Everything you know about marketing may be wrong. In How Brands Grow, marketing professor Byron Sharp argues that many of the marketing principles commonly taught in business schools are unsubstantiated myths. By examining the real-world data that indicates which marketing techniques succeed and which fail, Sharp claims to have discovered a new set of empirical rules that directly contradict the widely-held “common sense” principles of marketing.
According to Sharp, most modern marketers believe you should:
However, Sharp asserts that you should do the opposite—we’ve consolidated his advice into these three rules:
In short, Sharp argues that mass marketing—basic messaging about your brand for a general audience—is still the most effective way to grow, despite many marketing professionals declaring it “dead.”
(Shortform note: In a 2020 interview, Sharp claims that since the publication of How Brands Grow in 2010, the mainstream marketing world has fully embraced some of his ideas and resisted others. According to Sharp, large media companies like Facebook and Google were quick to echo his idea that brand growth comes from constantly attracting new customers—likely because they possess the tools to reach mass audiences (and thus, many potential customers) and can offer these advertising channels to other companies. However, he claims that companies still overvalue targeted marketing, failing to realize that the majority of their current buyers fall outside of their target demographic (as we’ll discuss later).)
New Marketing Coexists With Traditional Marketing
Sharp is right that commentators have been reporting the death of mass marketing for years. However, the data shows that mass marketing is far from obsolete: For example, consider how much brands still spend on television advertisements, a popular medium for mass marketing. Marketers in North America spent an estimated 64.5 billion dollars on television advertisements in 2021, and experts predict this number to plateau—not decline—over the next few years. It seems that the drastic shifts we’ve seen in the world of marketing have grown to coexist with mass marketing rather than usurp it.
For example, one marketing trend that has come to coexist with mass marketing in recent years is permission marketing. Permission marketing is when a brand gives consumers an opportunity to opt into branded messaging they’re interested in—for instance, a branded email newsletter—instead of forcing mass audiences to digest information about products they likely don’t care about.
In 2009, the Huffington Post declared permission marketing to be the movement that would kill mass marketing. Instead, existing big brands that rose to prominence in the age of traditional marketing have employed additional permission marketing channels instead of replacing their direct advertising. For example, Domino’s Pizza offers discounts to those who intentionally sign up for its emails and text messages (permission marketing) but still invests heavily in television commercials and billboards (traditional mass marketing).
Let’s examine each of Sharp’s new rules of marketing in turn, contrasting them with the traditional marketing rules they contradict.
(Shortform note: Sharp’s chapter on brand distinctiveness, which we’ll reference throughout the rest of this guide, is co-authored by Jenni Romaniuk. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll continue attributing these ideas solely to Sharp.)
Modern marketers often profess that it costs less to keep your existing customers than to attract new customers. Sharp explains that they believe this because it makes intuitive sense: If someone bought from your brand already, they’re more likely to buy from you again—they’re “your customer.”
Following this logic, your marketing is supposedly more effective on existing customers who are predisposed to spend a lot of money on your brand. For example, marketers may assume that it takes only one advertisement to convince an existing customer to purchase again, but five advertisements to convince a new customer to make a purchase. This makes the new customer five times more expensive to acquire.
However, Sharp insists that the data tells a different story: Marketing to existing customers is much less profitable than marketing to new customers.
Focus on Value Over Retention or Acquisition
Some argue that Sharp’s perspective on retention versus acquisition is a false dichotomy: You don’t need to choose one or the other to devise a cheap yet effective marketing strategy. Instead, marketers should focus on retaining or acquiring whichever customers are the most valuable, using the metric of customer lifetime value (CLV). This figure is a prediction of the total sales you’ll earn from a specific customer.
In The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss describes how calculating CLV helped him boost profits when he was selling brain supplements to distributors. Initially, he treated all of his clients equally, no matter how valuable they were. However, when he calculated his clients’ CLV, Ferriss found that five of his 120 clients were generating 95% of his profits.
Thus, Ferriss began spending more effort maintaining relationships with his most valuable clients, increasing his chances of retaining them, and cut ties with low-value clients who behaved unprofessionally. He also studied his top five customers and used the commonalities he found to find new, equally valuable customers. Instead of relying blindly on either retention or acquisition, he calculated which customers were worth trying to retain and which he should try to acquire.
Arguably, if marketers pursue a CLV-oriented strategy like Ferriss’s, it doesn’t matter if marketing to these customers is initially expensive: Your most valuable customers—who could drive 95% of your sales, as in Ferriss’s case—are worth whatever costs are necessary to get them.
Sharp uses data to argue that acquiring new customers, not retaining more existing customers, is the key to brand growth. At the core of Sharp’s data-centric argument is a statistical pattern we’ll call the “fixed pattern of brand growth.” After examining the financial data from a multitude of brands, Sharp concludes that virtually every company grows by increasing their profits in the same way:
Every time a brand grows in market share, its market penetration (total number of customers) increases dramatically, while its customer retention and average purchase frequency increase only modestly. In other words, when a brand grows faster than its competitors do, it’s always due to a greater total number of customers. Sharp finds that this pattern holds true for brands in wildly different industries, in markets around the world, and in data sets collected over the past several decades.
Let’s break this idea down. Theoretically, a brand can earn greater market share (earning more than their competitors) in three ways:
However, by examining the data, Sharp finds that when you break down the sources of any company’s profits and compare them to their competitors, you find that no brands accomplish goals two and three significantly better than their competitors. All competing brands lose about the same percentage of their customers to their competitors every year, and no brands have customers that buy much more frequently than their competitors’ customers do. Winning brands always set themselves apart by accomplishing goal one: acquiring more customers than their competitors.
According to Sharp, the fixed pattern of brand growth implies that no matter what managers or marketers do, it’s impossible for a brand to surpass its top competitors by seeking to make its customers more “loyal.” In other words, there’s no way to dominate a market by targeting the customers you already have. Ultimately, such marketing is a waste of money. In contrast, the data shows that acquiring new customers always results in brand growth.
Acquire New Customers by Serving Existing Customers
The fixed pattern of brand growth shows that all brands grow by acquiring new customers. However, this doesn’t mean that brands should ignore their existing customers. 93% of consumers admit to basing their purchasing decisions on online reviews, and 80% refuse to buy from businesses with negative reviews. Online reviews (and other word-of-mouth communication channels) therefore allow existing customers to attract or repel new customers. For this reason, even though customer service exclusively impacts existing customers, statistically, it manifests in increased acquisition.
In Raving Fans, Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles give tips on how best to use customer service as an outreach tool—a means of acquiring the new customers needed to grow. Sharp would argue that these strategies won’t help you retain more customers (even though Blanchard and Bowles claim that they will), nor will it get your existing customers to purchase more, but they may attract new customers through positive word of mouth:
Dig into customer feedback. According to Blanchard and Bowles, when customers describe part of their experience as “fine” or “okay,” it indicates room for improvement. They may even be hiding their disappointment to avoid appearing rude or entitled. Aim to have your customers raving about every part of their experience.
Keep your employees happy. Blanchard and Bowles see your employees as your “internal customers”—your job is to serve them just as much as your buyers. Happy employees are more likely to keep customers happy.
Don’t promise your customers too much at once. If you set the bar for customer service too high and make promises your company isn’t equipped to keep, you’ll lose your customers’ trust. Instead, be realistic about what your organization can accomplish and make incremental improvements to your customer service.
Why do marketing efforts that target existing customers fail? Let’s explain by examining the shortcomings of two of the most common marketing strategies aimed at existing customers: loyalty programs and promotional discounts. Sharp states that in most cases, marketers should steer clear of these techniques.
Sharp explains that in general, it’s wasteful to spend money marketing to existing buyers because they’re the most likely to make purchases without marketing intervention. We can see this principle at work by examining why loyalty programs fail to increase profits.
Loyalty programs attempt to incentivize existing customers to purchase from a brand more often by rewarding buyers with points or free products with every purchase. However, when comparing loyalty program members to non-members, the data shows that loyalty programs don’t influence members to buy any more frequently. Members are just getting value for the purchases they would have made anyway, without the loyalty program. Thus, the loyalty program is wasteful and unnecessary.
Why don’t loyalty programs influence people to buy more frequently? Sharp claims that for the most part, people only buy things when they need them—their purchase schedules are fixed. No marketing can influence existing customers to buy more than they want or need. On the other hand, when you market to new customers, you can increase your profits without futilely attempting to persuade anyone to buy more frequently. Instead, you simply wait until consumers need to make a purchase and influence them to choose your brand instead of your competitor’s.
