First published in 2010, Byron Sharp’s seminal book, How Brands Grow has become a marketeer’s bible. In it, Sharp used empirical research conducted at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science to challenge widely held industry beliefs about marketing effectiveness. In this article, Mark Knight, the founder of Major Labl Artist Club considers how Sharp’s principles of brand growth could equally be applied to band and artist growth and questions why the music industry has been so slow to adopt his learnings…
Byron Sharp had several key findings about how brands generally grow. These are:
1. Don’t waste time trying to grow loyalty in isolation as it doesn’t drive growth
2. Grow the number of people that buy your brand and loyalty will come as a result
3. Increasing market penetration is crucial; most buyers are light users
4. Targeting is overrated! Reach as many people in the most cost-effective way possible
5. Brands grow by increasing both their physical and mental availability
Social media is full of so-called music marketing experts trying to sell courses to new and emerging audiences with the promise of developing super fans through email marketing. But rather than being led with romantic notions of 70s fan clubs, how about we look at the empirical evidence of marketing effectiveness?
This is the first myth that Sharp’s research bursts. His Double Jeopardy Law states that smaller brands (artists, in our context) not only attract fewer customers but also experience lower loyalty.
Quite simply, if you are promoting a new artist, focus your time and money on acquiring new customers, not trying to retain fans that won’t be loyal. You’ll never fix the leaking bucket!
Byron Sharp’s law of ‘Buyer Moderation’ finds a natural tendency for extreme consumer behaviour (both high and low) to regress toward the mean over time. Just because they are a super fan this year, doesn’t mean they will be a super fan next year.
Sharp’s data concludes that as a small brand (artist), it’s far easier to get someone new to buy your product once than to get the same person to buy it twice. This is because smaller brands (artists) have fewer loyal buyers (listeners) and are more likely to split their purchases (streams) among competitors.
Spotify data shows users listen to 30 to 100 times more individual tracks than artists each year. People are spreading their listening across a wider range of songs and artists. If you’ve ever been surprised by the 'Top' songs in your Spotify Wrapped, it might be because the difference between your top 5 and top 100 streamed songs is just a tiny number of plays.
If you grow the number of people that buy your brand, loyalty will come as a result
Back in the brand world, data from Coca-Cola, arguably the biggest FMCG brand ever, highlights the importance of reach and growth from light buyers.
Their data shows how the ‘average buyer’ is different from the ‘typical buyer’ because a few heavy users skewed the ‘average buyer’.
In reality, half of all Coke buyers, purchase only one or two cans or bottles per year. Very few buyers purchase around the ‘average’ of 12 times annually.
This isn’t just a quirk of Coca-Cola, it’s clear all brands have many light buyers who purchase infrequently. Despite occasional purchases, these buyers are so numerous that they significantly contribute to overall sales.
From Coca-Cola's perspective, a heavy buyer is defined as anyone who purchases three or more cans or bottles of Coke annually. Even for a large brand like Coca-Cola, the market is dominated by very light buyers.
What can artists learn from this? That increasing penetration is the key to growth.
Now let’s bring it back to music. What if we imagine Taylor Swift as the Coca-Cola of music? As a big music brand, she has undoubtedly attracted some loyal fans these ‘Swifties’ represent the heavy buyers, but just like Coca-Cola her phenomenal growth and success has ultimately been driven by increasing penetration among the long tail of light listeners.
Millions of Spotify users have listened to her music at least once in the last 12 months and it’s this incremental penetration that has been crucial to her growth.
Targeting is overrated! Reach as many people in the most cost-effective way possible
Taylor Swift’s success has not been driven by niche targeting, she’s become a mainstream star by reaching the widest possible audience.
This jibes well with Sharp's point - it proves the key to maximising devotion is broad reach to a mass audience. Precise audience targeting just limits your chances of finding your audience. Remember just because we can segment audiences with data, doesn’t mean we should.
While your music may exist in a niche, most audiences don’t. On average, Spotify users listen to around 55 genres of music, with some listening to as many as 174.[MIDiA Resarch].
The lesson for promoting new artists is simply to keep your audience as big and broad as possible, you really can’t afford to rule out possible audiences, especially at the start. So the next time you are promoting a social post or running an Instagram ad widen your audience beyond ‘fans of a similar sounding artist’.
Brands grow by increasing both their physical and mental availability
Quite a statement, but what do we mean by that? Physical availability refers to the ease with which a brand's products can be purchased by consumers whenever and wherever they are ready to buy. In the brand world, there are several key considerations.
1. Breadth of distribution: Ensuring products are stocked in as many retail locations as possible
2. Shelf placement: Being prominently displayed on the shelves, to catch the attention of shoppers
3. Stock levels: Ensuring the product is always available for purchase
4. Format and channels: Offering products in a variety of sizes both on and offline
This can equally be applied to music. As a promoter of music, it’s important to ask yourself; How can I make my music more physically or digitally available?
Breath of distribution: Is your music available on all key music streaming platforms, independent record shops or big stores? Will listeners be able to find you on the platforms they use or the stores they visit?
Shelf placement: How do you improve the prominence of your music by getting your music on a key playlist, or the front page of Spotify or YouTube? How do you appear at the end of the aisle or within a staff pick section in record shops?
Stock levels: How do you ensure your physical product is always in stock and conversely how do you create and leverage the perception of scarcity in digital to create demand?
Formats and channels: What can you sell at gigs or in your online store so it feels like there is something for everyone at a range of price points?
I once heard a story about an artist who sold framed record sleeves (containing no vinyl record) as she realised most fans were buying them to hang on their wall, not to play.
The key to physical availability is about making it easy to buy and removing purchase barriers and blockers. With music that starts by ensuring the links in your bios or on your website are working.
So, what about 'mental availability'? Brand awareness is knowing your name, mental availability is about thinking of your name in a purchase moment. The acid test is to go to Spotify and hover by the search bar - which artist name comes to mind first? This artist has mental availability, now how do you get some?
To enhance mental availability, Sharp concluded brands should focus on:
Building strong and distinctive brand assets: Elements like logos, colours, and slogans that are easily recognisable and consistently used.
Logos, colours and fonts equally play a key role in effective music marketing. While you can replace slogans with catchy lyrical hooks or riffs that stay in your head.
Creating and reinforcing associations with various buying moments: Ensuring the brand comes to mind in multiple contexts where a purchase decision might occur.
For musicians, this means attaching your music to moods or moments. The Christmas song is the ultimate example of this. When you think Christmas, you think The Pogues, or Mariah.
But equally, your music could be the ultimate Friday night going out anthem, or the ultimate chilled Sunday soundtrack. Give people entrance points and reasons to listen to your music.
Maintaining consistent and widespread advertising: Keeping the brand top-of-mind through regular and broad-reaching marketing efforts.
This is where social media comes into its own. Maintaining a consistent presence can mean regular new releases or regular social media posts but it doesn’t always need to be new content. Remember new followers find you every day, so resurfacing great content from your past can be just as powerful.
You also don’t need to be a slave to social media. Going away on tour or holiday? Why not set up an ad or promoted post to maintain momentum while you are away?
Sharp’s findings provide a ready-made blueprint for music marketers to follow. Ditch the targeting, focus on broad reach to find new listeners, loyalty will come automatically so don’t force it, show up consistently and remove the barriers by making it easy to find and listen to your music.
