Ethan Decker · Applied Brand Science
Ethan Decker studied ecology, spent years running quantitative simulations, then moved into marketing. What he found was a discipline full of confident opinions, unverified assumptions, and strategies built on myths rather than evidence. He spent the next decade collecting, testing, and applying peer-reviewed marketing research to real brand challenges. This playbook distils the most important findings: the laws that do not change, the levers worth pulling, and the hogwash worth dropping.
Most marketing decisions are made with no reference to the evidence. The evidence exists. Use it.
The headline principles from the episode. The full step-by-step framework follows below.
The Playbook
Gary Vee says you must post on social media multiple times a day. He calls it a law of branding. It is a lever that works for him. He also says TV is dead because he personally does not watch TV. Ethan's framework: laws hold across every category and context. Levers depend on context. Hogwash sounds compelling and the evidence does not support it. Most marketing debates are about which category something belongs to.
Why it's overlooked: It is far easier to evangelise a tactic that worked for you than to study academic research on what drives behaviour consistently. Certainty sells. Inquiry does not.
The Playbook
Buying patterns are a banana curve, not a bell curve. Lots of light buyers who purchase rarely. A few medium buyers. Very few heavy buyers. Most of your revenue comes from the light buyers. A strategy built around converting more people into loyal superfans fights this law. A strategy built around staying salient to more light buyers works with it.
Why it's overlooked: The thousand true fans concept is inspiring. The banana curve is not. But the banana curve is what your customer data actually shows when you plot it.
The Playbook
Gravity does not need to be verified. The banana curve of buyer distribution does not need another proof of concept. Test levers constantly because they are context-dependent. Use the explore-exploit principle from ecology: send most bees to the current productive bush, but always keep some exploring before the current source runs dry.
Why it's overlooked: Retesting proven concepts feels like rigorous due diligence. It is safe-feeling work that consumes experimentation budget without generating new knowledge.
The Playbook
Does Snickers come to mind when you are hungry and need a snack? That is salience. Does a niche protein bar you read about six months ago come to mind? Probably not. Awareness means someone has heard of you. Salience means you surface when the need arises. Only salience drives purchase. Only salience is worth optimising for.
Why it's overlooked: Awareness is easy to measure in a survey. Salience at buying moment requires understanding actual purchase occasions and the triggers that create them. Harder to measure. Much more valuable.
Not all marketing wisdom is equal. Some things are laws — they hold across categories, geographies, and market conditions, the way gravity holds. Some things are levers — they work sometimes, for some brands, in some contexts. Some things are hogwash — they sound compelling but the evidence does not support them.
Most marketing debates are category errors. People treat levers as laws. People treat hogwash as laws. People ignore actual laws because they are not interesting enough to put in a conference talk.
Build the habit of asking, for any marketing belief you hold: is this a law, a lever, or hogwash? And can I show you the data?
"We confuse laws and levers and hogwash. Gary Vee is bullish on social media posting — he thinks it's a law of branding. It's not. It's a lever that works for him." — Ethan Decker. Gary Vee also thinks TV is dead because he personally does not watch TV. He has confused his personal experience with a universal principle.
List five marketing beliefs your team currently acts on as certainties. For each one, ask: is there published evidence that this holds across categories, or is it based on one case study or one channel expert's opinion? Categorise each as law, lever, or uncertain.
One of the most important laws of brand behaviour is the banana curve — the negative binomial distribution of buyers. In every category studied, buying patterns follow the same shape. Lots of light buyers who purchase rarely. A smaller number of medium buyers. Very few heavy buyers.
This is not a bell curve. Most of your volume comes from light buyers. A strategy built around converting more people into heavy buyers fights this law. A strategy built around reaching more light buyers works with it.
The fantasy of the loyal niche with devoted superfans is statistically rare. If you have a thousand true fans, you almost certainly have ten thousand lightweight visitors you are ignoring because they are not vocal.
"Buying patterns are not a bell curve. They're a banana curve — high on one end where all the light buyers are, really low on the other end where the heavy buyers are." — Ethan Decker
Pull your customer data and segment buyers by purchase frequency over the last 12 months. Plot the distribution. Is it a banana curve? If yes, what percentage of your current marketing is designed to reach more light buyers versus converting existing ones to heavier purchase frequency?