What About Subscriptions?
The subscription business model has boomed in popularity in recent years, and at first glance, it appears to be a viable way for brands to increase their profits by targeting existing customers. Unlike loyalty programs (which Sharp argues have no impact on a customer’s purchase schedule), subscriptions that require a monthly fee by their very nature allow the company to set their customers’ purchase schedules.
However, it’s possible that subscription services fall prey to the same downsides as loyalty programs. Like loyalty programs, all-you-can-eat-style subscriptions are more valuable to customers who would have made purchases anyway—with a subscription, a brand’s heaviest buyers often end up paying significantly less than they would have a la carte.
For example, Taco Bell has rolled out a subscription service: one free taco a day for $10 a month. Since Taco Bell sells individual tacos for around $2, this means that for the cost of five regularly-priced tacos, customers can get up to thirty via the subscription. In this case, subscribers who would have already eaten more than five tacos in a month are getting value for purchases they once happily made at a higher price, cutting into Taco Bell’s profits for no clear gain. Similarly, Amazon Prime Video subscribers who watch a lot of TV and movies may have been willing to pay for more expensive individual rentals or purchases of that same content.
It’s also possible that consumers who already planned on buying frequently are the majority of those who choose to enroll in subscription services, while consumers who know they wouldn’t use the subscription enough to save money choose not to participate. If this happens, brands suffer losses not only from subscribers who are getting extra value for no clear gain to the brand, but also from potential new customers who turn away because of the intimidating commitment of a subscription.
(Shortform note: The chapter in How Brands Grow on promotional discounts is written by John Daws and John Scriven. Since Sharp intentionally incorporates this information in his overarching argument, we’ll continue to attribute these ideas to Sharp.)
According to Sharp, many marketers believe that offering promotional discounts will influence existing customers to purchase more frequently. However, this strategy also fails to generate meaningful profits. Sharp explains that promotional discounts are attractive to marketers because they successfully boost sales for the duration of the promotion. However, this strategy entails a number of drawbacks that often keep it from being profitable.
First, Sharp points out that promotional discounts result in decreased profit margins, which means you need to sell much more for the promotional discount to be profitable. Second, if a discount persuades a customer to buy something they wouldn’t have normally bought, it also makes them less likely to purchase again in the future—their need for this kind of purchase is fulfilled early, and they won’t need to buy the item again for a longer time. In this way, you’re earning present sales at the expense of your future sales. For example, if you give someone a car wash for 50% off, their car will still be clean tomorrow, reducing the likelihood that they will come and buy another car wash soon.
The Myth of Short-Term Activation
Many marketing theorists describe promotional discounts as a short-term “activation” strategy for brands to use in conjunction with other long-term “brand-building” strategies like advertising and social media presence. In their eyes, activation events bring in a large portion of your profits, but only if you’ve already built up your brand image over a long period of time. This is because customers will only obey “calls to action” in activation strategies if they already have a positive image of your brand. With this in mind, theorists advise marketers to employ a mix of these two types of strategies: Build your brand, then convert that brand presence into sales with activations like limited-time discounts.
Sharp disputes this perspective—in his eyes, activation is an entirely unnecessary part of the growth process. Due to their decreased profit margins and negative effect on future sales, activation events like promotional discounts typically have an overall neutral or slightly negative effect on profits: All true growth is driven by brand-building. In Sharp’s eyes, the only thing activations do is group together sales that would have already happened due to brand-building: For example, a promotional discount on cars for the first week of April might make everyone who already intended to buy a car in April buy one during the first week of the month. Marketers see these profit spikes, conclude that they were caused solely by the activation, and thus mistake activations for a necessary half of the process.
With Rule #1, we established that marketers profit the most from acquiring new customers instead of trying to make their existing customers more loyal. With Rule #2, we’ll see how most marketers fail to optimally market to new customers. (We’ll explore what Sharp thinks marketers should do instead a little later.)
Sharp states that when modern marketers try to acquire new customers, they typically identify a target demographic and tailor their marketing toward it. Sharp challenges this strategy, asserting that in most cases, it’s virtually impossible to boost your sales by tailoring your marketing to a specific demographic. On the contrary, targeting a niche is more likely to limit your reach. Instead, market to as many demographics as possible.
