THE TOP 5%

Introduction to my new book

I was sitting in the boardroom of a major international insurance brand. A company that had dominated its markets for decades — not through luck, but through one of the most consistent advertising strategies the category had ever seen. Generations of customers had grown up with it. The brand was the category.

And then growth stopped. Not collapsed - just quietly, steadily stopped. Long before the turn of the millennium.

Now a new campaign would make the difference. The brief was smart. The creative was fresh. It spoke to younger audiences. The reasons for choosing the brand felt compelling, modern, relevant. The room was energized.

Six months later: sobering.

There were executives in that room who could remember the years when the brand did grow. Somewhere inside them, something already knew.

But “today’s advertising is different,” they said. “That old style is so outdated,” they said. The signal was there. It never got a voice.

Why do customers buy? How does brand communication work? All this has never changed. The cultural context may change and the way people speak. But that’s surface. The “inner customer mechanics” stay the same.

Imagine an Airforce pilot with an instrument panel that measures

• blood pressure, air temperature and sun exposure

• but does not altitude, speed and compass

Humans are masters in coming up with explanations and story. Blood pressure is indicator for altitude one can start to explain.

Further a pilot needs a dashboard with indicators for the why. Why do we loosing speed? Is the machine working? Is there enough gasoline? Are wing flaps working? How would those influence speed or altitude?

That is the problem this book addresses. Fixing execution while flying with the wrong instruments only takes you so far.

Do you want to see evidence?

5% of all brands grow sustainably.

Analysis from Professor Mats Georgsson shows that roughly 5 percent of brands show a growth that is significantly above market growth for 10 years or more.

5% of all product launches succeed.

Our own analysis on Nielson and Mintel data on CPG/FMCG product launches show that just 5% of launches survive two years in shelf. This number is different for each domain, but you get the point.

5% of all ads achieve real ROI.

System 1 group is virtually testing every aired TV spot and they follow up impact and have a good system to predict impact. Their analysis show that just 5% of adds create strong growth, while most ads nearly pay back the investments.

This raises a question:

Are 95% of brands too dump to do marketing right? Didn’t they study marketing in university? Can’t they effort a proper consultant to tell them how to grow?

Of course not. The problem is that professionals are satisfied with the standard. When these numbers indicate one insight, then that this standard of doing marketing does not work.

With this book I want to answer this question:

“What do the 5% know that the other 95% don’t?”

The title “Why Brands Grow” variates Byron Sharp’s “How Brands Grow”. Sharp showed us what brand growth looks like from the outside - the patterns, the regularities, the “laws” of mental availability and penetration. This book asks the question Sharp’s data couldn’t answer why those patterns exist, and how that understanding changes every decision made before the campaign launches.

The following answer runs through every page of this book:

Brand growth starts with listening to what customers know before they think — and surfaces only when cause and effect is finally understood.

“Brand growth starts with listening to what customers know before they think — and surfaces only when cause and effect is finally understood.”

That sentence will carry more weight by the last chapter. You’ll see.

Nothing in this book is theoretical. Every framework, every method, every claim about what actually drives buying decisions is grounded in real projects — brands across FMCG, technology, finance, and retail, in markets across Europe and North America, over more than thirty years. The consultancy I founded, SUPRA, has applied these methods since 2014. The case studies in this book are our cases. The failures are real. So are the results.

I’ll be honest about something. I got things wrong too. Early in my career, I trusted the data the way everyone else did. I built elegant models that produced garbage results. I presented findings I was confident in that turned out to be noise dressed as insight.

I’m writing this because these methods should be accessible - not locked inside consulting engagements. If you want to see what Deep Science reveals about your category, your brand, or your next major decision, that conversation is available.

Marketing is ruled by outdated beliefs

Countless great research and books are published every year. Still in practice we cling to old habits and beliefs. Here are a few beliefs that this book will shake:

1. Great strategy work is not the key: While intellect and analysis is helpful, if they build on shallow insights, those strategies will be a castle built on sand. The sad truth: this is the standard in management consulting work.

2. AI helps to get cheaper and faster but not better insights. AI can execute the same task much faster and helps to reduce costs of data collection. Of course, it also helps to reduce errors in manual work. But this alone doesn’t create growth. It lowers the barrier to standard insights. Professional market research was once an enterprise advantage. SMBs used it sparingly. With AI, that advantage disappears—everyone can access standard research methodology. What brands need are not just faster and cheaper but better insights.

3. Data science is not the same as science. Data is not the destination—it’s the fog you must see through. The destination is cause and effect. Understanding why customers buy matters more than what the numbers show. Correlation is not causation. In marketing, mistaking one for the other has cost brands dearly.

4. Intuition is not guesswork. Non-conscious intelligence drives every purchase decision. It fires before language, before awareness, before the customer could explain it. Learning to surface it—and measure it—is what this book teaches.

5. Awareness and attention are vanity metrics. Buying decisions do not require brand awareness to happen. The brain does not work the way the old AIDA model told us. The memory structures that actually trigger purchase are subconscious — and most brands are building the wrong ones, with the wrong methods, measuring the wrong signals.

Growth isn’t born from speed, scale, or more data. It’s born from clarity about what moves people, what resonates with them, and why they choose one brand over another. When we learn to use deep science, we stop drifting. We start navigating. And then we no longer chase the future. We build it.

My new book “The Top 5%” has three parts.

First we set the foundation in surfacing all the beliefs and frameworks that do not server us any more and establish a new understanding why customers buy

In part two I introduce the research framework “deep implicit” that simple takes the learnings of part one puts it into practice. It is about building that airplane instrument panel and shows which instruments we need which shall we ignore.

The last part then shows how you can use this research framework to solve the critical question any brands needs to answer when creating growth.

Hope you enjoy the read.

p.s. and if you feel for it please give me your thoughts as a comment on my launch LinkedIn post