The secret behind brand advocacy with John Lyons

Summary

Podcast Summary: Let's Talk Branding – "The Secret Behind Brand Advocacy with John Lyons"

Release Date: December 9, 2024

In this insightful episode of Let's Talk Branding, host Stef Hamerlinck converses with marketing veteran John Lyons about the often-misunderstood concepts of brand advocacy and customer loyalty. John, a seasoned marketer with over 25 years of experience, delves deep into the mechanics of building and sustaining brand loyalty, offering practical strategies and challenging prevalent misconceptions.

---

Introduction to John Lyons and Fractional CMO Role

[00:33] John Lyons begins by outlining his extensive background in marketing, highlighting his tenure at agencies and his pivotal role at the LEGO Group in Denmark. Currently, John operates as a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), assisting B2B businesses, professional services, and tech companies in leveraging effective marketing strategies to drive growth.

[01:21] John Lyons explains the essence of his fractional role:

"Fractional means like timeshare. I split my time fractionally between clients... It's a very holistic approach... How can we grow your business, what are our opportunities, what does that look like from the bottom line?"

He emphasizes the practicality of focusing on business growth opportunities without the entanglements of day-to-day corporate politics.

[02:43] Steph reflects on the hybrid nature of the fractional CMO role, likening it to having the flexibility of agency work combined with the depth of in-house positions.

---

Dissecting Brand Loyalty: Misconceptions and Realities

The conversation shifts to the contentious topic of brand loyalty. John addresses a common misconception propagated by the Ernst & Young's Institute and Byron Sharp, which suggests that loyalty is non-existent. He vehemently disagrees, citing the Double Jeopardy Law:

[08:58] John Lyons asserts:

"Loyalty absolutely exists. Even if we kind of take a step back... You generally go for what you know."

He elaborates on the nature of loyalty, describing it as polygamous rather than monogamous. For instance, a customer might prefer Diet Coke but switch to Diet Pepsi or water if Diet Coke isn't available, demonstrating category-based loyalty.

[12:53] Steph concurs, adding that loyalty often emerges as a natural consequence of brand growth and increased availability, but questions whether smaller brands can intentionally cultivate loyalty.

[13:50] John Lyons responds affirmatively, particularly highlighting subscription-based models in tech and SaaS industries that inherently require customer loyalty. He provides examples like the BBC's Couch to 5K program, which fosters loyalty by engaging users over time.

---

Strategic Investment: Acquisition vs. Loyalty

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around where brands should allocate their marketing budgets—between acquiring new customers or fostering loyalty among existing ones.

[12:53] John Lyons agrees with the Erba Bass principle that brands should prioritize penetration over retention:

"If you have to make a choice between acquisition and loyalty, go for acquisition."

However, he notes exceptions for leading brands like LEGO, where loyalty programs complement acquisition strategies effectively.

[18:28] John Lyons outlines multiple benefits of investing in loyalty programs beyond mere repeat purchases:

• Financial Benefits: While not the primary advantage, increased sales from loyal customers contribute financially.
• Owned Database: Building a direct relationship with customers.
• Community Development: Encouraging brand advocacy and creating ambassadors, as seen with LEGO and Nutella.

He underscores that loyalty should not replace acquisition but rather complement it, given the polygamous nature of brand loyalty and inevitable customer churn.

---

Building Effective Loyalty Programs

John shares practical insights from his experience managing loyalty programs at LEGO and Hasbro. He emphasizes the importance of creating value beyond discounts to foster genuine loyalty.

[22:34] John Lyons criticizes simplistic loyalty models:

"The discount only model is fundamentally flawed... providing exclusive rewards is a far better way of doing it."

He highlights LEGO's AFOLs (Adult Fans of LEGO) program, which allows fans to create and vote on custom sets, fostering a sense of community and belonging. Additionally, loyalty programs can drive acquisition by extending reach to customers purchasing through non-branded retail channels, as demonstrated by LEGO's partnership with Target.

---

Overcoming Challenges in Advocating for Brand Investment

Stef raises the issue of convincing corporate leaders to invest in brand-building initiatives over easily measurable performance marketing.

[33:25] John Lyons acknowledges the difficulty and proposes strategies to make the case for brand investment:

"You need to first kind of understand the case for brand and then be able to quantify it to senior leadership."

He suggests leveraging the Double Jeopardy Law and share of voice metrics to demonstrate the tangible benefits of brand investment. For instance, increasing a brand's share of voice relative to its market share can directly correlate with market growth.

John also emphasizes translating brand metrics into business language, making the financial implications clear to decision-makers who prioritize quantifiable outcomes.

