It’s Monday!
Today’s Curio includes:
🧠 Does brand loyalty extend across categories?
🚀 Building more rewarding jobs and careers.
And inspiring ideas and insights to help you lead better, think smarter and build stronger.
🧠 Would you buy shoes from your favourite brand of cheese?
Obviously, not.
But a recent study showed that on average, people who purchase a brand in one category (e.g. dairy products) are 2,4 times more likely to buy a different product in a different category sold under the same brand name.
And it’s true for anyone buying from two or more categories, which is everyone.
So, brand loyalty does extend across product categories.
But there’s a catch.
Cross-category brand extensions work best when the categories are similar or complementary. Not so much when they're substitutive or unrelated.
For example, you’ll gladly buy Nike's running shoes and gym gear. But you’ll think twice about buying cereal from them.
Beyond similarity, the type of customers who typically purchase from the two categories also matters.
It seems that Duplication of Purchase doesn’t work on people who only buy from their favourite brand in each category.
All successful brand extensions have one thing in common: consumer motivation.
So, if the consumer motivation is to ‘style my hair’, then the product extensions into shampoos, conditioners, and hair gels will create higher brand loyalty.
But extending the same brand into food supplements may not work as well.
Given the high failure rate of new brand introductions (new products fail within two years of launch), extending the same brand name across complementary categories can help you establish a valuable marketplace advantage.
🚀 On-the-Job Learning. Who has the time to learn? And who is going to teach?
We know that on-the-job learning and expert knowledge are strong drivers of performance.
But most managers don’t have the time, and most jobs aren’t designed to incentivise learning.
A recent study found that more learning will happen when work is well designed, irrespective of a person's occupation.
Here’s what managers can do to create more mentally rewarding jobs.
Let’s start with the ingredients of job design that can accelerate learning.
Complexity & challenge.
Autonomy.
Feedback.
And here’s a handy model we can use to create more mentally rewarding jobs and fulfilling careers.
S — Stimulating: Use job rotations, mentorships, and task distribution, so everyone gets to work on sufficiently complex and varied tasks.
M — Mastery: Describe the tasks and outcomes clearly and provide regular feedback that helps people improve.
A — Agency: Get out of their way. Give people autonomy to find new solutions and break the status quo.
R — Relational: Create a safe environment for people to be themselves.
T — Tolerable: Be proactive in helping people manage work demands such as workload and deadlines.
💡Inspiring ideas & insights
🖖 Lead better:
What stops managers from looking to other industries for inspiration. /HBR
To win over an audience, focus on building trust. /HBR
The questions leaders should ask in the era of digital transformation. /SloanReview
👩🔬 Think smarter:
Demand generation priorities for B2B marketers. /MarketingCharts
Interest in NFTs has plummeted. /Statista
Why brands are spending more on Reddit. /ModernRetail
👷 Build stronger:
How marketers are delivering better ads with first-party data and ML. /Google
How tech might shape the beauty industry in 2022. /Econsultancy
How J.Jill is winning over Gen X (45 - 60yo). /Glossy
Inside Asic’s strategy to collect more zero-party customer data. /ModernRetail
Stay curious!
Aliyar