What drives brand growth?
It isn't being the best on paper
A plain-English systematic review of what the best available evidence says about why people choose one brand over another — and what it means if you're trying to grow one.
Joseph Burrow
11 Min
Ask most people why one brand beats another and you'll get a sensible-sounding answer: the better product wins. Line up the options, compare them on the things that matter; price, feature list, quality and durability. And we pick the winner.
Think about buying a car. You weigh it up: cost per mile, boot space, reliability figures, a friend's opinion, the safety rating and insurance group. A clear pros-and-cons list, and the best option on paper won.
It's how we like to think we buy. It's almost never how we actually do.
And here's the part that needs pause: it isn't just that "best on paper" is the wrong lens. There's good evidence we couldn't use best on paper properly even if we tried. In blind tests, people can't reliably tell their favourite beer from a rival's, but put the labels back on and their ratings jump for the brand they know (Allison and Uhl's classic 1964 study). Show people identical wine at a higher price and they don't just say it tastes better; the pleasure centres of their brain actually light up more (Plassmann and colleagues, 2008). Coke and Pepsi drinkers split roughly evenly in anonymous tests, but tell them which is which and both their stated preference and their brain activity change (McClure and colleagues, 2004). Even brand premium itself thins out among experts: pharmacists buy far fewer branded painkillers than the rest of us, because they know all the ingredients are identical (Bronnenberg and colleagues, 2015).
Be careful how you read that. It does not mean quality is irrelevant: it clearly feeds how people perceive a product, and a bad product will eventually break the promise the brand makes. What it means is narrower and stranger: we're not very good at judging functional differences, and the mental cues around a product — its name, its price, its design, its reputation — measurably change what we perceive, and even what we mentally experience. But the "objective pros and cons" isn't how we make choices.
So if it isn't the spec sheet, what is it? This is where most conventions get lazy. We jump straight to "well, it's emotional." Havas has a newer, sharper version: claiming data prove the real driver is desire. And a whole other school of thought, associated with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, says almost the opposite: that human meaning has surprisingly little to do with it, and growth is mostly defined by being easy to remember and easy to buy, which sceptics (ahem) unfairly caricature as "just jam a jingle down people's throats."
They can't all be right. Or, as we'll see, they can mostly be right at the same time, once you stop arguing about semantics. Let's walk through what the strongest evidence actually says, where the experts genuinely disagree, and then the part that matters if you're trying to grow a brand without a global budget: what it means for you.
Think about buying a car. You weigh it up: cost per mile, boot space, reliability figures, a friend's opinion, the safety rating and insurance group. A clear pros-and-cons list, and the best option on paper won.
It's how we like to think we buy. It's almost never how we actually do.
And here's the part that needs pause: it isn't just that "best on paper" is the wrong lens. There's good evidence we couldn't use best on paper properly even if we tried. In blind tests, people can't reliably tell their favourite beer from a rival's, but put the labels back on and their ratings jump for the brand they know (Allison and Uhl's classic 1964 study). Show people identical wine at a higher price and they don't just say it tastes better; the pleasure centres of their brain actually light up more (Plassmann and colleagues, 2008). Coke and Pepsi drinkers split roughly evenly in anonymous tests, but tell them which is which and both their stated preference and their brain activity change (McClure and colleagues, 2004). Even brand premium itself thins out among experts: pharmacists buy far fewer branded painkillers than the rest of us, because they know all the ingredients are identical (Bronnenberg and colleagues, 2015).
Be careful how you read that. It does not mean quality is irrelevant: it clearly feeds how people perceive a product, and a bad product will eventually break the promise the brand makes. What it means is narrower and stranger: we're not very good at judging functional differences, and the mental cues around a product — its name, its price, its design, its reputation — measurably change what we perceive, and even what we mentally experience. But the "objective pros and cons" isn't how we make choices.
So if it isn't the spec sheet, what is it? This is where most conventions get lazy. We jump straight to "well, it's emotional." Havas has a newer, sharper version: claiming data prove the real driver is desire. And a whole other school of thought, associated with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, says almost the opposite: that human meaning has surprisingly little to do with it, and growth is mostly defined by being easy to remember and easy to buy, which sceptics (ahem) unfairly caricature as "just jam a jingle down people's throats."
They can't all be right. Or, as we'll see, they can mostly be right at the same time, once you stop arguing about semantics. Let's walk through what the strongest evidence actually says, where the experts genuinely disagree, and then the part that matters if you're trying to grow a brand without a global budget: what it means for you.
The Rules Everyone Teaches
Most marketers have met these, and taught together, they sound like one settled science.
People buy from memory, not from comparison. Most of the time, you don't stand in the aisle running a mental spreadsheet. You reach for what comes to mind. A large meta-analysis (Sethuraman, Tellis and Briesch, 2011) put the average short-term sales bump from advertising at around 0.12 — v small. Advertising works far better by building and refreshing memories than by persuading anyone in the moment.
Growth comes from getting more buyers, not from squeezing the ones you have. The single most reliable finding in the field is that brands grow mainly by acquisition — reaching more people — not by increasing loyalty. One study across both packaged goods and services (Riebe and colleagues, 2014) found that winning new customers is about twice as important to growth as stopping existing ones from leaving.
