Eat Your Greens

by Weimer Snijders

Since every customer base follows the NBD, brand share must depend on attracting light buyers. Sure, the heaviest buyers are important, but every brand must also reach out a long way to nudge in its lightest buyers from competitors.

One further evidence-based finding is that individual households don’t buy at the same rate from period to period. Roughly half of the heaviest buyers will be lighter the following year, but lighter buyers will then become heavier. This is known as ‘buyer moderation’, or ‘regression to the mean’.

Of the thousand and one variables which might affect buyer behaviour, it is found that nine hundred and ninety-nine usually do not matter. Many aspects of buyer behaviour can be predicted simply from the penetration and the average purchase frequency of the item, and even these two variables are interrelated.

your customers are mostly other brands’ customers who occasionally buy you. So, does it matter if you sell a functional or a premium brand? Or both?

The bottom line is, brands are not a result of brainwashing or spamming, they’re simply an essential part of our cognitive processes. Predicting the death of brands fails to understand their Darwinian nature: they do not exist because they were imposed unto us, they exist because of us. References

There are three phases to all marketing work. First, we diagnose the situation of the brand via consumer research and understand just what is going on. Secondly, we use that diagnosis to build a clear and simple marketing strategy. Finally, with that strategy in place, we select the appropriate tactics to deliver the strategy and win the day.

Who am I targeting? What is my position to that target? What are my strategic objectives for that target market?

I see marketing as three equal challenges of diagnosis, strategy and tactics. I see communications as one quarter of the tactical challenge. That means it should be about 8% of the stuff we talk about in marketing.

The concept, so missed by digital marketers, is not that digital is bad and traditional is good, but that the whole bifurcation was ridiculous in the first place. There are just tactical tools, and they can only be valued and selected once a target and a position and a strategy are in place.

Short-termists reach for the low-hanging fruit in the market: they reduce their investment in brand building because it takes time to deliver growth, and they switch ever more expenditure to sales activation and digital sales tools such as search, which can deliver short-term results, but do little for long-term growth.

Brand building is different. It means creating mental structures (associations, memories, beliefs etc) that will predispose potential customers to choose one brand over another. This is a long-term job involving conditioning consumers through repeated exposure, so it takes time; talking to people long before they come to buy.

Driven by a relentless diet of short-term digital metrics and a general management culture which fails to appreciate the dangers of short-term digital activation, short-termism is now growing on an industrial scale.

Short-term campaigns are defined as campaigns that ran and were evaluated over periods of less than six months. This is not an arbitrary period: analysis reported in The Long and the Short of It demonstrated how brand building takes over as the primary driver of growth from sales activation after six months.

Like fireworks, these campaigns make a lot of noise and light, but are gone before lasting impressions are created.