Debunking Branding Myths: Insights from Empirical Data

The stronger your brand, the more you sell. We can all agree on that. But this consensus quickly fades as soon as the discussion turns to which strategies and metrics truly make a brand strong.

Not surprising, as few areas in marketing are more shrouded in a thick mystical mist than branding. The field has no shortage of gurus, each holding their own truth about which brand strategies and metrics pave the way to success.

Fortunately, the past decade has seen a significant rise in a more scientific approach to branding. Stimulated by publications such as How Brands Grow by the Australian marketing scientist Byron Sharp, more and more brands are recognising the importance of empirical data as the foundation of their brand strategy. Thousands of activities are conceivable to strengthen your brand, just as there are thousands of metrics you could measure to infer the health of your brand. But for both, only a fraction yields results that allow your brand to grow with a high degree of certainty.

In this blog, we list three persistent myths that often arise in branding discussions. We debunk each myth with empirical data and also look at what you should practically do.

Myth 1: The Love Brand

The question “How can we become a love brand?” echoed endlessly through branding meeting rooms after the term gained popularity in the 2000s. The love brand was supposed to represent brands that have a deep emotional connection with their customer. A brand to wake up and go to bed with. And although this concept sounds like music to the ears of many brand managers, it turns out to be a completely unrealistic myth when we look at the role brands occupy in our brains.

How Loyalty Really Works

As a brand, we like to see our customers return loyally. The traditional thought assumes a customer who becomes increasingly attached to the brand, so that over time they tolerate no other brand in their shopping basket.

However, when we actually look at the empirical sales data, the love brand proves to be an illusion. Take one of the world’s most beloved brands: Coca-Cola. Although the market as a whole shows an average tendency towards Coca-Cola, it is not divided into two camps. Of the Coca-Cola buyers, 41% also buy Pepsi. Of the Pepsi buyers, 72% also buy Coca-Cola. Consumers are anything but monogamous.

How can this be?

Loyalty turns out not to be the result of a passionate connection between brand and individual, but simply an ingrained habit that makes our lives easier. Brands save us thinking. Our brain loves that because thinking consumes energy. Even the brain activity that is activated when we process brands shows that we mainly consider brands as objects that serve a purpose, and not so much as friends (Yoon et al., 2006). Brand loyalty exists, but it simply has little to do with love.

And even though brand loyalty is not as romantic as brand managers hoped, at the same time we see that the level of loyalty does differ from brand to brand. What is behind this? Loyalty turns out to follow an empirical law: the larger the market share of a brand, the more loyal the customer becomes. This is called the double jeopardy law: the smaller the market share of a brand, the lower the loyalty among buyers. Small brands are therefore doubly unfortunate.

Effective Branding in a World of Passionless Loyalty

This fact is good news: loyalty arises entirely naturally as a result of increasing market share. This practical conclusion holds across many sectors: when brands increase their market share (for example, by increasing their physical and mental availability), customer loyalty automatically increases.

Myth 2: “Our Brand Has Different Customers”

Every child is the most special child on earth (if we are to believe the parents of the child, at least). Among brand managers, a similar sentiment prevails: their customer base would be a completely unique amalgamation of demographic and psychographic variables that is totally different from the buyers of the competitor.

When we actually objectively measure what kind of people buy different brands, the reality is also sobering here. For example, Evens (1959) compared the customers of Ford and Chevrolet. What turned out? There was no difference in the distribution of demographic characteristics (gender, age, residential area, income) and psychographic characteristics (personality, identity, values).

This does not mean that every consumer is the same; they are clearly not. However, it turns out that the distribution of all those different unique characteristics of consumers over brands within the same category does not differ from each other. Nike or Adidas. Coca-Cola or Pepsi. McDonald’s or Burger King. Their customer groups do not differ.

Don’t Be Blinded by a Persona

The practical implication of the strongly similar customer bases is that it makes no sense to bring the end customer to life as a single persona (“our customer is called Janine, lives in a semi-detached house, has a dog…”). Personas are an attractive simplification, but they blind you to the real diversity within your customer base.

Myth 3: Focus on the Most Fanatical Users

Jan has been drinking Coca-Cola every day since his youth. He has never drunk another cola brand and never will.

Piet doesn’t drink sugary drinks that often, but occasionally he takes a bottle of cola from the supermarket. He sometimes buys Pepsi Cola and sometimes Coca-Cola because he doesn’t really taste the difference.

Which of these customers is more important to Coca-Cola?

You might initially bet your money on Jan, the brand-loyal cola addict. Yet Coca-Cola’s profit largely comes from Piet: the light user – of whom there are many more. No less than 25% of Coca-Cola’s turnover comes from customers who buy a cola once every six years, and 50% of the turnover from customers who only consume cola twice a year.

Light Users Do the Heavy Lifting

The mass of light users has important implications for the targeting and approach of your advertising campaigns. Instead of targeting this at the tiny club of fanatical users, it turns out to be more effective to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, particularly category buyers who have not been addressed before.

For that reason, it is still most effective today to base campaigns on a mass media basis. The first impression always makes the biggest contribution. Therefore, when selecting additional channels, focus on reaching as many new people as possible.