Branding Beyond Ehrenberg-Bass
A Chapter of the upcoming book "WHY Brands Grow"
The conventional understanding of branding starts with targeting: to find a target group that has a higher potential to buy our products. One way is to ask customers what they most care about and then select those who want things which the brand can serve well. The approach may also consider the customers’ ability to afford the product.
While all this sound very logical it has major flaws: It assumes two things that probably falls flat. The first is the idea of targeting itself. It assumes that focused communication on the target audience will provide a higher ROI. This assumption is nearly ever tested. In case the target group can be addressed surgically (which is hardly the case) the cost of communication is typically higher as well, because competition may be after this group too. Will the increased impact overcompensate the higher costs?
Professionals typically have an overly simplistic view on the customers. They believe a certain cohort prefers brand X and another type of human brand Y. Evidence however shows consistently that consumers are inherently polygamic. The bulk of brand preference is formed after purchase not before. Even Apple users (often referred to as fans) show similar switching behaviors as Android or Windows customers. If you locked on a platform, your are locked.
Further targeting naturally reduces the addressed market size and typically focuses on heavy category buyers. One statistic sets all this in an interesting perspective: According to research of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute does Coca-Cola sells 50% of its volume to consumers who at most drink 3 cola bottles or cans a year. This statistic is true for any brand who addresses the total category. By targeting the frequent buyers, you have already deselected 50% of the market (which may be cheaper to target).
The second step of the conventional understanding of branding is then to position the brand in the market considering the target group. Typically brands measure brand functional attributes like reliable, precise, fast, scalable, ease of use, convenience, innovative, affordable, environmentally friendly or appeal.
The idea is that certain properties are most important to the audience and here is where it might be a good idea to be perceived as the best choice.
While again this sounds straight forward, it sits again on an assumption that is hardly met: The assumption that human performs a rational value assessment of products and then rationally decide for the best option.
I learned about the uselessness of value analysis already when I learned it in university. Together with fellow students we applied it to select a club for Saturday night. We rated and weighed criteria like music, girls and price and computed an overall score. Did we opt for the winner? No, we clearly went with our intuition to choose a club with mediocre scores. We suddenly just “knew” it was the right choice.
The implicit choice formula is unknown to consumers. It takes advanced research to really understand them.
The Alternative: Ehrenberg-Bass Model:
The Ehrenberg-Bass model offers an opposite model to conventional persuasion-based marketing. It assumes that customers buy categories not products. Consumers perceive products and brands in those categories to be practically similar and equally viable for the job to be done.
Consumers now choose the product that they recognize and that feels most familiar. Therefore, a product is not purchased because it is different and more aligned to customers’ preferences, but because it is distinct. Being distinct makes it easier to remember and to build trust. This is in sync with the findings of neuroscience, that decisions are located in the subconscious System 1.
This distinctiveness can be fueled by anything that is perceived about the brand and product. Here is a list starting with things that influence distinctiveness the most – starting from strongest to weakest
1. Color - The fastest and strongest distinctive cue. Works pre-consciously require no attention or literacy and is remembered even without brand name exposure.
2. Logo / Symbol / Shape: Recognizable marks, icons, and shapes that trigger brand recognition instantly.
3. Name: Short, unique, easy-to-pronounce names create strong memory structures.
4. Typography & Visual Style: Fonts, layouts, graphic systems, and visual “grammar” that signal the brand before any message is processed.
5. Packaging / Product Form: Physical appearance, structure, or interface design (incl. UI patterns in digital products).
6. Sound & Sonic Assets: Jingles, tones, voices, audio logos — powerful but underused distinctive assets.
7. Language & Tone of Voice: Choice of words, sentence structure, rhythm, humor, or authority.
8. Price Signals: Not the price itself, but what it communicates (premium, mass, disruptive).
9. Usage Contexts & Availability: Where and when the brand is seen or used (mental and physical availability).
10. Brand Story & Meaning: Narratives, values, purpose — influential after recognition is established.
11. Social Signals: Who uses it, who endorses it, cultural associations.
12. Functional Attributes & Features: Specifications, ingredients, performance claims — usually weak drivers of distinctiveness unless extreme or patented.
The task of branding - according to this model- is to build mental availability by increasing perceived distinctiveness in consumers’ intuitive minds. To do that you need to craft distinctive assets and let consumers perceive them. The more distinct the assets and the more frequent exposure the stronger the brand’s mental structures in customers’ brains.
The use of this is that when consumers see a shelf with 10 products, they will focus on those with highest mental availability. Those products feel most trusted (familiar) and capable for the “job to be done”.