Early Adopters: A Demographic to Target?
In Purple Cow, Seth Godin opposes Sharp, arguing that you need to tailor your product to at least one demographic: early adopters, or those on the lookout for something new. Targeting early adopters is beneficial because they’re often the customers most willing to spend money on a new, innovative product. They also promote the product to other consumers through word of mouth.
The majority of consumers are satisfied with what they have and aren’t looking for something new. For this reason, the kind of innovation that eventually creates market leaders only appeals to a niche demographic at first. Tailoring your product to please everyone will dilute the qualities that make it innovative (and therefore appealing to early adopters). For example, if Netflix had tailored their service to appeal to the mainstream movie-viewing market, they might have invested in brick-and-mortar rental stores and lost in competition to Blockbuster Video instead of attracting the attention of the early adopters of in-home streaming.)
According to Sharp, marketers target specific demographics because they assume that markets are more divided than they really are. In other words, they assume that each product in a market appeals to a specific type of buyer, and marketers succeed by tailoring their marketing to that niche. For example, the marketers of a fruit smoothie bar may assume they’re selling to a young, health-conscious niche market while nearby ice cream stores sell to a separate market, one that’s more family-oriented and less health-conscious.
However, Sharp explains that marketing to a specific niche fails because most competing brands have demographically identical customer bases. In other words, the same kinds of people buy products that marketers think appeal to mostly separate audiences. Consumers enjoy buying a wide variety of different products depending on how they feel at a given time.
For example, imagine a company that sells healthy frozen meals. Their marketers may assume that they’re selling in the niche “healthy instant meal” market, competing against other companies trying to sell healthy instant meals to a target demographic—perhaps busy parents who don’t have much time to cook but have expendable income and want their kids to eat healthily.
However, Sharp would argue that our frozen meal company is operating in a mass market. Nearly everyone wants to buy a healthy frozen meal from time to time, even if it’s just once a year. Thus, our frozen meal company is not only competing with other healthy frozen meals, but all meal alternatives, including instant meals, restaurants, and meal delivery kits.
Sharp explains that marketers who suffer from the misguided assumption that they’re operating in a niche market set sales goals far too low. Falsely assuming that they’re “market leaders” of a specific niche, they don’t realize that they have the potential to convert customers from all the competitors in the mass market and become a top brand on a global scale. These marketers would earn more customers if they adjusted their marketing for a broader audience. Therefore, instead of targeting busy parents, our healthy frozen meal company should create marketing that appeals to everyone.
Targeted Marketing in the Internet Age
Sharp claims that tailoring your marketing to appeal to a certain group has no effect (evidenced by the fact that competing brands have demographically identical customer bases). He also asserts that most products naturally appeal to a wide range of demographics, even if only occasionally. However, specialized products exist that likely wouldn’t benefit from mass marketing because they truly do only appeal to a certain demographic—for example, guitar straps will generally only be bought by people who play guitar. Any marketing that shows ads for guitar straps to non-guitar players is a waste of money. In this case, tailored marketing does have tangible benefits.
Furthermore, despite the fact that Sharp published How Brands Grow in 2010, at a time when Internet marketing was growing, he doesn’t acknowledge the Internet Age’s advances in targeted advertising that arguably make it a more viable strategy. Never before have advertisers who sell specialized products been able to ensure that only people who fit their desired customer profile see their ads, making these ads as cost-effective as possible (since people who’d never be interested in the product simply never see the ad). Now, the advertising platforms owned by companies like Facebook and Google make this kind of targeted advertising available to all brands.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the Internet’s advanced targeted marketing only exacerbates the problems for brands that Sharp identifies in How Brands Grow. If brands can now ensure that their ads are only viewed by a narrow demographic, potential customers who fall outside of that demographic may be even less likely to hear about the brand than they would have been in the age of traditional mass marketing. This could prevent brands from expanding beyond the niche they falsely believe themselves to be competing in.
For example, if a company that makes quality leather guitar straps targets their ads only to males from age 18 to 24 who play guitar, they may miss out on potential sales from other demographics: people who aren’t men, people who fall outside the 18 to 24 age range, or people who don’t play guitar but want to buy a gift for someone who plays guitar.
