The Cogs of Empirical Marketing

Last week, you were the CMO of Yorkshire Tea (nice work, by the way). This week, you’re a sailor. 

The year is 1172, and you are adrift … lost somewhere in the middle of a vast, badly charted ocean.

Your only guide is a tattered map full of myths and misunderstandings. 

Mermaids? Dragons? The edge of the world? It’s not super helpful. 

You can’t quite figure out where you are, which means you’re not sure how to get where you need to go. And time is running out. 

Fast forward nearly a thousand years, and you’re a marketer facing essentially the same problem. 

You’re trying to grow sales, profitability and market share. But your map doesn’t accurately reflect how real people make real buying decisions in the real world. 

Most brand trackers measure things like awareness, consideration and intent. But these metrics don’t always guide you in the right direction. For example …

1. Awareness shows reach but not the likelihood of your brand coming to mind in a relevant buying situation. 

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I wanted to make s’mores, so I ran out to the grocery store. I had graham crackers and marshmallows in my basket. It was time to choose the chocolate.

Hershey’s is not my favorite. It’s almost never my first (or second or third) choice, and there were much better brands of chocolate on the shelves in front of me. 

Which chocolate did I buy? Hershey’s, of course. 

Because in the relevant buying situation of “making s’mores,” Hershey’s was top of mind. 

Hershey’s has tremendous awareness, and they’ve spent the past 130 years building an incredibly famous brand. But that’s not why I chose Hershey’s at that moment. 

The connection between “making s’mores” and Hershey’s chocolate — something else they’ve spent a long time building — was so strong I didn’t really consider another brand. 

This goes far beyond “awareness” to something called Mental Availability. We’ve talked about it before, and we’ll dive into it again over the next few weeks. 

2. Consideration misses wildly important context cues. Rory Sutherland uses wine to explain the behavioral economics of pricing, but it works for consideration as well.

Let’s say you’re at the store buying wine. Theoretically, your consideration set is all the brands of wine on the shelves in front of you. More reasonably, it’s the set of brands you’re familiar with. However, reality depends on context. 

If you’re buying wine for an ordinary Friday night dinner, you may have two or three brands that fit within your mental model of “table wine” or “dinner wine.” 

If, however, dinner is a special occasion — a birthday, anniversary, or some sort of important milestone — you’re more likely to spend a little more on a premium brand. 

Now, let’s say you’re going to a friend’s house for a dinner party. You might bring something nicer than “table wine” but not as nice as the bottle you bought for that big celebration. Or you might skip the wine altogether and bring a nice bottle of Scotch instead. 

And if you’re throwing a shindig for all your friends, you’re probably going to head to Trader Joe’s for a case (it’s a big shindig, you have lots of friends) of something much, much less expensive. 

Context matters, and these are three disparate consideration sets within a single product category. 

Wine with dinner becomes, “Which dinner?”, “Why?”, “With whom?”. Most brand trackers never get this granular, which means they don’t really give you insights you can work with. 

3. Intent barely correlates with sales. The gulf between what consumers say they’ll do in the future and what they actually do is enormous. 

Measuring something is absolutely better than measuring nothing, but a better map will make your marketing a lot more effective. 

That’s why we built the Cogs of Empirical Marketing.

It’s a better map based on data, not dragons. 

It starts with Market Share. The big cog at the heart of it all. That’s the one you need to move. How? 

Over the next few weeks, we will be talking about the Cogs — what they are and how they work together to drive profitability and growth. 

What does that mean for you?

The Cogs of Empirical Marketing is built on cutting-edge, global marketing research. We developed it to help clients take bigger, smarter, more effective swings. 

It’s a better map to help you get where you need to go. No mermaids or dragons … just insights you can use to diagnose problems, drive strategy, develop tactics and grow your brand. 

Let’s chart a course for real growth. 

See you next time!