---

Future Endeavors and Content Creation

Towards the end of the episode, John shares his plans to further demystify marketing concepts and assist other marketers in practical applications.

[41:07] John Lyons discusses upcoming projects including:

• Bin Juice: A bi-weekly video series tackling practical marketing topics.
• The Lion's Share: His ongoing newsletter.
• Collaborations with Seb McKay: Engaging in LinkedIn Live sessions focusing on positioning and copywriting.

He also mentions plans to create a more inclusive panel for an online marketing forum, aiming to incorporate diverse perspectives and expand the dialogue around real-world marketing challenges.

---

Conclusion

Stef wraps up the episode by applauding John's contributions to the marketing community and his commitment to bridging theory with practical application.

[44:05] Steph remarks:

"We need to start talking more about real cases and real stuff and get beyond the theory... Marketers doing it in real life, talking about it that really make it come to life."

John reciprocates the appreciation, reinforcing the importance of actionable insights in the branding landscape.

---

Key Takeaways:

1. Loyalty Exists and is Multifaceted: Contrary to some theories, customer loyalty is real and often polygamous, encompassing repeated purchases and brand advocacy.

2. Strategic Investment in Acquisition Over Retention: While both are important, acquisition should take precedence unless a brand has the scale and opportunity to effectively integrate loyalty programs.

3. Effective Loyalty Programs Go Beyond Discounts: Building community, offering exclusive rewards, and engaging customers in meaningful ways are essential for fostering genuine loyalty.

4. Quantifying Brand Investment: Marketers must translate brand-building efforts into business language and measurable outcomes to secure investment from leadership.

5. Practical Application and Inclusivity: Sharing real-world cases and incorporating diverse perspectives enhances the effectiveness and relatability of marketing strategies.

For marketers seeking to deepen their understanding of brand advocacy and loyalty, John Lyons' expertise offers valuable guidance on navigating the complexities of modern brand-building.

Transcript

[John Lyons]

And this is what really boils my pit, Steph, is when I get people that say that we know through how brands grow and era, Bass Institute and Byron Sharp, that loyalty doesn't exist.

[Steph]

Hey everyone. Today we're chatting with one of our most loyal podcast guests, John Lyons. He's back on the show to talk again about loyalty, the misconceptions and how we can invest in loyalty as a brand building mechanic. So buckle up and let's start branding.

[John Lyons]

So I'm John Lyons. I've been in marketing for about 25 years now. So I spent a lot of my career in agencies. I founded and successfully at a couple of agencies of my own. I've also spent time client side for a small technology group and for the best brand in the world, but certainly Denmark, the LEGO Group. And I'm now working as a fractional CMO. So I work with B2B businesses, professional service, kind of SaaS and tech, helping them basically use effective marketing to grow their business.

[Steph]

Love that. I see this term pop up a lot more recently like fractional cmo. What does a day in the life of a fractional CMO look like?

[John Lyons]

So I suppose the first thing to say is all that fractional means is like timeshare. So you know, I split my time fractionally between clients. So it's in an ideal scenario and nothing's ever ideal. You'd have kind of set given days to particular clients. But basically what you're doing is you are working towards an objective. Some of the work I do is project based, some of it is ongoing, genuinely fractional. And what you're doing is working towards those objectives and really looking at where the opportunities for the business is. So as you know, Steph, I've always been a very commercially minded marketer. I've always been very much dedicated and an advocate of marketing effectiveness, as you have been. And so it's just being very practical about, okay, how can we grow your business, what are our opportunities, what does that look like from the bottom line? What channels do we use, what message do we need to get out there? So it's kind of, it's a very holistic approach and at this stage of my career it's nice to come in as the knowledgeable person in the area that I'm knowledgeable in, not have to deal with day to day political issues and be expected to make a difference, which isn't always the case in corporate example.

[Steph]

Yeah, it sounds like a really interesting job where it's like not like what I, when I look back at not the time when I was not in house. Like I loved the fact that you could go on for a bunch of different brands and do a lot of stuff. But what I really lacked was like time to make a real impact and like do repeat and get learnings from it. And now I'm in house, it's like a totally different dynamic where you really get to build on one brand. But I can imagine after a while in your career this is a bit of a hybrid model where you have the best of both worlds.

[John Lyons]

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is, and I don't know if you're finding this and maybe you love it, I mean sometimes I do myself. But the other thing is that when you're coming in as relatively expensive but obviously high value, a relatively expensive partial hire or part time hire, you're not going to just fill gaps as you sometimes do as a full time in house person. So, you know, I've been in roles in the past where just because I've been there and we need something done, I end up doing the thing. There's no point paying my rates to do that so we can get other people to do those things. So it really gives me the opportunity to focus on kind of what only I can do.

