Three New Rules of Brand Growth You Need to Know

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A major new analysis from Kantar proposes three critical rules for brand growth as part of a decision-making framework for marketers.

‘Blueprint for Brand Growth’ is an analysis of 6.5 billion global attitudinal and shopper data points from the past decade – a collaboration between Kantar’s experts, industry leaders and advanced analytics work combining Kantar’s unique BrandZ and Worldpanel data assets.

Big idea

Brands that are meaningfully different to more people command five times the market penetration today, and have a real advantage in penetration growth over the next two years.

“For the first time anywhere, we have combined a decade of attitudinal brand research with actual shopper behaviour to more holistically understand the tangible impact marketing has on growth,” explains Jane Ostler, Kantar’s EVP of thought leadership, in a statement.

“Among other elements, we see that emotional connections in advertising are crucial. When optimised, they build differentiation and predispose consumers toward a brand, boosting sales and loyalty. ”

Three rules of brand growth

Kantar recommends three “growth accelerators” as decision-making frameworks, laid out in full in an e-book on their site and condensed here:

Predispose More People: Creativity, advertising and experience builds meaningful difference as well as mental availability for your brand. When optimally executed, this drives 9X higher volume share, 2X higher average selling price, and a 4X likelihood of growing share in the future.
Be More Present: Optimising distribution, customer journey, range, pack, pricing and promotions wins 7X more buyers than those present in only half of buying occasions.
Find New Space: Innovation focused on identifying incremental spaces (motivations, occasions, tangential categories and services) doubles a brand’s chance of growth. Increasing the number of usage occasions by 10% results in revenue growth of +17%.

These three accelerators, Ostler reports, will instinctively feel familiar to CMOs. They are now, though, underpinned with quantifiable evidence of their impact on brand and revenue growth.

Theoretical background

The research chimes with some emerging observations from Kantar’s BrandZ datasets proposed in a talk by UK Insights and Effectiveness practice managing director Dom Boyd and Oxford University professor Felipe Tomaz last year: mainly, that meaningful difference is the defining attribute of growing brands rather than their distinctiveness.

Critically, Kantar’s analysis goes against a prevailing observation in the discipline that distinctiveness through memorable branding is more important than meaningful difference.

The long-standing marketing debate, in the words of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, surrounds two similar but separate ideas:

“Distinctiveness is all about making your brand easily identified by customers.”
“Differentiation is about features of a product or service that differentiate a brand in the eyes of the customer.”

This reached a high point with the publication of Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk’s How Brands Grow (2010), in which the authors argue that “rather than striving for meaningful, perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn’t.”

Kantar isn’t proposing that branding distinctiveness is wrong, but rather that focusing on the attributes of market penetration as the main objective are insufficient to drive sustainable brand, revenue and margin growth.

Ideas in action: Heineken

“A brand like Heineken is at a very different stage in different markets worldwide, so using the Meaningful Different and Salient Framework, we’ve been able to really get underneath the drivers of meaningful differentiation to understand and connect with certain consumer groups that deliver brand growth across different markets,” says Tony Costella, global consumer & markets insights director at Heineken, in a statement accompanying the release.

Credit: Kantar, WARC, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute