What’s a “brand story” good for?
Like, do you need one? And if you have one, what do you do with it?
I regularly ask people at talks and workshops if they know the brand story of their toilet paper. You know — the stuff you use every. Single. Day. Of. Your. Life.
And maybe 1 in 200 have a clue.
Wanna grow market share?
There are two ways to do it:
Get more buyers
Get your buyers to buy more
Which matters more? Interestingly, the research points to two things — and fairly definitively.
What’s the ingredient to success nobody wants to talk about?
There's a major ingredient to success in business that we often don't want to talk about.
Half of all new businesses fail in the first 5 years.
Often, the reason for their failures — and other companies' success — is a big, fat, steamy scoop of luck.
How Do You Handle the Brand-Catagory Paradox?
How do you stand out while fitting in?
This is the Brand-Category Paradox: how to deliver category basics but in distinct, branded ways. Fortunately there are lots of Levers you can pull to help handle it.
How much organic food do people rilly buy?
Like, do “organic people” spend all their money on organics? What’s the ‘share of wallet’ for organics?
An analysis of purchase data for 8,000 German households found that only 4% of homes spent 20% or more of their food budget on organic food.
How Do Things Actually“Go Viral?”
Folks from Stanford & Microsoft analyzed the spread of over 600 millllllion things on Twitter during 2011-12: news, videos, photos, etc.
Turns out, the the biggest hits aren’t ‘viral’.
Do nonprofits follow the laws of brand growth?
Does brand science apply to charities and foundations and donors and stuff?
TL;DR: yes.
F’rinstance, all brands have a banana curve of buyers. Not a bell curve. Not a flat line. Not a loyal lump.
Big brands have bigger *ahem* bananas than small ones. But they don’t have a different shape or distribution
Well, if you swap ‘customers’ with ‘donors’, you see the same laws apply to nonprofits.
Which Pack Test Metrics Actually Predict Sales?
Designalytics has been doing packaging research for a looooong time. Recently, they did some research with IRI to see which test metrics predict in-market results for 52 pack redesigns across a range of CPG categories.
They compared sales for the 6 months after the redesign with the same 6 month period from the prior year. Then they checked how well those sales results correlated with the different metrics from the pack test.
What DIDN’T predict in-market success too good was whether people “liked” the new design. (It had a 46% correlation.)
Surprisingly (for me at least), find time wasn’t correlated with sales results either.
Is There Brand Loyalty to Colleges?
We usually think of college (or uni) as a loyalty purchase (if we think of it as a purchase at all).
People pick a school, attend it, graduate from it, love it, bleed red & yellow (go Yeomen!), and even send their kids to their alma mater.
And graduation rate is one of our key quality metrics for how good a school is. Start there: end there.
But the data tell a different story.
Does GEN-Z Really Prefer Brands With Purpose?
Apparently, when you don’t specifically ask about purpose or CSR, you don’t get Patagonia, Seventh Generation, or Dove.
Big Brands Have Higher Loyalty. Again.
One of the oldest laws in marketing is that small brands suffer twice: they have many fewer buyers, AND those buyers buy slightly less often (lower repeat, AKA loyalty, but don’t say loyalty, it’s a terribly messy word that should only be used for pets & sports teams). This is called Double Jeopardy. It’s older than me.
Is Your Brand Easy to Recognize?
A quick & unscientific way to test is to do an online image search of “your brand” or “your brand + your category”. (E.g., “Starbucks”, or “Starbucks coffee”.) Then zooooom out (Ctrl - or Cmd - ).
Check it on its own & against competitors. Can you tell them apart? Is there anything beyond your logo or product that pops? Do you look like everyone else, or are you creating your own distinct look?