What Marketing Science Says About Growing a Brand | Professor Byron Sharp (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute)

**Tim Soulo** (0:00)
Marketing funnels are nonsense. Positioning and differentiation don't matter. And buyer personas are a waste of time. These are not my hot takes. They come from decades of research by my guest, Professor Byron Sharp, who's the director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at Adelaide University, South Australia. He's the author of How Brands Grow, a book that I'm holding in my hands right now. And it's probably the most influential book on branding, where every claim is backed by real data.
And today I'm going to pick his brain on everything I've always wanted to know about branding, especially how the principles from his book apply to software companies like ours. Professor Byron, welcome to Ahrefs Podcast.

**Byron Sharp** (0:41)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for that introduction. It's very nice.

**Tim Soulo** (0:44)
So where I want to begin is to talk about the very, very fundamentals and specifically, like what is a brand? How do you define what a brand is? How do you know you have one? And what is the purpose?

**Byron Sharp** (1:00)
If people don't know what they're buying, they can't be loyal, they can't repurchase. So we talk about branding as just looking like you, as in not looking like someone else, right? So someone can go, oh, yeah, I like that. I'll buy that one again. Well, this restaurant's good. Yeah, I'll buy that. And so it's true then that there are a lot of, if you go into a supermarket, even in categories that you buy and you might be familiar with, there are a lot of brands that sort of aren't brands in the sense that, in Australia, we have, the classic is Italian tin tomatoes.
Every supermarket sells usually several brands of Italian tin tomatoes. And if you ask most people, what do they buy? They go, I buy the Italian tin tomato. And they have no idea, right? You know, and so I would say that's not a brand in it. For a lot of consumers, it's just the category and the supermarket swaps one out, puts another one in. They don't even notice. So a brand is something that people would notice. So people might think, I'm very happy buying Coke or Pepsi.
They're both colors, they're both nice, but they don't get them confused. They know that they've got a Coke in their hand or a Pepsi in their hand. They are different brands.

**Tim Soulo** (2:30)
I have this story in my head about the purpose and why we need brands. I didn't remember where it came from, so when I was preparing for this interview, I tried to use AI to look up the origin. The story goes like this.
If there's a shop in some village and they sell bags of sugar, and those bags of sugar are produced by from different sources, they come from different places, and they are not labeled with anything. So there's no brand, nothing. They're just like sugar, one kg or something. And you buy a bag from a random place, a random bag, and it's bad. And then next day you come, you buy another bag and it's good. And without branding, there is no way to differentiate it.

**Byron Sharp** (3:17)
No, no. The brand becomes just the store, right? Sugar from so-and-so's.

**Tim Soulo** (3:23)
No, no, no, no. But the store is sourcing sugar from different places, but you cannot differentiate which is which. So this story seems to be coming from the Simsta Labs skin in the game, but do you agree with this kind of definition of why brands matter?

**Byron Sharp** (3:39)
There is a really interesting story about brands in the Soviet Union, where they didn't have brands, right? You know, the state just made it. And people live like, so if you're lucky enough to buy a television set in the Soviet Union, people learned that there was some factories that produce good TVs and some that produced rubbish. And so they learned from the serial number on the back of the TV. And so the serial numbers on the back of the TV became the brands.

**Tim Soulo** (4:13)
Yeah.

**Byron Sharp** (4:14)
Yeah. That's a lovely story. It's like, well, it reminds you that consumers get value from a brand, like being able to distinguish differences in quality. Now, some people would say, Oh, but in a modern consumer society, products are tested and you don't get huge sugar. It's good whether you buy it from Aldi or whatever.

**Tim Soulo** (4:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

**Byron Sharp** (4:39)
But brands still form a useful purpose for people in that they speed up their shopping. It's like, I've been told to get sugar. Where's our sugar? Oh yeah, there it is. What one's that? Well, it's blue.