A memory problem, not a message problem. The question is not whether people like the brand but whether it is retrieved at the moment of buying, and whether anything about it is recognisable without the logo.
7 tools across 4 of the 9 questions
The set of situations, needs and moments in which a buyer thinks of a category — the cues a brand must be linked to in memory to be considered at all.
Breaks when Useless when the category does not yet exist — a genuinely new product has no moment to be recalled in, and must build one before this tool has anything to work on.
Understand the marketA two-factor account of brand growth: the probability of being noticed or recalled in a buying situation, and the ease of buying once you are.
Breaks when Where distribution is fixed and single-channel, the second term carries no information and everything collapses into the first.
Understand the marketNon-name brand elements — colours, characters, sounds, shapes — that trigger the brand in memory, scored on fame and uniqueness.
Breaks when A new brand has no assets to score — investment first, measurement much later. And changing an asset resets everything accumulated in it.
Say somethingA character, format or structure reused across successive campaigns so that recognition accumulates instead of resetting each time.
Breaks when Nothing compounds for a brand that repositions or changes agency often. Without accumulation the device is just a mascot.
Say somethingA brand's share of category-related search volume, used as a fast and free leading indicator of market share.
Breaks when It is a proxy, and proxies drift from what they proxy. Search volume rises with newsworthiness as well as with demand, so a crisis and a successful campaign look the same. In categories where buying does not involve search, or where the brand name is also an ordinary word, the signal is mostly noise. And because it is cheap to move — brand-name bidding, PR spikes — it degrades the moment it becomes a target, which is the standard Goodhart path.
MeasureA budget split, roughly 60% to broad-reach brand building and 40% to short-term activation, associated with the strongest long-term business effect.
Breaks when The ratio moves by category — the B2B figure is about 46/54, drawn from fewer than 50 cases, and the authors themselves call it tentative and warn against following it precisely. The database skews to large, mature, well-funded brands; a product starting from zero is not in it.
Allocate budgetRepeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it, with no argument, no reward and no recall required.
Breaks when The curve turns over. A meta-analysis of 268 curve estimates from 81 articles finds the effect is inverted-U shaped — liking rises with exposure and then falls — so the schedule that built preference destroys it if it keeps running unchanged. The effect is also strongest where the exposure is not consciously recognised, which means the attention an ad wins can cost it the mechanism it was relying on.
Say something