Emotion does tend to beat a rational argument long-term. Binet and Field, working through the IPA's databank of nearly a thousand real campaigns, found emotionally-led campaigns produced markedly more of the very large business effects: 1.7 times as many brand effects as rational, information-led campaigns, and that the gap widens the longer period you measure. One honest caveat: that databank is made of award entrants, so it flatters absolute results. The relative comparison (emotion versus reason, judged inside the same pool) is a trustworthy bit.
Being "meaningfully different" predicts choice and, especially, perceived value. Kantar, drawing on one of the largest longitudinal brand datasets in the world, finds that across 540 categories in 54 markets, how meaningfully different a brand is accounts for around 60% of whether someone's predisposed to buy it, and how salient (top-of-mind) it is accounts for around 40%. But when it comes to whether people will pay more, meaningful difference accounts for over 90%.
Being recognisable is a consequential job on its own. The Ehrenberg-Bass tradition stresses distinctive assets: your colours, logo, characters, sound, smell, the shape of your packaging (the things that let someone recognise you fast and attach the right memories to the right brand) produces around 40% of whether someone might choose you.
Design and CX shows up wherever performance is highest. McKinsey's design index found the top quartile of design-led companies grew revenue around 32 percentage points further, and delivered 56 points more shareholder return, over five years. The Design Management Institute's index told a similar story.
And there are rules of thumb for how to split your money. The best-known is the 60:40 rule: spend roughly 60% of your budget on long-term brand building and 40% on short-term sales activation. In B2B, the same researchers put the balance closer to 46:54, necessitating more direct activation.
Laid out like that, it looks like a tidy, agreed body of knowledge. It isn't. The people who built these ideas argue — genuinely, in peer-reviewed print — about what actually drives growth.
Most marketers have met these, and taught together, they sound like one settled science.
People buy from memory, not from comparison. Most of the time, you don't stand in the aisle running a mental spreadsheet. You reach for what comes to mind. A large meta-analysis (Sethuraman, Tellis and Briesch, 2011) put the average short-term sales bump from advertising at around 0.12 — v small. Advertising works far better by building and refreshing memories than by persuading anyone in the moment.
Growth comes from getting more buyers, not from squeezing the ones you have. The single most reliable finding in the field is that brands grow mainly by acquisition — reaching more people — not by increasing loyalty. One study across both packaged goods and services (Riebe and colleagues, 2014) found that winning new customers is about twice as important to growth as stopping existing ones from leaving.
Emotion does tend to beat a rational argument long-term. Binet and Field, working through the IPA's databank of nearly a thousand real campaigns, found emotionally-led campaigns produced markedly more of the very large business effects: 1.7 times as many brand effects as rational, information-led campaigns, and that the gap widens the longer period you measure. One honest caveat: that databank is made of award entrants, so it flatters absolute results. The relative comparison (emotion versus reason, judged inside the same pool) is a trustworthy bit.
Being "meaningfully different" predicts choice and, especially, perceived value. Kantar, drawing on one of the largest longitudinal brand datasets in the world, finds that across 540 categories in 54 markets, how meaningfully different a brand is accounts for around 60% of whether someone's predisposed to buy it, and how salient (top-of-mind) it is accounts for around 40%. But when it comes to whether people will pay more, meaningful difference accounts for over 90%.
Being recognisable is a consequential job on its own. The Ehrenberg-Bass tradition stresses distinctive assets: your colours, logo, characters, sound, smell, the shape of your packaging (the things that let someone recognise you fast and attach the right memories to the right brand) produces around 40% of whether someone might choose you.
Design and CX shows up wherever performance is highest. McKinsey's design index found the top quartile of design-led companies grew revenue around 32 percentage points further, and delivered 56 points more shareholder return, over five years. The Design Management Institute's index told a similar story.
And there are rules of thumb for how to split your money. The best-known is the 60:40 rule: spend roughly 60% of your budget on long-term brand building and 40% on short-term sales activation. In B2B, the same researchers put the balance closer to 46:54, necessitating more direct activation.
Laid out like that, it looks like a tidy, agreed body of knowledge. It isn't. The people who built these ideas argue — genuinely, in peer-reviewed print — about what actually drives growth.
It's important to remember that big data all comes from the same place — the past.
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy (2019)
Where the Experts Fall Out
Here is the real disagreement, and it's worth stating precisely, because most summaries blur towards a sellable middle ground.
On one side, the Ehrenberg-Bass school argues that being perceived as different is over-rated and close to irrelevant for growth. In their reading of the data, what matters is being distinctive (easy to recognise) and available (easy to bring to mind and easy to buy), but not being rated as meaningfully better or different on a list of attributes. They have the studies to press the point: work by Romaniuk, Sharp and Ehrenberg (2007) found perceived differentiation is low and doesn't line up with loyalty or share the way differentiation theory predicts; an earlier paper by Ehrenberg, Barnard and Scriven (1997), pointedly titled Differentiation or Salience, argued brands mostly compete as near-substitutes and it's salience, not difference, that separates them.
On the other side, Kantar argues that meaningful difference is the number-one lever. In one analysis they ran with Oxford's Saïd Business School across hundreds of brands, being meaningfully different was the single biggest brand-related factor in share-price outperformance — accounting for around 35% of the effect, against roughly 0.6% for salience.
Those are not small differences of emphasis. One camp says difference barely matters; the other says it matters most.
There's a second, sharper puzzle sitting underneath, and it's the one that should make you suspicious of soft "brand love" arguments. If some brands genuinely enjoy far more desire or affection than their rivals — as Havas and others claim — you'd expect them to enjoy far more loyalty too. But they don't. Behavioural loyalty (how often people actually rebuy) barely varies between competing brands in a category, and the variation you do see tracks how big the brand is — its penetration — not how loved it is. This is the famous "double jeopardy" pattern: smaller brands get hit twice, with fewer buyers and slightly less loyal ones, and it falls out of the maths of how markets work almost automatically (the Dirichlet model, if you ever want to go down that rabbit hole). It's a genuine challenge to any story that says warm feelings, on their own, buy you a durable advantage.
And then there's design. Those McKinsey and DMI numbers are real — but they're correlational. They show that design tends to be a feature of the highest-performing companies. They can't show design caused the performance, because the companies that can afford brilliant design are, unsurprisingly, often the ones already winning. An Ehrenberg-Bass thinker would go further and say the same about the attitude scores Kantar leans on: bigger brands score higher on almost every attribute simply because more people use them, so the attitudes may largely reflect size rather than create it.
So: which is it? Meaning, or availability? Difference, or recognition? Is design a driver, or just a symptom of success?
Here is the real disagreement, and it's worth stating precisely, because most summaries blur towards a sellable middle ground.
On one side, the Ehrenberg-Bass school argues that being perceived as different is over-rated and close to irrelevant for growth. In their reading of the data, what matters is being distinctive (easy to recognise) and available (easy to bring to mind and easy to buy), but not being rated as meaningfully better or different on a list of attributes. They have the studies to press the point: work by Romaniuk, Sharp and Ehrenberg (2007) found perceived differentiation is low and doesn't line up with loyalty or share the way differentiation theory predicts; an earlier paper by Ehrenberg, Barnard and Scriven (1997), pointedly titled Differentiation or Salience, argued brands mostly compete as near-substitutes and it's salience, not difference, that separates them.
On the other side, Kantar argues that meaningful difference is the number-one lever. In one analysis they ran with Oxford's Saïd Business School across hundreds of brands, being meaningfully different was the single biggest brand-related factor in share-price outperformance — accounting for around 35% of the effect, against roughly 0.6% for salience.
Those are not small differences of emphasis. One camp says difference barely matters; the other says it matters most.
There's a second, sharper puzzle sitting underneath, and it's the one that should make you suspicious of soft "brand love" arguments. If some brands genuinely enjoy far more desire or affection than their rivals — as Havas and others claim — you'd expect them to enjoy far more loyalty too. But they don't. Behavioural loyalty (how often people actually rebuy) barely varies between competing brands in a category, and the variation you do see tracks how big the brand is — its penetration — not how loved it is. This is the famous "double jeopardy" pattern: smaller brands get hit twice, with fewer buyers and slightly less loyal ones, and it falls out of the maths of how markets work almost automatically (the Dirichlet model, if you ever want to go down that rabbit hole). It's a genuine challenge to any story that says warm feelings, on their own, buy you a durable advantage.
And then there's design. Those McKinsey and DMI numbers are real — but they're correlational. They show that design tends to be a feature of the highest-performing companies. They can't show design caused the performance, because the companies that can afford brilliant design are, unsurprisingly, often the ones already winning. An Ehrenberg-Bass thinker would go further and say the same about the attitude scores Kantar leans on: bigger brands score higher on almost every attribute simply because more people use them, so the attitudes may largely reflect size rather than create it.
So: which is it? Meaning, or availability? Difference, or recognition? Is design a driver, or just a symptom of success?
Where the Fight is Smaller than it Looks
When we took down the walls and dissected what separated the findings: some of the conflict dissolved, and a surprising amount of it feels like entrenchment over semantics.
Unpack the two key terms. Ehrenberg-Bass champions being distinct. Kantar champions being meaningfully different. When we were fact-checking our own understanding, those two ideas kept bleeding into each other on the page. Because, honestly, only a Type-A specialist would insist that being distinct and being different are opposed. To a normal human they're nearly the same word.
What Ehrenberg-Bass means by "distinctiveness" is recognisable. What Kantar means by "meaningful difference" is recognisably standing for something that matters to the buyer. There's enormous overlap, but because this is empirical evidence, its not accurate to say data supports the redefined terminology. The genuinely unresolved bit that experts fairly still fight about; is whether being rated as different on specific attributes (completely detached from recognition) drives growth on its own. And there, the evidence really is mixed, so nobody should pretend it's settled.
But step back from the vocabulary and you can see these aren't rival machines. They're describing different parts of the same machine.
When we took down the walls and dissected what separated the findings: some of the conflict dissolved, and a surprising amount of it feels like entrenchment over semantics.
Unpack the two key terms. Ehrenberg-Bass champions being distinct. Kantar champions being meaningfully different. When we were fact-checking our own understanding, those two ideas kept bleeding into each other on the page. Because, honestly, only a Type-A specialist would insist that being distinct and being different are opposed. To a normal human they're nearly the same word.
