Why your Marketing Strategy needs an Upgrade in 2025

Marketing myths busted: Why your strategy needs an upgrade in 2025

?

Marketers must challenge biases, embrace data-driven insights, and rewrite the rules to drive growth in a world where consumer behavior defies logic. Experts emphasize the urgent need for a marketing playbook reset in 2025.

?Binit Kumar, Evidence Based Marketer

?As we usher in 2025, brands are becoming more competitive with new launches, changing consumer preferences, and new technologies questioning their marketing playbook. Spends are being scrutinized, and marketers are looking for laws, empirical science, & research to be able to justify & grow their brand more profitably. Most importantly, to justify their existence.

There are also a lot of biases and reservations among the marketing fraternity about challenging the status quo, the thought process that made brands over the years. The uncertainty around if the research is relevant for your country, your brand, or your consumer, coupled with top-line and bottom-line pressure, as human beings, as meek marketers, we surrender to the most travelled path.

In order to be more effective than an anecdotal marketer, the article lists seven such biases, along with thoughts from leading practitioners and researchers across the world.

1) 'Changing attitude' is a marketer’s problem and not a marketing problem

Byron Sharp, director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, believes the worst mistakes made by marketers are simply due to not knowing about the things we have discovered about buying behavior and brand performance. He cites an example, which he calls “marketing’s attitude problem”, which is the tendency to turn any problem into one that requires changing consumers’ beliefs and attitudes.

So if people aren’t recycling their rubbish, we think we have to make them care more about the environment and convince them that landfill is evil. If not enough people are buying our brand, then we need to convince them our brand is right for their needs and better than all alternatives.?Naturally, this leads to persuasive style advertising.

But before that, it fuels much analysis (paralysis?) of brand positioning, brand personality, consumer motivations, brand DNA, choice modelling, and so on. Marketers worry about what media to use, not in terms of who it will reach and when, but whether or not it will match the brand’s personality.

They miss important opportunities like making their brand easier to see on the shelf. A large industry feeds off this misplaced idea that attitude is what is holding back sales; if we just crack the special code and convince people we are best for them, then the sales will come flooding in. It’s easy to get things wrong when you are (even subconsciously) operating on the wrong assumptions about the world.

2) Right message + right person + right time will give right results

Nancy Harhut, Author, Using Behavioral Science in Marketing & Chief Creative Officer, HBT Marketing, says this is predicated on the belief that people make well-thought-out, well-considered decisions, that they absorb the information we send out, weigh the pros and cons, and come to the logical conclusion that they should do what we ask.

However, that is not how things work. Humans are hardwired to conserve mental energy, and as a result, people often rely on decision-making shortcuts—certain automatic, reflexive behaviors. Behavioral science research indicates that up to 95% of purchase decision-making takes place in the subconscious mind. Marketers need to understand this, as well as how to trigger these decision defaults, to increase engagement and response.?

3) Emotion and drama are all that matter

Phil Barden, managing director-UK, Decode, notes that communication that evokes an emotional response helps us to process, remember, and share the ad. However, why do some emotionally charged advertisements succeed while others fail? To answer this question, he cites renowned psychologist Professor Roy Baumeister, who says the scientific literature almost never indicates a causal relationship between emotion and behavior, except in extreme cases.

Professor Baumeister states that “emotion is stimulated by actions and outcomes” and, in another paper, that “emotions [are] a feedback system whose influence on behavior is typically indirect [by] providing feedback and stimulating retrospective appraisal of actions [to] alter guidelines for future behavior”.

Emotions are a result of our actions—not the other way around! They provide feedback on whether we are on the right track or not. Behavior in general, and consumer behavior in particular, is ‘goal-directed behavior’—we purchase brands and products to achieve the desired state, goals, needs or jobs to be done. It is motivation that actually determines what we purchase.

Science clearly demonstrates that motivation acts as a gatekeeper between an emotional advertisement and actual brand choice. Motivation, not the emotional response while watching the ad, is what makes people do something—and motivation is very different from emotion.

Motivation to buy a product develops if the ad stages the product as an effective means to get a ‘job’ done. A job can be functional and/or psychological or social. The desire to change our mood can also be a job that products help to accomplish.?

4) 'Brand love': All we need is our tribe

Ethan Decker, an expert on Applied Marketing Science, cautions that a long-standing and dangerously wrong myth is that all your brand needs is a small group of passionate fans or fanatics, and so you should put your effort into delighting that small group of future passionate, fanatical loyalists. We look up to brands such as Harley Davidson, Supreme, Tesla, Canada Goose, or even Apple as examples of these 'passion brands'—even though some of them are enormous companies with vast customer bases.

