Why good brand strategy requires more than following the data.
There is a debate running through the marketing industry that I find both fascinating and increasingly frustrating.
On one side, evidence-based marketing, led by the work of Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, has challenged decades of conventional wisdom about how brands grow. On the other, strategists and practitioners continue to argue for differentiation, emotional connection, customer experience and loyalty as essential ingredients of successful brands.
The disagreement is not new. What interests me is how quickly a valuable body of research can become a set of rules that practitioners are expected to follow almost unquestioningly.
Mental availability. Physical availability. Distinctive brand assets. Reach.
All important. All supported by meaningful evidence.
But are they the whole story?
I don't believe they are.
What marketing science has taught us
Let me start with something important. I have enormous respect for the contribution of evidence-based marketing.
For too long, our industry relied on assumptions that were intuitively appealing but not always supported by data. The idea that most consumers have deep emotional relationships with the brands they buy. That loyalty is the principal engine of growth. That brands can build their businesses primarily by cultivating a small group of devoted customers.
Research has challenged many of those beliefs, and rightly so.
The evidence that brands generally grow by expanding their customer base, reaching more category buyers and making themselves easier to notice and buy has important implications for marketing investment.
So does the distinction between differentiation and distinctiveness. Brands need to be easily recognized, and distinctive assets can help them achieve that recognition without having to explain themselves every time.
These are valuable lessons. Any serious strategist should understand them.
My concern begins when they are treated not as evidence to inform strategic thinking, but as a substitute for strategic thinking itself.
The difference between a pattern and a strategy
Marketing science is particularly good at identifying patterns across large populations of brands and consumers.But identifying a pattern is not the same as developing a strategy for an individual business.
A law-like regularity observed across categories may tell us what tends to happen. It does not necessarily tell us why one company is struggling, what is preventing its growth, or which strategic choice will create the greatest advantage in its particular circumstances. Those questions require a different kind of investigation.
They require understanding the category, the competitive landscape, the business model, the product proposition, customer needs, organizational capabilities and the economics of the business. They require knowing not only what consumers do, but what influences their decisions. And sometimes they require discovering something that the existing data has not yet revealed.
After more than two decades working on brand strategy across different industries, markets and stages of business development, I have learned that the most valuable strategic insights rarely come from applying a universal formula.
They come from understanding what is particular about the business in front of you.
Distinctiveness matters. So does having something worth choosing.
One of the more contentious debates concerns differentiation.
The evidence tells us that consumers often perceive relatively limited differences between competing brands, and that many brands share customers with their competitors. This is an important observation. But I struggle with the leap sometimes made from that observation to the conclusion that differentiation is of little strategic importance.
There is a difference between arguing that consumers do not perceive brands as highly differentiated and arguing that companies should not seek to create meaningful competitive advantages. The first is an empirical finding. The second is a strategic recommendation. And the two are not necessarily equivalent.
A compelling product proposition, a superior customer experience, an innovative business model or a distinctive approach to solving customer problems can all influence why people choose one company over another.
Not every advantage is sustainable. Not every difference matters to customers. And not every differentiation claim survives contact with the market. But that is precisely why strategic judgment is necessary.
The question is not simply whether a brand is different. It is whether the difference creates value that customers recognize and have reason to choose.
A brand that is easy to recognize but offers little compelling value may still generate sales. But recognition alone does not resolve every competitive challenge. Equally, a genuinely superior proposition that nobody knows about, recognizes or can easily buy is unlikely to reach its commercial potential.
These are complementary challenges, not opposing schools of thought.
What the debate often leaves out
I sometimes wonder whether our industry has become so focused on explaining how marketing works that we risk losing sight of what brand strategy is supposed to accomplish.
A brand is not simply a collection of memories in consumers' minds. It is also the expression of a business. Its products. Its services. Its behavior. Its customer experience. Its decisions about what to prioritize and what to walk away from. When a company develops a new product, improves a service, changes its distribution model or fundamentally rethinks how it creates customer value, those decisions shape the brand. They also influence its growth potential.
This is where my own definition of brand strategy has always been broader than communications. Brand strategy should help a business make choices about how it competes, how it creates value, and how it builds a recognizable and compelling proposition over time. Communications makes those choices visible. It cannot replace them.
The danger of replacing one orthodoxy with another
The irony is that evidence-based marketing emerged, in part, as a challenge to established industry beliefs. It encouraged marketers to question familiar assumptions, look critically at data and distinguish what we know from what we merely believe. That intellectual discipline is valuable. But it should apply equally to the theories that have subsequently gained prominence.
A useful framework becomes less useful when every problem is expected to fit within it. And a healthy discipline becomes less healthy when disagreement is treated as evidence of ignorance rather than an invitation to investigate further. There is nothing unscientific about asking whether a general finding applies to a particular context. Nor is there anything inherently rigorous about repeating a conclusion without examining its assumptions and limitations.
The best strategic thinking requires both intellectual humility and the confidence to exercise judgment.
What this means for business leaders
For CEOs and CMOs, the practical question is not which school of marketing thought to subscribe to. It is how to use the available evidence to make better decisions. Are we reaching enough potential customers? Are we recognizable and easy to buy? Are we investing in the right distinctive assets? These are essential questions.
But they should sit alongside others.Why are customers choosing us, or not choosing us? Where does our proposition fall short? What do competitors offer that we do not? What could we create, change or improve that would make us genuinely more valuable? And perhaps most importantly: which of these challenges is actually limiting our growth? Answering that question demands research, analysis, creativity and strategic judgment.
Not allegiance to a particular theory.
I believe our industry is at its best when it combines the discipline of evidence with the imagination to see possibilities that existing patterns cannot fully explain. We should embrace marketing science. Challenge our assumptions. Demand better evidence. But we should resist the temptation to mistake a powerful explanation for a complete strategy.
Evidence should sharpen our thinking. Not replace it.
At MARTA, we believe the strongest brands are built at the intersection of rigorous insight, compelling strategy and business reality. We work with leadership teams to understand what makes their businesses valuable, define how they can compete, and bring that thinking to life.