summary ofHow Brands GrowBook by Professor Byron Sharp

second KEY POINT

Why loyalty isn't enough

Every category has its giant, and everyone has a theory about how it got there. Usually, that theory involves loyalty. Somewhere behind a dominant market share, we assume, there's a devoted group of customers who keep choosing the same brand and rarely stray.Take two British laundry brands, Persil and Surf. One's a household name at home; one isn't. Persil was roughly a fifth of the laundry aisle, and Surf was a sliver of it. If Persil's lead came from stronger loyalty, its customers should have been buying it far more often. They weren't.Over a year, Persil buyers bought it 3.9 times on average, and Surf buyers bought it 3.4 times. That's barely a gap. The real difference was how many households bought at all. About 41% bought Persil, against 17% for Surf.Sharp's name for this pattern is the double jeopardy law. Smaller brands suffer in two ways: they have fewer buyers, and those buyers tend to purchase them slightly less often. Both matter, but it's the first one that does the damage. The same thing shows up in market after market, decade after decade.There's a tempting alternative here. If adding buyers is hard, why not get the ones you already have to buy more often? Marketers often point to Arm & Hammer, a baking soda brand, as proof that it's possible. In North America, baking soda sat in the cupboard for baking and not much else, so the company sold people on a second use: put an open box in the fridge to absorb odors.Sharp's answer is basically that the example was already old when he was studying marketing. And decades later, it's still the one everyone reaches for. If lifting purchase frequency were an easy route to growth, there'd be a lot more famous examples.The problem is that habits are stubborn. Even dentists can't reliably get people to brush twice a day. Associations are stubborn, too: a product mentally filed under "baking" doesn't easily become part of the "fridge deodorizer" category. And changing how millions of people use a product usually requires enormous marketing effort. Unilever once encouraged men to spray Axe over their bodies like perfume. Most continued using it under their arms.So, if sales come down to how many people buy and how often, you've got far more room to move the first number.

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