May 28, 2021

How to Challenge Your Thinking When it Comes to Marketing

How to Challenge Your Thinking When it Comes to Marketing

Written by Marc BinkleyHere are the 4 biggest ideas that have challenged my thinking in this past year:

1. Brand management is about market penetration, not loyalty.

Customers are not nearly as loyal as we believe. They’re polygamously loyal to several brands. In other words, ‘loyal’ customers make up a small percentage of the total market and are most likely heavy buyers of the entire category. The number of loyal customers brands have, can be predictably estimated due to the Double Jeopardy law. The bigger a brand gets, the more loyal customers they have. The smaller a brand is, the fewer loyal customers they have. Heavy buyers make up 30 to 40% of a category, not the 80% that we are lead to believe from the pareto principle. If a brand is to grow, they need to reach more light buyers since they make up the largest buyer group in any category. See Share of Triggers

2. Growth is achieved by building mental and physical availability.

Brand management isn’t about creating awareness, it’s about intentionally identifying the biggest triggers (or category entry points) that initiate a purchase decision, then building and refreshing memory structures between the trigger(s) and their brand. The stronger the recall in a multitude of buying situations, the more chance a brand will be remembered when it comes time for the customer to make a purchase. From McKinsey’s research on the customer decision journey, we know that brands with high availability are three times more likely to be selected at the moment of purchase than brands that aren’t on the list. Physical availability for brands is about making products and services more accessible to the target consumers.

3. Creative is the closest thing to a silver bullet we have.

Kantar updated its findings of the top 10 drivers of advertising profitability. Number one was the size of the brand. Number two? Contrary to belief, it’s not audience targeting or budget setting, multimedia campaigns, cost or product seasonality. Number two is creative. Take a minute to soak that in. See Long Form Creative.

4. Segment, Target, Position. STP: The holy trinity of marketing

If you want to get more out of your marketing budget, do not skip past these three things. First, segment. Take a look at the entire market. Break it into groups. Customers within each group are like one another but differ from the customers in each of the other groups. Attempt to put a value to each of the groups and then calculate your market share in each. This is not strategic. It’s simply a map of the market. If your competitors did the same exercise, they may end up with the exact same map. Second, target. Using the map you created with your team, have a discussion on which segment(s) of the market you choose to go after and which you choose to ignore. THIS IS THE HEART OF STRATEGY. Strategy is about choices. Now that you’ve chosen your target segments think about how to position your products and services to that group of people. I’ve found the value wedge described in How to Win Complex Conversations incredibly useful.