Rethinking Brand Growth

Insights from Kantar's Diary of a CMO 2025

Introduction: Rethinking Brand Growth

The persistent pressure on marketers to justify their budgets and deliver measurable returns has reshaped the conversation around brand equity. Kantar’s Diary of a CMO 2025 addresses this challenge directly. Rather than offering another marketing platitude, it provides a structured data-based approach, linking brand perceptions to financial performance.

The report is framed by a foreword from Professor Koen Pauwels, who reiterates a crucial but often underemphasised truth: differentiation remains a core driver of brand penetration, particularly for smaller brands in growth markets. In a climate where mental availability and habitual choices dominate, standing out is not optional but necessary.

What makes this study distinct is its commitment to practical application. Drawing on Kantar’s long-running BrandZ dataset, it sets out to answer a fundamental question: how can marketing contribute meaningfully to business outcomes? The paper offers not just a theoretical framework, but a diagnostic toolkit. It maps a path from perception metrics to pricing power, from brand salience to sales conversion, and ultimately from marketing activity to commercial impact.

This article explores the study's key themes and reflects on their implications for brand leaders today. As marketing seeks credibility at the executive table, Kantar’s findings offer timely, evidence-based guidance.

The Foundational Shift — Differentiation Reinstated

One of the most striking positions in Diary of a CMO is the reassertion of differentiation as the foundation of brand growth. For much of the past decade, marketing discourse has been dominated by the idea that penetration is the sole route to growth, a view heavily influenced by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Kantar, however, introduces a corrective: while penetration is vital, it is not a strategy. Instead, differentiation drives penetration.

This distinction matters because it changes how marketers approach brand building. Differentiation, as Kantar defines it, is not abstract. It is perceptual, rooted in how consumers experience a brand’s relevance, distinctiveness, and emotional value. In practice, only 11% of brands grew penetration significantly in the past year. What set them apart was a higher-than-expected perceived difference, relative to their size.

Kantar’s Meaningful Different and Salient (MDS) framework provides the structural underpinning for this argument. The framework emphasises that meaningfulness and difference are not secondary considerations but essential in breaking habitual consumer choices. For smaller brands, this insight is critical. Lacking scale, they cannot outspend larger rivals. But by offering something genuinely different — in product, purpose or experience — they can dislodge incumbents and grow share.

Professor Pauwels reinforces this idea with academic rigour. Drawing on his peer-reviewed work with Oliver Koll, he notes that the link between differentiation and penetration is powerful in growing markets. In such environments, where consumer behaviour is more fluid, a brand’s ability to stand out becomes decisive. In this light, differentiation is not a luxury — it is the entry price for growth.

The implication is clear: marketers must refocus on what makes their brand distinct, not in terms of vague positioning statements but through measurable perceptions that influence consumer choice. Without this foundation, growth efforts risk being both ineffective and unsustainable.