“You Cannot Be All Things To All People If You Want To Grow”

What makes brands grow? We spoke with Professor Koen Pauwels, who is referred to by Mark Ritson as “the best marketing professor on the planet”. In this conversation, Professor Pauwels shares a clear and practical view on the topic. From positioning and segmentation to data, differentiation and long-term effectiveness, his argument is simple: growth comes from making sharper choices, executing them consistently, and using data to improve decisions rather than just defend them.

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About Professor Koen Pauwels

Professor Koen Pauwels is one of the leading voices in marketing effectiveness today. As a Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Northeastern University, he is known for combining academic rigour with real-world relevance across topics such as brand growth, dashboards, pricing, retail media and marketing ROI. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Research in Marketing and previously worked as Principal Research Scientist at Amazon Ads.

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At DVJ, through our Brand Growth platform, we are keen to better understand what drives brand growth. From your perspective, what separates growing brands from those that stagnate?

“I typically divide this into two things: doing the right things and doing things right.

Doing the right things starts with bringing together insights on your customers, your company and your competitors. The first question is: where do you really want to play? That is partly about category selection, of course, it is easier to grow in a growing category, but it is also about positioning.

So, marketing strategy and positioning are crucial. I still think it is very important to think in terms of segmentation, targeting and positioning. Consumers differ in important ways, and companies need to be clear about which segments are most desirable for them. That could be the biggest segment, the one that is willing to pay more, or a small number of large customers who can become a reference for others.

Then comes the question of feasibility: what can we genuinely offer that we are better at than the competition? That is where positioning becomes concrete. Why should customers take us seriously? That is your point of parity. And why should they choose you? Are you faster, cheaper, better?

Once you have that crystal clear, you can probably use it for five to ten years. And that kind of strategic clarity is often what I see missing when companies talk about growth, especially profitable growth.

After that comes execution. I still believe in the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion, all aligned to the strategy. Brands that grow well are brands that think carefully about doing the right things first. You cannot be all things to all people if you want to grow. You have to pick your battles. When I was at Amazon, I pushed back against the Metaverse hype. Not just because I saw it as a limited market, but because I didn’t see any competitive advantage for Amazon in it.”

So, where does that leave Byron Sharp’s thinking, who emphasises reaching a broad audience and building distinctiveness rather than differentiation?

“I would say I agree with Byron Sharp 95%. But I do think there are some blind spots in his theory.

What he did very well was push the importance of distinctiveness. Academia has probably not paid enough attention to that. In theory, consistency over time seems obvious. In practice, it is hard. Every new CMO wants to change things. CEOs and everyone around them have opinions about branding. Everybody thinks they can do a marketer’s job without any formal training in marketing.

So Byron was right to emphasise: stay the course unless you have a really good reason to change.

He was also right that differentiation is hard. It is difficult to get consumers, or customers in B2B, to see you as genuinely better than competitors, and to make that stick over time. But hard does not mean unimportant. Differentiation is extremely valuable when you achieve it. It drives not just sales, but also price premium and stronger organic growth.

Apple is the cliché example, but it is a good one. Apple gets an extraordinary amount of publicity for free. Even an announcement gets more coverage than a competitor’s launch. Why? Partly because journalists like writing about Apple, but more importantly, because consumers trust the brand and think highly of it. The brand stands for something. So yes, distinctiveness matters. But differentiation matters too.”

Is the balance different for young brands and established brands?

“Yes, that is where the nuance really matters. For young brands, differentiation is essential. If you are a new brand, you cannot go to a consumer who is reasonably happy with their current choice and say, ‘Switch because we are here.’ You have to give them a real reason: we are better, faster or cheaper for your needs.

Later on, once you are a large and established brand and your differentiation is already broadly known, then distinctiveness becomes relatively more important. Brands like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s are good examples. At that point, consistency matters more than trying to invent some big new difference every year.

That said, even for bigger brands, segmentation still matters. You may want to reach everybody eventually, but you should not speak to everybody in exactly the same way.

A person actively looking for a new refrigerator should be approached differently from someone who is nowhere near the category. That is still segmentation, even if people dress it up differently.”

Many companies pride themselves on being data-driven. But what does data-driven marketing actually look like in practice?

