The Formula for Brand Growth
In essence, the secret to growing a brand is as simple as increasing the number of people that buy the brand (increasing brand penetration).
Marketers have believed that brand growth came from making shoppers and consumers more loyal to a brand. The Brand team would identify a particular segment of consumers and target their brand at this group assuming that if they could increase brand ‘love’, this group of people would buy their brand more frequently at the expense of competitors.
However! The difference in the number of purchase between competing brands in a category tends to be extremely small i.e. all brands in a category tend to get bought about the same number of times in a year.
Lesson: It is not the change in frequency of purchase that makes a brand grow but rather a change in the total number of people buying it.
The action for a brand owner is clear: To grow a brand you need to continually recruit new users/buyers.
To grow a brand through continuous cycles of recruitment & re-recruitment requires several things:
1. Media plans should strive to deliver maximum reach and maximum recency.
Brand impressions tend fade after about 8 weeks and so, therefore a brand needs to be reaching the buyer with a message as close as possible to the purchase decision.
If there are long gaps between brand messages consumers may forget about the brand & be nudged to purchase another brand in their repertoire that reaches them with a message in that time
2. Brand consistency becomes a vital consideration
Winning brands tend to recycle the same messaging and brand icons everywhere from packaging to advertising to point of sale and avoid making changes that would require the creation of new memory structures.
We see this with leading brands like Coca Cola where packaging and platform idea changes are slow and almost imperceptible over decades but the brand always remains top of mind with the consumers.
3. The development of Famous, breakthrough, culturally relevant creative campaigns.
In the world of the constant recruitment and re-recruitment of inconsistent buyers, the need for innovative and creative work becomes even compelling. The brand should be trying to attract the attention of people who by definition don’t have a strong relationship with the brand.
If what is done isn’t outstanding it will simply be ignored
