In Part 1, we delved into the crucial concept of market orientation. This is where your company, each department, your products, and the services you deliver all strive to exceed your customer's expectations. We also explored setting your business strategy, defining your beliefs and actions, and establishing a few key SMART objectives each year. Your brand strategy was next, encompassing positioning, brand story, relative differentiation, distinctiveness, and distinctive brand assets. All of this culminated in how these strategies come to life across your brand ecosystem, which must encompass the elements that resonate with customers pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase.

Grasping your customers' journeys, from their initial interest in the market to their decision-making process, purchase, and repeat purchases, is paramount. In Part 2, I will illustrate two fairly typical customer journeys to help you fully comprehend the significance of this.

A considered purchase - an infrequent purchase that requires thought, time and usually a higher price point;

• Not in market
• Open to possibility
• The decision to buy or change
• Evaluating options
• Buying
• Experiencing (during this time, brands want to build an understanding of how to get customers to buy again, building greater lifetime customer value)

This journey can often last months or years and see people seriously evaluate 3-5 brands before deciding. Brand salience (coming top of mind when the need arises) is very important because potential buyers only evaluate a small number of brands within any category. Being salient to more buyers will increase your chances of being assessed and chosen.

A habitual purchase is usually made more frequently and requires less thought, time and investment. If it worked last time, the chances are people will repurchase it;

• Experiencing (not in the market to buy as they are happy with what they have or have enough right now and don't need any more)
• Open to possibility/decision to buy or change/evaluating options (I'm grouping these because for habitual purchases, there isn't usually much of this, and if there is, it's usually over a much shorter time frame)
• Buying
• Experiencing

It's essential to understand and remember that for most categories (B2B and B2C), 70-95% of category buyers are not in the market to buy most months and quarters, but they will be in the future. Those in the market to buy each month or quarter are typically around 5-30% of total category buyers. Companies' big profits are in ensuring that many buyers (current and future) know about them and their products and services. Those future buyers are where all the big long-term profits are found, so speaking to 'out of market' audiences is vital for profitable long-term business performance.

So, what is essential for you to consider and apply to maximise the impact of your marketing efforts?

First, I will discuss the work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Professor Byron Sharp. His decades-long extensive research into 'How Brands Grow' (published March 2010) and 'Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice' (published December 2012) are both well worth reading. Byron demonstrates that for brands to grow, they must have availability. 

• Mental availability (awareness and salience): after all, you can't sell a secret. Over time, to ensure you grow, a brand must build greater mental availability (greater brand salience)- the greater your mental availability is, the larger your future opportunities will be. Jenni Romaniuk's work on Distinctive Brand Assets (discussed in Part 1) is vital here, too. When thinking about those 'out of the market' (not looking to buy now, but will in the future) and those weighing up their options, mental availability paired with understanding category entry points (CEPs) and codifying your marketing with distinctive brand assets so buyers know it's you is a must. 
• The other must-have is physical availability (being easy to buy) in retail environments, online, and brick-and-mortar stores, whether your own or retail partners. If it is challenging for people to find you and buy you, they won't.

Growing market share requires growing your brand power in consumers' minds (mental availability) and growing your power in the market (physical availability).

'How Brands Grow' suggests that brand consideration is not so much 'considered' as it is emotional, which means that being mentally available when a consumer is shopping your vertical is critical, but perhaps not as complex as some marketers have thought it in the past. 

Remembering 'emotion' is fundamental when we move to the next body of work that every business and marketer should know. 

'The Long & The Short of It' (Les Binet & Peter Field - Published by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) in 2013), which was the follow-up to their work 'Marketing in the Era of Accountability' (published by the IPA in 2007), which examines the impact of timescales of effect, exploring the tension between long and short-term strategies for brands and businesses as well as providing evidence-based recommendations on how best to approach investment in advertising is something every marketer should read and embrace. 

In short, businesses need to combine long-term messaging, emotional priming (the brand grows stronger, leading to a long-term volume increase and reduced price sensitivity), and short-term, motivational rational messaging (delivering sales uplifts, with no negative brand perception shifts or reductions in price sensitivity).

Brand-building communications that speak to 'out-of-market' future buyers create greater brand salience and likeability (preference), ensuring that more buyers are primed to consider and buy the brand when they enter the market. The better job a brand does here will ensure their motivational retail messaging works harder and ensure the brand can charge more, creating more significant margin and profit.

Peter and Les have also partnered with the good folks at the LinkedIn B2B Institute to replicate their research through a purely B2B lens, and the findings are the same. 

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institutes research demonstrates that in most B2B categories, 80-95% of category buyers aren't looking to buy this quarter. So, most of your buyers are future buyers, and the best way to engage them is through brand communications that prime them for future purchases rather than retail communications that they are not interested in because they are not in the market to buy.

