by Temel Aksoy
If a payment system used by shoppers isn’t available at your points of sale or e-business site, eliminate this obstacle.
If shoppers want to buy your brand at a physical point of sale or on your website but are unable to do so for whatever reason, find out what the hurdles are and eliminate them.
95. Rule
3: Get Noticed
People who just want to live their lives have no room in their minds for your brand. Your brand is very valuable to you; it’s the focus of your life. The products in which you’ve invested time and effort to create, and the commercials you’ve spent a small fortune producing, are your top priority, but they’re essentially insignificant to everyone else.
When one out of millions of people feels the need for a product or service in your category, it’s only possible for them to remember your brand, see it when they go out shopping (or when they get online) and buy it if a series of probabilities are working in your favor.
The first two—being in people’s minds and being available at points of sale—are points I’ve discussed at length in this book. Being noticed is what drives the third essential point. If a brand doesn’t stand out, it will do no good to be remembered and to be available at sales points.
Getting noticed means attracting attention. Your brand must draw attention, both in its advertising and at points of sale. Just as there are some people who are practically invisible in society, there are also brands that fail to make their presence noticed. They’re not recognized, and they attract no attention, even though they spend tons of money to overcome these obstacles. Don’t be one of those brands.
Your brand must get noticed at points of sale.
Your advertising should stand out. (More on this in the next chapters.)
96. Rule
4: Refresh and Build Memory Structures
Some brands turn their commercials into large-scale productions, using the country’s most famous celebrities in their advertisements. They devote a significant budget to broadcast their ads and run them on almost every channel. They also do a good job of integrating other channels of communications during the campaign. Most of the people in the country see and remember the ad.
Some time passes. The same brand launches a new advertising campaign. It’s a large brand, so there’s no shortage of resources for ads. The brand does another large-scale production. It uses the same celebrity and makes another huge advertising buy for the new campaign. People see the ad and remember it.
However, even though the second commercial is for the same brand and uses the same celebrity, it doesn’t refresh the brand memory created in the first ad because it’s shot in a different setting with different visuals and a different ad narrative. The two ads look like they belong to two different brands.
Failing to create brand memory is a cardinal sin of marketing, one that’s often committed by brands that fail to create memory structure—even though they’ve spent a small fortune. There’s nothing wrong with an ad being creative, generating a buzz or having a great sense of humor, but none of these will benefit the brand if they don’t refresh brand memories. Brand memory is like a brush fire. It will flame up and burn brightly, but it will die down just as fast. Its effects won’t be long-lasting unless the fire is stoked regularly.
Every brand that advertises should aim to be as permanent as possible. Advertising is like putting a tiny dot on the human mind with very weak and volatile ink. As soon as the ad stops running, this dot fades away. For the ad to become relatively permanent, the brand must continue to leave its mark on the same part of the human mind using a pen of the same color. Coloring different regions of people’s minds, always using pens with different colors, will make the ad less effective—particularly because people don’t have a special interest in watching advertisements. The effect of advertising is largely subconscious, working in the background of people’s attention (details in chapters 69, 70, 71 and 72).
Make your advertising effective so that memory structures unique to your brand are created in people’s minds.
Refresh this memory in all subsequent ads.
97. Rule
5: Create and Use Distinctive Brand Assets
In a world where every brand that’s competing with your brand in your category has roughly the same product or the same service, similar points of sale, the same payment options and the same after-sales service, how can you stand out? What makes you who you are and distinguishes you from the competition is your brand name, logo, color, symbol, slogan and music. These are what we call trademarks (details in chapters 52, 53, 54, 55 and 56).
Forget the myth that you can differentiate your brand with positioning strategies. You can’t differentiate your brand from your rivals, but you can create distinction with your trademarks (details in chapters 37, 38 and 39).
Remember, marketing is the task of selling your brand—which is practically identical to the competition—to people who are almost totally indifferent. Shoppers have no special reason to buy your brand. They don’t attribute any special meaning to your brand. But if your brand is the one they remember when they need something from your category, this effect will boost your sales. Your trademarks are shortcuts that ensure your brand is what customers think of when they need your category. Here are some tips about creating distinctive trademarks:
Devote time, effort and money to creating your trademarks, and be meticulous in their management.
Make sure that your trademarks are visible on your products, in your ads and at points of sale.
Advertise in such a way that you create memory structures.
98. Rule
6: Be Consistent, Yet Fresh
One of Andrew Ehrenberg’s most important discoveries was that every brand’s user base consists mostly of light buyers. All marketing laws are built on this finding. Brand owners and marketing directors generally disregard this fact, that their own brand’s user base consists mostly of light users. Instead, they think in averages and make decisions based on averages, but these averages are very dangerous.
Here’s a hypothetical but realistic example, based on the characteristic of the user base of all brands:
If a brand is bought on average ten times a year, this means that, most likely, the vast majority of the user base buys the brand twice a year, and a small minority buys the brand 40 times a year (details in chapter 43). The danger when thinking in terms of averages is that by doing so, marketers overlook the mindsets of light users—who make up the majority of the brand’s sales. They then make expensive creative decisions based on a false assumption about their customers and their customers’ feelings about the brand.
Marketers who spend their lives with the brand forget that they live in a totally different world than the typical (light) user, who buys the brand—for instance—twice a year.
