Does your organisation practice Sharp thinking or blunt marketing?
The IMA is constantly researching the ways in which Insight teams generate new insights, and in particular how they can best 'nail the issue' at the start of new research and analysis projects. We believe that one aspect of best practice is to develop a series of mental constructs, models of how consumers behave in the category in which your organisation operates, and that has led us to look at the book written by Byron Sharp.
Sharp's 2010 book - How Brands Grow - caused a stir in marketing circles when it was first published, and we believe that this sequel is also a very important publication for anyone involved in marketing strategy. It's also a lively and stimulating read.
How Brands Grow and How Brand Grow part 2
For many years the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science based at the University of South Australia has shared evidence-based stimulus on brand performance dynamics with the wider world. However, the profile of the institute's work was dramatically raised in 2010 when Byron Sharp, the institute’s director, published ‘How Brands Grow – What Marketers Don’t Know’.
The original book challenged some firmly held convictions. Strategic marketing ‘sacred cows’ such as the imperative of brand differentiation, and the belief that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition, were put to the sword by Sharp’s rigorous analysis of multiple categories across multiple markets.
There have, of course, been opposing views on certain key ‘laws’ (Dunnhumby, as an example, is still challenging some of Sharp’s conclusions), but Sharp’s publication provoked long overdue debate. In the following years I remember certain marketing agencies starting a pitch by asking whether we (the client) had already been ‘Byron Sharped?'
In part 2 - which in some ways we prefer - Sharp and his team return with fresh data and some provocative lessons for effective brand management. His book, ‘How Brands Grow - Part 2’, is an easy read and packed full of punchy, unequivocal advice.
Building on the established principle of double jeopardy, Sharp has consolidated some key rules for achieving growth, including the central principle that brand growth comes through building user penetration, and that ‘loyalty’ only ever follows penetration.
To a large extent, Sharp’s sequel is designed to consolidate key principles and to close gaps in the original analysis. Emerging markets, services, e-commerce operators and luxury markets get close attention, but there is also fresh evidence from mainstream categories and markets.
Why should Insight managers, market researchers, and customer analysts read it?
If your Insight team works within, or with, your marketing department, having a well-founded and evidence-based view of marketing and how it affects the interaction your customers have with you is critical. One of Insight's key roles is to build a big picture view of how consumers in your market become customers of your organisation and create value for it; understanding Sharp's rules of marketing, brand management and market share form an obvious reference point for this.
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