At the start of the session, festival presenter Matthew Marsh pointed out that Ritson and Sharp have known each other for around thirty years, but that the last time they shared the stage was a full decade ago. They were now given just half an hour to agree on evidence that would be sufficiently robust for marketers. An entertaining debate was expected, at the very least, as both experts are well known for disagreeing on almost everything.
On the stage of the Debussy Theatre in Cannes, MiniMBA founder Mark Ritson faced off against Byron Sharp, professor of marketing science and director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, whom Ritson likes to call ‘The Dark Lord of Penetration’. Their task was to find common ground in five areas: mental availability, brand distinctiveness, the revival of mass marketing, brand purpose and consistency.
1. Mental availability
Sharp pointed out that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science originally used the term ‘brand salience’ for this concept. However, it gradually moved away from this term because people often associated it with mere brand awareness or with which brand came to mind first. This, however, is not about a one-off battle for ‘top-of-mind awareness’, but about a brand’s broader ability to come to mind in various purchasing situations.
Ritson noted that this was one of the most important shifts that Ehrenberg-Bass brought to marketing: from the question of what a brand means, to the question of what triggers the brand in the customer’s mind. In other words, marketers should not only consider what associations a brand evokes, but above all what situations, needs and stimuli trigger the brand itself.
In the traditional conception of marketing, according to Ritson, awareness often served merely as a gateway to brand image, brand relationship or emotions. Mental availability, however, reminds us that a large part of a marketer’s job simply consists of ensuring that people recall the brand in a relevant situation. Ritson summed it up in his own words: “Salience über alles.”
“Nobody cares about your brand. You think about it eight hours a day, five days a week, but the consumer has seven hundred brands in their head. You’ve got three seconds and two brain cells – that’s why mental availability is so important,” Ritson told the audience from the stage. According to him, if a person recalls the brand in a given shopping situation, much of the work has already been done.
2. Distinctive brand elements
“Branding is important, but not for the reasons people often think. It’s not about being green when everyone else is purple. It’s about looking like you – whatever that means. It might well be quite beige; it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that people recognise the brand,” said Sharp.
Ritson followed this up by saying that if mental availability is such a big part of a brand’s work, one of the main ways to achieve it is precisely through a range of distinctive elements – the logo and a few other easily recognisable features. According to him, the problem often arises within companies themselves. People who work with the brand every day grow tired of its own elements over time and feel they’ve become hackneyed, often before consumers even notice them. Consumers, however, see them much less frequently; they aren’t in constant contact with them.
As an example, Ritson cited the Veuve Clicquot brand and its distinctive yellow. He said the team had been discussing whether there was too much yellow and whether the brand should shift more towards white. He immediately rejected such a suggestion: “You’re completely mad. It’s the biggest ‘asset’ in wine,” he reportedly argued.
The conclusion from this point is clear: marketers must overcome fatigue with what makes their brands recognisable and simply hold out for longer.
3. The revival of mass marketing
By ‘revival’, Sharp did not mean a return to the caricature of marketing where a brand says the same thing to everyone regardless of their differences, but rather the revival of sophisticated mass marketing. He spoke of the aim to reach the entire relevant market, whilst at the same time sensibly taking practical differences into account.
“Marketers, of course, do things to broaden their reach. They realise that some people live in the north, so perhaps we need shops in the north. Some people live in the south. Some people speak Spanish, so perhaps some adverts should be in Spanish. That’s sophistication. You’re still trying to reach everyone, but you’re not pretending that everyone is exactly the same,” explained Sharp.
Ritson added that reaching ‘everyone’ certainly does not mean ‘the entire population’. If a brand sells dog food, the relevant market is dog owners, not everyone in the world. The point of sophisticated mass marketing for brand building is to reach the entire category or the entire relevant market, not just a narrow segment that the brand chooses as a more convenient target.
According to Ritson, activations are a different matter – a short-term layer where it makes sense to work more specifically: with a specific segment, product, moment and message. He refers to this dual approach as ‘two-speed marketing’. He argues that for long-term brand building, it makes sense to reach as broadly as possible across the entire category, whilst for short-term performance, it is better to work more specifically with people who are close to making a purchase.
Sharp did not frame this targeted activation as classic targeting, but rather as availability in the purchasing situation. “It is extremely important for people to understand that there is advertising for mental availability, which aims to reach the entire market, and then there are the things we do for the five per cent of people who are buying today. These two things are completely different,” added Sharp.
It was at this point that the 95:5 rule, based on the work of John Dawes, entered the discussion. Put simply, it suggests that roughly five per cent of customers are ready to buy something at any given moment, whilst the remaining 95 per cent are not. For Ritson, this is a useful way of explaining to people in companies why it makes sense to invest in long-term top-of-mind awareness, even when the majority of the market isn’t currently in the market to buy anything.
4. Brand purpose
Ritson pointed out that he and Sharp have been consistent on this topic for more than ten years. In his view, brand purpose makes no sense for most brands, with the exception of a handful of companies for whom it is genuinely part of their very essence.
He criticised, in particular, the idea that ordinary everyday consumer brands should explain to consumers where they stand on social issues. He steered the debate back to mental availability. “Stop talking about what you stand for. Just make sure your brand sticks in people’s minds,” he said.
Sharp followed this up from a data-driven perspective: “This isn’t a ‘category entry point’,” he added, “Nobody’s going to come up and ask: which brand saves dolphins?” Ritson continued: “Nobody cares what your toothpaste thinks about racial equality,” he said. In his view, in this era of obsession with brand purpose, the simpler and legitimate role of marketing has been forgotten: to sell a good product or service at a profit.
Byron Sharp then added another argument: brand purpose often represents only a small part of brand image, which in itself is not usually decisive. Research by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, he said, showed that even for brands considered the best examples of brand purpose, this motif did not help mental availability.
5. Consistency
According to Sharp, whilst all marketers believe in consistency, a look at their work reveals no evidence of it. The problem is not that people reject consistency, but rather a lack of discipline and the fact that brands have not sufficiently defined their distinctive elements.
He pointed out that a large proportion of sales come from people who have not bought the brand for a long time. In the case of fast-moving consumer goods, he said, roughly half of this year’s sales may come from people who haven’t bought the brand for several months. If, in the meantime, the brand changes the style of its communication or its recognisable elements, these people may simply not recognise it.
Mark Ritson commented on this once again, noting that marketers tend to grow bored with their own work much sooner than consumers do. According to him, a campaign is often only out for a week or two before the team already feels it is time to do something new. “We know from reliable data that a campaign needs two to three years for you to get the most out of it – and perhaps even longer if the creative is good,” added Ritson. He also cited data from David Tiltman, according to which the average duration of a campaign for major brands is only around 30 to 40 days. His advice on the matter was therefore simple: “Leave your cakes in the oven a bit longer.”
Source: aka.cz