1. Drive new users (penetration)

2. Build mental availability (salience and cut through)

3. Build physical availability (make it easy for people to buy)

4. Reinforce and refresh your distinctive assets

5. Focus on consistently delivering your brand “personalities” at all consumer touch points

6. Drive trial

7. Use wide-reaching, broadcast media

8. Focus on a long presence in media

9. Back a few big, long-term bets

10. Base before innovation

For more rules, see Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow.

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

Sufficiency is the level at which advertising spending actually starts to work.

No marketing organisation has the money to do everything it wants to do.

Airing below sufficiency is a waste of time and money. It will not be sufficient to win the war for mental availability.

The only strategy is to focus on core products.

Only once those brands have been given enough support should you spend ad dollars on other brands or products. A famous example of this was Steve Jobs’ decision to reduce the product range at Apple to five core products. It proved to be a highly effective strategy. 

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

In branding, clarity is everything.

Marketers must ensure products stand out to reach large audiences of light buyers cost-effectively.

To do this, marketers have various tools they can deploy.

Marks of distinction

Distinctiveness, or how we stand out from others has been shown in research to be effective at driving mental availability.

Distinctiveness helps lock a brand into memory. It creates a neural association, which makes it easier to recall. How many flat chocolate bars can you name?  Several? None? Now how many triangular chocolate bars can you name? It’s much easier to recall something distinctive such as Toblerone, when it is distinct from the category. That distinction is worth money.

Distinction can come from the product, the pack, or the advertising.

Beauty products with a marks of distinction include the iconic tartan of Burberry, the duck egg blue and crystal bottle of Tiffany, the crown and London setting of Rimmel, and the Wave & Red colour of Wella.

A celebrity endorsement such as Kate Moss for Rimmel counts as a mark of brand distinction.

Distinctiveness is one of the most effective tools we have to cut through the noise of the competition and get inside our customer’s heads.

The reason is a matter of human survival: we ignore anything that resembles “business as usual” (it’s not a threat or a benefit), yet we are genetically hard-wired to notice things that break the norm.

By identifying the different assets of our brands, brands can assess them for fame and uniqueness. The leading brands can then be leveraged at all consumer touch points.

Personality

Many brands use personality to help define their brands and lodge them in the minds of customers.

Brand personalities lock into archaic story patterns buyers are already aware of. When fashion giant Coty associate one of its brands with an archetype such as Rimmel and The Rebel, it triggers deep, emotive associations between the brand and buyers.

 The clearer and more distinct a brand’s personality, the easier it is for people to recall it.

 Personality is increasingly a key point of distinction. That’s why Coty has an outside agency to help define the archetypes of our top 20 brands.

Purpose

Purpose is why the brand exists, how it intends to positively impact consumers’ lives and how it helps our consumers. The notion of a brand’s purpose has been popularized by “Start With Why”, a book and Ted Talk by Simon Senek.

Purpose brings the meaning of brands to our consumers. It also guides marketing decisions about what the brand offers, how the brand acts and communicates.

Purpose is a reflection of the core beliefs and values of the brand. It can also be informed by consumer, culture and category. Evidence suggests that companies with purpose driven-brands outperform the market average.

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

We know that brands are “substitutable.” In other words, all category buyers can be consumers of competing brands as well as ours.

So we need to ensure our brands easily come to mind when people are considering buying from a particular category. If we don’t make it easy for them to believe us, they will happily switch brands.

At the same time, there are partitions in every category, which can be explained in terms of premium versus value.

Shoppers often shop around their chosen partition, says Byron Sharpe in How To Grow Your Brand

To increase penetration, we need to play in all partitions, and ensure we drive mental and physical availability in each partition.

One brand per partition

The best strategy is to have one brand per partition with the resources to exploit its potential fully.  Too many competing voices will not help us win through the competitive noise.

We can call this strategy “base before innovation”. Core brands must be prioritized  – double down on heroes in each partition – before supporting new brands.

In order to win in portfolio availability, we will:

• Keep focus on core brands/ core lines

• Match key price partitions

• Keep consistency of distinctive assets

• Support innovations consistently over time

About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

To make a brand easy to buy we need to build mental and physical availability. Everything else is secondary.

Building mental availability requires distinctiveness and clear branding. Building physical availability requires breadth and depth of distribution in space and in time. Together, mental and physical availability make a brand easier to buy for more people, in more situations.

In the long run, brands compete in terms of mental and physical availability. Mental and physical availability takes a long time to build and a long time to fade. This stability is worth real money.

Salience is the propensity for a brand to be noticed and thought of in buying situations. We create salience by building memory associations about a brand. The more extensive and fresher the network of memory associations, the greater the brand’s chance of being noticed or thought of in buying situations.

By building memory links in buyers, marketers can increase the number of people who think of a brand, the number of times each person thinks of a brand, the number of times a person thinks of a brand as an option to buy.

Why branding and advertising matter

The maintenance of brand salience depends on the quality of branding and advertising.

Distinctive, consistent icons and imagery build memory associations that allow a brand to be recalled in a variety of buying situations.

Physical availability means making a brand as easy to notice and buy as possible, for as many consumers as possible, across as wide a range of potential buying situations as possible. This includes hours of availability and ease of facilitated purchase.

The power of sampling

Often the very best way to drive physical availability is to try a product, or what we call sampling via  beauty consultants or in store, or buy enticing customers with a glass of Proseco or nibble of a treat. Other factors include price, promotion, distribution and shelf space.

The laws of physical availability can be brutal in their simplicity: you can double sales by simply doubling distribution.