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F8-02·F8 — Digital Marketing: Contextualised

The Fundamentals Still Apply

The productive tension

Digital disrupts tacticsandleaves strategy intact

the laws of how brands grow are channel-agnostic

The synthesis

Everything that digital seems to make new — the targeting, the measurement, the feedback loops, the precision — operates at the tactical layer. The strategic layer, where the laws of brand growth live, is unchanged. Double jeopardy, duplication of purchase, the penetration law, mental and physical availability, the 60/40 brand-activation split, and the 95:5 out-of-market rule all hold in digital contexts. Brands that ignore these laws in favour of "what works in digital" do not discover new laws. They just relearn the old ones painfully, usually after their performance numbers collapse. The strategic discipline is channel-agnostic. Digital is a set of tactics operating inside it.

Learning objectives

  • Apply Byron Sharp's laws of brand growth to digital categories using Nielsen, Kantar and Ehrenberg-Bass evidence
  • Explain why mental and physical availability matter in digital and how they are built online
  • Use the LinkedIn B2B Institute 95:5 rule to argue against performance-only digital strategy
  • Interpret share of search as a leading indicator of brand equity
  • Show why performance-only digital strategies reach diminishing returns and how brand-building restores growth

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