Sharp uses data to back up his assertion that most companies compete in mass markets. For instance, he explains that by examining what percentage of two brands’ customers overlap (how many people bought both brands in a given span of time), you can determine which brands are in competition with one another. Sharp claims that the “specialized” brands that people assume serve niche markets share the same percentage of buyers with their niche competitors as generic brands, proving that these specialized brands are competing in the mass market. This data shows that most market niches don’t really exist.
Indifferent Majorities Buy Niche Products
One explanation as to why the customers of competing brands overlap so much is that products that in theory only appeal to niches often become the norm. In Skin in the Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes a phenomenon he calls the “Stubborn Minority.” This is the idea that society is not shaped by majority consensus, but instead by passionate small groups who impose their preferences on an indifferent majority.
For example, in the US, 41% of packaged food is certified kosher (satisfying the dietary restrictions of Jewish law) even though fewer than 2% of the US population practice the Jewish faith (and only about a fifth of that small group keep kosher). This is because non-kosher eaters don’t care if their food is kosher or not and are willing to buy kosher food, allowing many brands to make their food kosher by default.
For this reason, kosher brands compete in the mass market against all food brands, not just against other kosher brands. Kosher food isn’t a niche market because kosher brands share the same non-Jewish customers as their competitors.
Sharp argues that significant functional differences are one of the only things that can truly segment a market—for instance, a laptop charger fitted for a British power outlet will have more buyers in Great Britain than the United States.
(Shortform note: Since Sharp believes that significant functional differences are able to segment a market, he would likely agree that it’s possible to create a new niche market by introducing unique functional differences to your product (even though this strategy runs counter to his advice to compete in mass markets). The authors of Blue Ocean Strategy call this strategy “value innovation”—the search for new advances that, in their view, allow you to offer customers greater value for a lower cost. These new advances may stem from either cutting-edge research or lateral thinking with existing technology.)
Sharp also specifies that price ranges often segment a market—although not as much as you might expect. Just as the average consumer purchases a variety of products, they also purchase the same product at a variety of quality levels, even at wildly different prices. For example: On average, the people who dine at an upscale bistro are wealthier than the average fast food patron, but people who earn less will still dine at the bistro on special occasions. Thus, this bistro could increase profits by marketing to the middle and lower class.
(Shortform note: There is evidence to back up Sharp’s assertion that people with expendable income aren’t the only ones buying high-priced goods. One study shows that the bottom 20% of families spend as much as 40% of their income on “luxury goods” (goods bought in greater quantities as income increases). Why would low-income families spend so much on non-essentials? Some theorize that lower-income individuals who live in areas of greater income inequality feel more social pressure to appear successful, so they purchase flashy luxury goods despite lacking the finances to comfortably do so.)
If it’s impossible to find success by marketing to existing buyers or other specific demographics of consumers, what can marketers do to be more successful than their competitors? To answer this question, we’ll first explain how consumers decide which brand to buy, then we’ll show how marketers who understand this process can influence consumers to buy their brand more often.
In Rule #2, we established that all competing brands sell to the same demographics, even when they target different demographics in their marketing. But why is this the case?
According to Sharp, targeted marketing fails because consumers don’t care enough about branding for it to impact their purchasing decisions. Customer surveys reveal that consumers typically perceive all brands in a category to be roughly interchangeable—when the differences between brands are slight, consumers fail to see differences at all. This is especially true for the intangible features of a brand: Only a small fraction of consumers ever think about a brand’s image or personality. Even if they do describe a brand as more “trendy“ or “wholesome“ than its competitors in surveys, they frequently change their opinions if interviewed later.
For this reason, any marketing that attempts to prove a brand is different or better than its competitors misses the point entirely. Most of the time, consumers buy without ever deliberately comparing various brands and determining which is best for them. Sharp explains that humans have adapted to a brand-saturated world by completely filtering out the vast majority of branded messaging they encounter. Even if you’ve crafted the most convincing value proposition possible for a target demographic, it’s more than likely that your message won’t get past your audience’s mental filter, and they’ll ignore it completely.
Should Marketers Worry About Brand Dilution?
By arguing that consumers purchase without regard to the differences between brands, Sharp attempts to disprove the existence of “positioning.” In Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout claim that marketers can create their own market niches by influencing consumers to perceive their brand in a certain “position” within a market—for example, as more a luxurious jewelry brand than cheaper alternatives.
