5 ways to translate Byron Sharp to better socials
I like to describe myself as professionally born in the world of social and digital culture, but raised in the world of integrated marketing communications.
Another way of putting it is by describing it as the anatomy of a strategy organism, where my backbone is integrated but my muscles are social by design.
I get into weird analogies, so there’s two for you.
Anyway, 15+ years in agencies of all shapes will help expose you to a world of integration in ways that fundamentally changed how i see the role of brands.
But also, they changed how i see the world of social within the world of brands.
It’s my opinion that we need to design social comms to build brand equity, not just engagement, and in order to do that we need to understand what brand equity is, how you grow and measure it, and what are the other factors that we need to understand before understanding the factors that social can control.
So, having done my IPA Effectiveness Test in late 2023, i kept copious notes because i like notes and i always had a funny feeling i’d refer to them later.
That time is now, and the notes are these.
Below is a list of 5 things i’ve learned through my training as an effectiveness expert, with practical applications for how you can approach your job more effectively too, in a very stealable format so you can bookmark this for your own social and comms work.
I focused here on lessons from Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It isn’t an exhaustive list, it is literally 10% of my notes, but if there’s demand for this i will document the other stuff i have for future parts. Send me an email if you’d like me to do that!
1. The Law of Double Jeopardy
What it is:
A simple idea that says brands with a lower market share have fewer buyers, who also buy less frequently, and this is something that has been documented across categories and markets, so no, "your brand isn't different" (probably).
What to do with it:
Loyalty has its role, as does frequency of contact with customers (especially in the world of social, where more evidence from Byron Sharp and Karen Nelson Field suggests people who follow already buy from you), but brands grow through penetration.
That is, by targeting people who don’t buy very often, but targeting loads of them in one go.
This is how i’ve split in the past the role of organic vs paid, and i think still holds up well:
Organic used to be about how you use your existing customer base to grow earned media through interaction that signals to the algorithm you deserve more distribution, but increasingly and due to FYP-like feeds, we can reasonably conclude it’s more made up of light buyers (though the algorithmic nature means you can’t really conclude they are potential buyers of your brand, just general population, so there we go)
Paid is how you go after a more targeted section of light buyers through high reach comms that are not necessarily designed to be interacted with or shared, but have tighter roles around recognition, core messages or reasons to click or buy
I find this sort of language helps bridge the gap between social and non-social, so see how you go!
2. Physical availability
What it is:
The notion that brands need to be available in various facets to maximise the chances of being bought.
This is typically broken down as:
Mental availability (are you easy to think about in relation with a buying moment), and
Physical availability (are you easy to find in a buying moment, e.g. stores), though
People also talk about digital availability (are you easy to find online in a buying moment, e.g. search on the web, Amazon or an app store)
What to do with it:
Be clear with yourself where the contribution of communications really sat.
Most case studies will say things like “we did a campaign and sales went up by 30%”, but they often also ignore the fact that for example by investing in a campaign you might also have invested in greater distribution or a more modernised retail experience, so it couldn’t have just been the comms.
This is what happened with Sainsbury’s, who once experienced strong Christmas sales because they bought 12,000 tonnes of salt to put on their car parks to ensure snow did not restrict customer access.
It’s useful to understand where the sources of reputation or revenue come from, by for example having post purchase surveys, or occasional customer surveys, measuring where they remember hearing from you, or what drove them to buy, and seeing if social exposure is boosting the conversion of your physical or digital availability, instead of just claiming more reach is your end game.
It means more awkward measurement chats upfront, but it’s either this or awkward return on investment conversations in 12 months' time, and i know which level of awkward conversations i'd much rather have.
3. Mental availability
What it is:
Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t awareness, awareness is “do i know about you”.
Mental availability is “do i know about you and do i link you with the right things that will get me to want to choose you”, so yes it's a bit more complex. Think “airlines” (Virgin) vs “i need to get to Europe cheaply” (Ryanair). Awareness vs salience, in a nutshell.
