It’s not very often that you get excited by a marketing textbook, but that’s the effect Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow had on me. The trouble is, it was the wrong sort of excitement. I found myself writing ‘d’oh’ and ‘aarrrgghhh’ in the margins.
This book is, quite rightly, doing the rounds - especially with clients - and it’s well worth the read if you’re interested in marketing practice.
The reason for my excitement is that Sharp has determined a series of ‘laws’ for marketing based on decades of data, rather than just the experience of an opinionated marketer. However the book’s title, How Brands Grow, is a bit of a misnomer as the laws explain the way things are, rather than how to actually grow your brand.
As useful as the laws are, it becomes contentious when Sharp changes them into ‘rules’. Rule number five in particular, “Create And Use Distinctive Brand Assets”. An innocent enough expression, except Sharp is discarding differentiation in favour of distinction. By distinction, he refers only to a brand’s livery, its branding.
Agreeing with his laws doesn’t mean agreeing with his rules. The “Duplication of Purchase” law says that large brands have the largest share of every other brand’s customer, so a brand’s loyalty can be predicted by market size, not by how differentiated it is. This is his “proof” that consumers don’t see differentiation, ipso facto it’s no longer needed.
His own data suggests otherwise. For example, the least differentiated category is water, where 32% of consumers think at least one brand is unique or different. I would hardly call that undifferentiated.
Sharp is confusing differentiation with exclusivity. His litmus test for what he calls “meaningful differentiation” is monogamy; this is unrealistic for something as trivial (Sharp’s description) as brand choice. He gives the example of Nike and Adidas sharing (shock, horror) the same customer. Just because I perceive Nike to be differentiated it does not preclude me from purchasing other brands (and perceiving them to be differentiated). These thoughts are not conflicting.
So if it’s not differentiation that drives brand choice, what is it? According to Sharp, all we need to do is create distinctive brand assets - visual, aural and verbal iconography. He determines a distinctive asset by two criteria: firstly, whether the asset is uniquely linked to the brand; and secondly, if this association is well known.
So let’s take the distinctive brand asset, McDonald’s Happy Meals. Firstly, are Happy Meals uniquely linked to the McDonald’s brand? Tick. Secondly, is the association well known? Tick.
To make the distinctiveness versus differentiation argument stick, Sharp has conjured up numerous names for what is really differentiation - mental associations, descriptive memories, unique identifying characteristics. It feels a tiny bit like denial.
Here’s an idea for a third criteria for Happy Meals: does the distinctive asset drive the brand’s differentiation? Tick.
Sharp makes a strong argument for better distinctiveness. No one would dispute this, but we patently need both. This may potentially be simplistic, but: ‘cause’ differentiation, ‘effect’ distinction. The reason these assets are distinctive is because they are so imbued with meaning.
Which brings me to Sharp’s use of the phrase “meaningful differentiation”. This is where he has hit the nail on the head. It is about meaning something, and that’s what each of the distinctive brand assets have - meaning. That meaning is firstly, unique to the brand (tick), secondly, well known (tick) and thirdly, differentiates it from the category (tick).
The alternative is meaningless distinction.
James Hier
Chief Strategy Officer
MEC
This article first appeared in the 9 March 2012 edition of AdNews. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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