The chemistry under the taste.
Explore Branding
How brands are built and how the brain receives them: brand strategy, brand equity, and the neuromarketing studies that are documented.
The branding canon: what to read, in which order, and what it argues about
Branding has a literature of perhaps fifteen works that everything else cites, and they do not agree with each other. One tradition, from Ries and Trout through Aaker and Keller, holds that a brand is a position in the mind, won by meaningful difference.
Aaker or Keller: which brand equity model answers which question
Two models define brand equity and they are not alternatives. Aaker (1991) counts what the brand is worth to the firm, as assets and liabilities.
Distinctive brand assets: distinctive, not different
Differentiation says give buyers a reason to choose you. Distinctiveness says make sure they can find you at all.
Excess share of voice: the exchange rate between voice and share
Excess share of voice is your share of the category's advertising presence minus your share of its revenue. The relationship between the two was set out by John Philip Jones in Harvard Business Review in 1990 and turned into a planning rule by Binet and Field using the IPA Effectiveness Databank.
The 95-5 rule: most of your buyers are not buying
At any given moment, around 95 per cent of the businesses you want as customers are not in the market for what you sell, and about 5 per cent are. The figure comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute's work for the LinkedIn B2B Institute in 2021 and it is a derived heuristic, not a survey result.
Double Jeopardy: small brands lose twice
Small brands have fewer buyers, and those buyers are slightly less loyal to them. That is the whole of Double Jeopardy, and it is one of the few patterns in marketing that holds across categories, countries and decades.
Marketing myopia: the question Levitt asked and the answer that went wrong
Theodore Levitt's 1960 essay argued that industries decline because they define themselves by what they make rather than by what the customer needs. The railroads were in the railroad business, not the transportation business, and the cars and planes took the customers.
Kapferer's brand identity prism: six facets and no measurement
Jean-Noel Kapferer's prism, first published in French in 1991 and in English in 1992, describes a brand's identity in six facets: physique, personality, culture, relationship, reflection and self-image. It is the most used identity framework in European brand practice and it has almost no empirical validation.
Mere exposure: familiarity is pleasant, and that is a problem
Robert Zajonc showed in 1968 that repeated exposure to something increases liking for it, with no argument, no information and no awareness that it is happening. It is among the most replicated findings in social psychology, confirmed across hundreds of experiments.
Processing fluency in marketing: what is easy to read feels true
Things that are easy to perceive, read, say and remember are judged more true, more likeable and more familiar than the same things made harder. Reber, Schwarz and Winkielman set the mechanism out in 2004: the brain registers the ease of its own processing and misreads that ease as a property of the thing processed.
Loss aversion in marketing: the asymmetry that sells urgency, and the fight over whether it exists
Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory, published in 1979, holds that losses weigh more heavily than gains of the same size. The usual figure is about twice as heavily, from their 1992 estimate.
The somatic marker hypothesis: emotion as the machinery of choosing, and the experiment that was challenged
Antonio Damasio argued in 1994 that emotion is part of how people decide, not interference with it. Patients with damage to a specific region of the prefrontal cortex kept their reasoning and lost their ability to choose well.
System 1 and System 2 thinking in marketing: what the two-system model says, and what marketers added to it
System 1 and System 2 are the names Daniel Kahneman used in Thinking, Fast and Slow for two modes of thought: fast, automatic and effortless on one side, slow, deliberate and effortful on the other. The labels came from Stanovich and West in 2000.
The Coke and Pepsi brain study: what McClure found in 2004, and what the result can and cannot carry
In 2004 Samuel McClure and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine scanned people drinking Coke and Pepsi. Blind, preferences were split and brain activity in a reward region tracked the taste.