How brands GREW

You know how Mental Availability is actually a probability. It’s the chance of a brand coming to mind in a buying situation.

So, of course, the more your brand is mentally available the better.

But the measurement itself is as binary as a coin toss. Either a brand pops into your mind or it doesn’t.

Which brings us on to Category Entry Points.

These are the cues people use to access memories in a particular buying moment. They can be internal or external.

You may well know that bigger brands tend to be associated with more CEPs than small brands.

So it’s tempting to think the job is to keep adding more and more of these associations. Rather than focusing on one overall positioning covering the most important needs and occasions, which might be more affordable.

That leads to Distinctive Brand Assets. Logos, colours, taglines, sounds, characters.

DBAs help people identify and recall your brand in buying situations, so they can find it in a store or in their mind.

It’s what’s called a memory structure, a network of mental associations built up over time. Like the steel frame of a Grand Designs house rising out of the foundations.

But you may not know that memories are dynamic not static. Every time a purchase decision is made the frame is unconsciously rebuilt. A different house every time.

That’s why it can be a problem asking about CEPs and DBAs in a research survey where everything is conscious.

Then there’s Double Jeopardy and Duplication of Purchase. Did you know that they’re both essentially about mathematics?

Double Jeopardy says that large brands have more buyers than small brands and their customers are slightly more loyal.

Duplication of Purchase says that buyers of one brand are likely to purchase other brands in the category in proportion to their market share.

Together they mean the bigger you are the bigger you get. More buyers leads to more buyers. It’s percentages of percentages.

Which leaves the NBD-Dirichlet. The Negative Binomial Distribution part models how many times customers buy in a given period. The Dirichlet part models how customers split their purchases across different brands.

Combined, they lead to views like most people buy from multiple brands in a category, market share tends to be stable in mature categories and large brands benefit from having more light buyers, not more loyal customers.

But did you know even Andrew Ehrenberg, who created the NBD-Dirichlet, acknowledged its limits?

“The theory discussed here does not account in direct terms for any dynamic effects of advertising, pricing etc in changing the level of sales. It is not that sort of theory. Put it another way, this model tells us more or less about stationary buyer behaviour, except for one thing, why one brand has more buyers than another.”

Why indeed.

There’s no doubting how much that science has brought to marketing. We needed evidence.

The NBD-Dirichlet has also proved remarkably accurate in predicting buying behaviour across different categories.

But so far, much of it has been about recognising patterns and spotting correlations.

So yes, the laws describe how brands grow. But you also need to understand how brands grew to this point, your brand in particular. What caused it.

That’s likely to take more than saying it was increasing mental availability, adding more category entry points and attracting more light buyers.

It might even involve exploring your target’s motivations and what your brand means to them, so you can work out what connects the two.

That’s the thing with science. There’s always more to discover.