And while brands like these do indeed have some passionate and outspoken fans, none of them are sustained on a diet solely of fanatics. They all survive—and thrive—via a large and quiet majority of customers who are happy to buy the thing and then never say another word about it. And in fact, many never come back to buy again.

Do people need to like your product or service? Absolutely. But do they need to love it to come back for more? No. And do many people buy a product or service once or twice and never again? All. The. Time. Light buyers matter, sometimes supremely. So stop believing that your brand will thrive via the love and loyalty of a small, passionate fan base. And start embracing the large and silent majority who buy you regularly, or sometimes, or seldom.

5) Brands have a price problem. Fix price and unlock growth

Richard Bordenave, chief behavior officer, PRS IN VIVO, points out that what behavioral science tells us is that value is not about monetary price only but about what consumers are ready to trade to be able to buy one brand instead of an alternative, including effort or time.

Price perception itself can be influenced by numerous factors that can alleviate the pain of paying, like psychological price points, framing, or scarcity. Value is not about the price tag or product features only, but it is anchored in a situation. For example, why are you happy to pay for a cold bottle of beer on the beach of a fancy hotel at twice the price of a beer from the supermarket? Because it seems fair to pay more when it is delivered on a fancy hotel’s beach.

These situational and transactional factors can look more difficult to grasp for marketers, as they have less control over choice variables, but they remain critical to understand and factor in for any plans of brand restage.

A healthy value equation is one that triggers purchase behavior of a particular brand in a category when people consider that the anticipated reward is worth their relative investment (compared to alternatives). One rule of thumb when touching one aspect of the value equation is to compensate on others, managing the two sides of the equation. When impacting the cost reduction formula or changing the format, beware of not damaging the experience compared to the competition.

If your product now under-delivers on key JTBD, you are putting your entire business at risk, i.e., the main reason people buy the category.

6) Advertising is predictable and will trigger the purchase

Faris Yakob, founder of Genius Steals, notes that if creative work was deterministically predictable, then movie studios would only release hits. Advertising is a complex system that various vested parties have tried to position as linear causality—but it’s not.

The multiplicity of factors surrounding any individual purchase decision is impossible to enumerate. Instead we tend to look at recent interventions as primary triggers of buying behavior, but they can only work if the person is in-market and the product is relevant to their needs. Therefore, this inverted temporal discounting overweighs the impact of the intervention and is inherently misleading, which is what creates the performance plateau.

Advertising almost always ‘works’ to create some positive effect for a marketer as a function of media spend, but there is significant upside potential. Multiple profitability studies show that the creative that works best can provide a 10x multiplier on efficacy, which is a variance of one order of magnitude. That’s massive and creates inherent problems in predicting returns. Creative testing, whatever technology it uses, observes patterns but does not provide specific recipes, more broad combinations of sugar, salt, and fat (attention, emotion, and assets).

7) Singular messaging is key for long-term brand building

The genesis of this thought process is from the school of 'segmentation, targeting, and positioning' marketing university. Identify a segment, find strong RTB, and communicate it consistently to keep driving trials and building a loyal fan base.

In research this hardly holds true; consumers are a homogenous set, have a repertoire of brands, have very similar satisfaction scores across brands, and they hardly recall RTB. If this holds true, then 'what evokes your brand' becomes more important than 'what your brand evokes'.

Breakfast on an occasion can evoke Kelloggs, Aloo Paratha, or Maggi depending on the context of 'feeling healthy, on a trip, no time to cook'. Thus it is imperative for brands to create wider and fresher networks so that brands get evoked in various buying situations among all category buyers. Understanding category entry points for your brands will be the North Star for marketers in 2025.

In order to refresh memory structures, brands need to focus on representation and resonance. This is being done today in India with cultural insights around regional festivals and cricket. They both are very integral parts of our social milieu. Brands that come with products and communication to represent the segment create more resonance and attention from them.

Final 2 cents on Marketing KPIs around CEPs :

Market Share: HHP & Buying Rate (Volume * Occasions) is actually a sales metric (physical availability) that is presumed to be a KPI of the marketing team. Prof. Jenni Romaniuk has instead suggested a framework of mental availability:

1. Mental market share - This is the brand’s share of CEP-Brand linkages in the category = (n linkages for a brand) / (total linkages for all brands across all CEPs).

2. Mental penetration - This measures if the brand is present in memory, such that it has any chance of being retrieved = (n category buyers with linkages for a brand) / (total sample size).

3. Network size - This is the measure of how wide the memory network is, amongst those with mental penetration = (n linkages for a brand) / (n category buyers with linkages for the brand).?

?

?

?

?

?

?