What Ehrenberg-Bass means by "distinctiveness" is recognisable. What Kantar means by "meaningful difference" is recognisably standing for something that matters to the buyer. There's enormous overlap, but because this is empirical evidence, its not accurate to say data supports the redefined terminology. The genuinely unresolved bit that experts fairly still fight about; is whether being rated as different on specific attributes (completely detached from recognition) drives growth on its own. And there, the evidence really is mixed, so nobody should pretend it's settled.
But step back from the vocabulary and you can see these aren't rival machines. They're describing different parts of the same machine.
Being well-known, and being known for something that matters, are not competing strategies. They're the same strategy, done well.
Joseph Burrow, Practice Lead
Start with the keystone that marketing school leans on — "mental availability," the propensity of a brand to come to mind in a buying situation. The mistake is to treat it as one thing, and to assume it's built by one thing: repetition. It isn't.
Coming to mind is built from three ingredients, and only one of them is raw reach:
Coming to mind is built from three ingredients, and only one of them is raw reach:
- Distinctive assets are the retrieval cue. They're what make a memory findable, and — crucially — attach it to you rather than to the category or a competitor. This is the recognition job.
- Relevance and meaning are the breadth and strength of the memory. How many real buying situations, needs and feelings you're linked to, and how strongly. Our brains hold on to things that matter to us and things that carry feeling far better than they hold on to flat repetition — that's just how memory works.
- Reach is the fuel. It's what puts the first two in front of people, over and over.
Put like that, the dichotomy ends. Meaning isn't the opposite of availability — meaning is one of the things that builds availability.
Reach is the fuel; relevance and distinctiveness are the multipliers that decide how much memory you actually get per unit of reach. Being well-known, and being known for something that matters, are not competing strategies. They're the same strategy, done well.
Reach is the fuel; relevance and distinctiveness are the multipliers that decide how much memory you actually get per unit of reach. Being well-known, and being known for something that matters, are not competing strategies. They're the same strategy, done well.
Two Engines: One for Volume, One for Value
Once you see it as one machine, the evidence sorts itself into two engines, and knowing which one you're pulling is consequential growth and ROI.
The volume engine — being chosen by more people — runs on distinctiveness, availability and reach. This is where the Ehrenberg-Bass school is strongest. If you want more buyers, you need to be easy to recognise, easy to bring to mind across lots of buying situations, and easy to actually buy. Emotion and relevance still matter here, but they matter as the thing that makes your recognition efficient, not as a separate lever.
The value engine — charging more, holding margin — runs on meaningful difference. This is where Kantar is strongest, and the evidence is weighty. Remember: meaningful difference accounts for over 90% of whether someone will pay more, and Kantar attributes roughly 94% of a brand's pricing power to being meaningfully different, versus just 6% to salience. And pricing power is worth more than it looks. McKinsey's pricing work found that a 1% improvement in price can lift operating profit by around 8%; several times the impact of a 1% gain in volume. Meaningful, in other words, is what lets you escape the race to the bottom.
There's a third thing meaning does, quietly, and it's the most useful of all for a smaller brand: it improves the return on every pound of marketing you spend. When your message is relevant and distinctive, each impression encodes more strongly and lands on your brand rather than leaking to the category. You're not just buying attention; you're converting imore of each impression into durable memory. Remember that thought, it's a key to the challenger brand predicament, which we'll get to.
Now, an honest complication, because we promised not to tidy things up falsely. One peer-reviewed study (Stahl and colleagues, 2012, in the Journal of Marketing) found that being more differentiated raised profit per customer but actually lowered acquisition and retention. Difference cuts both ways. The reconciliation is in the kind of difference: relevance that broadens you (linking you to more buyers, more situations, more of what people already want) grows your customer base. Differentiation that narrows you (polarising, niche, "not for everyone") can shrink it, even as it lets you charge more of the few who remain. The design of your difference decides which of those you get. That's not a footnote; for a growing brand it's one of the most critical choices you'll make.
Once you see it as one machine, the evidence sorts itself into two engines, and knowing which one you're pulling is consequential growth and ROI.
The volume engine — being chosen by more people — runs on distinctiveness, availability and reach. This is where the Ehrenberg-Bass school is strongest. If you want more buyers, you need to be easy to recognise, easy to bring to mind across lots of buying situations, and easy to actually buy. Emotion and relevance still matter here, but they matter as the thing that makes your recognition efficient, not as a separate lever.
The value engine — charging more, holding margin — runs on meaningful difference. This is where Kantar is strongest, and the evidence is weighty. Remember: meaningful difference accounts for over 90% of whether someone will pay more, and Kantar attributes roughly 94% of a brand's pricing power to being meaningfully different, versus just 6% to salience. And pricing power is worth more than it looks. McKinsey's pricing work found that a 1% improvement in price can lift operating profit by around 8%; several times the impact of a 1% gain in volume. Meaningful, in other words, is what lets you escape the race to the bottom.
There's a third thing meaning does, quietly, and it's the most useful of all for a smaller brand: it improves the return on every pound of marketing you spend. When your message is relevant and distinctive, each impression encodes more strongly and lands on your brand rather than leaking to the category. You're not just buying attention; you're converting imore of each impression into durable memory. Remember that thought, it's a key to the challenger brand predicament, which we'll get to.
