Both, neither or NOTHING AT ALL

These days, everyone’s quick to argue the answer is always both.

Maybe it is for long vs. short, qual vs. quant, distinctive vs. different.

But do brands live in the company or the consumer?

Is marketing an art or a science?

Are you more Kotler or Sharp?  

I often think neither is closer to the truth.

Maybe that’s why the debates never end. We’re surrounded by false dichotomies, but that doesn’t mean you should add two views together and divide them by two. If you want that, use AI.

Most of the binary side-taking is actually positioning.

Byron Sharp has always positioned himself as a challenger. It's why he set the double jeopardy law against the idea of 'loyalty beyond reason', a kind of passionate devotion to a brand which does exist but is extremely rare.

Maybe marketeers like Kotler were guilty of overstating the importance of emotional bonds to brands. So we’re all now paying a kind of collective penance, forced to follow the simplistic tactics of Sharp and his henchmen.

And somewhere in the middle motivation and the art of marketing got killed off.

Maybe it was the scientist who did it. There’s a dismissive air to that “ask not what a brand evokes, but what evokes a brand”. It goes beyond saying salience is all-important. It implies looking for meaning is a fool’s errand.

Then again, the classic Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning approach always had its flaws. Why target two out of six segments, when all six buy your brand?

And what about all those light buyers? We all now know a brand that grows has more of them.

Then again, Kotler did emphasise the importance of understanding needs and wants, what some now call demand spaces. Sharp only ever mentions them at a category level. He does love those Category Entry Points, the more the merrier.

Time and again, we get offered a partial condition for growth masquerading as the complete explanation. 

The real victim in all of this has been the brand.

The answer was never a choice between loyalty and availability, and it certainly isn’t some weird Fly-like fusion of the two.

Brands work in the quiet corners of memory and the hidden power of assets. To the unskilled eye they can look like nothing at all.

But they really live in the space between people and products, in brief moments of closeness.

So the aim should be to close the gap, to move people closer to brands and brands closer to people.

That’s where I stand or fall.

But I had to pick one or the other when it came to a company name.

I couldn’t have both.