Kotler vs Sharp Debate: How do brands really grow?

Time of India

2 days ago

HighlightsPhilip Kotler, regarded as the Father of Modern Marketing, emphasised the importance of understanding customer needs and creating value beyond just price and distribution. Byron Sharp, through his concept of 'mental availability', argues that brands must not only be physically accessible but also easily recalled by consumers in buying situations to drive growth. The article concludes that building customer loyalty requires consistent product quality and emotional connection, alongside strategies for increasing brand penetration.
A Toast to the Living Legends of Marketing!
In this series, I discuss the work of some of the key marketing thinkers in the context of my own experience of working with love-mark and emergent brands. In the first write-up, I share my 'S.C.H.O.O.L' of thought taking on fundamental insights from
Kotler
& Sharp and find harmony and progression vs. conflicting ideologies (perhaps because I've been using both for years now)!!
The Birth of Modern Marketing
For decades,
Philip Kotler
, now 93 years, has been regarded as the Father of Modern Marketing. He was the Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Kellogg's School of Management, and he wrote over 80 books that contributed to fundamentals of marketing. This famous quote below is perhaps why I found a career in marketing and consumer insights so compelling and rewarding.
At the heart of his teachings, Kotler advocated a greater focus on meeting customers' needs and on communicating the benefits received from a product or service beyond just price and distribution. He also broadened the concept of marketing from selling to the art of communication and value creation and how it can be applied to charities, political parties and other non-commercial situations.
None of us can potentially dispute these contributions which have stood the test of times. Today, all organizations, decode the sentiments of their 'consumer base', build their policies and market their brands based on these principles.
Premium brands
like Apple outsell cheaper alternatives by solving for consumer needs around design and functionality but also deeper image and lifestyle desires. A clear case of needs and benefits building over the price and distribution mindset of utilitarian theories of economics, of his time.
Why then the outcry and claims that Kolter's theories may not be relevant for the modern world?
New Insights based on Empirical Evidence
Many of the debates around Kotler's work can often be directly linked to the work of another Marketing thinker of our times, Professor Byron Sharp, who is a Professor of Marketing Science and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – the world's largest centre for research into marketing.
His 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). In his first book, he made a rather scathing attack on how brands are so often mismanaged using brand voodoo and evidence-free claims that people 'love' brands, are 'loyal' to a brand or want to have 'relationships' with brands (and as intended it received a lot of attention!). In my personal view, the tone and messaging of Part 2 is more balanced and insightful on how to grow brands.
Let's discuss 2 foundational frameworks or 'laws' as from Prof Byron.
Grow your brand by being available
While marketers highlighted awareness' as a first step to brand-building; Byron's work takes the concept further and talks of salience as a mix of physical presence and 'mental availability'.
Physical availability is about being easy to buy; wide distribution, easy accessibility, and presence in the right places at the right time. Mental availability on the other hand is the ease with which a brand comes to mind in buying situations.
In this concept, Byron pointed out that it's not just enough to build generic awareness—rather building situational salience is key. Your brand must be top of mind in contexts that the consumers think of buying your category (for example soft drinks try to build associations with spicy and fried food or hot weather because of high fitment to consumption in these occasions).
Further, the brands assets must be distinctive and help the consumer recall the brand in that moment of decision-making. These could be logos, colours, taglines, jingles.
For example, '
kuchh meetha ho jaaye
' helps one think of Cadbury as a choice when thinking of indulging in a sweet. Jingles like '
Amul doodh peeta hain India
' or '
Hamara Bajaj
' are deeply embedded in the consumer psyche or how some brand logos like the Mc Donalds Arch, the Nike Swoosh help consumers remember the brand instantly. These are not just logos or sounds—they're shortcuts to the brand's meaning. These elements do the heavy lifting of memory encoding in buying situations.
A good case study from recent times is DOMS that competed with established players like Nataraj, Apsara, Camlin but succeeded by crafting mental availability through its own distinctive branding, fun and user-friendly packaging that made it a favourite with its key target audience – the kids. It also built a strong presence in both local stores and modern retail. The result: a brand that punched above its weight.