In some cases, these two contrasting perspectives lead to opposing marketing strategies. For example, Ries and Trout warn against brand dilution: when a brand weakens its image by offering a wider variety of products. Ries and Trout would claim that if a luxurious jewelry company added a more affordable line of products, they would seem less prestigious to consumers, reducing the demand for their high-end jewelry.
On the other hand, Sharp would likely argue that rolling out an affordable line of products wouldn’t hurt sales of the high-end line. Why not? Sharp would argue that because consumers filter out the marketing that “positions” the jewelry as more luxurious than its competitors, they wouldn’t think of the brand as more luxurious in the first place. There would be no brand image to dilute, so a cheaper line wouldn’t dissuade anyone from buying the expensive line.
If consumers don’t rationally weigh their options, how do they decide which brand to purchase? Sharp explains that when deciding which brand to buy, consumers ignore the vast majority of options and decide between the few options that are immediately present. This not only means presence in the physical sense (in other words, the options in a consumer’s immediate surroundings) but also conceptual presence: When you think about a product, what’s the first brand that comes to mind?
What consumers think of your brand matters far less than how often they think about your brand. According to Sharp, if a customer recognizes your brand and considers buying it, however briefly, they’re already vastly more likely to purchase your brand than your competitors’ brands, whom they don’t instantly recognize and thus ignore completely.
Availability Bias Explains Consumer Behavior
The effect that mental presence has on our purchasing decisions relates to availability bias. This is an irrational flaw in human thinking—the more easily something comes to mind, the more significant we feel it is. For example, many people are more afraid of plane crashes than car crashes, despite the fact that car crashes are far more likely to occur. This is because news stories of mass deaths in plane crashes and the terrifying idea of being powerless during a plane crash more easily spring to mind than car accidents, making our fear of planes more intense than our fear of cars.
One way you can reduce the effect of availability bias is by slowing down and intentionally using logic to explain your decisions. However, when consumers are deciding what brand to buy, it’s likely that they wouldn’t care enough to override their availability bias in this way, even if warned against it. This kind of intensive logical thinking is too much work for too little payoff in low-stakes purchasing decisions.
In this way, mental presence has the same effect on consumer behavior as physical presence: For the same reason you wouldn’t bother to drive to the next store for the chance of finding a slightly better product, you wouldn’t spend the effort racking your brain for another brand for the chance that it’s slightly better.
Because consumers only think about a select few brands when deciding which to purchase, Sharp claims that the most effective way to market your brand is to increase the likelihood that consumers will think about it.
(Shortform note: In the past, this principle has inspired extreme publicity stunts to attract negative attention just to get people thinking about a brand or product—as the saying goes, “Any press is good press.” In Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday explains how he deliberately sparked a nationwide protest against an offensive movie he was hired to promote. This got more people thinking about the movie—negatively or otherwise—and as a result, many more people went to see the movie who otherwise wouldn’t have heard of it.)
Sharp proposes three main ways to influence consumers to think about your brand:
First, Sharp recommends advertising regularly. Advertising works by prompting consumers to create and maintain memories about your brand. If a consumer encounters your brand in the future (or anything that reminds them of your brand), they’ll remember your commercial and will be more likely to consider purchasing. For example, even though it’s unlikely that a Chevrolet or Toyota television commercial will convince someone to immediately go out and buy a car, the advertisement makes it more likely that they’ll think of the brand the next time they need to buy a car—months or even years in the future.
Since advertisements work by triggering memories, Sharp asserts that the best advertisements grab the audience’s attention and engage them emotionally, making the advertisement more memorable. Memorable advertisements work well even if they’re not logically persuasive. Ads do, however, need to prominently connect to the brand in a memorable way. If the audience doesn’t register which brand the advertisement is promoting, they won’t remember the ad when the time comes to choose which brand to buy.
Advertising on Social Media
In Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk explains how marketers can use social media to promote their brand—using a strategy that closely mirrors Sharp’s. Vaynerchuk’s main idea is that the most effective social media advertising focuses on building a long-term relationship with potential customers. To this end, he advises using two types of posts—“jabs,” short and entertaining pieces of branded content, and “right hooks,” calls to action that prompt followers into making a purchase (or “activations,” as we called them earlier).