[Steph]

Yeah, I kind of need that in.

[John Lyons]

A little way because certainly, you know, my last full time role, I remember my MD kind of Sophie saying to me, john, stop trying to do everything. I want you doing the things that only you can do. And sometimes I spread myself too thin and this protects me against that.

[Steph]

Yeah, maybe one more thing on this. Like I'm curious, when you start a new fractional role somewhere at a company like what's the first thing you always do?

[John Lyons]

So the first thing I always do is I asked do they have a marketing or business strategy and do they have any customer research? And quite often so what I'm finding certainly in the current environment and this isn't going to change, but in the kind of dot com tech era, it's a lot easier for very smart people to spin up a business based on a product that they've developed but without necessarily knowing the market. So I think we've probably got more sales and product led businesses than we've ever had before. They get to a point, some of them realize straight away that they need marketing. But sometimes they get to a point where they're plateauing and what they need is for someone to come in and show them the other side, the marketing side of things, which I get product and I did a little video recently talking about product market fit because I think that's the most fundamental thing that lots of businesses don't consider sales and product based. What is the product market fit? Think of the market so kind of going in and trying to look at the product market fit and also try to understand who the customer is. Because we still have this belief that a build it and they will come, which isn't true. But also, well, we want everyone to buy it. No you don't. You want to focus in on the people that are most likely to buy it and be what they need you to be. So it's kind of, it's really about helping them understand the opportunities and also the financial benefits. So to me, marketing isn't just a cost. Marketing is about business outcomes.

[Steph]

Yeah, interesting. And I've seen that personally as well, working with some B2B SaaS companies like in that area. Very often marketing is like something they consider maybe down the line, but there's not a lot that actually like start with it or at least have. And especially then like thinking about marketing as a broad discipline but then as a brand part of it, that's like usually the last thing. Like oh yeah, we'll do that in four years when we have a lot of money and we're ipoing or something. But it's often something very hard to convince these types of companies from.

[John Lyons]

But we're seeing businesses in early stages kind of moving into getting growth people in before actually refining what it is they're trying to offer people. That's a fundamental mistake. I'm absolutely fine with growth people. I'm absolutely fine with sales activation. But you kind of need to understand what people need you to be first.

[Steph]

Yeah. And how do you do that, John?

[John Lyons]

Research, customer research. Any research is better than no research. Try to understand, you need to understand what the consumer needs. So too often businesses focus on what it is they do and they don't think through in terms of how that connects to what their potential customers need. And what they don't need is a list of features. What they need is an outcome. So again, kind of when we talk about product based companies, most of them focus more on features than benefits. But the way to sell to people is to show them that what you're providing to them solves their problems. It gives you benefits. So to me it's about understanding the market and then being very, very definitive and concise about what your strategy is, what your, your marketing strategy, your brand strategy, how you're taking that to market and sticking to it.

[Steph]

Hmm. Yeah, maybe let's shift gears now because obviously you've got a big bit of, like. How do you say that? I'm going to say a bone to pick. Is that a real thing to say? I don't know. But anyway, loyalty. You mentioned, you mentioned, you mentioned it to me that, like, some of the people that come on this podcast before, but, like, in general, it's a thing where we accept that basically loyalty doesn't exist. But you're saying, no, Steph, that's wrong. Like, tell us more.

[John Lyons]