To make it even more complex, the aim is to be mentally available in a way that fits the category (i understand what you’re selling), while standing out from competitors (it’s different enough from others).
Because it means the job is about more than slapping a logo upfront on your ad, which yes will drive awareness, but the next question is “awareness of what, or associations with which important things”.
This is where brand lift studies fall short, if we don’t examine them or corroborate with other sources to identify which equity we’re building.
What to do with it:
Be clear on what you’re looking for people to take out when they see your brand. Sure, Liquid Death has huge awareness, but more importantly they have a link to making sustainability feel hardcore, instead of just being a softy game. And i suspect over time we will see their retail distribution results yield big time.
When you think about your own brand comms on social, yes reacting to trends and whatnot will give you salience and cultural capital, but you need to balance this with understanding what people are taking out from your comms beyond knowing you exist and are cool (or trying to be).
When i worked on O2, we consistently did qual with people about our socials, to understand if:
They were entertaining
They changed how people felt about O2
People took out any key messages or associations
Impact and communication before persuasion (a la Dave Trott), except adapted for the world of social. Perfectly balanced(ish). As it should be.
4. Emotion, yeah?
What it is:
The idea that emotion sells more than rational arguments, and yes, so far, so logical, we've seen this evidence before. But the thing is, that emotion needs to be born out of something that is actually true about a) people, b) the product, or c) the company.
This is where lots of brands on social fall short, where they think the job is to entertain (entertainment makes us laugh, and laughing is emotional!), but they risk doing so without grounding it on something that feels true to them, which in turn reduces links with the right associations that get people to choose (AKA, Category Entry Points, a la Jenni Romaniuk).
As my pal Frederico Roberto (no relation) says, “emotion is the potion”. But i’d say the ingredients for the potion need to be born out of factual truth about the product, not fancy trends around purpose.
What to do with it:
By all means, argue for the importance of an entertainment-first approach, but do it in a way that feels grounded to stuff you can claim to be an advantage of choosing you.
What most people misunderstand about Ryanair’s early-2020s social media strategy is that their role on social wasn’t to grill their customers about random seat allocation or make fun of Scotland dropping out of the Euros because it was fun.
It was to do this in order to demonstrate that they’ll go to extreme lengths to ensure their flights are cheap, and therefore available for all. And if customers don’t get that, they can fly elsewhere.
See the difference?
5. Distinctive assets
What it is:
The idea that brands need to be correctly recognised in order to maximise mental availability, and the way you do this is by reinforcing or building what are called distinctive assets.
They include things like logos, colours, typography, characters, jingles, stuff like that.
I’ve asked around and a CMO anonymously told me they once did a campaign that had 95% exposure and less than 50% correct brand attribution, i.e., potential money down the drain. Mark Ritson has also claimed in one of his columns that the average is about 60%, so there's a pattern here. And it ain’t a pretty one.
My suspicion is that this is even worse in social, where people pretend that entertainment is more important than clear brand links, when the fact entertainment is crucial, yes, but in order to build brand links.
What to do with it:
Identify what you can credibly call a distinctive asset, and then explore how to use it in your comms without it feeling forceful. The obvious stuff here is logo everywhere, but that’s so basic and a potential turn off for many, especially in organic.
Instead, explore how your assets can be subversively introduced via colours in accessories, the clothes people wear, specific sounds, characters (hey Duolingo!), and so on.
It means doing some research, but it doesn’t have to be expensive – asking some real folks on WhatsApp for example is better than just assuming you know what will resonate! I helped build this product back at VCCP, and it saved our bacons countless times in campaign and content strategy for social and beyond.
So there you go, five foundational pieces of marketing effectiveness findings that will make you a better social pro. Or even if you’re not a social pro, it will help you better understand how to evaluate the contribution of social to the wider marketing mix.
We miss out on creating these false tribal wars between traditional and non traditional, especially because fundamentals are just that, core elements within which different specialisms can thrive.
