In Defense of the “And Short”

Last week, we tackled the “Known but Not Chosen” problem. 

This week, we’re talking about light buyers, reach and what “sophisticated mass marketing” really means. 

We’re also going to defend short-term sales activation tactics. Scandalous? Why, yes. We nearly gave ourselves the vapors. Okay, what are light buyers? 

A light buyer is someone who does not buy a brand very often. Less obvious is how much they do not buy a brand. A light buyer might purchase a particular brand once a year, maybe less. 

Even for massive global brands, like Coca-Cola, a light buyer might consume one or two cans or bottles per year at most. A heavy buyer might consume a can of Coke each month. 

Of course, it all depends on the category. Durable goods like washing machines or garbage disposals have ginormously long sales cycles, so a light buyer might purchase a brand once in their lives. 

Only a very, very small percentage of customers can be considered “brand loyalists” in any sense of the phrase. They’re important, but there aren’t very many of them, and they’re not worth as much as you might think. It’s certainly not 80/20.

Light buyers and potential buyers are worth somewhere around 50% of your sales, and reaching more and more of them is the only way to grow. Also, there’s this thing called “regressing to the mean.” Heavy buyers aren’t always heavy buyers. Eventually, they hit their limit and become light buyers or non-buyers. Some non-buyers, if you’re able to reach them, become light buyers. Light buyers can become moderate or even heavy buyers. It’s the circle of sales. Feel free to sing that one song from “The Lion King.” 

Putting the burden of your quarterly sales goals on the shoulders of heavy buyers is a little, well, rude. They’ve already purchased as much as they can. They only have so much freezer space, cupboard space, fridge space, shelf space, wall space, closet space, cabinet space and garage space to spare. Don’t forget about them, of course, because they matter. All your buyers matter, including light category buyers and potential buyers (we like to think of them as friends who haven’t met you yet). 

Instead, go to where the people are. Find the potential new customers who have never experienced your brand but really should. There are so many more of them, which is why they’re so valuable. Go to them. Run to them. Open your arms. Reach them. Teach them. Bring them into your world. Okay, that was a little weird, but you get the idea.

And where are they? Uh, everywhere. And how do we find them? Well, people still watch television. Linear and streaming TV are still one of the most powerful tools for reaching lots of people, building mental availability and generating brand fame. People also still listen to the radio, though it’s mostly called audio now, and it includes terrestrial, satellite and streaming. And podcasts. 

You can target broadly on platforms like YouTube and Google Search. Content creators and influencers on social media can be effective, especially for smaller brands. You can build a brand on digital channels, and most channels are digital now anyway.

Billboards, public transit ads and ads in high-traffic locations build distinctiveness that reinforces mental availability in people’s minds as they go about their day. Print ads. In-store ads. Shelf talkers. End caps. That sort of thing.

Display is where it gets a little tricky. These placements range from really good to horrifying. The ad buys are usually less expensive, but you get what you pay for, though sometimes you don’t. There is a tremendous amount of ad fraud, which costs marketers and advertisers roughly $37 billion each year. Ad fraud is absolutely avoidable if you know what you’re doing. To be clearer than crystal, our media team very much knows what they’re doing and has the track record to prove it. They’re brilliant. We love them. 

The point is that scale matters if you want to grow.

“Hang on,” you might say. “That’s all well and good, but I don’t have the budget to be everywhere all the time.” That’s where the “sophisticated” in sophisticated mass marketing comes in. You don’t need every channel, though you do need to find the right mix. The point is to target the category more broadly while using your budget more tactically. It means rethinking targeting and segmentation. 

For example, segmentation by demographics or psychographics is a little silly, particularly because category buyers are both polygamously loyal and pretty much all alike. Chevy buyers buy Ford and sometimes Honda or Kia. Millennials and Gen-Zers aren’t terribly different. On the other hand, geotargeting can be a lovely way to reach people without excluding potential buyers who might not fall into some arbitrary bucket. 

And here’s where we take a moment to defend targeted sales activation tactics, the “and short” of the long and the short of it. Sales matter. A lot. Profitability matters more, and you can’t have the latter without the former. You can have sales without profitability, which is often a pricing problem and a Dispatch for another day. Targeted ads can be an incredibly effective and important tool for driving sales.

As we’ve talked about before, roughly 95% of your potential buyers aren’t in market at any given time. That means roughly 5% are. Depending on the size of your brand, that’s still a lot of people. 

For decades, the problem has been that so many brands have focused on targeting heavy buyers. Which? Makes a certain kind of sense. Heavy buyers are easier to reach, and they buy more. Except … heavy buyers are only easier to reach until they aren’t, and they only buy more until they can’t. Again, there aren’t as many of them, and smaller brands have fewer heavy buyers. 

Reach is truly everything. Attention is everything else. Brands that only play the short game with segmented, targeted (sometimes hypersegmented and hypertargeted), short-term sales tactics eventually run smack into a wall. A drop in sales, a loss of mental availability, a growth plateau (or worse) and a spike in customer acquisition costs. For larger brands, chasing efficiency metrics like ROI can become a huge problem, because they’re not bothering to do the work of reaching those very valuable light buyers and potential buyers. It’s like a dog chasing its tail when there are so many bunnies and squirrels in the yard to play with. 

However, all of this is a matter of scale, and plenty of brands aren’t remotely close to hitting that wall. At this stage, short-term, transactional ads that drive sales are more important than brand ads. When done well, retargeting can be a game-changer. 

So what does this mean for you?

Brand and branding matter. Building strong, distinctive brand assets and being wildly disciplined about deploying them is not an option. Neither is building and reinforcing mental and physical availability. Creating long-lasting brand memories and associations through emotional, attention-grabbing ad campaigns centered around category entry points is critical. For smaller brands, the long game is important, but it isn’t quite as important. Yet. Our job is to get brands to “yet” … and beyond.

Here’s the fun part: Your “top of funnel” marketing actually makes your bottom funnel tactics more efficient and effective. Balanced campaigns that feature brand-level advertising and short-term, activation ads are more effective in both the long and the short term. 

Growth still comes from reaching light buyers. For marketers, it means getting the best possible creative in front of as many eyeballs as possible in the smartest and most consistent way possible with the budget you have. 

Still, sometimes people need a gentle nudge. Not to push them into a funnel they didn’t want or need to slide down (and doesn’t really exist), but to remind them you exist, and you’re just a click away … should they need you. 

So we can’t forget the “and short” of it. The “and” is there for a reason. We’ll see you next time. 

Sources!

1. The Long and Short of It – Les Binet and Peter Field
2. How Brands Grow 2 – Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp