Applied Brand Science

One of the more counterintuitive findings of brand science is that if someone is a HEAVY category buyer, they tend to be the LEAST loyal to brands.

Take hot sauce: my friend Tanya LOVES hot sauce, as evidenced by the hot sauce shelf in her fridge.

As a heavy category buyer.
+ She buys a LOT of brands. (I see 9 brands here.)
+ She changes up the mix all the time.
+ She buys some brands VERY consistently (e.g.., TRUFF, the one with the geode-like cap)
+ But even her "favorite" brands only make up a small share of her collection. Not even 25%.

From the BRAND's perspective (let's take TRUFF),
+ Tanya is definitely a HEAVY brand buyer: 3-4 bottles a year is a lot vs their average.
+ And that's huge in a category where the average consumption is 1.5 bottles per year (srsly).
+ But they'd be WRONG to think that she's "loyal" to them. Obvi. Or... wait...

Ultimately,
a. Stop using the word "loyal". It's just confusing.
b. Understand the science of brands so you stop trying to "make water flow uphill"

It’s easy to assume your customers all shop the same way. But Domino’s recently shared a stat that blew my mind: only 15% of their customers ever use both delivery and carryout.

It turns out, carryout people and delivery people are completely different groups. The shopping style is the segment.

Our brains are wired to take the easiest shortcut possible. We don't adapt our lives to fit a brand's system; we just pick whatever is most convenient in the moment. By simply making it easier for "carryout people" to buy, Domino's unlocked a massive wave of growth.

You don't need a complicated psychological profile of your audience. Sometimes you just need to look at the data, see how they physically prefer to shop, and make it ridiculously easy for them to pay you.

Would you rather be unique, or be remembered?

Most brands act like those are the same question. They're not.

F'rinstance: nobody picks their vodka because it's "unique." Vodka is, chemically, supposed to taste like nothing. And yet some vodka brands win, decade after decade.

Not because they cracked some hidden differentiator. Because they're the one you already recognize when you're standing in the aisle, half paying attention, running late.

You don't need a special idea. You need a familiar one, delivered consistently, forever.

Boring? Kind of. Also effective.

Starting a new business takes an incredible amount of courage. In 2023 alone, over a million small businesses were born in the US.

But the reality of entrepreneurship is pretty sobering. Data on 19 million companies over the past 30 years shows that half of them don’t make it to their fifth birthday. Only 20% make it to age 21.

We love the stories of the lucky outliers who defied the odds. But as humans, we are wired to look at the exceptions and ignore the base rates. We assume our business is different.

The interesting part of the math is that once you make it past year four, your odds of surviving another year jump to 90%. Survival itself becomes a habit.
It takes a lot of the pressure off, honestly, to realize you don’t need a miracle to survive. You just need to stop fighting gravity. Grounding your day-to-day decisions in the actual, predictable laws of how buyers buy is the best insurance policy you can get.

If you want people to be INTERESTED in your brand,
then your brand has to be INTERESTING.
(Obvi.)

Of course, you can borrow interest from celebs, or collabs, or sponsoring something like a sports team.

But better yet is to BE interesting.
Then not only do you not neeeeed those partners,
but those partners might actually want to work with YOU.

What model of consumer behavior underlies your business?

Four big ones:

1. ECONOMISTS: “Assume a rational human in a social vacuum, calculating utility accurately across time…”

2. CREATIVES: “Assume an irrational human driven by social pressures, buying purely on feelings…”

3. STATISTICIANS: “Assume a random distribution of preferences among humans with no discernment…”

4. PHYSICISTS: “Assume a spherical human in a vacuum, extruding money uniformly in all directions…”

(Ok, the 4th one is silly. But it is exactly how physicists make any progress with science: by making absurd but useful simplifying assumptions.)

These all have pros & cons. As George Box once said, "All models are wrong. Some are useful."

Importantly,
🔸 Do YOU know which model underpins your thinking?
🔸 Does your team know how the model(s) they use colors their work?
🔸 And are you updating your model to be the most useful one for growing your business?

If customer ratings actually drove business growth, McDonald’s would have gone out of business decades ago.

In a massive study of 11,000 diners, McDonald’s ranked worst in food and worst in service. Yet they are four times bigger than Wendy's.

Why? Because as humans, we are wired to avoid risk and conserve energy. A reliably "meh" burger is a safe bet compared to the anxiety of a random local dive. Plus, with 13,000 locations, they are simply the easiest option to find.

Stop stressing about proving you're the absolute highest-quality option on earth. Focus on being incredibly predictable and impossible to miss.

Those who don't learn from marketing's past are doomed to repeat it.

Aside from Paul Feldwick, the whole industry is so obsessed with the future that we forget to learn from the past.

4-year-old data is seen as "outdated". 30-yr-old theories are "no longer relevant." Spare me.

The best brands don't copy the past; they learn from it and build on it.

Thank you George Santayana, for penning this aphorism in 1905.



PS Want to learn from the past? I just launched a webinar on the Laws and Levers of Brand Science—the stuff that's timeless, . Find it at AppliedBrandScience.com.