Now, an honest complication, because we promised not to tidy things up falsely. One peer-reviewed study (Stahl and colleagues, 2012, in the Journal of Marketing) found that being more differentiated raised profit per customer but actually lowered acquisition and retention. Difference cuts both ways. The reconciliation is in the kind of difference: relevance that broadens you (linking you to more buyers, more situations, more of what people already want) grows your customer base. Differentiation that narrows you (polarising, niche, "not for everyone") can shrink it, even as it lets you charge more of the few who remain. The design of your difference decides which of those you get. That's not a footnote; for a growing brand it's one of the most critical choices you'll make.
Where Design Creates Value
So is design investment a failproof YoY driver of growth? On the honest evidence, no. It is not a proven, independent cause. The big numbers are correlational; design is a hallmark of high performers more than a demonstrated creator of them. Anyone who tells you a redesign causes a 32% revenue jump is overselling.
But that's not the end of the story, and it's not a reason to underinvest. Design is a likely mechanism through which distinctiveness and meaning actually get built into the things people feel and recognise.
Recognition doesn't happen in the abstract; it happens because your assets are distinctive and consistent. Meaning doesn't transmit itself; it's carried by how a product looks, how an experience feels, how a message is made.
In the "the DNA of breakthrough brand value growth" Kantar and Oxford’s Saïd Business School showed 70% of what people register as a brand's "meaningful difference" isn't the tangible stuff you can trademark — the colour, logotype, tagline — it's the intangible stuff: the positioning, the experience, the psychological and experiential components of the brand that build our perception of the brands unreplicable qualities.
Design is how the intangible gets made visible and repeatable. It earns its place not as a magic cause, but as the delivery system for the two things the evidence says genuinely move buyers.
So is design investment a failproof YoY driver of growth? On the honest evidence, no. It is not a proven, independent cause. The big numbers are correlational; design is a hallmark of high performers more than a demonstrated creator of them. Anyone who tells you a redesign causes a 32% revenue jump is overselling.
But that's not the end of the story, and it's not a reason to underinvest. Design is a likely mechanism through which distinctiveness and meaning actually get built into the things people feel and recognise.
Recognition doesn't happen in the abstract; it happens because your assets are distinctive and consistent. Meaning doesn't transmit itself; it's carried by how a product looks, how an experience feels, how a message is made.
In the "the DNA of breakthrough brand value growth" Kantar and Oxford’s Saïd Business School showed 70% of what people register as a brand's "meaningful difference" isn't the tangible stuff you can trademark — the colour, logotype, tagline — it's the intangible stuff: the positioning, the experience, the psychological and experiential components of the brand that build our perception of the brands unreplicable qualities.
Design is how the intangible gets made visible and repeatable. It earns its place not as a magic cause, but as the delivery system for the two things the evidence says genuinely move buyers.
"Design is how the intangible gets made visible and repeatable. It earns its place not as a magic cause, but as the delivery system for the two things the evidence says genuinely move buyers."
Joseph Burrow, Practice Lead
Why none of this is a playbook
Now the caveat that most confident marketing advice skips; and the reason you should be wary of anyone, us included, who hands you universal rules.
Almost all of the strong evidence above has three biases baked in:
Now the caveat that most confident marketing advice skips; and the reason you should be wary of anyone, us included, who hands you universal rules.
Almost all of the strong evidence above has three biases baked in:
- It's built from averages, which quietly harden into "best practice" that may not fit your situation.
- It's enterprise-biased, drawn largely from big companies with big budgets, salience and marcomms effciencies.
- And it's FMCG-biased, drawn heavily from fast-moving consumer goods that people buy often, cheaply and with little thought. If you're a considered purchase, a young category, a business-to-business brand or a service, the "laws" may bend or entirely invert.
And there's a gap that matters more than any other weakness. For a brand starting from near-zero awareness, what has to come first is heavily under-evidenced. The famous laws describe how established brands behave; there's much less on the brands nobody's heard of yet. There is no universally accepted answer to "what's the first move." This is important, because a lot of people, and a lot of consultants, will confidently tell you there is one.
The most defensible reading is that a new brand needs distinctive assets that communicate a reason to be chosen — something that earns a place in memory a competitor can't simply outspend — and that meaning matters more at the start, not less. Which fits what founders of breakthrough brands consistently describe: find a compelling, defensible niche first. But hold that as a well-reasoned bet, not a proven law. Honesty about where the evidence runs out is exactly what lets you avoid expensive mistakes.
So instead of a playbook, here's what top-line evidence actually means in each of the worlds emerging and evolving brands live in:
The most defensible reading is that a new brand needs distinctive assets that communicate a reason to be chosen — something that earns a place in memory a competitor can't simply outspend — and that meaning matters more at the start, not less. Which fits what founders of breakthrough brands consistently describe: find a compelling, defensible niche first. But hold that as a well-reasoned bet, not a proven law. Honesty about where the evidence runs out is exactly what lets you avoid expensive mistakes.
So instead of a playbook, here's what top-line evidence actually means in each of the worlds emerging and evolving brands live in:
"Brand is, in effect, a strategy for overcoming resource constraints — most valuable exactly when resources are tightest.
You can't out-spend them. So you have to out-encode them."
You can't out-spend them. So you have to out-encode them."
Joseph Burrow, Practice Lead
If you're in B2B
At any given moment, as a rule of thumb, only about 5% of business buyers are in the market, the other 95% aren't buying anything right now. And here's the finding that should reorganise your priorities: the majority of buyers (by some counts 80 to 90%) already have a shortlist in their heads before they start the buying process, and most end up buying from a name that was on that Day-1 list (research relayed through the LinkedIn B2B Institute, drawing on Bain and others). The shortlist is very nearly the decision. You can't talk your way onto it once the tender opens; you have to already be in mind.
That's why brand-building is not soft in B2B — it's how you get onto a list you otherwise can't join. Then, within the shortlist, something shifts: because these are considered, often high-stakes purchases, meaningful difference, trust and the reduction of risk do more of the deciding, and they matter more the riskier and more complex the purchase gets (Zablah, Brown and Donthu). And that popular idea that "B2B is all about relationships"? It's overstated. Relationships help you keep clients; but the growth engine is still winning new ones, built by being in memory while they're out of market — and buyers, it turns out, struggle to attribute functional differences to specific suppliers anyway, so being known and trusted does more work than your feature list.
If you're a challenger
There's a well-established rule that spending a bigger share of your category's voice than your share of its market tends to drive growth. But here's the catch that decides your strategy: you don't convert that spending anywhere near as efficiently as the market leader does. Nielsen's analysis suggests leaders turn a given amount of extra share-of-voice into roughly three times more share growth than challengers do. Read that again, because it's brutal: to keep pace with the leader pound for pound, you have to be something like three times more effective with every pound.
You can't out-spend them. So you have to out-encode them. That's exactly what the three ingredients of mental availability are for: distinctive assets so every impression accrues to you and not the category; relevant, emotionally-resonant creative so each impression lands harder and sticks; and consistency so impressions compound instead of resetting. Spend amplifies a good strategy — but it doesn't substitute for one, and it isn't a multiplier on a weak one. Being three times more effective is not a slogan; it's the only affordable path, and it's built from the levers above.
If you're a small or growing business
You have fewer buyers and slightly less loyal ones (double jeopardy again), and — the bit the textbooks skip past — you also simply have less money. So your entire game is efficient acquisition: getting the most growth out of every limited pound.
Which flips a common assumption. A clear, consistent, distinctive and meaningful brand isn't a luxury you earn once you're big — it matters more when you're small, precisely because it's how you squeeze more out of every unit of spend. There's a growing body of research on "brand orientation" in smaller firms — how clearly and consistently a company commits to a distinctive set of values and a meaningful position — that points this way. Reijonen and colleagues (2012) found a positive link between brand orientation and growth in SMEs; more recent longitudinal and review work (including a 2025 review in the Review of Managerial Science) frames it as a cyclical engine: brand orientation helps drive growth, which funds more brand-building, which drives more growth. The striking conclusion is that brand is, in effect, a strategy for overcoming resource constraints — most valuable exactly when resources are tightest.
A fair warning attached to that: the SME-specific evidence is thinner and less consistent than the big-brand data, so treat it as a strong steer rather than a law. And in our own experience the single biggest reason small brands get less out of each pound is a practical one — they can't hold their meaning and distinction consistent across every touchpoint as they grow. The signal leaks. Fixing that leak is one of the highest-return, least-glamorous things a growing brand can do.
If you're creating a category
Be careful with the romance of "creating the category." It's mostly survivorship;l we remember the handful who won and forget the many who didn't. Golder and Tellis found roughly 47% of market pioneers failed outright, and that the companies who ended up leading a category usually weren't the ones who created it. New space is real and worth pursuing, but you win by occupying it — in memory and in distribution — not by naming it first.
And notice how new categories actually get made to work in practice: not by inventing a need, but by finding what people already want and can't get — the latent desire, the social and cultural signals of demand — and building the brand squarely on those.
As an illustration, the founding pair of a first-to-market product had anticipated their innovation would spark a new demand on merit. Our ethnography programme revealed a pattern of unfulfilled desires and the emotional and social levers to position their product as a solution people were already longing for.
At any given moment, as a rule of thumb, only about 5% of business buyers are in the market, the other 95% aren't buying anything right now. And here's the finding that should reorganise your priorities: the majority of buyers (by some counts 80 to 90%) already have a shortlist in their heads before they start the buying process, and most end up buying from a name that was on that Day-1 list (research relayed through the LinkedIn B2B Institute, drawing on Bain and others). The shortlist is very nearly the decision. You can't talk your way onto it once the tender opens; you have to already be in mind.
That's why brand-building is not soft in B2B — it's how you get onto a list you otherwise can't join. Then, within the shortlist, something shifts: because these are considered, often high-stakes purchases, meaningful difference, trust and the reduction of risk do more of the deciding, and they matter more the riskier and more complex the purchase gets (Zablah, Brown and Donthu). And that popular idea that "B2B is all about relationships"? It's overstated. Relationships help you keep clients; but the growth engine is still winning new ones, built by being in memory while they're out of market — and buyers, it turns out, struggle to attribute functional differences to specific suppliers anyway, so being known and trusted does more work than your feature list.
