маркетинг, который мы потеряли

All brands have many lighter buyers. While these people are only occasional buyers of a brand, there are so many of them that they collectively contribute substantially to sales volume. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Our research (Sharp & Romaniuk 2007) of many dozens of brands, across product categories, shows that over a three-month period a ‘fast-moving consumer good’ brand will typically have a Pareto share of only 35%. Over a year this metric will have risen to over 50%, usually not far over 50% and rarely anything like the proverbial 80%. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Around 30% of cola buyers don’t even buy themselves a single Coca-Cola each year. Note that these are people who do buy cola (not just soft drink) – so most of these people do indeed buy Coca-Cola, just very occasionally and not every year! Therefore, from Coca-Cola’s perspective, a heavy buyer is anyone who buys three or more cans or bottles of Coke a year. Many of us who thought we hardly every bought Coke now turn out to be quite normal Coke buyers. Very light buyers dominate, even for Coca-Cola – which is a very large brand indeed. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

At the very extreme, the buyer who drinks Coca-Cola morning, noon, and night has a very well ingrained habit. They are locked in their ways and may even be a little bit addicted to the product category. One could argue there is little need to market to these buyers at all, especially considering that they are comparatively non-responsive to advertising (i.e. their behaviour tends not to change in response to advertising; their buying neither increases nor decreases). They will keep buying in large volumes until one day something momentous happens and they downgrade, or drop the brand, or quit the category (or die), all of which is usually out of your control. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Coke’s advertising tries to grab a tiny window of our attention and remind us that Coke is fun, that we’ve had it before and we like it – Coke’s advertisements are mostly reminding us of things we already know. By doing this, Coke is trying to increase our (very low) probability of buying it tomorrow. If it works, it changes our probability of buying tomorrow from almost nothing (say 1 chance in 400) to slightly more than almost nothing (say 2 chances in 400). This is a change in probability that is so slight we’d hardly notice, which is why people say that advertising doesn’t affect them, because it’s too subtle for them to notice. But if every person who is exposed to a single Coca-Cola ad increases his or her buying propensity from 1 chance in 400 to 2 chances in 400, Coke’s sales among this group double! Therefore, even advertising that says nothing persuasive and gives no new reasons to buy can have a dramatic impact on sales – without causing people to rethink their opinion of a brand, and largely without them even noticing. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Importantly, it can help prevent the blinkered, production-oriented vision that comes from category definitions based on product features or production processes. These are rife, and are typically too narrow. For example, the chocolate market can be divided into dozens of sub-markets – block, bars, pieces, individually wrapped, candy coated, chocolate coated candy, and so on. These product-based category definitions can blind managers to their true competitors and prevent them from understanding how customers actually buy. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Even consumption situation-based category definitions (e.g. for snacking, for sharing, for gifting) commonly result in artificial overly narrow category definitions. The reality is that few brands are exclusively bought for specific consumption situations, and which brands are bought for which situation varies between consumers and over time. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Marketers and researchers find it tempting to categorise shoppers according to the prices they pay. For example, it is thought that there are low-end shoppers, those who buy in the middle range and others who buy premium products. The notion of the ‘deal-prone’ shopper reinforces this view. However, research into actual buying behaviour shows that consumers do not confine themselves to one price category. Most consumers buy across a range of prices – over time they will buy the same brand at different prices and also buy brands that sit at different prices. This might be because of availability, promotions, something catching their eye, differing needs, mood swings, wanting a change, granny coming to visit and so on. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

The big discovery is that the customer bases of brands in a category are very similar – except in numbers of buyers. One way of thinking about it is that there isn’t a vanilla ice-cream buyer and a different type of person who buys strawberry – there are just ice-cream buyers who sometimes buy vanilla and very occasionally buy strawberry. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