People do not buy one brand in any category and stick with it. They buy a repertoire — a small set of brands that rotate through their purchase occasions. This is true for pasta sauce, for cars, for enterprise software, and for education.
Someone gets their bachelor's from one university, their master's from another, their certification from a third. They buy one brand of hot sauce one week and a different one the next.
Your goal is not to become the only brand someone buys. Your goal is to be in their repertoire. To be chosen among the options. To stay mentally available so that when they next come to the category, you come to mind.
"Repertoire buying: in any category, most people buy between one and four brands. Your job is not to own the category — it is to be one of the brands in their consideration set when the occasion arises." — Ethan Decker
Identify the three or four brands buyers in your category typically rotate between. Are you one of them? If not, what would it take to get into more repertoires — not to become the only choice, but to become a regular one?
One of the fundamental laws of human decision-making is that we minimise cognitive effort wherever possible. When faced with a complex choice, we do not conduct a rigorous analysis. We replace the hard question with an easy one.
"Is this BMW a high quality car?" is hard. "Is this more expensive than the Hyundai?" is easy. If yes, it is probably better. Done.
This is not a flaw to be corrected. It is how all human brains work — in consumer categories and in B2B equally. Marketing that tries to overcome this tendency by loading people with more information fights the law. Marketing that works with it — by making the easy proxy question answer clearly and memorably — is far more effective.
The car door sound. Not a technical test. Not a safety rating. Just: does it sound like a quality car when it closes? If yes, the heuristic is satisfied. "If you don't realise that one of the fundamental laws of shopping is that humans replace hard questions with easy ones, you're going to be wasting a lot of time trying to educate people with RTBs and logical facts." — Ethan Decker
Identify the three easiest proxy questions buyers in your category actually use to make a decision. Not the questions they say they use in surveys. The ones they use in practice. Then check whether your brand answers each one clearly.
Laws do not need to be tested. Gravity does not need to be verified. The banana curve does not need another proof of concept. When you run experiments to reconfirm things that are already established, you waste experimentation budget on safe-feeling work.
Levers require constant testing because they are context-dependent. A mascot campaign that worked brilliantly for one brand may do nothing for another. A PR stunt that generated massive awareness five years ago may be an exhausted mechanic today.
Ethan's principle from ecology: explore and exploit. Keep most resources on the tactics currently working. Always send some resources to explore new sources before the current one dries up.
Lazy Boy worked with Ethan to stop doing marketing based on fairy tale and start doing it based on empirical evidence. The Garfield movie partnership was a lever they had not pulled in years. It got Lazy Boy more cultural visibility than they had seen in a generation. The lesson is not "do pop culture partnerships." The lesson is "keep exploring levers even when exploitation is comfortable."
This quarter, reserve 20% of your marketing experimentation budget for genuinely new levers — things you have not tried before. Document what you test and what you find. Build a lever log that accumulates knowledge over time.
Awareness and salience are not the same thing. Awareness means someone has heard of you. Salience means you come to mind when the need arises.
A brand can have high awareness and low salience. People know you exist. But when they are in market, you do not surface. That brand has wasted its advertising on impressions that never convert to consideration.
The job of brand communication is to build mental structures that make your brand surface in the right moment. This requires consistent presence at the category entry points — the occasions, needs, and triggers that bring buyers into market.
Does Snickers come to mind when you are hungry and need a quick snack? That is salience. Does a niche protein bar brand you read about six months ago come to mind? Probably not. The difference is not awareness. It is the strength of the mental link between the occasion and the brand.
Map the three or four primary occasions when buyers in your category enter the market. For each, ask: if our target buyer is in that moment right now, how likely are they to think of us? What specific messages or brand memories are you trying to plant to make that happen?
The playbook is derived from the conversation. The nuance and the reasoning behind every principle are in the episode itself.
"The most expensive thing in marketing is a confident wrong belief."
Episode 005 · Sep 2024