He was a mathematical economist, which Byron Sharp and his colleagues would presumably approve of. He was a prolific American statistician and economist affiliated with Stanford University, Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of my favorite economists of all time is Harold Hotelling. So, perhaps it might be helpful to provide a perspective based on economic history. Well… I work in marketing, and I studied economics. “Perhaps too many marketers learned their economic history in art school?”
What’s Byron Sharp’s take on all of this? So, it seems odd to me that, despite their evident reverence for Byron Sharp and his views on branding, marketers persist in trying to combine his evidence-based laws with the more touchy-feely (or even ‘moronic’) concept of brand purpose. More recently, Byron Sharp told Campaign Magazine that “as marketers, particularly in this area of brand purpose, we are getting very arrogant”, citing the example of marketers who felt moved to acknowledge the Covid crisis in their advertising as a particularly hubristic waste of money. “They should be standing up proudly for the astonishing amount of choice that the modern market economy (yes, that’s capitalism) delivers. His apparent belief is that marketers who pursue a purpose, as well as profit, are in some way ashamed of capitalism, when they should be its most vocal supporters: In a 2017 blog on why marketers aren’t respected, he echoed Mark Ritson’s description of brand purpose as ‘moronic’ and questioned the ethicality of spending shareholders’ money on ‘your favorite cause’. One reason I find this curious is that Byron Sharp has been extremely vocal in his derision of brand purpose. The handbooks have strikingly similar titles (“The scientific marketing approach”) and all four explicitly reference Bryon Sharp’s book and its laws.Ĭuriously, they also all include brand purpose, with the aim of establishing an approach to brand building that is simultaneously scientific and socially aware. In the past two months alone, I have been provided with the marketing handbooks of four clients (all global brand owners, all likely to be in your fridge, or store cupboard, or drinks cabinet). It’s been over a decade since Byron Sharp and his colleagues at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute published How Brands Grow and the popularity of his laws of growth seems as astronomical as ever. Before I found out about the Lindy Effect, I assumed that ideas – particularly ideas in the field of marketing – had a finite and limited shelf life.
And if it survives a further ten years, then it will be expected to be in print for another fifty years after that. So, if a book has been in print for forty years, it can expect to be in print for another forty. According to Nassim Taleb’s ‘Lindy Effect’, every year an idea passes without extinction doubles its additional life expectancy.
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