Newtonian tones

Being married to a scientist, I’m well appraised of the stories of just how insecure, vindictive and petty scientists can be. Even the ones who’ve had the kind of success that would, in other fields, precipitate humility. Isaac Newton was the poster boy – trashing the reputations and discoveries of his contemporaries, even after they were in their graves. He was a prize prick, without friends, and nobody felt sorry for him when that apple hit him in the head.

So, with the advent of ‘marketing science’, it’s unsurprising to see its lead proponent acting with all the grace of an incel at a baby shower.

Last week Mi3 published a report on a presentation from Professor Byron Sharp, where he spent much focus and energy denouncing the work of basically any marketing effectiveness researcher that was outside of his organisation.

The fact that the findings of those researchers are consistent with his own appears either to be lost on him, or perhaps identified as some kind of threat.

Either way, what use is it to anyone to undermine the gains made in our understanding of how marketing works?

When I started out in advertising, the industry was transitioning. From those halcyon days of clients delighting in the mysterious magic of their creative agencies, to a time of marketers yearning for an evidence base with which to defend themselves against the suspicion of boards and executive culture lobotomised by accountants and lawyers.

In the past two decades, that evidence has been unearthed and exposed by a small group of advertising and marketing effectiveness researchers who have amassed sets of data that, when interrogated thoughtfully, have given us a sense of what works and why. 

The reassuring thing for marketers is that we’ve all reached very similar conclusions.

Essentially that brands are their most successful when they get themselves into the minds of large groups of people, and then show up at the right moment when those people are ready to buy the kind of thing they sell.

The human brain has a familiarity bias – which means that we like to buy things that we’re familiar with before we get into the situation of needing to buy them. When it’s time to buy, we gravitate toward familiar choices. That’s why big, well known brands are more efficient at making sales than small, unknown brands – even when the latter has a rationally better offer.

It’s irrational, yes. And anyone who can’t wrap their head around the fact that humans are irrational shouldn’t be in business – or at least won’t be for very long.

All effectiveness roads are leading to Rome

Thus, when we look at the data, we can see that the companies that do a good job of both making themselves familiar to the masses, and also getting their product or offer in front of people when they’re shopping for it, are the companies that grow the most efficiently.

Peter Field and Les Binet call this ‘brand building’ and ‘sales activation’. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls it ‘mental availability’ and ‘physical availability’. I call it ‘creating Future Demand’ and ‘converting Existing Demand’. 

They’re all the same concept.

Yes, Ehrenberg-Bass has the resources to perform vastly more knob twiddling than the others, some of which is useful and some of which produces concepts so arcane that their practical application is out of the question (hands up who’s measuring mental availability properly, or could ever afford to do so ongoing).

But – on the top-line basics, it’s advantageous for our industry that many independent researchers have reached the same conclusions.

In science they have a term – ‘replication crisis’ – which describes scientific research that, when other scientists do the same experiments in different environments, can’t be replicated. The results are different. Casting compelling doubt on the validity of the original research.

Science is only robust when it doesn’t suffer from replication problems. When experiments can be replicated and the same results achieved.

And the important point is that they can be replicated by other researchers in other organisations – not just replicated by the same scientists in the same organisation.

Which is why I find it perplexing that Professor Sharp is so insistent on criticising others who have found the same results as his institution. The IPA work also found that driving penetration is more effective than trying to improve loyalty. That reaching broad audiences is more important to growth than narrow targeting. That campaigns that run for long periods (i.e. consistently) are more successful than campaigns that run in short bursts. That larger brands have an unfair efficiency advantage over smaller brands. Most of these principles were published in the IPA’s 2007 study ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’, three years before How Brands Grow debuted.

Ehrenberg-Bass brilliant

Before you go thinking I’m anti-Ehrenberg-Bass or the thinking of Professor Sharp and his colleagues, I’m not. Their work is brilliant. And often just as brilliantly communicated. They are absolutely right in their assessment of what works in marketing and in building brands. 

What I disagree with is the division sown by fallaciously positioning the work of others as wrong, or somehow contrary to what they themselves have published.

Sharp draws a fair enough distinction between ‘science’ – the practice of studying and revealing ‘law-like’ patterns in representative samples of data – and, let’s call it ‘effectiveness research’ – studying the results of marketing case studies in large effectiveness award databases, which are clearly incomplete data sets.

But his preoccupation with that distinction (without any discernible difference in outcomes) is telling.

And besides, he only makes that distinction when it suits him.

Field & Binet data not spurious

Field & Binet’s 60:40 principle (that the most effective brands spend around 60 per cent of their budgets on brand-building activity and about 40 per cent on sales activation) was dismissed by Sharp as ‘terrible and misleading’ and based on spurious data. Ironic given that Ehrenberg-Bass’ much-touted-lately 95:5 rule (that only 5 per cent of buyers are in the market for a product at any one time – the other 95 per cent are ‘out-market’ today, but will be ‘in-market’ sometime in the future) is based on a thought exercise presuming that B2B companies roll over their suppliers about once every five years. It’s unscientific AF. Even Professor John Dawes, who came up with the principle, admits that “the 95 per cent figure is not meant to be a precise rule. We’re using it as a heuristic to get the idea across”. The truth is that principles don’t need to be 100 per cent scientific to be tremendously useful to the industry – as both 60:40 and 95:5 are. But in Sharp’s eyes it’s one rule for Ehrenberg-Bass, and quite another for anybody else.

I gave a presentation in Cannes this year alongside RGA’s Global Chief Strategy Officer Tom Morton. He’d been recently picked at by Sharp for daring to question whether Ehrenberg-Bass’ laws governed digital companies. To be honest, I’m with Sharp that they probably do. But the point was that Tom had asked a fair enough question, and been dismissed as a charlatan. Tom was very reasonable in his response – and pointed to a quote by the physicist Richard Feynman, who said “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”

Scientific pursuit is at its best when it’s open to new and different perspectives. When it collaborates. When it champions replication success and consistency of ideas.

As an industry we’re lucky to be circling around a unified theory of how brand building works. That theory has been contributed to by many – both academic and practicing. Their findings are consistent. Which should be celebrated by the researchers, and be a source of confidence for marketing’s practitioners.