What you need to know:

• Mark Ritson thinks the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is wrong in dismissing brand differentiation in favour of distinctiveness. Instead, marketers need both in order to grow faster.
• Ritson applauds Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow for cutting through marketing “bullshit”. But he suggests the Institute may be being swayed by “dogma” and a commercial agenda.
• Per Ritson: “This isn't science. This is them replacing one concept with another so they can dominate client concepts – something I have no problem with. But don't call it science, call it what it really is: consulting, dogma, ideology.”
• Marketers aiming to nail differentiation must wield the knife to their brand positioning slide decks, the virtual professor told ADMA’s Global Forum.
• They need one concept and “two, maybe three” brand attributes, to create a brand position that fits onto a single slide.
• Then they need to go hard across as many channels as possible for as long as possible, CX and products included – for years – before changing anything.
• Too many marketers have pulled out before their target has even seen their campaign, per Ritson – and that’s if marketers actually know their target in the first place. Evidence from the Better Briefs Project suggest most don't.
• But not Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill. “She’s a genius,” per Ritson. Why? Because her follow up to this year’s campaign… is the same campaign.

Distinctiveness alone is not enough

There’s a lot written about distinctiveness versus differentiation, most of it “moronic”, per Ritson. “You can be greedy and have both,” he told ADMA’s world forum. “You need both.”

Distinctiveness is well laid out by Ehrenberg-Bass: A brand that looks like itself coming to mind in buying situations.

“It’s super important, a brilliant concept and we should all be aiming for it,” said Ritson. “It’s probably more important than differentiation in most cases. But don’t give up on differentiation. Distinctiveness alone is not enough.”

While nothing is truly unique, the problem for most brands is that they are doing relative differentiation all wrong, per Ritson, because positioning in the main “has become a pointless, indulgent, stupid process; you have too much ... it’s broken.”

Hence, after nine months working on differentiation research, Ritson said he has reached a clear conclusion: “You can have differentiation, but you have to tighten your shit up and stop having lots of slides for your positioning.

“You have too many concepts. Call it brand positioning, brand attributes, brand ladder, brand purpose, it doesn't matter. But if you have more than one concept, it's already dead,” per Ritson.

“Even if you have one concept, you have too many attributes. You’ve maybe got room for three if you want to try and get relative differentiation. [But if] you have 47 attributes in your brand positioning deck, that's probably 45 too many. And it's not like the other two have a chance. They all die.

“Choose one, two, three things and focus on it for a long time – and you can have differentiation that drives a fuckload of success, both growth and pricing sensitivity.”

Back to basics

Getting to those three things requires marketers to go back to basics. Per his research with the Better Briefs Project, two in three marketers don’t actually know who their target is. That’s “job number one”, said Ritson, then work out the three attributes to “drop into their head”.

“Three things. That’s better than any concept sold to you by any agency or consulting firm in the history of marketing,” said Ritson. If it’s more than a page, forget it: “It’s too much and it takes a proper woman or proper man with training and confidence to position a brand on three things, rather than on a slide deck with 75 slides and a big picture of Nelson Mandela.”

How brands grow more?

Ehrenberg-Bass and Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow was “an important antidote” to petabytes of marketing gobbledygook, per Ritson. But he thinks the Institute and Sharp are wrong to dismiss differentiation.

“How Brands Grow came out of left field, and [Sharp] got rid of all this bullshit. The bad news is they're just as bad as everybody else,” said Ritson. “The front of the book [states] ‘rather than striving for meaningful perceived differentiation, marketers should seek meaningless distinctiveness. Branding lasts, differentiation doesn’t’. This is also bullshit. It's naughty bullshit. And my problem as usual with Ehrenberg-Bass is that they are right but they go too far: ‘Past worldview: positioning. New worldview is all about salience and distinctiveness’. They claim to be scientists at Ehrenberg-Bass – but there's a whiff of aftershave behind the white coat; commercial driving intent,” he added.

“This isn't science. This is them replacing one concept with another so they can dominate client concepts – something I have no problem with. But don't call it science, call it what it really is: consulting, dogma, ideology.”

Do less, larger

Once marketers have found their attributes, “a couple of things that you can deliver relatively better than the competitors, you’re going to win,” per Ritson. But only if they stick to them and go as broad as possible.

“Say fewer things in your execution. Hammer them all the time; say them more often with more media. You want a bit of Meta, TV, YouTube – more media [equals] synergy effects. Say them with 60 per cent of your budget to build your brand; say them with better creative; say them across more than advertising – which is a relatively weak touchpoint – so say them through service, through product, through everything else.”

Don’t change a thing

Crucially, per Ritson, brands need to hammer those messages much, much longer.

“I’m talking about years – there is no such thing as wear-out. If you have a good campaign and a good strategy there's no reason it shouldn't be running for five years other than your impatience and desire to make more useless shit. Most of you are pulling out before most of your target market have even seen them.”

He gave Tourism Australia CMO Susan Coghill a wrap for doing just that.

“She’s a genius. Guess what her follow up to the big animated kangaroo is next year? The same fucking thing, because she knows what the fuck she is doing.

“So say them with distinctiveness … this isn’t a battle between differentiation and distinctiveness. This is two sciences working together to build you brand and grow your market,” said Ritson.

“Your challenge is to combine them together. Your brand position: singular; tight; relative; important; unchanging. Your brand codes or distinctive brand assets, a handful: Unique; famous; unchanging  – just as Jenni Romuniak [Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s International Director] teaches you how to do it. You play with them once they're 40 years old – once you are Vegemite you can do that kind of thing.

“And here's the big challenge: On a single page of paper. The minute you go to slide two on your positioning deck, you've lost it, you fail … Do less to achieve more,” said Ritson.

“It’s not an impossible mission. You don’t need to trade off differentiation and distinctiveness. You can have both – and you need both – to be successful.”