How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know

He pointed to a 92% retention rate for iPhone owners.

And then Byron Sharp, who runs the Ehrenberg-Baston suit and wrote How Brands Grow and has been really promoting a lot of the ideas from Andrew Ehrenberg and Frank Bass, answered that 92%, that number, came from a survey of what people plan to do.

And The Economist had reported iPhone retention at about 80% in the US and about 50% in China.

Interesting, right? So same phone, same category.

But I think about how people actually buy groceries.

Most of us split it across a few stores.

And Byron Sharp has a name for this in How Brands Grow, and so he calls it polygamous loyalty.

So you can love Kroger and still grab milk at Publix because it's on the way home.

A added benefit is it's like melatonin.

I make it read like three, four pages, then I'm out, you know, but it was called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp.

And he talks a lot about some of the, he's a professor at South Australia University, but he talks a lot about the myths of marketing and the misses of marketing, but ultimately distills it down to the two most important components are physical availability and mental availability.

And you have to really think for your specific product, what's going to be more important, you know, his physical availability more important or his mental availability more important.

Um, and I, I read the book, it blew my tiny little mind.

I was already familiar with how brands grow and stuff like that.

Um, but I, at that point, the agency was kind of primarily digital, so every time there was a new platform, every time there's a new social platform, I would investigate it for my agency-

Oh, okay-

But I was able to teach myself to stand up and present, and I know that being able to talk at events, even just ask questions, the good questions, rather n- than just the showy ones.

Actually, I, I'm, I'm gonna, let me just drop a, a marketing hammer, a big name.

I, I was at a talk once that Byron Sharp from How Brands Grow and, uh, Ehrenberg-Bass, you know, the most important book in marketing, he was giving a talk at South Bank Uni and, um, there'd been some work done, Charles Graham, who I mentioned earlier, about brand loyalty across five years, and is it really a thing, and kind of the lightness of buying.

And I just kind of said to him at one point, "Do you think that this will be any different if you look at it over 10, 15, 20 years?" And he turned around and went, "That's a really good question."

Um, but it's just like what is it that actually makes names memorable? Th- what-- 'Cause there's anecdotes about it, there's sort of pseudoscience around it, um, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and see, you know, what real kind of research there was around this.

To your broader question, you know, I don't think I'm alone in that I worked in branding for almost a decade before I had ever heard of How Brands Grow.

Um, even though it was-

Mm.