Because the marketer spends every day intimately involved with every detail of the brand, they think that the brand’s packaging is old-fashioned; that changes should be made to the product; and that everyone is tired of seeing the TV commercial that was shot three months ago and has been shown at regular intervals ever since. But the vast majority of the user base consists of light users who don’t think like this at all.
Obviously, it’s imperative that brands use new packaging, new ads and new visuals from time to time. However, because the user base consists of light users, it takes much longer than marketers realize for brand packaging, visuals and advertisements to grow old. Here are some tips for how to be consistent, yet fresh:
Make novelties, but maintain the same approach, the same narrative and the same visual elements.
Say the same thing in a different way and repeat this for many years.
It requires lots of creativity to do this, so work with the most talented advertising creatives your budget will afford.
99. Rule
7: Stay Competitive
Ambition is key. If you set easily attainable goals, remember that you’ll underestimate your brand’s growth potential. This is essentially a waste of resources.
Never forget that if you postpone achieving your goals today, when it’s possible, you may not have the opportunity in the future. Because of time constraints we all face, it may be tempting to cut corners or set small goals. Always remember that people and companies must do their absolute best with their limited resources and time to improve themselves.
To reach your goals, make a plan for where your revenues will come from:
New geographical regions
New users
Additional consumption situations of existing users
…
Just as important is eliminating every obstacle that prevents existing users from purchasing your brand.
Take seriously every user group that you believe will drive significant demand and develop products that suit their needs. (For example, if there are people who don’t buy your brand because they’re allergic to one of the ingredients, and if you think there’s sufficient demand, produce a product for this segment.) Don’t allow potential users to choose a brand other than yours for reasons such as product features, product diversity or package size.
Track the competition closely. Don’t allow them to get the upper hand because of changes in their marketing approach.
Accept the fact that you’re not free to set the price for your brand, because the price level is set by all of the brands that compete in your category. Don’t allow potential consumers (customers) to buy rival brands because of your high price. Don’t provide the competition with a price umbrella by setting prices too high (details in chapter 59).
Use price discounts as a short-term sales tactic only. You won’t acquire new customers through price discounts. This only allows your existing customers (consumers), who are primarily light buyers, to acquire your brand more cheaply, eroding your profitability. Don’t let price discounts become the backbone of your marketing activities (details in chapter 60)
As I said in the Preface, the laws of marketing are similar to the laws of nature. Both use empirical evidence to understand the world and make predictions about what might happen, based on what has happened in the past.
The marketing laws and realities I’ve presented in this book—and these seven rules on how to do marketing right—all derive from empirical evidence that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has collected about consumer behavior. Marketers must base decisions on what they learn from this kind of evidence, not what they feel to be true based on unproven beliefs, assumptions, fads or trends.
If you can loosen your attachment to myths and instead embrace scientific marketing approaches, you’ll see a difference.
100. The
Dirichlet Model
In the 1950s, statistician Andrew Ehrenberg, in England, analyzed the behavior of heavy buyers of Cadbury’s chocolate beverage over the course of a year. He observed that the vast majority of the brand’s consumers were light buyers.
After trying various statistical models, Ehrenberg realized that people’s buying behaviors fit a certain statistical distribution. In an article he wrote in 1959, he put forward that consumers’ buying behaviors were consistent with a statistical pattern called “Negative Binomial Distribution.” (For more on this, see John Scriven and Gerald Goodhardt, “The Ehrenberg Legacy.”)
In the years that followed, Ehrenberg, along with Gerald Goodhardt and Chris Chatfield, conducted studies in which they observed that buying behaviors were explained even better by the statistical distribution named after the famous German mathematician Dirichlet. In 1984, Ehrenberg, Chatfield and Goodhardt proved that Dirichlet distribution, a special subset of NBD, explained shopper behavior in almost every product and service category.
To those who are curious how the Dirichlet Model works, I recommend reading the John Bound article “User’s Guide to Dirichlet” (see References), which can be summarized as follows:
The information that consumer panels provide is market size, brand share, penetration and rate of purchase data for the whole market and for individual brands. But the most precious feature of these panels is that they track individual purchasers over time.
Based on observations of these individual purchasers, Andrew Ehrenberg’s contribution was to reveal some generalizable buying patterns of consumers. Remember that these generalizations, as in other scientific fields, are the foundations of marketing science.
The Dirichlet Model uses individual brand shares and numbers of purchases of each brand (together with total category data) as input to make predictions for the behavior of such a brand of that share in such a product category. When these data are supplied, The Dirichlet Model predicts for each brand the following (quoting from page 4 of the article):
Penetration of purchasers (percentage buying the brand at all)
Percentage buying the brand once and five times in the designated period
Average number of purchases of the brand per buyer of the brand
Average number and distribution of the numbers of purchases of the category by buyers of the brand
Share of category requirement (This follows from the average number of purchases.)
Percentage of sole buyers (A sole buyer is one who buys only one brand in the category in the period.)
Rate of purchase of sole buyers
Percentage repeat buying period to period
The author emphasizes that penetrations or market shares (which are closely related to one another) are input, not output. The Dirichlet Model then tells us how a brand of that size may be expected to behave in terms of the measures predicted, given the input information about both the total category and the other brands.
The Dirichlet model provides marketing directors with the value expected of each performance criteria; in other words, the norm. Directors will be able to make the best decision by benchmarking their results to these norms.
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