The work from the IPA and the B2B Institute shows the ideal split to maximise your long-term abilities to create greater sales, margins, profits, market share growth, and market efficiencies are as follows;

• For most, a good target is 60% brand-building activities (long-term) and 40% retail activation activities (short-term)
• The B2C average is 62% brand and 38% retail
• The B2B average is 46% brand and 54% retail
• Durables - 58% brand and 42% retail
• FMCG - 60% brand and 40% retail
• Financial services - 80% brand and 20% retail
• Other services - 51% brand and 49% retail
• Retail - 64% brand and 36% retail
• For Online brands - 74% brand and 26% retail

The balance also shifts depending on the age of your company

• Year 1 - 35% brand and 65% activation (you need runs on the board, after all)
• Early growth (post year 1) - 57% brand and 43% retail
• Mature brand - 62% brand and 38% activation
• Market leader - 72% brand and 28% retail.

From my experience, most brands place too much effort and investment against retail activation activities, fighting over the smaller number of 'in-market' audiences and much less on the bigger opportunity of future buyers. Peter Field's work (again in partnership with the IPA) on the effects of short-termism and its detrimental effect on creativity and marketing effectiveness is also worth reading.

The other essential thing that came from Les and Peter's work in 'The Long & The Short Of It', was the power of fame. Brands should aim to make themselves famous so more people know them, like them, and want to buy, use, and be seen using them. Being creative to stand out and ensure this happens is vital. Pair this with Ehrenberg-Bass research that shows the vast majority of advertising is ignored, and you should at least give it your best shot.

As the ad contrarian Bob Hoffman said, client briefs should be three words. Make me famous. 

Next is the work from Dr Grace Kite and Tom Roach, who built on the work from Peter and Les to bring more light and understanding to the issues of placing too much marketing effort against retail activation. For them, too many businesses get stuck in the 'performance plateau' because they have exhausted the demand for their products and services. All brands will hit a sales ceiling, and the only way to overcome that is to speak to out-of-market audiences, priming more to buy the brand when they are next in the market.

Grace and Tom demonstrated that growth would reach a limit as brands scale up using always-on retail activation. Both brand and retail activity will be needed to overcome the performance plateau and create growth.

Tom has also done excellent work on the dangers of Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) found in online advertising and Return on Investment (ROI), which is worth reading and understanding and making the best choices to achieve greater long-term business success. It's important to remember that ROAS and ROI are efficiency metrics, not effectiveness metrics. They are the metrics that show the effort (efficiency) it takes to deliver the result (effectiveness). They are not about business growth. You can improve your ROAS and ROI by investing less and making your business smaller.

As Tom said, "ROI tends to inversely correlate with profit growth, as due to diminishing returns, ROI decreases as you spend more, and increases as you spend less. So, the easiest way to increase your ROI is to decrease your media spend. Focusing on increasing ROI would, therefore, limit growth or even "send you broke", as Byron Sharp says." 

ROAS can have even more significant dangers than ROI as it takes credit for past activity and other media channels' efforts. Ad technology chases easy sales, not business growth. It also targets people who are more likely to buy anyway. With the likes of Meta and Google making most of their money from advertising, it works very well for them, as advertisers give them even more money. Lastly, ROAS inversely correlates with business growth.

Businesses should focus on measuring incremental revenue and profit from advertising investments. The best strategy is to play both the short and the long game, focusing on long-term business effectiveness.

James Hurman's work "Future Demand," published in 2022, builds on this and demonstrates that brands need to create future demand for the products and services they sell by building the brand's awareness, salience, and preference with more future buyers. 

James demonstrated that every brand has a 'demand ceiling'—in short, the number of people in the market who need the category product/service and won't reject the brand in question. Demand conversion activity cannot covert demand that doesn't exist. Creating future demand takes longer than converting existing demand; therefore, when a brand starts creating future demand only when existing demand is exhausted, there is a period of sales stagnation. Only when future demand is created consistently can sales growth be maintained sustainably.

To create future demand, brands must

• Target large and new audiences
• Stand out from their competition
• Bind emotionally with audiences.

Another well-worth-reading whitepaper that James worked on with Peter Field in association with WARC and the Cannes Lions is 'The Effectiveness Code,' which explores what makes marketing more effective. They used the effectiveness cases from the IPA Databank, the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions database, and the WARC database, which includes the most awarded and most effective marketing cases, cross-category, B2B and B2C, cross-geography, and across time periods.

The last person you want to learn from is Professor Mark Ritson, the founder of the Mini-MBA courses in marketing and brand management and consultant to some of the world's biggest and best brands. Mark likes to keep on point, so I will only reference his views on the power of 'Bothism' here.

To maximise your business and marketing effectiveness, you must do both;

• Be different & distinctive
• Do the Long & the Short
• Prime for future sales & convert current sales
• Do emotive brand communications & rational action-orientated communications
• Do mass targeting and tight targeting
• Measure long-term (brand health, market share growth, profit) & short-term (sales performance, margin).

