FORTUNE FAVORS
THE BOLD

Comparatively speaking, marketing is a young science. As Byron Sharp points out in How Brands Grow, doctors spent 2500 years administering bloodletting (using leeches to extract blood from patients) as a cure for all manner of ailments, only to realize the practice was killing vastly more people than it cured.

Notwithstanding the data available to us, theories with zingy titles (the 80/20 rule, for eg) have too often been parrotted as fact. We are taught to admire Harley Davidson as a pillar of brand loyalty, because someone, somewhere, tattooed a Harley logo on their arm. But when you look at the data, die-hards make up less than 10% of Harley owners, and the majority purchase their bikes second hand, which helps explain why they make up only 3.5% of total revenue (Swinyard, 1995).* 

Theories like this are still being taught in schools. And if you take them at face value, you can see how a brand manager at Harley might waste substantial time, mindshare, and dollars by over-indexing on their most loyal customers, if they didn’t first look at the data available to them.

Thanks to the work of brilliant individuals like Byron Sharp, organizations like Ehrenberg-Bass, the IPA, WARC, as well as the many companies who generously share data as a matter of practice (not just when they submit to awards), there is a wealth of data available to those who seek it out. 

By continuously seeking out the best and most current data to inform both strategy and tactics, brand leaders can avoid the most common mistakes, and even tap into currents that accelerate their progress.

*This study is no spring chicken, but even if the number quadrupled since then, it still would make up less than ¼ of the 80% claimed by the Pareto Principle

“How do you define the size of a brand?” A deceptively simple question, and one that many brand leaders don’t know.

The size of a brand is most commonly defined using one of two metrics: Market Share -or- Share of Sales. Regardless of the metric you choose, the resulting truths are the same:

1. Brands don’t stand still. At any given moment, a brand leader is either fueling growth or managing a decline. By extension, everything they do should be in service of growth.

2. Growth is a competitive game. Whether the metric is Market Share or Share of Sales, growth is always achieved at the expense of competitors. This means brand leaders must understand how their competitors play the game if they want to win more often than they lose.

3. Growth is a team sport. Customer acquisition. Customer retention and loyalty. Profitability gains. Sales efficiency. The list goes on. Done right, the commercial impacts of brand investments are widespread. But just like Market Share, many of the metrics brand impacts aren’t owned outright. It takes execution across departments to grow. And it requires alignment and collaboration across teams to deliver a compelling, consistent, and intentional experience throughout the customer lifecycle.

Size impacts so many aspects of brand strategy, investment, and growth. More than we can cover here. But for me, these truths are foundational, and they inform everything I do.

The limits to ROI coming from campaigns focused on loyalty – as detailed in the Harley example under Start With Evidence – are just one example of the pitfalls that can be avoided by examining the data available to us.

Another common example is the cross-sell. Leaders with established businesses so often see this as a shortcut. An “easy” path to growth. “All we need is 15% of our customers to buy this new offering in order for it to be successful in year 1.”

This leads to a focus on selling into existing customers, often at the expense of building a sustainable growth engine for the new offerings on the board. Unfortunately, the harsh truth is that cross-selling is immensely difficult, even when offerings are very similar, and the friction associated with making a new purchase is low. 

Take consumer banks. In most scenarios, a new account can be opened with a few clicks. But on average, North American consumers hold 3 products, regardless of where they bank, even though most banks offer dozens of account types with different bells and whistles, as well as credit cards and financing options (Accenture, 2016). 

Or think of yourself, when you go to your favorite restaurant. You almost always order the same thing, even though they often have new specials or promotions to try.

This isn’t to say “don’t invest in cross-selling”. It’s hard to think of a scenario where it doesn’t make sense as a part of a larger strategy. No, Swim With the Current is about taking stock of the data available to us, understanding the limitations of specific tactics — to inform expectations and level of investment — and investing in strategies that are most likely to deliver the greatest business impact over time.

Which, as it happens, has a lot to do with singing.

As human beings, the influence of the intuitive, emotional side of the brain on decision making is hard to overstate. In Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman perhaps characterized it best:

“Rational thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it but they'd prefer not to.”

It might sound simplistic, but it’s how we are wired. This psychology is reflected time and again in purchasing behavior. Even in B2B - where the sales cycle averages 192 days, or over 6 months long - evidence suggests that 80-90% of buyers enter the market with 2-3 brands on their mind for a given product or service. And of those buyers, 90% purchase from one of the brands on their day 1 list (Bain & Co, Google; Dreamdata) .

TL;DR: If you aren’t on the day 1 list — if you aren’t remembered when it matters most — odds are you’ve already lost the war.

So how do brand leaders increase the probability that their offerings are both remembered when it matters most, and bought when the purchase is made? 

The answer: by being well known, and even better liked. Reaching for “fame” not just in one campaign, but as a long-term goal.

This cannot be achieved speaking only to features and benefits. It requires telling stories that trigger us. Telling jokes that make us laugh. Singing songs that shed new light on our current reality. And taking actions that reinforce our values, even when they come at a cost.

But singing a song that no one hears? That’s a fool's errand. To Sing Loud is to reach the greatest possible percentage of your audience many times over with content that sparks a reaction. To sing your song, and become famous for it in the process.

Only by singing loud – by triggering emotional connections with a high percentage of buyers – can brand leaders increase the probability of making the day 1 list, and meaningfully accelerate growth.

Speaking of human wiring, it can be enticing to hide behind complexity. Or to look at a problem from so many angles that despite even the best intentions, the forest is lost for the trees.

For many, it’s easier to move to solutioning than it is to first define the problem.

Easier to write a campaign brief that hits on all the value props, than it is to commit to one that is essential.

Easier to settle for language that is “good enough” than it is to go the distance and find the answer that delivers real clarity.

There is no marketer with any tenure that hasn’t jumped to the wrong conclusion (myself included) when evaluating campaign performance. 

I’d argue each of these examples represent a danger to the profession as a whole. It’s the unknown unknowns – when we think we have the answer, but we don’t – that really create problems.

When the bar is clarity, suddenly we ask more questions. We look to disprove our own hypotheses. 

When the bar is clarity, we have the hard conversations early. We know what we are signing up for; both the risks, and the potential rewards.

We create space for higher level problem solving. Not just from ourselves, but from our teams. Contractors. Agencies. 

Brand leaders must do the work to find clarity themselves, if they are to have any hope that their customers will get it, and keep coming back for more.

Clarity takes commitment. But it’s always worth the effort.