Jabs help build positive memories about your brand among your followers, as Sharp recommends. This way, when you post a right hook, directly urging your audience to make a purchase, they already have a positive attitude toward your brand and are more likely to buy. (As we’ve discussed, Sharp would likely argue that these right hooks are unnecessary if you’ve posted enough jabs—when your audience eventually needs to make a purchase in your category, they’ll already think of your brand first.)
Like Sharp, Vaynerchuk claims that jabs are most effective when they grab your attention and engage your emotions. To accomplish this, he recommends integrating references to pop culture and current events into your social media posts, making your content relevant to topics that your audience is already interested in. These in-jokes don’t necessarily use logic to persuade audiences to choose your brand, but they typically connect back to the brand in some way.
For example, after the 2013 Super Bowl power outage, Oreo posted a graphic with the caption “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark.” Oreo wasn’t trying to logically persuade viewers to buy their cookies by advertising that they’re still edible in the dark—they caught the audience’s attention by poking fun at the power outage, then turned that attention into a positive memory about the brand by making the audience think about “dunking” Oreos in milk.
Second, Sharp recommends creating recognizable brand assets. These are symbols associated with your brand—for example, a recognizable logo and color scheme, and a memorable brand name. Whenever a potential customer recognizes any of these assets—for instance, spotting them at the store—they’ll recall positive memories of your brand (interesting advertisements, past purchases, and so on) and will be more likely to buy.
For this reason, Sharp argues that it’s important to keep these assets consistent throughout your brand’s lifespan. Changing your brand assets reduces the chance of your audience immediately recognizing them, removing the link to past experiences and making it more likely that their mental filter causes them to ignore your brand entirely.
(Shortform note: If rebranding throws away the value of your brand assets by making them less likely to trigger your customers’ positive memories of the brand, why do so many companies do it? Many argue that it’s necessary to keep up with changing times and avoid appearing outdated. Still, history shows that there’s a right way and a wrong way to rebrand, and the key distinction is likely subtlety: Brands Gap and Tropicana faced customer backlash after rebrandings that were too extreme, and they were quickly pressured into reverting the change. In contrast, Google was able to successfully overhaul their logo over the course of nearly two decades through a series of subtle tweaks.)
Third, Sharp recommends expanding your reach and selling through as many channels as possible to increase your brand’s visibility. Whenever someone notices your product on the shelf at a store, or listed on an internet search, it triggers their memories of your brand and increases the chance of them making a purchase.
For this reason, when you expand somewhere new, do whatever you can to make your brand easier to notice. For example, fast food restaurants use large branded signs to grab hungry drivers’ attention and convince them to stop there for lunch instead of at their competitors.
(Shortform note: Sharp doesn’t offer much specific advice on how to expand distribution. In Blitzscaling, Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman advise finding ways to piggyback on existing distribution channels. For example, in the early days of PayPal, the company expanded its reach and made it easier for customers to notice it by getting online vendors to add a “Pay with PayPal” button to their eBay listings. eBay had already done the heavy lifting of building a customer base interested in making online purchases—PayPal simply found a way to tag along and tap into this market. These early online customers were the type most likely to notice PayPal and remember to use it in the future the next time they needed to transfer money online.)
Sharp argues that most marketers have a misguided view of their brand presence—they don’t accurately understand why their marketing is successful (or not). Assess your brand presence to gain a clearer idea on how well you’re doing and what you could be doing better.
Sharp argues that most marketers spend too much time worrying what customers think about their brand and not enough about how often customers think about their brand. How do you currently balance these two priorities? How could you shift your focus toward increasing the likelihood that your audience will think of your brand? (For example, imagine you run a seafood fast food franchise. Your advertisements may be too focused on positioning your brand as “fresher” than your burger-peddling competitors, and you should instead try to make them humorous and more memorable.)
Sharp claims that brands often tailor their brands to a target demographic that’s too narrow. How could you adjust your service and messaging to appeal to a broader audience? (For example, your seafood chain may only be popular with families, failing to serve individuals looking for a quick bite to eat. You might be able to remedy this by offering a value menu and emphasizing your drive-through service in advertising.)
List all your brand assets. Is there a way you can make them more distinctive or memorable, without changing them in a way that makes them less recognizable? (For example, your seafood restaurant’s brand assets may include a basic text-based logo and nautical theme. You could make these assets more memorable by creating an animated mascot to add to the logo or establishing a consistent color scheme for your nautical branding.)