100%. And not only is it wrong, the people that you're quoting to state that it doesn't exist. Say the complete bloody opposite. Okay? And this is what really boils my pit stuff, is when I get people that say that we know through how brands grow and Erbas Institute and Byron Sharp that loyalty doesn't exist. That's fundamentally incorrect. The double jeopardy law shows that not only does loyalty exist, but that the biggest brands have more loyalty than the smaller brands. Loyalty absolutely exists. Even if we kind of take a step back in terms of considering how we make purchase decisions, how often do you walk up to, I don't know, the chilli unit in a store or a cafe and take out a product you've never seen before? You generally go for what you know. Now, that is repeat purchase is loyalty. Whether or not people want to compare it to what you might be like in a relationship, it's not the same thing. Brand and product loyalty is not monogamous. It's polygamous. Absolutely polygamous. We have a category repertoire, so I favor Diet Coke. I'm a diabetic, so I have to go for diet stuff anyway. But I favor Diet Coke. I like the taste of it. Now, if there isn't Diet Coke, I'm not going to die of thirst. I'll probably go for the Diet Pepsi or maybe a water or a cup of tea. That's my category repertoire right there. I'm loyal to Coke. You could say I'm loyal to Pepsi. And that's the case across the board. And again, how brands grow has shown us this. Your most loyal customers also buy your competitors. But loyalty is absolutely a thing. And I think what people mistake is what Byron Sharp has said is that if you want to grow your business, invest in penetration rather than retention. So invest in growing new, bringing in new customers, rather than trying to retain or extract extra value out of existing ones. And I would agree with that. And I've had a career in loyalty. I ran a loyalty agency at one point I was kind of leading strategy at the LEGO Group's loyalty program at one point. If you have to make a choice between acquisition and loyalty, go for acquisition. If, however, you're the biggest toy brand in the world, you can play both, but also if the brand is right for it. So if we go back to the LEGO group, there are so many reasons why you can be loyal to that brand. Number one, every LEGO brick ever made connects to every other LEGO brick ever made. So whenever you buy a new product, you can combine it with the old product. So there's a natural kind of continuation there. But also the way that they've been super, super smart, particularly since they kind of reinvented the brand, I guess kind of 10 years or so ago, is they bring out lots of new sets. So it's not just about I want more LEGO bricks. In the same way as we might talk about chewing gum or toilet paper, I need a thing, it's I want the thing, I'm going to play with it. There's a benefit. Or actually, as we, as I also know from my time there, not just play with it, sometimes people buy it for display, so it's a collectible as well as a toy. There's all sorts of baked in reasons why people would be loyal to that brand. So if you're the right brand in the right category and you've got the budget, then there's absolutely a reason to invest in loyalty programs. But if you've got to make the choice, go for penetration. I agree.

[Steph]

Yeah, it's interesting. Like, I mean, I guess that's like the way I've always interpreted is like loyalty is more of like a consequence when your brand grows. At some point you'll get more like repeat purchase because you're more physically available, more mentally available. So obviously people will start buying you more. I'm wondering though, like, because you say at a certain scale or in a certain opportunity, it starts to become interesting to invest in loyalty. Like two questions. There's. Do you think there are exceptions to the scale thing? Where, for example, really small brands in certain niches start with loyalty, basically go the opposite way, like community based fandom. There's a lot of these new theories that come out. So do you think that's possible and maybe what are the signals to look at that? Yeah, maybe it's good for us to invest in loyalty.

[John Lyons]

I mean, yeah, it's absolutely possible. And I think some of the models are probably related as much as anything to the pricing and usage model. So what we've seen And I think it's overstepped a little bit recently. But what we've seen is a lot more subscription based products and platforms, particularly in tech and SaaS and apps. And of course they are all about building loyalty because you're getting people to come back and back and back. I think some of them have looked at it purely from an internal perspective. There's platforms out there that I would love to use, but I only need to use it once. I don't want to sign up for a year. You're missing out on my money because you've got a fixed business model because you're looking at your kind of your mrr. It's ridiculous. But there are others out there that absolutely work on that basis. And so whether or not you're bringing people in to be kind of part of the brand experience to contribute towards it, which again can be a really useful thing, whether you call that fandom or community or you're building something that absolutely requires people to return and stay loyal to. One example, and it's not a product for sale, but I think it's relevant is are you familiar with the couch to 5K?

[Steph]

No, not really.

[John Lyons]

Okay, so it's something that I think the BBC did over here. Hello, I'm British, I think. So the BBC did over here to kind of help people get better. And basically the idea is they've got a program that will take you from being fairly idle couch to being able to run 5K. And so I did this a year or so ago and you have to stay with the program. It kind of builds you up, you go out, you walk a bit, you run a bit and by the time you get to the end of the program you can run 5k. And I'm proof that it works. It's. Well, okay, I kind of more often not got to 4k rather than 5, but you have to stick with the program to do that. So again, that kind of has inherent loyalty built into it. But I think also the other thing that is worth saying about loyalty, and this is a point that I heard Derek Walker say make once, which is that you will show loyalty to a company or a business that treats you well to start with. So he told me a story about, I think it's a friend of his who goes to the same petrol station every, every day on his way to work and he buys a bag of donut holes, that's what he likes for breakfast. And it got to a point where they started having the bag ready for him when he got there. So that is inherent loyalty straight there. You can't fake loyalty. And where I think the LEGO group again gets it really right is if you go into a LEGO owned store, it's such a great experience. Everyone who works there cares and are happy just talking and playing. There is a positive experience which you can build upon. If you don't have that positive experience, you can't build upon it. Nobody is going to be loyal to, let's say, for example, who's doing really badly at the moment. Water companies in the UK are terrible right now. They've got really bad reputation. They're dumping sewage. Nobody is going, nobody likes their water company. We're stuck to them because they're localized. It's a localized monopoly. You can't build loyalty from that, but you can build loyalty from having someone's favorite breakfast snack ready for them.

