40 years
PrincipleBrand Strategy
Brands earn the right to playfully reinvent their distinctive assets only after roughly 40 years of consistent enforcement.
Distinctive brand assets earn the right to be played with only after decades of enforcement - '40 years of enforcement, then you can play': KFC's Colonel, Louis Vuitton x Murakami's neon monogram, Barilla's spaghetti fireworks. Playing before the codes are drilled just destroys them.
Source
Uncensored CMO: Byron Sharp vs Mark Ritson - 5 big marketing truths we agree on (2026)
Jon Evans (host); Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson
00:59:00, Mark Ritson
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StatOnly about 45% of marketers can correctly define penetration.PrincipleMarketing is shifting from the Kotlerian school to the Ehrenberg-Bass school, where mental availability makes up 70-80% of the brand job.Quote"Your job is to come to mind in buying situations." Not to be loved, not to have an image - to surface at category entry points.CaseBanks with 96% awareness still lose product lines because awareness hides category-entry-point gaps.Quote"Every advertiser and marketer should have a Post-it note on their desk saying: the consumer doesn't give a shit." (Sarah Carter, DDB) Consumers juggle hundreds of brands with a handful of free brain cells - your brand obsession is an exact inversion of their indifference.WarningMarketers systematically overestimate how distinctive their brand assets actually are to customers.PrincipleDistinctiveness plus relative differentiation (double-D) is achievable; true uniqueness rarely is.PrincipleMost successful product launches are unintentionally Me Too - distinctive enough beats different.PrincipleKit Kat and Volvo have each repeated a single positioning idea for roughly 40 years.Stat91% of marketers own promotion, but only 23% own product.StatThe 95/5 rule: at any moment, roughly 95% of category buyers are not in the market to buy.StatIn B2B pitches, about 80% of the buying decision is effectively made before the process starts.