Ask any marketer what their primary objective is, and you’ll likely get a two-word answer: “brand growth.” It’s the metric that defines careers, and the relentless pressure behind every campaign. But what if most of what we believe about brand growth is wrong?
Dale Harrison, an ex-physicist turned marketer, was featured on the October 3rd, 2025, MAC Reality Check live, and laid out a case that directly challenges industry myths with scientific rigor and hard data.
1. We Don’t Even Agree on What “Growth” Means
The first problem is that marketers use the word “growth” as if it has a single, universal meaning. It doesn’t. According to Harrison, there are four distinct types of business growth. This confusion is the root cause of nearly every strategic marketing error.
Market Share Growth: Increasing your percentage of total market sales relative to competitors. This, according to decades of data, essentially NEVER happens!
Revenue Growth: Increasing the total amount of money your brand brings in.
Profit Growth: Increasing the amount of money left over after all expenses are paid.
Asset Growth: Increasing the market capitalization or total value of the business entity.
Crucially, Revenue Growth and Market Share Growth are not correlated. A brand can experience one while losing the other. For example, Bizible, now Adobe Marketo Measure, saw its revenue grow even as it was losing market share. Conversely, Ricoh captured more market share in the fax machine category even as its overall revenue dramatically declined because the category itself was collapsing.
Almost all marketing discussions, particularly those stemming from the “How Brands Grow” school of thought, are incorrectly focused on market share growth.
In reality, over 99% of what we call “brand growth” is just revenue growth, often from a category that’s expanding on its own.
2. Gaining Market Share Is a Statistical Fantasy
Gaining market share through marketing is essentially a myth. We have almost a century of data across thousands of product categories showing that relative market share is extremely stable over years, and even decades.
Historical examples are everywhere:
Tide has been the #1 laundry detergent in the US since 1947.
Boeing has been the #1 producer of commercial aircraft in the US since 1929.
The #1 spot in toothpaste has been a back-and-forth battle: Colgate was #1 from 1897 to 1962, Crest held the top spot from 1962 to 1997, and Colgate has been #1 again from 1997 to the present.
This isn’t just old data. Recent research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (EBI) definitively confirms this stability. A study tracked 639 brands across 28 categories over five years and found:
• The average five-year market share gain was a mere +0.01%.
• A third of all brands had ZERO market share growth.
• Another third of brands actually saw market share losses.
• Only 4% of brands managed to grow by just 1% per year.
The researchers concluded:
“Marketing practitioners spend a great deal of money and effort to increase their brands’ market share. Empirical evidence, however, has shown that...the norm is long-term equilibrium.”
“It has been established that marketing activity does NOT affect most brand market shares in the medium and even long term.”
3. The Four “Black Swan” Events That Actually Create Growth
While sustained market share growth from marketing activities is a fantasy, Harrison points out that there are four rare, high-impact scenarios where it can happen.
The problem? None of them are repeatable marketing strategies. They are “Black Swan” events; unpredictable, rare, and outside a marketer’s control.
1. Riding the Category Wave: This is the most common form of “growth,” where a brand takes its “fair share” of an expanding market. If the entire lake is rising, every boat rises with it. This is primarily driven by revenue growth, rather than a gain in relative market share compared to competitors.
2. A Massive Cash Injection: Brands like Oatly ($200M+), Liquid Death ($350M+), and Warby Parker ($700M+) didn’t grow with clever tactics; they grew by receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in external capital. This cash allowed them to purchase a massive level of excess share of voice (ESOV) over a multi-year period, effectively buying awareness and market share. This is a growth strategy available to fewer than 0.02% of all brands.
3. A Market Leader Implodes: Sometimes a brand gets lucky when its primary competitor stumbles and collapses. Salesforce grew significantly by being in the right place at the right time when the then-dominant CRM provider, Siebel, failed to adapt and imploded. The data shows this is an exceptionally rare opportunity, as only 0.1% of brands ever see the market share leader collapse.
4. A 100x Product Innovation: A truly radical product innovation can shift an entire market. The classic example is the iPod. Competitors were selling MP3 players that held 10 songs. Apple launched a device that held 1,000 songs. It was a 100-fold improvement that fundamentally changed the price-to-value equation for consumers, dramatically shifting the entire category’s price elasticity curve and significantly altering the market.
The “Growth Formula” Is a Snake Eating Its Tail
The prevailing prescription for growth is, “Brands grow through increasing Mental & Physical Availability through Broad Reach marketing.” Theoretically, this is a true statement, but not a pathway open to most brands. It conveniently ignores the most important question: “WHERE IS THE CASH COMING FROM?”
Reach isn’t free; It costs money, which creates a Catch-22 that locks most brands in place:
To achieve greater reach, you need to increase your cash flow.
Your cash flow comes from your existing customers.
The number of existing customers you have is a function of your current market penetration and share.
Therefore, your maximum potential reach is ultimately constrained by your existing market share.
Unless an investor drops a nine-figure check in your bank account, you can only afford the reach that your current size allows. This creates a feedback loop where big brands stay big and small brands stay small.
“Growth through getting ‘More Mental Availability’ is a Snake Eating its Tail.”
The core idea of How Brands Grow, that large brands are large because they have more customers, is purely a descriptive statement that tells us nothing about how those large brands became large.
Telling a small brand to “get more mental availability” to grow is like telling a poor person to solve their financial problems by “buying a private jet.” It’s technically true that rich people own private jets, but it’s a uselessly descriptive statement that ignores the fundamental resource constraints.
Marketing’s Real Job Is Defense, Not Offense
Marketing’s true purpose is to:
Hold onto your existing market share. This is the “Red Queen game” as the Red Queen told Alice, “you have to run as fast as you can to just stay in place.” You must market as hard as your competitors to maintain your position.
Capture your “fair share” of any underlying category growth. If the market expands, you need to be actively marketing to claim the portion of that expansion that your current market share entitles you to.
Be ready to act opportunistically. Stay alert and be prepared to capture market share when a competitor inevitably stumbles.
Hope someone decides to drop half a billion on you!
It’s a less glamorous job description than “growth hacker,” but it’s one grounded in reality.
As Harrison bluntly puts it:
“Marketing is largely the price you pay to keep what you’ve got.”
This reframing forces a critical question for every marketing leader: If our primary job is defense, what metrics should we truly be focused on, rather than growth?