[Steph]

Yeah, and that's, I think, indeed, like where, like, I think everything Byron Sharp and the Best Institute tells us is correct. And I think it's something we need to be mindful of. Especially, like if we look at things from a certain scale and from a certain distance. Where it falls flat is like if you start to use these basic principles, like, okay, let's only focus on acquisition in a sort of like very cold way, it becomes like almost the idea that you never need to care about, like what happens after when people buy your product or whatever. And that's like totally the opposite of what you should be doing, I think. And I think if you can, like, for example, for Alan, the brand I've been working on, what we've been doing actually is kind of flipping it and like thinking, how can we build brand with our customers, but also make that very visible in a way that we acquire new customers. And I think that's like a strategy that is very often ignored. I don't know if you've seen similar things, but. Yeah, it's just a thought.

[John Lyons]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, there are a number of different positive outcomes from loyalty as a loyalty program, if you like, or trying to engage in more loyalty. One of them is financial. Of course you're not looking to lose money, but actually it's probably one of the lesser ones. So the other reasons for doing it are obviously kind of, yeah, building an owned database, pretty straightforward, pretty basic, but also developing that community in such a way that people advocate the brand. And of course I can go back and talk about Lego for that, but I worked on a campaign years ago now for Nutella. Everybody loves Nutella, of course, but we were able to use that fact to encourage people to. Basically we were looking for an ambassador. So there's a world Nutella day which the brand were not involved with. The fans came up with that themselves. And so the program that we had was that we did a UGC competition where people sent in a short video of them talking about Nutella, various things about it. And you could see the passion. You know, some people were absolutely obsessed by this. Now we also know most people are not obsessed about stuff. But these people were so passionate and because they're sending in videos we could see that they were also very good at presenting, very good at kind of sharing and amplifying that they became advocates, they became ambassadors. So that's another great thing that you can do from, from a loyalty program. There's, there's so many more things that you can do. And I worked on one years ago for, for Hasbro. So nerf perks. So Hasbro sell through retailers unlike the LEGO group who sell through retailers and through their own stores. What Hasbro didn't have was any insight into their customer base. And by setting up a retailer agnostic loyalty program we were able to uncover those insights. And it was fascinating to find out the expectations that the, that the kind of standard customer would be a 13 year old boy wasn't the case. We were finding kind of middle aged men. One of the highest purchases was a middle aged lawyer who just liked to sit in his office shooting Nerf blasters all around. It's crazy. So that's another outcome. You can get insight from it as well. So there's all these outcomes to consider. Not just can we generate more sales from it, but equally you still need to be focusing on the acquisition as well. Because regardless of loyalty a, we know it's polygamous so we still need to be in front of our customers, even if they're loyal. But also there will be churn. People will grow out of a product. They'll move on to something else. I used to love, I used to love this Scottish shortbread biscuit called Crystals. It's the best biscuit of all time. When I got diagnosed with diabetes, I'm never eating that again. So I've fallen off of that. You still need your acquisition to replace me? I haven't gone to a competitor, I've just gone from the category. So all of those things need to play as well.

[Steph]

Yeah. What's interesting to me is like it almost seems like investing in loyalty. At least that's how like I think Ehrenberg Bass frames it and they look at it mostly as repeat purchase. It's almost like that investing in loyalty is almost opposite to brand building. While in reality, like I think there is a lot of gray where you can basically create synergies between both. Right, what like, yeah, for you, I.

[John Lyons]

Mean, what are tactics in the gray area anyway?

[Steph]

What are tactics that you can do to increase loyalty? Maybe beyond just like, hey, you'll get 10% off of every next purchase or whatever.

[John Lyons]

You can give people exclusive access to things and events. You can engage people in kind of feedback loops, make them part of the decision making. So again, because I was there in house on it, I'm going to talk about the LEGO group again. But they have a program that has the AFOLs. The adult fans of LEGO are able to, to create their own custom sets that they go up onto a website and they get votes for. And when they get over 100,000 votes, they're then considered as being made a set by the LEGO group. Now, as a fan of lego, there's nothing better than having your set out there, right? You've actually got a set that you've created, but also people are voting for it. So it really kind of amplifies the community aspect, but it's giving back. It's not just sitting there and taking. Because you could just sit there and watch forums and take insight from it, but here it's active, engaging. And of course as part of the loyalty program, we would, we would invite, we would invite kind of the most active members to events. So when we reopened the London, the big London store at Leicester Square, we had a lot of people from LEGO groups, you know, unofficial, but we knew of them, we connected with them, that they had a big AFOL engagement team. Yeah, adult fans of LEGO engagement team. So we had groups come from all over the country. We had people come that were members, they were able to kind of enter a prize draw to come to this pre opening. And it was fantastic, you know, that they feel part of things. And I think kind of for me, the discount only model is fundamentally flawed really, because what you're doing is you're, you're kind of almost incentivizing people not to spend until they can get it for cheaper or less. So again, having exclusive rewards, it's far better way of doing it. And you know, at the LEGO group, I can't reach it, a LEGO group, we would have a number of sets a year that would only be available through the membership club to members and you would have to use points to buy them. And you only get points through making purchases. And all of this was exclusive stuff that brings you closer to the brand. So I think those kind of tactics tend to work a lot better than just here's your 10% off, which is how the program started. A year or so before I joined, that was what it was doing. And while I was there, part of the strategy we were looking at were how to bring more value to it, but also how to grow the platform and bring more people into it.

