How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know
A landmark work of marketing science that challenges decades of received wisdom — and offers evidence-based principles that every fundraiser and charity marketer should know.
How Brands Grow provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day. Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programmes really affect loyalty, it presents decades of research in a style written for professionals who want to grow their organisations. It is the first book to present these laws in context and to explore their meaning and application.
The most distinctive element of this book is that the laws presented are tried and tested; they have been found to hold across varied conditions, time periods and countries. This stands in stark contrast to much conventional marketing theory, which the evidence here suggests is far from soundly based.
For fundraisers and charity leaders, the implications are significant. The same patterns of buyer behaviour that apply to commercial brands apply equally to charities competing for attention and donations. Understanding how people really make decisions to give, and what actually drives growth in supporter bases, is essential reading for anyone serious about sustainable income growth.
About Byron Sharp
Professor Byron Sharp is the Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia — the world’s largest centre for research into marketing. The Institute’s fundamental research is used and financially supported by many of the world’s leading corporations, including Coca-Cola, Kraft, Kellogg’s, British Airways, Procter & Gamble and Mars. Professor Sharp has published over 100 academic papers and is on the editorial board of five journals.
Reviews
“A wonderful stimulant, a fascinating corrective to our tendency to follow fashion and let received wisdom go unchallenged.”
MarketingWeek
“Highly practical … includes many groundbreaking ideas.”
CHOICE
“Marketers need to move beyond the psycho-babble and read this book … or be left hopelessly behind.”
Joseph Tripodi, Chief Marketing Officer, The Coca-Cola Company
“Until every marketer applies these learnings, there will be a competitive advantage for those who do.”
Mitch Barnes, The Nielsen Company
“A scientific journey that reveals and explains with great rigour the Laws of Growth.”
Bruce McColl, Chief Marketing Officer, Mars Incorporated
“This book should be required reading on any marketing course.”
Colin McDonald, author of Tracking Advertising & Monitoring Brands
Voted AdAge’s Most-Recommended Marketing Book of the Summer 2013.
- Read How Brands Grow Part 2 (December 2021)