If you're a challenger
There's a well-established rule that spending a bigger share of your category's voice than your share of its market tends to drive growth. But here's the catch that decides your strategy: you don't convert that spending anywhere near as efficiently as the market leader does. Nielsen's analysis suggests leaders turn a given amount of extra share-of-voice into roughly three times more share growth than challengers do. Read that again, because it's brutal: to keep pace with the leader pound for pound, you have to be something like three times more effective with every pound.
You can't out-spend them. So you have to out-encode them. That's exactly what the three ingredients of mental availability are for: distinctive assets so every impression accrues to you and not the category; relevant, emotionally-resonant creative so each impression lands harder and sticks; and consistency so impressions compound instead of resetting. Spend amplifies a good strategy — but it doesn't substitute for one, and it isn't a multiplier on a weak one. Being three times more effective is not a slogan; it's the only affordable path, and it's built from the levers above.
If you're a small or growing business
You have fewer buyers and slightly less loyal ones (double jeopardy again), and — the bit the textbooks skip past — you also simply have less money. So your entire game is efficient acquisition: getting the most growth out of every limited pound.
Which flips a common assumption. A clear, consistent, distinctive and meaningful brand isn't a luxury you earn once you're big — it matters more when you're small, precisely because it's how you squeeze more out of every unit of spend. There's a growing body of research on "brand orientation" in smaller firms — how clearly and consistently a company commits to a distinctive set of values and a meaningful position — that points this way. Reijonen and colleagues (2012) found a positive link between brand orientation and growth in SMEs; more recent longitudinal and review work (including a 2025 review in the Review of Managerial Science) frames it as a cyclical engine: brand orientation helps drive growth, which funds more brand-building, which drives more growth. The striking conclusion is that brand is, in effect, a strategy for overcoming resource constraints — most valuable exactly when resources are tightest.
A fair warning attached to that: the SME-specific evidence is thinner and less consistent than the big-brand data, so treat it as a strong steer rather than a law. And in our own experience the single biggest reason small brands get less out of each pound is a practical one — they can't hold their meaning and distinction consistent across every touchpoint as they grow. The signal leaks. Fixing that leak is one of the highest-return, least-glamorous things a growing brand can do.
If you're creating a category
Be careful with the romance of "creating the category." It's mostly survivorship;l we remember the handful who won and forget the many who didn't. Golder and Tellis found roughly 47% of market pioneers failed outright, and that the companies who ended up leading a category usually weren't the ones who created it. New space is real and worth pursuing, but you win by occupying it — in memory and in distribution — not by naming it first.
And notice how new categories actually get made to work in practice: not by inventing a need, but by finding what people already want and can't get — the latent desire, the social and cultural signals of demand — and building the brand squarely on those.
As an illustration, the founding pair of a first-to-market product had anticipated their innovation would spark a new demand on merit. Our ethnography programme revealed a pattern of unfulfilled desires and the emotional and social levers to position their product as a solution people were already longing for.
If it's a high-stakes, considered purchase
The rule is simple and it holds across contexts: availability gets you into the consideration set everywhere, but the more a decision is deliberated and the higher its stakes, the more meaning, trust and risk-reduction do the actual deciding once you're in the running. And this is a great example of when following "best practice" without assessing context can be actively damaging.
We partnered with a real-estate investment brand who attributed slow growth to overcomplexity and "high fees." In contextual inquiries, we watched in real-time as the best practice social proof convinced 60% of predisposed buyers that the platform wasn’t for people like them. And inverted Hick’s Law, in direct contrast to the sea of competitors racing to be the simplest, to successfully signal that this Web3 brand was uniquely built on rigour, long-term and stability.
The rule is simple and it holds across contexts: availability gets you into the consideration set everywhere, but the more a decision is deliberated and the higher its stakes, the more meaning, trust and risk-reduction do the actual deciding once you're in the running. And this is a great example of when following "best practice" without assessing context can be actively damaging.
We partnered with a real-estate investment brand who attributed slow growth to overcomplexity and "high fees." In contextual inquiries, we watched in real-time as the best practice social proof convinced 60% of predisposed buyers that the platform wasn’t for people like them. And inverted Hick’s Law, in direct contrast to the sea of competitors racing to be the simplest, to successfully signal that this Web3 brand was uniquely built on rigour, long-term and stability.
"In physics the opposite of a good idea is a bad idea. In psychology, opposites can both work."
Rory Sutherland, Alchemy (2019)
So What DO We Do?
If there's no universal playbook, what replaces one? Not a formula but a way of working.
The evidence points to a sequence, and it starts nowhere near investing in design or marketing actions.
First, work out what actually drives growth in your specific situation — before you spend a penny building anything. Which engine are you pulling: do you most need more buyers (volume), or the ability to charge more (value), or room in a new space? Which lever is your real constraint, and which spending would be waste? This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that saves the most money; because, as we've seen, "best practice" is a composite average, and averages can be wrong for specific contexts.
Second, find a compelling, defensible position and the specific emotional, social and cultural levers that genuinely matter to the people you're trying to win. Not generic category feeling: the actual, particular things that will move these buyers to choose. This is where the value engine and the efficiency gains are unlocked, and it's the step that takes real work to get right.
