is tempered by opportunity. People who buy from a category less often have less opportunity to be disloyal. Similarly, people who shop from stores that stock few brands also appear more loyal (e.g. people who live in smaller towns).

Within every brand's customer base there are a few people who feel much more attitudinally committed to the brand. It may be part of their self-image, used to signal what sort of person they are to themselves and to others. But the marketing consequences of these brand fan(atic)s turn out to be very limited. Most of a brand's customers think and care little about the brand, but the brand manager should care about these people because they represent most of the brand's sales; the brand needs these people if it is to increase its sales.

Rather than striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn't.

Buyers don't need to see differentiation to buy a brand, or to keep on buying it.  

To encourage brand loyalty a brand must stand out so that buyers can easily, and without confusion, identify it.

The fundamental purpose of branding is to identify the source of the product or service.

There are two criteria that make some branding assets worth more than others. These two criteria are: 

• fame - how many people associate the brand with that asset 

• uniqueness - of those people how many only associate that brand with the asset

Distinctive assets need to be learned by consumers. Until the links between distinctive elements and the brand are learned they cannot function as a substitute for the brand. To successfully teach the link requires a commitment over many years, even decades. For example, the Nike 'swoosh' was first introduced in the 1970s; for a long while it was shown alongside the brand name, prior to being used as a solo brand identifier. The strong recognition that the Nike swoosh has today is because of the consistent investment over many decades.  A brand can’t be distinctive unless it is consistent.

A little bit of your advertising today works today, but much is to prevent people from being less likely to buy you when they make their next category purchase in months/years time. 

Successful advertising, in particular, reaches the millions of consumers who have a very low probability of buying a brand next week or month. If a brand's advertising reaches them, if they notice it, if it refreshes or builds the memory structures that make the brand more likely to be noticed or come to mind in a buying situation (i.e. enhancing mental availability), then it nudges their propensity to buy the brand. This is the sales effect. But most of these additional sales won't show up in this week's sales figures because hardly any of these consumers will buy this week; they simply don't buy that often even with their newly enhanced propensity. Indeed, most of these extra sales will never show up as part of a lift in overall sales because, before the consumer even buys from the category, he or she will be hit with competitor advertising (or other marketing activity) that nullifies the effect of the advertising exposure.

An advertisement cannot build memory structures if it is not processed; memory structures cannot generate sales if they are not associated with the brand that is being advertised. Most advertising exposures fail these two hurdles, so the money spent is wasted, or worse, the ad refreshes memories for competitor brands.

Memory is the link between an ad and brand choice.

To influence behaviour, advertising must work with people's memories.

The lesson is clear, physical and mental availability need to go hand in hand, advertising falls flat when the brand isn’t physically available, and brands sit on shelves when consumers don’t notice them.

1.Continuously reach all buyers of the brand's service/product category, with both physical distribution and marketing communication. 2.Ensure the brand is easy to buy. 3.Get noticed.  Often. 4.Refresh and build brand-linked memory structures that make the brand easier to notice and buy. 5.Create distinctive communication assets. 6.Be consistent, yet fresh and interesting. 7.Stay competitive, keep up the mass appeal; don't give customers reasons not to buy the brand.