Evidence over fashion. Effects over tactics.
Funnels. Algorithms. Attribution models. Martech stacks. Dashboards. AI-generated content. Endless optimisation.
Marketing has become strangely complicated.
Meanwhile, most businesses are still wrestling with the same fundamental questions they’ve always faced:
- Why should they remember us?
- Why should they pay more for us?
That’s because good marketing starts much earlier than advertising.
It starts with value.
A business exists to deliver enough value to customers that it earns a fair return doing so. Marketing exists to help make that happen.
Its role is to understand customer needs, create products and services that answer those needs, communicate their value, and ultimately help the business grow.
Effective marketing creates value for both the customer and the company.
That sounds obvious, but it’s remarkable how often marketing gets disconnected from the value being created in the first place.
Instead, businesses jump straight to communications.
“We need a campaign.”
“We need social content.”
“We need more leads.”
“We need to go viral.”
Maybe.
But before any of that, it’s worth asking a much more important question:
What value are you actually bringing to the market?
Market orientation is one of the best places to start.
At its simplest, it means understanding and responding to the needs, problems, desires, and behaviours of the market you operate within.
And then the harder question: What do you offer that competitors don’t?
Because if everybody in your category believes similar things, offers similar products, uses similar language, and communicates in similar ways, you don’t really have a marketing problem.
You have a sameness problem.
A good strategy is about finding and creating a competitive advantage.
That advantage can come from many places:
But ultimately, it comes back to value.
The businesses that grow tend to create value customers either:
- cannot get elsewhere
- cannot get as easily elsewhere
That matters because the more unique and appealing your value becomes, the less interchangeable you become.
And once you stop being interchangeable, marketing becomes significantly easier.
One of the most common mistakes businesses make is overestimating how much customers care about features.
Customers rarely buy features for their own sake.
They buy what those features allow them to do.
Or how they make them feel.
The functional benefit matters:
“This product saves me time.”
But the emotional benefit often matters just as much:
“This product makes me feel more confident, capable, secure, successful, or in control.”
The best marketing understands both.
This is where understanding Category Entry Points becomes incredibly valuable.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute describes Category Entry Points as the cues, situations, needs, or contexts that bring people into the market.
In simple terms:
What is happening in someone’s life when they think about buying something in your category?
What are they trying to solve?
What triggered the need?
What circumstance created the buying moment?
Understanding these moments helps businesses answer several important questions:
- How to become mentally linked to buying situations
That linkage matters enormously.
Because brands rarely grow by convincing everybody to become deeply loyal believers.
They grow by becoming easier to notice, easier to remember, and easier to think of at the moment of purchase.
This is where branding becomes commercially important.
Not cosmetically important. Commercially important.
Strong brands create additional value beyond the functional utility of the product itself.
People are often willing to pay more for the same underlying product when it comes from a brand they know, trust, admire, or feel connected to.
That additional value comes from several places.
Familiarity
Humans are naturally drawn toward what feels known and recognisable. Familiarity reduces perceived risk.
Perceived Quality
Strong brands create assumptions of competence, quality, and reliability.
Meaning
People use brands to signal things about themselves and reinforce their identity.
Difference
Distinctive brands are easier to notice, remember, and choose.
This is why branding is not simply about logos, colours, or taglines.
Those things matter, but only because they help encode meaning and memory.
A strong brand moves you away from being treated like a commodity.
And commodities almost always end up competing on price.
The more meaningful and distinctive your brand becomes, the greater your pricing power tends to become.
Which is why branding should not be viewed as decoration.
It is an economic advantage.
Positioning is often overcomplicated.
At its simplest, positioning is the intended space you want to occupy in the customer’s mind.
It should be explainable in a sentence.
Nike believes that “if you have a body, you are an athlete.”
Its positioning encourages people to unleash their inner athlete.
“Just Do It” becomes the behavioural expression of that belief.
KitKat believes breaks matter.
“Have a break, have a KitKat” links the brand directly to a category entry point and a behavioural moment.
Simple. Memorable. Effective.
Strong positioning helps businesses:
Without positioning, communications often become fragmented, reactive, and forgettable.
One of the most useful things marketing science has given businesses over the past few decades is clarity around how growth actually happens.
Because, despite what many businesses would like to believe, growth rarely comes from clever hacks, hyper-targeted funnels, or squeezing another 0.3% out of a click-through rate.
Brands primarily grow by becoming easier to buy and easier to remember.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute describes this as building:
Mental availability is the likelihood that your brand comes to mind in buying situations.
Physical availability is how easy it is for your brand to be found and purchased.
Both matter enormously.
It’s also important to remember that in most categories, buyers only seriously evaluate a handful of brands when they enter the market. Which means that if your brand isn’t already mentally available before the buying moment arrives, you often don’t even make the shortlist.
That has significant implications for marketing.
Most people are not actively looking to buy most things most of the time.
The 95:5 rule (Dawes, 2021) highlights this particularly well in categories with longer buying cycles. Roughly 95% of potential buyers are out of the market at any given time, while only around 5% are actively looking to purchase.
Yet many businesses direct nearly all of their marketing toward that small in-market audience.
That creates a problem.
Because future growth tends to come from the much larger group of future buyers who are not ready to purchase today, but may be in the future.
This is why brand-building matters.
The businesses that consistently grow are often the ones doing the patient work of building familiarity, memory, distinctiveness, and positive associations long before people need them.
They become easier to think of when buying moments arrive.
And in categories where products and services are increasingly similar, that mental advantage becomes incredibly valuable.
One of the more damaging things modern marketing has done is convince businesses that only immediate, measurable activity matters.
That has pushed many organisations toward an overreliance on short-term activation:
- immediate attribution
Those things matter.
But they are not the whole job.
The IPA, WARC, the B2B Institute, System1, Peter Field, Les Binet, James Hurman, and many others have consistently shown that the most effective marketing systems balance long-term brand building with short-term sales activation.
The “long” builds future demand.
The “short” converts existing demand.
Both are necessary.
Brand building helps:
- increase mental availability
Activation helps:
The mistake many businesses make is treating these as competing priorities instead of complementary ones.
Short-term activity works better when long-term brand building has already done its job.
A strong brand improves the effectiveness of almost everything downstream:
The better job you do creating future demand, the easier it becomes to convert current demand.
One of the simplest but most important questions in marketing is this:
Is your audience in-market or out-of-market?
In-market audiences are actively looking to solve a problem now.
Out-of-market audiences are not currently interested in detailed product information, features, pricing, or specifications because they are not buying yet.
This distinction matters enormously because businesses often communicate to everybody as though they are ready to purchase immediately.
Most people aren’t.
Which means much of what brands communicate gets ignored.
For in-market audiences:
- Information matters
For out-of-market audiences:
This is where the communications strategy becomes much more useful when viewed through different roles.
Some communications should:
Other communications should:
- Nudge those loosely considering
And after purchase, communications should:
Not every ad needs to do every job.
In fact, trying to make every communication achieve everything at once usually weakens it.
This is one of the most important realities in marketing.
Most advertising is ignored.
Not because audiences are stupid.
Not because advertising never works.
But because people are busy.
They are thinking about:
Not your campaign.
Which means brands need to earn attention and memory.
That is where creativity becomes commercially valuable.
Creativity is not simply about making things look nice.
It helps create:
- Surprise
And those things have measurable commercial effects.
Peter Field, Orlando Wood, System1, and others have shown repeatedly that creatively strong advertising tends to outperform dull advertising commercially.
More importantly, dull advertising is incredibly expensive.
When the work itself draws little attention or is easily forgotten, businesses need to spend significantly more on media to achieve the same effect.
Which means creativity is not the opposite of effectiveness.
Creativity is often a multiplier of effectiveness.
A strong idea makes every media dollar work harder.
And in categories where everybody says similar things in similar ways, creativity becomes one of the few remaining ways to create a noticeable difference.
Humour, in particular, remains one of the most underused and powerful tools in marketing.
Not because it is easy.
Because it feels risky.
So businesses often remove the very personality that would have made the work memorable in the first place.
Until the advertising becomes safe.
And invisible.
One of the biggest problems in modern marketing is category conformity.
Businesses benchmark competitors so heavily that eventually everybody starts:
The result is a sea of sameness.
Distinctive brands escape this trap.
Distinctive brand assets help people recognise and remember a brand quickly.
These can include:
You do not need dozens of them.
A few strong, consistently used assets are often more powerful than constantly reinventing things every year.
Distinctiveness works because memory works through repetition and association.
The more consistently brands reinforce recognisable memory structures over time, the easier they become to identify and recall.
Which leads to another important point.
Consistency Compounds
Many businesses underestimate the commercial power of consistency.
There is enormous pressure in marketing to constantly change:
Sometimes change is necessary.
But often, businesses abandon good things long before they have fully compounded.
System1 and the IPA have shown that consistent brands significantly outperform inconsistent brands over time.
Consistency strengthens:
- Efficiency
It allows creativity to compound.
And compounding is where some of the largest long-term business effects come from.
Strong brands are rarely built overnight.
They are built through years of:
When businesses continually reset everything, they often destroy the very memory structures they spent years paying to build.
Consistency does not mean becoming stale.
It means reinforcing the same underlying strategic meaning often enough that people remember you when it matters.
Marketing is not simply about promotion.
It is about creating value, building memory, shaping perception, creating preference, and making future buying decisions easier.
The businesses that grow sustainably tend to understand this.
They focus less on chasing every new tactic and more on strengthening the fundamentals:
- Easier physical availability
Because in a world where most advertising is ignored, and most brands look interchangeable, the businesses that win are usually the ones that become easier to notice, easier to remember, and easier to choose.
