Why brands matter more than customers’ enthusiasm
Dave Winterlich, chief strategy office at Dentsu, meets Prof Byron Sharp, author of game-changing industry title, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know
Despite how excited media practitioners get about their field, most of that excitement barely ripples outside the industry pond. Most things that excite agency folk barely leave a mark on the consciousness of the wider business community.
But every now and then something comes along that seems to capture that community’s collective imagination.
Twelve years ago, in March 2010, Prof Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, published what he believed would be little more than a research book for existing clients of Ehrenberg-Bass, a text to furnish them with evidence-based marketing when they spoke to their CEOs and CFOs.
The book was How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know and had an initial print run of just 1,000 copies, which sold out in a day. The title went on to be one of the seminal marketing tomes of the last 20 years.
Even in Ireland it seemed that everyone in the industry had a copy in their laptop bag. More than a decade on from its publication, Prof Sharp discusses the impact the book had, whether the findings are still relevant in our fast-moving world and what his general take on marketing is.
Was he at all surprised at the success of the book? It was the institute’s advisory board that asked him to write it. As an academic title it had to be a hardback and with a decent publisher like Oxford University Press. “I never thought it would sell so well. I always thought it would be around for a while so I’m very pleased, it had a big impact, yes,” he says.
Read the full article in The Irish Times.
