It’s time to boldly lead

BIGGER BRANDS are always big because more people buy them, not because they have higher weights of purchase – so growth strategies based on heavy users or loyalty building don’t work. Customers in any category buy across all brands in a predictable way, so segmentation doesn’t exist. Users perceive all brands pretty much the same, so the quest for differentiation is pointless.

These, and several other marketing heresies, are the results of a huge body of empirical research into purchasing and other data, carried out by the late Andrew Ehrenberg and his many distinguished colleagues over 50 years. These robust, law-like patterns, replicable across time, geographies and categories, have long been in the public domain, but mostly in academic journals or privately published papers.

Now for the first time, professor Byron Sharp, head of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia, has summarised this crucial body of marketing knowledge in a single, accessible volume. It is a valuable and important achievement.

Practitioners now have a choice. They can find arguments to disprove, or at least qualify, the strong and simple principles that the author Byron Sharp trenchantly presents, or they can begin rethinking their practice to fit the reality of how markets really behave. The first course is, I think, unlikely to succeed but the second may also prove challenging because the efficacy of segmentation, loyalty programmes, niche targeting and price promotion are all called into question. Advertising, too, works not by communicating differentiating propositions, but by creating salience through ‘meaningless distinctiveness’, talk that will shock many creatives almost as much as planners and clients.

This view of advertising as ‘mere publicity’ has long seemed to me a powerful one, and certainly more useful than the message transmission model, but I am not convinced that it tells the whole story. And the tone of dogmatic certainty that characterises this book seems to me less appropriate when it involves the more problematic topics of mental processing, emotions or aesthetics.

How brands grow clears away many major misconceptions and offers a practical agenda for change, but it still doesn’t quite put its finger on just why brand A performs so much better than brand B – nor, perhaps, should we expect to find simple, generalisable answers to such questions. At least that will leave something for ad agencies to puzzle over. Meanwhile, this book remains essential reading.

How brands grow: what marketers don’t know, Byron Sharp, OUP (2010), £22.50