“The short answer is: you are willing to change your decisions based on data.

If you are not willing to do that, then you are not really data-driven.

That does not mean you should ignore experience or gut feel. And it certainly does not mean every decision needs a perfectly calculated ROI. There is still a lot of room in marketing for creativity, experimentation and learning.

But being data-driven means starting with the decision you are trying to make and then being very clear about what you want the data to help you understand.

In my consulting, for example, clients often ask me to optimise the marketing mix. But then I first ask: do you want advice on reallocating the budget, or do you also want advice on the size of the budget itself? Very often, the people hiring me do not control the total budget. They only control part of it. So the practical question becomes: within the constraints you actually have, what can you do better?

That matters because even if the model says something dramatic, for example raise prices by 40%, cut advertising in half, almost no marketer is going to do that immediately. The career risk is simply too big.

So what do good marketers do? They move in the direction of the evidence, but they do it in manageable steps. They test. They run field experiments. They reduce risk.

That, to me, is what real data-driven marketing looks like: using data to improve decisions in the real world, not just to produce a mathematically elegant answer.”

And what would you consider the main reason why companies are not making optimal use of the data available yet?

“The first reason is data silos. Companies are drowning in data, but the right data often sits in different parts of the organisation, owned by different teams, with different incentives. Sometimes, people do not even know where the relevant data lives. And even if they do, they still need to convince others to share it.

The second issue is a lack of alignment. If my incentives are not aligned with those of leadership, and those incentives do not clearly support the company’s broader goals, then data is much less likely to drive good decisions.

And then there is the issue of decision-making itself. Companies need structural ways to make data win the argument.

That is not just about dashboards. It is also about how meetings are run. If the most senior person speaks first, everybody adjusts to that. If they speak last, the chances improve that the strongest argument actually gets heard.

That is the real challenge: how do you design meetings and decisions so that the data has a fair chance of winning?”

In marketing there is an ongoing discussion about short-term versus long-term results. Is that something you recognise as well, and how does that play a role in effective marketing?

“I do. And that whole trajectory also happened at Amazon. When I came in, everyone was told: we want to be in the best position five to ten years from now. So, your decisions were guided by that. It was a wonderful environment. Later on, it became more about delivering quarterly results so that Wall Street would be happy.

But I always say that in practice, the long term is a percentage of the short term. You cannot simply say, ‘Trust me, it may take years, but this will pay off in the long term.’ Not in today’s environment. Your strategy and your positioning should also generate some short-term signals that things are moving in the right direction.

Those short-term wins are what create organisational buy-in for longer-term investment.

That does not mean everything has to convert into immediate sales. This is where leading KPIs matter. You may not see sales effects right away, but you may see an increase in consideration, search behaviour, website visits or inbound interest from the sales team which your analysis has demonstrated to convert to profits later.

That sounds like a plea for combining behavioural and attitudinal data, rather than choosing between them

“Exactly. Behavioural data is powerful because it is unobtrusive and often relatively cheap. But it only tells you what people do, not why they do it.

That is why attitudes still matter. Surveys still matter. If you want to understand why people are responding in a certain way, how they think about your brand, and how they compare you to competitors, you still need to ask them.

And that is also why humans still matter, despite all the excitement around AI. AI can help make reporting and analysis faster. But clients still want someone to explain why something is happening. They want interpretation. They want judgment. They want empathy. That is still human work.”

Finally, what is the one piece of advice every marketer starting out should hear?

“Get trained. There is just no excuse. I completely agree with Mark Ritson on that point. Too many marketers have little or no formal training in marketing. And that is a problem, because our field has developed a huge amount of useful knowledge over the past 50 or 60 years.

The good news is that there are no longer many barriers to accessing that knowledge. You do not have to read academic journals cover to cover. There are executive summaries, blogs, podcasts, videos and explainers everywhere.

What I do think is unacceptable is when people present themselves as branding experts while not knowing the foundational thinkers in the field. If you want marketing to earn respect in the boardroom, marketers need to be seen as specialists too. The CFO has credentials and recognised expertise. Marketers should bring the same depth.

The knowledge is out there. It has never been more accessible. So my advice is simple: take the discipline seriously.”