𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗧𝘂𝗿𝗻 𝗢𝗻 (𝗼𝗿 𝗢𝗳𝗳) 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴?
👉 How long does it take before we see the full impact of starting to do brand marketing?
👉 And what happens if we’ve been doing brand marketing, but have to pull back because of budget cuts?
These decisions do not have instantaneous effects…there’s a complex dynamic that plays out over time.
As you begin to do brand marketing, there’s an immediate effect on the 5% who happen to be coming in-market right now.
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But what’s the effect on the 95% of future buyers?
What happens is that you begin to reach some fraction of those future buyers each month with your brand marketing. So now you have people who know you exist.
But those memories aren’t forever…they will begin to immediately decay with a specific « memory half-life » that can be measured.
So there’s a dynamic cycle of forming and refreshing memories, and those memories being lost.
Eventually, this dynamic reaches some steady-state equilibrium where, of all buyers coming in-market right now, some fixed fraction are aware of your brand when they’re ready to buy.
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But what’s that « steady-state equilibrium » level, and how long does it take to get there?
The answer is that it depends on how much you spend and how quickly you spend it.
But the dynamics of timing and awareness levels also depend on several factors:
1️⃣ Relative market share (which limits free cash flow available to invest)
2️⃣ How long brand memories last (longer for higher-consideration B2B goods)
3️⃣ How long until each buyer comes in-market (more time to forget)
4️⃣ How often are you reaching each buyer to refresh their brand memories
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This is the problem with vague blandishments about « building mental availability » to « grow your brand » 🤦♂️
Building that « mental availability » is NOT some one-and-done exercise. It’s a complex dynamic process that evolves over time according to strict rules.
How this process will work will be different for EVERY product category and for EVERY company within a product category!
❓ What’s the maximum level of « mental availability » a given brand will be able to reach?
✔️That’s a dynamic steady-state equilibrium that you reach and maintain…closely tied to your market share!
❓ How long before a brand can reach that maximum level of « mental availability »?
✔️That’s tied to the specific details of your product category and relative market share.
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You will NEVER be able to see or know this using a stationary model like the NBD-Dirichlet.
That requires a broader dynamic model based on stochastic partial-differential equations like what’s shown in the graphic below.
This is the difference between vague suggestions that somehow « more mental availability » is good (duh!) and seeing the actual machinery of brand building.
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Below are the results of a Monte-Carlo simulation against 100,000 customers across five brands using the BAM model.