How Brands Grow - Byron Sharp, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest centre for research into marketing. His first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk. He has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking. The revised 2nd editionof the textbook was published in 2017.Byron has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals. What we covered in this episode:Being turned down for a publishing deal for How Brands GrowWhy experts are terrible at predicting the futureMarketers getting distracted by Purpose with little empirical support for itThe ethical reason we should be focussed on the best return on marketingByron responds to Peter Field’s Purpose researchThe top marketing myths exposed by How Brands GrowThe No.1 surprise in How Brands GrowWhy your customers are mostly the same as your competitorsThe law of Double Jeopardy and why we are over exposed to our own brands heavy buyersThe paradox of very small brands having a larger customer base than expectedPhysical and Mental availability overlapHow similar the top brands look vs ten years agoLucozade sugar tax backlash and how that proved the laws of marketingThe surprising importance of light and very light buyersWhy a lot of your sales come from people who haven’t bought you for at least a yearThe importance of not changing your designWhether the laws vary depending on categoryWhy market research is designed to highlight difference rather than similarityThe importance of distinctiveness and being rememberedWhat Levitt, Kotler and Akker got wrong about differentiationWhy even bankers can’t tell their banks apartThe power of pink concrete mixersAsking an 8 year old to tell you what’s different about your brandThe real role of advertising for your brandHow search works just like point of sale to catch people as they fallHow the laws remain the same in B2BWhy Apple isn’t your typical brand when it comes to selling product differentiationWhy Ehrenberg Bass has just own distinctive assetWhy fruit doesn’t need packagingThe biggest unanswered question in marketingPlans for Ehrenberg Bass to make training available to marketersWhat Byron missed out in How Brands GrowThe importance of marketing the research and highlighting the implicationsDescribing Mark Ritson as the best business journalist in the worldWhat Byron thinks about the environment and the role of marketing in it