But the buying journey does not always start with a consumer standing in front of a shelf. Often it starts with a need that pops up:
You are driving a car. It’s 8 am. You are feeling hungry. This implicit goal will direct your perception. Among the hundreds of stimuli that pass by on the highways, you will realize those that are strongly associated with breakfast, not food perse. When McDonalds now started to communicate Breakfast as an association anker sales increased. Not just because they offered an omelet burger but because they became a “breakfast option”
The Ehrenberg-Bass institute named these situations “Category Entry Points”. Situations and contexts in which a need appears that a category can serve. In those situations it’s not enough to be distinct. Your brand needs to be associated with this Category Entry Point. Again, the thinking here is 100% implicit – processes in System 1.
Finally, Ehrenberg-Bass institute introduces the concept of physical availability. If your product is not on the shelf, you will not be chosen. If McDonalds doesn’t have restaurants beside the highways, chances are low, hungry drivers will spot them as an option.
But the concept of physical availability needs to be understood in a broader sense. If your product is hidden on the shelf far from eye level it is harder to find it. Physical availability is lower. The mantra is: make your product easy to buy. Human brains are lazy. Any operation needs to promise a reward that is high enough. Otherwise, customers go for the easy way.
An Advanced Model of Branding
The model of Ehrenberg-Bass now correspond well to the modern discoveries of Neuroscience on how the brain works. We are well advised to take this as a baseline for developing an advanced model of branding.
But we need an advanced model because even the Ehrenberg-Bass model has limits, many limitations:
1. Objective dichotomy categories vs. subjective and granularity of categories: Who defines what a category is? Is it e.g. “beer”, is it “lager vs. white vs Pils …” or is “Corona-like beer” also a category? It is the latter! Categories are a real thing, but they are built inside customers’ brains, and it may happen that different people form different categories and different nuanced category trees.
2. From Category Entry Points (CEP) to Implicit Goal Associations (IGA): If the category the product belongs alters, it might be wise to broaden the concept of CEP. An alternative way is to start where everything begins: the want and the implicit goal of a human is pursuing. If we can associate the brand with the important wants and goals humans have and the brand can fulfill, then -every time a want is active- our brand may come to mind. It does not need a category definition for that.
3. Exclusion of system 2: The EB model underestimates high-engagement categories such as luxury, health, and belief-driven categories. Buying decisions might be implicit, but depending on the category the rational mind or the psyche has a more dominant influence. It does not decide but it may cause important implicit beliefs.
4. One dimensionality of mental structures: with EB it’s all about mental memory structure. No matter what, it is all about impression not the quality of it. Evidence however shows that perception can lead to negative outcomes when associated with negative contexts or emotions. In touchpoint modeling we see that one third of touchpoints have negative impacts. Seeing a JustEat car is positive while seeing a JustEat bicycle driver is negative. According to EB this could not be the case. Any impression should form a memory structure. But the truth is that the quality of the impression counts big times.
5. Innovation: According to EB, innovation means inventing a new category. A category is a set of features that serves certain needs like no other category. EB, however, has no model on the use of features to create value. EB is mostly descriptive and only advises brands to build distinctiveness and build mental availability by building reach advertising and broad physical availability by being easy to buy. That is it. EB does not tell how to grow. It tells you what not to do to not stagnate.
EB (Ehrenberg-Bass) is a branding concept that excludes meaning from branding. The category inherits the meaning not the brand or product. Like the mere exposure effect of sponsorship, it doesn’t matter what this Coca Cola logo means. Knowing it makes it feel trusted. While this is a proven strategy, it’s not the full story.
It might explain a lot a variance in descriptive aggregate studies but is a dichotomic overly simplistic model of the brain. Common sense tells everyone who has access to it: “why people buy” is more complex than this.
Depending on the implicit needs, they choose different products from same category.
Better Branding means moving beyond persuasion, targeting myths, and one-dimensional distinctiveness toward a model that reflects how people actually choose.
Brands do not grow because they are the “best” for a narrowly defined audience, nor because they are merely seen often. They grow when they become mentally available for the right human goals, distinct enough to be noticed, easy enough to choose, and meaningful enough to feel right in the moment of need.
The task of modern branding is therefore to build strong memory structures, link the brand to the implicit goals that drive behavior, ensure effortless availability, and carefully manage the quality of every exposure. In this sense, better branding is not about convincing the rational mind — it is about shaping intuitive preference at scale. The brands that win are not those that argue better, but those that are remembered first, feel right instantly, and are easiest to act on when the moment comes.