I first saw a Yorkie chocolate bar in a London corner store and was surprised by the packaging: it featured the slogan, «It’s not for girls!» and had a picture of a girl that was crossed out. This packaging looks like a serious attempt to gain a segmented customer base: men. Of course, this is cheeky British humour, designed to get the brand, and its television advertising, noticed. However, decades before Nestle adopted this slogan, Yorkie ads consistently stressed the large chunks of chocolate and very much targeted blue-collar, male workers. Most of the original advertising featured truck drivers enjoying Yorkie bars. After a long gap, or a period of unmemorable advertising, the «It’s not for girls!» campaign was launched – perhaps as a return to the brand’s historic roots. As one commentator noted, «From the ads they seem to be targeting not ‘British men’ but British, large, bearded, macho, builders. That’s got to be a limited market …» (Redfern, 2002). But either the market got the joke or the targeting failed because this is what the user base of Yorkie looks like today: Male 56%, Female 44%. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

We observe this sort of loyalty in all categories, including service categories and corporate buying. Buyers restrict their purchases to a personal repertoire of brands. People buy far fewer different brands than they could. Ten purchases seldom results in ten different brands being bought. Buyers keep returning to their favourites, and this set of favourites can be very small. The 50% repeat-buying rate for car brands occurs because buyers consider only around two brands on average; one of which is usually the brand they bought last time (i.e. the brand they drive now) (Lambert-Pandraud 2005). About a fifth of buyers consider only a single brand, which is almost always the one they bought last (Lapersonne 1995). Yet this is what consumer behaviour textbooks refer to as a ‘highly involving purchase decision’! How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

The first two patterns reflect what is known as the duplication of purchase law. This law says that all brands, within a category, share their customer base with other brands in line with the size of those other brands. In other words, everyone shares a lot with big brands and a little with small brands. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Long ago marketing wisdom was that Avis buyers rented from Avis and Hertz buyers rented from Hertz. So if Hertz had 23% market share in a particular country, it was assumed that 23% of car renters used Hertz. As soon as marketing scientists starting looking at ongoing panel records of real-world repeat buying they realised the error of their assumption. Buyers are polygamous; brands share consumers. In the long term, 23% market share means that most category consumers use Hertz, but on average, they only use Hertz not much more than 23% of the time. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Non-buyers and light buyers are heavier buyers than you think, and heavy buyers are lighter. This is neatly illustrated in a two-year analysis of a leading brand of tomato sauce in the US using IRI and Nielsen panel data (Anschuetz 2002). Although the brand was stationary (not growing or losing sales volume), 14% of its sales came from households that did not buy it at all in the year before; in other words, from people who the brand’s marketing team would have considered were non-buyers of the brand. While the small group (9%) of heavy buying households delivered 34% of volume, this was less than the 43% they delivered in Year 1. Table 4.4 shows that over time the heavier buyers get lighter, and the non-buyers and light buyers get heavier. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

This means that a brand’s defection rate is essentially a function of its market share, and the category it’s in. This defection level does not vary substantially between competing brands. How many customers a brand loses in a year depends on how many it has to lose in the first place. Obviously a brand can’t lose a million customers if it doesn’t have a million customers to start with. Larger brands therefore can, and do, lose more customers each year, and they also gain more customers. But as a proportion of their customer base they lose (and gain) lessthan smaller brands, i.e. their defection percentage is lower. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

Erica Riebe (2003) examined the dynamics of customer base growth and contraction in her doctoral research. She examined both growing and declining pharmaceutical brands over 10 years. For each brand she calculated the amount of acquisition and defection it should have had given the market norm and the size of the brand (i.e. if a brand’s customer base was stable then its acquisition and defection levels should be equal, and will depend on the size of the brand). She expected that growing brands might show excess acquisition and lower-than-expected defection. That is, together these two factors would contribute to the growth in the customer base. Surprisingly, she found that growth was almost entirely due to particularly high acquisition. The declining brands showed a similar pattern but in reverse: their defection rates were healthy and matched stable brands of similar market share, but their acquisition rates were poor. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎

However, market share growth is difficult. Markets are more competitive than ever. Marketers have to work very hard just to retain their current market share position; run very fast just to stand still. For example, the scope for price promotions to deliver any more growth is limited by the fact that we are running about as many promotions as the retail system can handle. How Brands Grow, Revised e-book version 2014 ↩︎