Byron Sharp is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world’s largest centre for research into marketing.

His first book How Brands Grow: what marketers don’t know has been called one of the most influential marketing books of the past decade (Warc, 2015) and was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers. In 2015 he published the follow-up How Brands Grow Part 2 with Professor Jenni Romaniuk. He has also written a textbook Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice which reflects modern knowledge about marketing and evidence-based thinking. The revised 2nd editionof the textbook was published in 2017.

Byron has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals.

What we covered in this episode:

Being turned down for a publishing deal for How Brands Grow
Why experts are terrible at predicting the future
Marketers getting distracted by Purpose with little empirical support for it
The ethical reason we should be focussed on the best return on marketing
Byron responds to Peter Field’s Purpose research
The top marketing myths exposed by How Brands Grow
The No.1 surprise in How Brands Grow
Why your customers are mostly the same as your competitors
The law of Double Jeopardy and why we are over exposed to our own brands heavy buyers
The paradox of very small brands having a larger customer base than expected
Physical and Mental availability overlap
How similar the top brands look vs ten years ago
Lucozade sugar tax backlash and how that proved the laws of marketing
The surprising importance of light and very light buyers
Why a lot of your sales come from people who haven’t bought you for at least a year
The importance of not changing your design
Whether the laws vary depending on category
Why market research is designed to highlight difference rather than similarity
The importance of distinctiveness and being remembered
What Levitt, Kotler and Akker got wrong about differentiation
Why even bankers can’t tell their banks apart
The power of pink concrete mixers
Asking an 8 year old to tell you what’s different about your brand
The real role of advertising for your brand
How search works just like point of sale to catch people as they fall
How the laws remain the same in B2B
Why Apple isn’t your typical brand when it comes to selling product differentiation
Why Ehrenberg Bass has just own distinctive asset
Why fruit doesn’t need packaging
The biggest unanswered question in marketing
Plans for Ehrenberg Bass to make training available to marketers
What Byron missed out in How Brands Grow
The importance of marketing the research and highlighting the implications
Describing Mark Ritson as the best business journalist in the world
What Byron thinks about the environment and the role of marketing in it

Escalating Tariff Fights with Brazil and India and how U.S. Efforts Impact Russia and China