Gravity
To get off the ground, you need something that creates lift.
There are laws, principles and patterns that lead brands to growth. I genuinely believe there is earnest desire to understand these principles, and shared incentives exist for putting more work that has a better chance to actually work into the market.
But understanding that laws of brand growth exist doesn't remove the burden of thinking. There's still room for style and intent.
The chasm - as Christopher Owens describes in his latest piece on Gossip Traps & Cargo Cults - for bridging theory and practice has been preserved for all kinds of reasons. Some pernicious, some simply by accident.
One of the biggest problems, at least to me, is that just knowing the principles of brand growth (building for mental market share, with emotion & distinction at scale and over time) isn't enough to effectively apply them.
Even if you can neatly cite the Law of Double Jeopardy or know that sonic branding is one of the most powerful distinctive brand assets, you still have to make hundreds of choices in applying them to a brand's situation and strategy. The application gap is fraught with choices and tradeoffs that aren't neatly navigated.
People and platforms with competing agendas can exploit that. The language of effectiveness isn't proprietary - you will hear tactics pitched that are extremely counter-growth, out of ignorance, self-preservation, or greed.
The opportunity for marketing to level up to a professional standard is in being able to navigate the chaos, ignore the charlatans, and more importantly (at least to me) communicate choices that predictably grow brands, not through dogmatic ritualization, but through clear interpretation & adaptation. Effectiveness that's fit for format, as it were.
One significant opportunity, in my opinion, in getting to a more practical application of principle, is to stop perpetuating the appearance of false binaries.
The binaries that get the most swirl (in my corner of the advertising world):
Category Penetration vs. Loyalty
Broad vs. Narrow
Distinctive vs. Differentiated
I think these feel confronting because they are all, ultimately, saying "your brand isn't special." With the ego-dampening implication that YOU, dear leader of said brand, must not be that special either.
And champions of evidence-based growth aren't doing ourselves any favors by relentlessly advocating for a dogmatic binary; choosing a strategy that drives growth with light category buyers doesn't mean you must completely shutter any and all investment in capturing repeat sales. Loyalty programs still drive significant opportunities for profitable growth. The nuance is in not expecting your loyalty program, or the first-party data on audience members captured from them, to drive ALL of your growth.
The challenge, then, is not in choosing the wrong end of a binary. It's in giving the "Job" to the wrong mechanism.
Effective application of the principles of evidence-based growth is more about skewing your choices, resources, and expectations towards the things that can help make the whole ecosystem deliver more. You simply have to make sure you're focusing on attacking the right jobs-to-be-done first before allocating additional bets that deliver value in other ways.
