Amid constant uncertainty and economic turmoil, the question on every CMO's lips is, “How can I have the most impact for my brand and business?”
Marketing leaders are set by their boards of directors with demanding financial targets, so linking strategy to financial results is the holy grail, allowing them to prioritize and optimize marketing efforts and influence other business decisions. can do. At the same time, AI and advanced analytics are opening up new avenues for making decisions that maximize brand growth, making it more important than ever to focus on business results.
Decades of data and expertise about what consumers think and feel (attitudinal data) and what they actually do (behavioral data) informs the choices they ultimately make. It gives you a unique perspective and hard evidence on what makes a difference. To help our customers take full advantage of our expertise, we embarked on a year-long project to bring this data together under one unified framework. We did this by analyzing over 6.5 billion attitude and shopper data points over the past 10 years. This project is unprecedented in Kantar's history in its scale and ambition and is the evidence base for our new quantitative decision-making framework, the Brand Growth Blueprint.
Why meaningful differences make a difference
So what have we learned from assembling the best thinkers and processing billions of data points? We believe that brand awareness leads to increased market penetration and therefore brand choice. We were able to quantify that the percentage of shoppers in a category is strongly correlated over time.
Our Meaningful, Different and Salient (MDS) framework, certified by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB), emphasizes that difference, not just differentiation, is key to building strong emotional connections between consumers and brands. It claims to be. New analytics underlying Blueprint quantifies the importance of difference, and brands with meaningful differences that reach more people have up to 5x greater market penetration than brands with fewer meaningful differences. It turns out that you are getting a rate. Additionally, brands with high meaningful differentiation are so attractive that they can command prices up to twice the average price range for their category, making differentiation (and indeed marketing functions) important in protecting margins. We emphasize that we are fulfilling our role.
3 principles for brand growth
Blueprint principles are familiar to marketers and are reinforced by existing research on how brands grow. However, this new evidence shows that increased market penetration, while necessary, is insufficient to collectively drive sustainable brand and revenue growth. Our analysis reveals three core growth drivers for implementing these principles.
– influence more people – Increase the probability of purchase by reinforcing everyone's inclination towards your brand. This increases volume share by 9x, average selling price by 2x, and future share growth by 4x when executed optimally through exposure and experience.
– Show more presence – Optimize your marketing investments to shift consumer trends and gain choice over other brands. A brand with strong equity and good activation will grow 2.5 times faster than a brand with weak activation.
– find new space – Find the space for the most incremental expansion through meaningful and different innovations, expanded distribution, and communication. If a brand can find new moments and contexts within its scope, its potential for growth doubles.
From knowledge to action
So how can these new quantified marketing rules actually help marketers improve and prioritize their work? The blueprint is about how brands grow. In addition to being a valuable evidence base, it provides a practical decision-making framework called the Starting Grid to guide marketing investments for maximum impact.
While these new growth accelerators are universal and apply to brands in all sectors and of course B2B, each brand has its own starting point that you need to be aware of. You can then use Blueprint's decision-making framework to devise a strategy that makes sense for your brand, its size and stage, and category.
We are very excited to share the results of this thinking and analysis with our clients and the wider community. Our blueprint for brand growth sets new standards for strategic marketing understanding and excellence. All marketing leaders can use this to assess a brand's own competitive positioning and prioritize strategic responses and marketing investments. No matter the challenge, a blueprint serves as a starting point and an evidence base for marketers to shape the future of their brand.
If you missed the webinar introducing the Blueprint for Brand Growth, you can watch it on demand here.
