For years marketing has been debating two views of how brands grow.
One comes from Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The other from the brand strategy tradition associated with Kotler, Keller, and Aaker, and to a minor extent, yours truly.
The debate often becomes polarized. But the difference may actually be simpler.
Think of biology vs. medicine.
Biologists study populations. They look for statistical regularities across thousands of organisms.
Doctors treat individual patients. They ask: how does this organism become healthy?
Both are valid. They simply operate at different levels.
Marketing has the same distinction.
Ehrenberg-Bass studies population-level behavior — large datasets of buyers across many brands and categories, mostly based on consumer panels from retailers. It reveals important regularities in how markets behave.
Marketing and brand strategy focuses on firm-level advantage — how a particular company shapes demand, builds meaning, and creates willingness to pay. Evidence is many empirical studies from a large number of scholars and experiences in building brands by practitioners.
Population patterns describe what tends to happen in the categories studied in general.
Strategy addresses a different question: what should we do?
The real lesson is not that one perspective replaces the other. Marketing needs both.
Just as medicine depends on biology to understand how the human body works, marketers and academics need both perspectives to understand how brands grow and how strong brands are built, and how to build brand equity that lasts.
To discuss how these insights apply to your organization, get in touch with our team.