[Steph]

Yeah. So basically acquisition within the loyalty program.

[John Lyons]

Acquisition within the loyalty program. But also traditionally the loyalty program only run through lego.com and Lego Lego branded stores or LEGO owned stores. So if you bought your Lego from anywhere else, you weren't engaging with the loyalty program. And so when I was there, I did some research and found that, I mean it was over 90% of people buy their Lego from not Lego. Now at that time I think we were, we were close to 50%, maybe even higher, of people that bought through the, the owned retail channels were members. So we were kind of reaching saturation point. The real area for growth was external and I was able to make that case. And whilst I was there, we launched the first trial with Target in the US which proved successful. And it's kind of now rolling out to other retailers. And again, it's kind of how can we bring more people in and add value to them? Because there are people that are buying these products that love the product that because of location don't even know that there's a loyalty program. If you don't live near one of the LEGO retail stores, and let's say you live near a big toy superstore or kind of, you know, a big retailer that stocks toys, you're going to buy them there and you don't even know the program exists. Bring them in.

[Steph]

Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe like another, like let's say shift in the conversation. Like obviously these big brands, it makes sense for them to, especially a brand like Lego where you actually have people getting excited about your product, it makes a lot of sense to invest in loyalty. And as we said, even for smaller brands, it might be interesting to look into it. Let's say you're a lot smaller, like 1% market share or maybe less. Like most of the companies are like that and these brands are coming to you say, hey John, we want to hire you as a fractional cmo, because basically we need to grow, we need to build our brand. But like, how do we begin doing that? Because if we want loyalty, obviously we need to invest in Brand?

[John Lyons]

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, kind of as we mentioned earlier, that the Erba Bass Double Jeopardy law shows that you need brand to build loyalty. So I mean, the building block really is for me is firstly understanding where you are a brand, what your market share is and what your share of voice is. So basically, you know, that, that gives us an idea of what, what the potential for growth is. Alongside that, doing some solid customer research. Now, not everybody can afford brand tracking and obviously, you know, there, there are great businesses out there now and I have nothing to do with them. I've just seen the work like tracksuit who do that in a far more affordable way. But what brand tracking does, it will show you precisely where you need to focus in order to grow your business. Either you, you're lacking awareness or consideration or preference, or maybe you're not aligning your brand attributes aren't as well aligned with what people want and need from when they buy from your category. And it will give you all of that. But if you don't have that, any kind of research is useful. You need to understand what it is that a potential consumer, someone who's going to buy from the category you're in, needs and wants to be true in order to choose you. And you can only do that through customer research. So I would always kind of advocate let's firstly, let's map out the market and then let's do some customer research, whether or not that's quantitative or qualitative or both, so that we can find out basically what we need to be in order to sell more to more people that are buying from the category and more often and for more money, because that is what marketing does. Okay, so we're looking at where those opportunities are. We then maybe need to look at the, you know, strategically look at the positioning. Who is it we're targeting, what is it they need us to be? How are we going to go about doing that? Now, there's lots of frameworks I'm a big fan of get who to buy. So, you know, you get your target segment who have a particular problem to do whatever it is you need them to do and buy is the key thing because that's what you're going to be doing with your market plan. So it could be by showing them the value or by turning up where they're having their problems, whatever it is, and then from there kind of making sure that your brand is presented in a way that people understand. Now, I did some research recently on cybersecurity, where 67%, I think it was of the companies that we surveyed said that they believed that their brand was distinctive. And we know the value of distinction, right? So I did a very quick survey of the top six cybersecurity only brands as given to me by an AI platform. And they all looked exactly the same. Not only did they look the same, they had the same primary color, which was a dark blue. Almost all of them. I think five of the six had white as their secondary color. They all used the same six words interchangeably, including innovation. I don't know what's so innovative about sounding like everyone else in your category. And they all talked about them rather than, rather than the customer. So it's actually not that difficult sometimes to be distinctive and to be memorable. And the truth is, and I'm going back to your friend of mine, Jenny Romniak, and I'm going to paraphrase her quote, which is one of my favorites in marketing, which is that too much marketing and advertising is focusing on trying to persuade people as if we're already in the room with them, Whereas the truth is we need to gain the mental availability for a chance to be in the room with them first. And you only do that by being distinctive. So making sure that you're distinctive, that you're on message, that you are presenting as what people need you to be, is the ultimate first step. And then you've got your marketing plan. What objectives and key results are we going to set here? How are we going to assess short and long term performance and growth and sticking to it, being agile if things change? Because sometimes things change and you know, we all know the big P word that became so popular during the kind of lockdown era, pivot. Sometimes you need to, but ultimately, if the market doesn't change and you've done your research properly, you stick to your category, you stick to your strategy and you make it work.