He would also probably say do them consistently, passionately and brand code the shit out of it (see part 1).

To finish our marketing framework, a bit of behavioural economics, which once just lived in academia and economics, is now alive in marketing thanks to the work of the likes of the late great Noble Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' published in 2011, Dan Ariely 'Predictably Irrational' published in 2008, Nobel Laureate Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School Professor Cass R. Sunstein 'Nudge' published in 2008 and 'Misbehaving published in 2015, and Richard Shotton 'The Choice Factory' published in 2018 and 'The Illusion of Choice' published in 2023, to name a handful, have illuminated our understanding of how we humans operate, think, evaluate the world around us, how we evaluate our options, and how we make choices and purchases, which is all wonderfully interesting and immensely useful for marketing and advertising.

It's important to know that our actions are based on rules, biases, heuristics, and how we are presented with information. Everyone uses quick thinking (heuristics), rules of thumb or shortcuts when making decisions. Everyone is heavily influenced by what we think others are doing (bias), creating consistent patterns of behaviour that deviate from expectations. Everyone is heavily influenced by how choices are presented (choice architecture), which explores how the grouping and ordering of choices affect our decisions.

Dan Ariely showed that we make 10,000+ decisions daily, with 95% based on intuition, "it feels right," or "it's good enough." Meanwhile, 73-93% of our decisions are guided by instinct and past behaviour.

Daniel Kahneman demonstrated in 'Thinking Fast and Slow' that humans have two systems in our brains.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, error-prone, implicit, requires no thinking, and allows emotions to run the show.

System 2 is slow, considered, logical, explicit, thought-based, where critical thinking lives.

As Daniel said, "99% of what humans process is subconscious. System 1 runs the show, that's the one you want to move".

Why does this matter? It matters greatly, as brand activity and communications engage 'System 1' thinking, which ignites a less rational but ultimately more powerful relationship between consumers and a brand, product, or service.

With 60-95% of your customers and potential customers (your future profits) 'not in the market' this quarter, meaning they aren't interested in your rational, features, and offer-based communications, brand, and emotional communications that engage 'System 1' to prime them for future actions are vital.

This brings me to round out our marketing framework with a bit of behavioural economics.

Priming

Priming, or the priming effect, occurs when an individual's exposure to a certain stimulus influences their response to a subsequent prompt without awareness of the connection. These stimuli are often related to words or images that people see during their day-to-day lives. Priming is the role of brand-building activity, perfect for 'out of market' future buyers. You are engaging System 1 thinking here.

Nudging

As we will use the term, a nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that predictably alters people's behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. The intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid to count as a nudge as people move from out of the market to weighing up their options to making a purchase; what content and tactics can you utilise to nudge them towards our offering now becomes what is important. For considered categories, you will engage System 2 thinking here as potential buyers weigh their options.

You want to think about how you will prime and nudge prospective clients. The better job you do priming and nudging, the better your retail activation activity will work.

Converting

Engaging System 2 thinking, turning interest into action and using explicit action-orientated communications that maximise revenues without discounting (where possible). 

If it's a habitual purchase, you may even be able to keep buyers in System 1 and make the purchase journey as easy as possible with gut, instincts, and emotion running the show.

Retaining

Maximise lifetime customer value through increasing repeat purchases, cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and customer referrals. Orientate your business around the customer and meet and exceed their needs. Engage System 1 thinking and make it super easy for people to buy again with no thinking required, and you'll be well on your way to creating greater lifetime customer value.

Lastly, you must also harness the power of creativity to ensure your brand, your message, and how it's delivered takes you out of the sea of marketing sameness you will find in every category, B2B and B2C. Of all the levers we have to pull in creating effectiveness and profit from advertising, creativity is second only to brand size (Paul Dyson, 2014 'The Top 10 Drivers to Advertising Profitability and Kantar 2020, 'Reviewing the Top 10 Drivers of Advertising Profitability'), and they were both miles ahead of anything else. Creativity will be your best friend if you aren't the biggest (and even if you are).

Remember Les, Peter, and Bob on making your brand famous.

It's essential to remember that audiences (regular people who may want to buy your products and services) don't care about brands and what we have to say, especially when they are not in the market to buy what you are selling. So you need to make them care (even if it's a little) and give you their attention (even it that's also just a little). That's where creativity comes in.

Two excellent podcasts worth checking out that feature insightful conversations with talented and experienced marketers and business leaders who embrace what I have covered in Parts 1 and 2 would be;

• On Strategy Showcase with Fergus O'Carroll
• Uncensored CMO with Jon Evans.

If you want to know more about any of this, get in touch. I strongly recommend reading some of the works of the great minds I have referenced above.