Byron Sharp is right: chasing fleeting attention is a waste of money
Professor Byron Sharp isn’t “smashing” attention metrics. He’s urging marketers to stop misusing them.
At Adelaide our inspiration to create evidence-based metrics to evaluate the quality of media came from the work of Byron Sharp, so much so that we named our company after the hometown of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. If there’s one thing we have learned about the Sharp doctrine, it’s the importance of understanding the nuances of Professor Sharp’s beliefs and perspectives.
“Want Loyalty? Get a dog,” a heavily cited quote from Sharp’s must-read How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, has been oversimplified and misinterpreted by many to mean, “Loyalty programs are a waste of money.” In reality, Sharp is suggesting that advertisers don’t overinvest in loyalty programs at the expense of finding new customers.
In Sharp’s most recent talk at the Mi3-LinkedIn B2B Next Summit, we’ve seen a similar misconception play out. Without considering the nuances of his argument, it appears he is dissuading marketers from using attention metrics. As quoted in Mi3’s article, Sharp says that “paying more for more than fleeting attention is a waste of money.”
Read full article in The Media Leader.