[Steph]

And I'm also very curious, like, I think a lot of marketers that are working at like these, I don't know, it could be B2B. It's typically for B2B, but it happens in a lot of B2C companies as well that I talk to. It's like they realize this stuff. Like they know that at some point they need to be very visible to the broader market to acquire new customers, to be distinctive, to have like, they usually even have a lot of good ideas, bold ideas, creative ideas. But where it stops is like the companies won't allow them to take those risks to build brand basically because it's easier to just dump money into, you know, digital performance marketing that is very easy to track. And at the end of the month, you can say, hey, we've, we've generated that amount of leads or whatever, that amount of clicks. Like, how do you. Maybe because you have to do that as well, I guess, as a fractional cmi. How do you convince those leaders to start investing in brand?

[John Lyons]

It's a tricky one, isn't it? So, I mean, I had a conversation not long ago with a marketing leader of an organization that in effect promotes marketing effectiveness. And they were unable to persuade the board to invest in brand. And so that kind of shows how deep it goes. Now, I think there's a few things at play here. I think lots of people who understand the fundamentals of the importance of brand, you know that they've read how brands grow, they're familiar with Bennett and Field, they fail to translate that into business language. But also they don't know how to quantify it. Because what's so easy about performance marketing is that you can literally say, you put this in, you get that out, and you can stop at any time. You're not committing to a long period. You test and iterate. But we know again, Les Burnett and Peterfield have shown us this, that brand delivers the greatest outcomes. So for me, you need to first kind of understand the case for brand and then be able to quantify it to senior leadership, to the money holders, the cfo, the CEO. And there's a few things that I kind of use. Number one, we know from John Dawes at the Erin Barbas Institute, working with the B2B LinkedIn Institute, that at any given time, only 5% of your target market are in buying mode. So whatever marketing you're doing, 95% of it isn't going to convert by its very nature. So on that basis, what do we do with the 95%? Because also, I've seen research that shows that there's a strong correlation between brand awareness and purchase intent. It's kind of like, you know, it's over 60% if you put it in percentage points. So we know that brand awareness is important for purchase, and we know that people aren't always purchasing now. And of course, we know, going back to our good friend, the double jeopardy law, that the biggest brands sell more to more people and more often they have higher penetration and they have higher loyalty. Really, kind of, how do we turn that into a case, an argument? And it sort of takes us back to the long and short of it. So again, we know from the Long and short of it, that your optimum average spend, and this is based on the IPA effectiveness database, the optimum average spend is 60, 40 in favor of brand. Now, I saw something recently, it was a report and I can't remember who it was from. I'll share this with you later. But actually the spend is the opposite. It's 60 on performance and it's 40 on brand. Typically across CMOs that were surveyed and 71% of CMOs said that they would be increasing the spend on performance, which is crazy. You know, the way that. So we know it's important and we know it's not being done, but we need to quantify it to people. And to me, there's a couple of models that I would use and I have used, number one is brand tracking. So if we can see from brand tracking that compared to the rest of the category, you are underperforming a certain stage of the funnel. Let's say consideration. If you're going to invest in increasing your consideration by a certain percentage either to get closer to or even surpass, if you're going to be kind of really bold the category norms, then you know that that's going to have a financial outcome because it follows down the funnel. So you can say, I need this amount of money to grow consideration by this percent, and that will deliver this to the business over 12 months. So it's about smart objectives, objectives and key results. Or it might be an attribute. You know, we need to be seen as being more innovative. So we need to change our messaging around that and maybe we need to change the business around it. You know, all 4Ps can come into play here. And by doing that, we stand to grow a certain amount of more market share and therefore this will be the financial outcome. So you're mapping it, you're putting it in numbers, you're putting it in business language. Don't talk about brand and things that people take as fluffy because they don't understand the value of it to business. People talk business. And of course the other one and Les Burnett and Peter Field have kind of been the main people developing this. It's not their, their original thing, but excess share of voice. So we know empirically that if your share of voice is more than your share of market, you stand to grow. Okay, so, and not only that, we know the amount that you will stand to grow. So you can add 0.5% to actually it's 0.3 to 1.2% market share by having a 10% excess share of voice. Really Easy to calculate. It's your share of voice minus your share of market. Share of market. There are tools that out there that will help you do it. Share of voice that has been shown that share of search is a brilliant proxy for that. So whether or not that's pure brand search or it's brand plus category search, those are the comparisons so you can map out where you stand. Are we in decline? Are we in equilibrium, Are we in growth and by how much? And if we spend X to grow our excess share of voice by a certain amount, this is what comes out at the end of it. Again, you can put that down as an OKR with your budget, with your. With your smart objectives, the input, the outcomes, the budget and the. Yeah, that's it. Put it like that to the business. And that's what I've always done in my career. But what I've been trying to do recently, and we've talked about this before, is just trying to put this down into something that's tangible and practical for other marketers. Because I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I've been in this game for a long, long time. I've had lots of different roles and I'm confident I can talk, I can talk on the fly. And, you know, I have white man privilege. So I can stand in a room full of business people as someone that's also run a business. And this has been a major help to me as a marketer. I can stand in a room of people that are running a business and say, I have run businesses myself. I understand the ups and downs, I understand the pains of running a business. This is what we do, this is how we grow it. And it's, you know, not saying it's easy for me, but I've developed the kind of the language to explain it. And what I'm trying to do now is to put it down in a way that will be more useful to other marketers because I think it's the number one thing that people ask. So whenever I've. When I did the Marketing Week, Mark ritz and mini MBAs, and I did all three, the question that would always come up would be, how can I get my CFO to sign off budget? These are educated people, these are trained marketers. So I think that there's a need for it, there's a practical need for it. You know, I don't know if I've found the silver bullet. I've talked to, you know, talked to Les Burnett about this. I've talked to Dr. Charles Graham from Ereburg Bass Institute about it, but I'm hoping to kind of bring some light to it because it's something I think is needed. And, you know, as you can tell, I kind of care quite a lot about.

