Grab your price-insensitive brand and dance it to growth. At every step, difference matters.

Have we lost the plot?

Mark Ritson stood in front of 200 delegates of the largest Aussie brands at the launch of Kantar BrandZ Top 40 Most Valuable Australian Brands in Sydney’s historic Rum hospital ‘The Mint’ and declared so. Full disclosure, he didn’t get a penny; he was there to set the record straight on segmentation, targeting and positioning and to remove the stigma from differentiation.

By his own admission, Kantar has been politely proving for decades that the combination of salience, meaning and difference increases the likelihood of brands to be chosen. But chivalry didn’t do our industry any favours; the marketing pendulum has swung too much over to one side and we need to swing it back to the middle. For that (and to no one’s shock) the tongue-in-cheek professor used profanity to hone the message.