Third, build those levers into distinctive assets and experiences so that being recognisable and being relevant become the same act. The goal is recognition that means something the buyer is already looking for ; so that every impression does double duty. This is what we mean when we talk, a little loosely, about "surviving being outspent." We don't mean a brand is immune to a rival who buys more reach forever, memory fades without reinforcement, and enough sustained spending will always tell. We mean something more precise and more useful: you can build your recognition on a point of genuine meaning that is intrinsically more memorable per unit of attention than a competitor who is simply buying more attention. A reason to be chosen that money alone can't easily drown out.
Fourth, demonstrate it cconsistently across every touchpoint, over time, so it compounds instead of leaking. Consistency is the unglamorous multiplier. It's the specific thing that lets a smaller brand start to access the compounding that larger brands get almost for free ; and its absence is the specific thing that quietly wastes most small brands' spend.
None of that is a silver bullet. It's what the evidence, read honestly, tells us will define the success of downstream spend.
If there's no universal playbook, what replaces one? Not a formula but a way of working.
The evidence points to a sequence, and it starts nowhere near investing in design or marketing actions.
First, work out what actually drives growth in your specific situation — before you spend a penny building anything. Which engine are you pulling: do you most need more buyers (volume), or the ability to charge more (value), or room in a new space? Which lever is your real constraint, and which spending would be waste? This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that saves the most money; because, as we've seen, "best practice" is a composite average, and averages can be wrong for specific contexts.
Second, find a compelling, defensible position and the specific emotional, social and cultural levers that genuinely matter to the people you're trying to win. Not generic category feeling: the actual, particular things that will move these buyers to choose. This is where the value engine and the efficiency gains are unlocked, and it's the step that takes real work to get right.
Third, build those levers into distinctive assets and experiences so that being recognisable and being relevant become the same act. The goal is recognition that means something the buyer is already looking for ; so that every impression does double duty. This is what we mean when we talk, a little loosely, about "surviving being outspent." We don't mean a brand is immune to a rival who buys more reach forever, memory fades without reinforcement, and enough sustained spending will always tell. We mean something more precise and more useful: you can build your recognition on a point of genuine meaning that is intrinsically more memorable per unit of attention than a competitor who is simply buying more attention. A reason to be chosen that money alone can't easily drown out.
Fourth, demonstrate it cconsistently across every touchpoint, over time, so it compounds instead of leaking. Consistency is the unglamorous multiplier. It's the specific thing that lets a smaller brand start to access the compounding that larger brands get almost for free ; and its absence is the specific thing that quietly wastes most small brands' spend.
None of that is a silver bullet. It's what the evidence, read honestly, tells us will define the success of downstream spend.
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Peter Drucker
What Does Drive Brand Growth?
The truthful answer is: it depends.
But, what matters is the dependencies are knowable. It's driven by being chosen by more people, which comes from being easy to recognise, easy to bring to mind and easy to buy — made far more efficient when you're recognised for something that genuinely matters to those buyers. It's helped, especially on price and margin, by meaning something relevant that competitors can't easily match. And the exact mix — how much weight sits on availability versus meaning, on volume versus value, on breadth versus depth — changes with your category, your size, your buyers and how considered their decision is.
It's dangerous to run with confident one-size-fits-all advice. Best practice isn't just sometimes unhelpful; in the wrong context it can actively cost you sales. Get the read wrong and the price is real: you overspend to stand still, your growth stalls, and you're left with less room to survive a hard year. Get it right and growth starts to thrive on mattering rather than survive on overspend, and, it compounds.
If there's one thing we'd stake a claim on, it isn't a magic lever. It's that the levers that will drive growth for your brand, and the pitfalls that will drain it, are specific to your competitive context; and they can be mapped out before you spend, rather than discovered after. The discipline of mapping them is a consequential job, but getting it right is a multiplier of every penny you spend downstream.
In the end it was never about being best on paper. It's about being known, by the right people, for something that genuinely matters to them; in ways they can easily recognise, and easily buy. The work is figuring out what that something is, for you.
The truthful answer is: it depends.
But, what matters is the dependencies are knowable. It's driven by being chosen by more people, which comes from being easy to recognise, easy to bring to mind and easy to buy — made far more efficient when you're recognised for something that genuinely matters to those buyers. It's helped, especially on price and margin, by meaning something relevant that competitors can't easily match. And the exact mix — how much weight sits on availability versus meaning, on volume versus value, on breadth versus depth — changes with your category, your size, your buyers and how considered their decision is.
It's dangerous to run with confident one-size-fits-all advice. Best practice isn't just sometimes unhelpful; in the wrong context it can actively cost you sales. Get the read wrong and the price is real: you overspend to stand still, your growth stalls, and you're left with less room to survive a hard year. Get it right and growth starts to thrive on mattering rather than survive on overspend, and, it compounds.
If there's one thing we'd stake a claim on, it isn't a magic lever. It's that the levers that will drive growth for your brand, and the pitfalls that will drain it, are specific to your competitive context; and they can be mapped out before you spend, rather than discovered after. The discipline of mapping them is a consequential job, but getting it right is a multiplier of every penny you spend downstream.
In the end it was never about being best on paper. It's about being known, by the right people, for something that genuinely matters to them; in ways they can easily recognise, and easily buy. The work is figuring out what that something is, for you.
