At its core, marketing is the art and craft of building mental and physical availability for a brand through advertising and distribution, which in turn enables brands to serve their functional and cultural purpose.
These are some of the reads that have had the most influence on my opinions about marketing, so I would encourage you to start from here:
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How far along an idea is, from 🌱 rough to 🌿 developing to 🌳 mature.
In most marketplaces, a few sellers drive most of the outcomes.
In any category, light buyers (i.e., those who only buy the category occasionally) favor large brands over small ones. This is known as the “Natural Monopoly Law” (i.e., larger brands monopolize light buyers).
The problem with selling to the consumer on the Internet is that it favors price comparison and, as a result, discounting. The moment one brand starts offering a product for a slightly lower price than the competition, it triggers a discounting spiral that makes everyone worse off—it’s a vicious self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Despite all the talk about brands needing to invest in customer retention, it’s important to know that brands cannot survive on retention alone: most brands only retain 20-30% of their customer base.
Segmenting your audience is only worth it if you’re actually treating the segments differently, and the difference is meaningful enough to drive incremental sales compared to your treatment of a non-segmented audience.
Luxury used to be having money to buy things. It was the accumulation of wealth.
Brand growth comes from light buyers, and light buyers are not motivated enough to shop in specific channels: they will just buy their products wherever they want to buy it.
In marketing, brands serve two different purposes: a functional purpose and a cultural purpose.
Purpose is not irrelevant for brands, but it can’t just be lip service.
Just like good management (see Good management requires consistency), good advertising requires consistency over a long time horizon to build mental availability.
For a long time, marketers have been trying to capture what makes good advertising. Unfortunately, it is tough to capture.
Intuitively, it seems like the 80/20 rule would hold true for a brand’s revenue distribution, where the top 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue.
The ultimate goal of any brand management strategy should be to turn your brand into a reference for its category.
Many marketers consider brand marketing and performance marketing as two completely separate concepts. In their mind, brand marketing is a very long-term strategy that is not directly tied to a financial impact, while performance marketing is a very short-term strategy that is directly tied to a financial impact.
We’ve established that Brands should stand for purpose, not search for it.
If you need to search for your purpose, it means it’s artificial. Purpose is the byproduct of your values and work, not something you impose on your brand.
You shouldn’t create artificial demand for your referral program. Instead, build it once people are already referring organically. Otherwise, if your product is not good enough, you’ll find yourself filling a bucket with a hole in the bottom.
The modern consumer is bombarded with brands they can choose from. As a result, consumers filter out most of the brands they see because the human mind simply cannot process all the information it’s exposed to, and it has to take shortcuts.
