How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know Hardcover – 11 Mar. 2010

How brands grow is a book largely about fundamental marketing principles: brand growth, how advertising works, price promotions and loyalty programs. It’s a myth-busting classic, filled with scientific discovery so it feels different from the more traditional business textbooks. Sharp successfully tears strips off current marketing practices and likens marketing managers to “medieval doctors, working on impressions and myth.” He pushes this analogy further when he compares much of our modern marketing theory to the practice of bloodletting, which was once regarded as a particularly effective way to “cure” medical ailments.You get the feeling that Sharp really enjoys challenging every single marketing assumption we all have; from the taken as given need to differentiate your brand to the fact that a brand’s consumers are a distinctive type of person, in fact, even the pareto law gets a kicking, gone are the assurances that 80% of sales come from the top 20% of your buyers – according to Byron only slightly more than half of sales come from the top 20% of the brand’s customers, the rest come from the bottom 80% .It’s true to say that by and large this book is somewhat of a manifesto for what he calls his new world model:Past World Model Positioning Differentiation Message Comprehension Unique SellingProposition Persuasion Teaching Rational InvolvedViewersNew World Model Salience Distinctiveness Getting noticed,emotional response Relevant Associations Refreshing andbuilding memory structures Reaching EmotionalDistractedViewsAnd this new world model rests on a very simple premise that ALL brands grow by increasing their market penetration, forget about loyalty and/or anything else. He proves this hypothesis through what he calls the Double Jeopardy Law. Sharp argues that the Double jeopardy law tells us what our marketing metrics will look like – if we are successful in gaining sales and market share.Here’s an example:Shampoo Brands Market Share (%) Annual market Penetration (%) Purchase Frequency (average)Suave Naturals 12 19 2.0Pantene Pro V 10 16 1.9Alberto VO5 6 11 1.6Garnier Fructis 5 9 1.7Dove 4 8 1.4Finesse 1 2 1.4Average 1.7Note: Smaller US shampoo brands suffer from only slightly lower loyalty.If Finesse were to catapult up to the sales levels of Suave Naturals or Pantene Pro V, it would be substantially more popular with millions more households buying it each year. But these households would not, on average buy it much more often than current Finesse households buy the brand.Finesse’s brand manager could plan to reach market leadership by getting current customers to buy eight times a year. That would be enough to do it – in theory. But in practice it’s impossible. As Sharp goes on to point out Finesse buying households currently only buy shampoo six times a year; therefore Finesse would need to command 100% loyalty just to achieve six purchases per year per customer. But no shampoo brand in the US commands 100% loyalty. Such a marketing plan is a fantasy.Double jeopardy, therefore, tells us what is, and what isn’t achievable – sort of a practical guide to strategy formulation.Make your brand famous,make your brand popular.The book continually delivers a strong case for mass marketing, as attested above, Sharp continually hammers home that growth in market share comes by increasing your brand popularity or fame. You do this by gaining many more buyers (of all types), most of whom are light consumers buying the brand occasionally. This allows Sharp to controversially define brands as “undifferentiated choice options of varying popularity.”It’s an easy read, a lot of it planners probably already know as it’s based on the work of Andrew Ehrenberg who in 2003 proved, albeit with shorter term dynamic analysis, that both rising and declining brands displayed more change in their penetration than in their purchase frequency. Sharp adds a level of metric data to the debate which makes Ehrenberg’s theories easier to substantiate. This argument also fits well with the more recent IPA analysis by Binet & Field in 2007 which showed that effectiveness award winners were far more likely to have set targets to increase market penetration.

Probably one of the best books I have read on marketing. Mind opener, highly recommend it.

This is an outstanding book for anyone who is interested in selling - which since all business is selling, should be anyone in business.It debunks quite a lot of ideas around marketing - e.g. there is no such thing as loyalty - most big brands are big because they have massive distribution so it makes is more likely consumers will find them on the shelves when they're looking for something in the category. The nice thing is that much of the earlier chapters are backed by reasonable amounts of data (e.g. how easily consumers switch brands, etc) - something that is unusual in marketing.It also ties in nicely with the work of Daniel Kahneman on heuristics saying that, despite having little loyalty, most people only buy things they've heard of (we take mental shortcuts for decisions as Kahneman has comprehensively proved) so you need to make sure people have heard of your brands in the first place if you want to sell it.However, I only give this four stars as in some of the later chapters (e.g. Chapter 9, "How advertising really works") the author suddenly drops his evidence-based approach and goes back to the time-honored marketing approach of making authoritative but evidence-devoid assertions. For example, the now popular idea that you need to create more "occasions" around your brand to grow mindshare clearly come from this book, but no data for it is ever presented.

I love this book.It's the first book on marketing I've read - and I've read many, many books on marketing - where I was presented with hard, solid data for the claims that are made. Almost all of the other marketing books have relied upon waffly anecdotes and less than scientific 'evidence'.What Bryon Sharp has done is point a very bright light on marketing and branding. By using statistically relevant data, gathered across many different industries and countries, he pulls the rug from under many of the commonly accepted 'hearsay' views of marketing.For example, he shows how dis-loyal loyal customers can be. He pulls apart certain concepts around Differentiation and Price Promotions. He also explains the role that Advertising really plays.But that's not all he does. As Bryon chops away at the hype and puffery, he provides instead a solid and convincing framework for effective marketing and branding.As with others here, I wish more professional marketers would read and learn from this book. As Byron Sharp points out, what we should be moving to is a world of evidence based marketing. And the evidence of - if we apply the lessons of this book - increased sales, revenue and profits.Highly recommended.