The insight? Great brands don't just rely on being
seen
or
bought
; they build distinctive brand assets that consumers recall and find easily.
Penetration being key to growth
One of the most important frameworks by Byron was what he describes as the Law of Double Jeopardy. This law states that brands with less market share have so because they have far fewer buyers (first jeopardy), and these buyers are slightly less brand loyal (second jeopardy).
Data Source: How Brands Grow Part 2, Sharp and Romaniuk
Start-ups and brand builders love Byron Sharp for providing this clarity on where the focus needs to lie especially in the early stages of brand-building. There is no denying the need to focus on gaining penetration and customers experiencing your brand to 'start' to grow the brand.
However, how do brands gain penetration and is it possible just via distinctive assets?
A lot of people use Byron's work to jump to the conclusion that performance marketing is the answer to all problems. Indeed, performance marketing is a great tool, especially given the ability to slice and dice audiences and 'acquire customers' from
Google
or
Meta
– options that didn't exist in the mass advertisement world of Kotler.
However, lets pause to think about today's love marks – not just Apple, Nike, Coke, but even more
home-grown brands
which have scaled -Boat, Mamaearth, Minimalist, Swiggy, Zomato, Lenskart.... how did they grow?
Did they only focus on paid customer acquisition as a strategy to grow penetration? Eventually significant gain in penetration for any brand is only possible by servicing
Expanding to newer geographies for solving same set of consumer needs. Growing relevance of existing products to a larger set of consumers by growing relevance to newer occasions or use-cases. Launching product innovations that allow you to address newer cohorts.
Sometime back we were consulting a health tech start-up providing diabetes solutions and in our consumer research found that all consumers inundated by multiple 'solutions' (as they would have searched content on diabetes) on and just like we block any calls that look like spam, they had 'mentally blocked' such messages even as they were being physically delivered to the audience. How then can one break-through?
In another case, we worked with an ecommerce app which saw growth marketing ROI falling and realized the need to sharpen their understanding of their target audience and their proposition to make these efforts impactful.
In both cases, the way to drive 'mental availability' or relevance was built on a thorough understanding of consumer's psyche'; their barriers and motivations, their decision-making context - which in turn helped sharpen both the performance marketing messaging and branding strategy.
In his book, Byron references to Category Entry Points, as the means to build mental availability, (which sound exactly like the 6Ws framework we have been using for a long time) and originally attributed to Professor O.C. Ferrell, Professor of Marketing at New Mexico.
Love V/s Loyalty
Just recently, we were speaking to the marketing director of the leading restaurant chain of India, and how their ability to drive customer loyalty and retarget their customers was one of their key strengths vs competitors, especially in a crowded market where customers are always seeking new experiences.
Hence, there is perhaps another way to decode the same data shared by Byron on penetration and frequency: brands that grow meaningfully over time are those that crack both penetration and frequency!
Wouldn't it be impossible to drive penetration beyond a certain level without delighting existing customers and providing the best-in-class product experience?
For example, a brand like Lays continues to attract new customers and gain repeat consumption in a crowded snacking category in India with many strong brands like Haldiram, Bingo because of its superior taste and consistent quality that consumers experience each time.
Retention is of course much harder to drive than acquisition. Loyalty isn't something that can be bought with discounts or fleeting media impressions—it can only be built through consistent product quality, great experiences, emotional resonance and 'rewards' for loyalty.
In conclusion, Byron's work builds on the work of giants before him. Especially in the current era of emotionally distracted viewers, inundated with more media clutter and multiple choices, loyalty is harder to build and efforts to build penetration are critical to grow. However, even as per Byron's work: to grow penetration, one must decode the key category entry points and own these key associations.
So, in summary, my 'S.C.H.O.O.L' of thought building on the work of these learned gentlemen!!S: Don't just build generic awareness; build situational salience. C: Cut through the clutter with memorable and distinct brand assets.H: Heighten the ROI of customer acquisition by hitting consumer's underlying triggers and barriers.O: Own key contextual associations most hardwired to your category's consumptionO: Don't make the mistake of overlooking existing customer's and your actual product experience.L: Latch-on and reward loyalty when you can find it 😊!