How brands grow? – It’s a numbers game!
Ben Martin, communications planner, Telegraph Media Group, on why those listening to Byron Sharp might just be a little like Brad Pitt…
If you’ve spent any time in the male changing rooms of a media owner’s gym recently (a niche target perhaps, but bear with me) you will doubtless have overheard conversations regarding a recent but somewhat under-viewed Brad Pitt film, Moneyball.
It tells the tale of a baseball manager who transforms the fortunes of a team that has struggled to compete in a league dominated by wealthy franchises, using players rejected by these billionaire-funded behemoths.
So far, so The Mighty Ducks, you may think. But this is no formulaic fantasy of a lazy scriptwriter – barring some Hollywood polish the story of Billy Beane has its basis firmly in fact.
A compelling piece of cinema, but the real story is not Oakland Athletics’ rise from no-hopers to giant slayers, but the manner in which their squad was put together, which was to alter the sport for good.
Placing faith in a Yale economics graduate, Beane disregards the conventional “logic” of his seasoned scouts and coaches, basing trades, salaries and selections instead on data.
His young assistant tirelessly analyses the minutiae of performances and ignores subjective observations including (but not limited to) “throwing like a freak” and “having an ugly girlfriend”, the latter being seen as indicative of low self-confidence.
Controversially selling supposed “stars”, the duo create a team of previously undervalued players that favours methodically “getting home” base-by-base over highlight reel home runs.
The unveiling of this new thinking generates discomfort that even a naked emperor would find hard to match among the straight talking veteran scouts, who have made a living on their observation and intuition.
However, the achievements of this group of players whose salaries totalled around $40 million went far beyond their billing (the much-fancied New York Yankees had a total of three times that figure).
It was enough to change the thinking of even the biggest franchises, and dramatically furthered the cause of Sabermetrics: the specialised analysis of baseball through objective evidence.
From baseball to advertising theory
So why am I inflicting a sports history lesson and my questionable film reviewing acumen upon you? It’s because I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the quest of Billy Beane and the work of marketing scientist Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass institute and author of How Brands Grow.
The segue from American sport to advertising may seem extravagant, but the behaviour of consumers en masse is complicated, yet measurable: not unlike the outcome of thousands of high velocity bat and ball connections.
Professor Sharp’s book, and indeed the 50-year body of work upon which it draws, forms marketing suggestions based on empirical data gathered across hundreds of categories and in markets around the globe.
Produced by scientists, the focus is on testing theories to breaking point rather than manipulating scenarios to provide case studies supporting what are effectively personal ideas.
The conclusions are remarkably clear despite the breadth of studies and, as Sharp himself admitted when speaking recently at Telegraph Media Group, often uncomfortable in an industry that prides itself on cutting-edge location of target audiences for advertisers.
The suggestion that the ideal “target” for any brand is anybody who buys within that category or anybody who could do (even a 12-year-old will one day buy a car), could sound suspiciously simplistic when not qualified through countless examples.
Making a brand available to all
Professor Sharp’s message is that brand growth comes from shifting the behaviour of all those within a category, including light and medium purchasers of which there are many more, rather than squeezing a few extra purchases from the smaller group already buying.
Increased physical and mental availability of a brand to all potential buyers offers a far greater prospect for brand growth than the (negligible) impact of upselling Facebook fans and loyalty programme members, he argues. These people already like your brand enough to declare it to their friends after all.
The suggestion that an ideal way to spend a marketing budget (perhaps barring new launches with time-sensitive sales targets) is to spread it evenly throughout the year to all demographic groups, meets with equal wariness from those used to clever tactical executions and burst strategies.
Again, the data shows that building and refreshing memory structures in as many people as possible, as often as you can is the most efficient way to grow a brand: why miss someone who may buy your product in order to remind somebody else twice?
The biggest brands in any category are the ones with a greater number of buyers, purchasing more often, not those with a hardcore audience of superfans.
The Ehrenberg-Bass institute also argues against targeting “desirable” groups as a means of growth or efficiency (even Apple altered its iPad messaging to meet the unexpected surge in 50+ buyers who actually had the $500 to drop on a new gadget).
They equally dismiss the obsessive pursuit of ROI, a (frequently misused) accountancy term – by cancelling all marketing and dividing investment by the resulting zero, ROI would be infinite. Market share and sales volumes however, would be a different story.
So simple, yet so under-used
These evidence-based facts do not diminish the need for creative thinking. After all, there is as much responsibility in finding the right message in order to drive the desired reaction.
The book talks at length about the need for strong and consistent creative choices and the need to stand out. Reaching potential buyers is only half the battle, after all.
But if the evidence is so overwhelmingly conclusive, why isn’t everybody doing it? As Professor Sharp noted mischievously in his Q&A session, it took doctors hundreds of years to begin washing their hands between operations, despite overwhelming evidence of the dangers of not doing so.
In Moneyball, it took a stubborn desire to ignore convention and risk personal derision in order to achieve an outcome that had been computed in microscopic detail.
Resistance from agencies is understandable: it could be a tough meeting with a marketing director, explaining that the “value” added by your dedicated team is to evenly spread their money across the year, and that their cool new gadget will be shown off just as much to over 50s in the home counties as to young urbanites.
However, those who are brave enough to put faith in the numbers could change the face of advertising. Perhaps one day we will see an Ehrenberg-Bass-directed strategy in every agency.
It seems unthinkable, but it could happen. Just ask the full-time Sabermetric analysts at the Mets, Yankees, Padres, Cardinals, Red Sox, Nationals, Diamondbacks, Cleveland Indians and Blue Jays…