[Steph]

Yeah, I guess, like, for a lot of people, they believe in the idea, but very often they struggle to get going. And I agree that the things that you mentioned, even just simple things as looking at share of search and trying to quantify what that would mean for the investment for the next year, could be a great starting point for a lot of marketers. So people listening, go and try that. Go to Google Trends and just see how that looks like, because I think it's quite an easy tool that we didn't have like five or 10 years ago. So especially in some categories, maybe to wrap things up. John, you've been putting out some really cool content. Like, what are some of your, like, future plans? What can we still expect? Is there a book in you? What is going to happen?

[John Lyons]

So, yeah, I mean, you've been an inspiration for a lot of this. So, you know, you were one of the first people that started going on about my hat. And you and Harris have both kind of inspired me to go out there and create digital versions of hat that have been really quite successful for me. So, you know, kind of I've taken that and another silly thing that I've been doing, which is taking pictures of my local bins. And so, you know, I've got a content, a regular content piece called Bin Juice, which is a video where every two weeks I sit down, I just talk about a marketing thing from a practical perspective that's going to continue. My newsletter, the Lion's Share, is going to continue. I've also recently been contributing to some LinkedIn Live stuff with a guy called Seb McKay. So he's a positioning expert, former copywriter. And again, we kind of come on, we talk to people, we take comments on, and we just talk about various marketing things. And I'm kind of interested in turning that into something more useful. So speaking to a marketer that I know, Simon Swan, he's talked quite a few times to me about kind of practical marketing and what I'd like to do with it is expand it and turn it almost into a bit of an online marketing surgery. So I don't want it to just be me and Seb because it's two white guys with not much hair. And I think representation is important. Not dei, but I think representation is important because you get different perspectives. So I'm hoping to bring on board Derek Walker, who is a fantastic advertising guy from the states, and Liesl McDonald, who is a brilliant, brilliant client side marketer with so much experience. I've spoken to both of those. So what we're looking to do is to put that kind of panel together and make it more of an inclusive chat with people that are watching, where basically if we can't help people with their marketing problems, we'll see if anybody else can and just make it a bit of a forum. So that's coming up soon. I'm looking forward to that.

[Steph]

Yeah, I love that. And I think it's exactly what we need. Like we need to start talking more about real cases and real stuff and get beyond the theory, which is great. I mean, I have a full bookcase behind me of it, but I think it's the marketers doing it in real life, talking about it that really make it come to life. So hats off, John, for you and thanks again for coming on the show.

[John Lyons]

You're welcome. Thanks for having me, Stef. Always a pleasure.