Whether you can claim the top spot in an existing category, strategically signal popularity, or pioneer a new category where you can be the biggest, the pursuit of prominence is a defining aspect of growing your brand advantage.  

The essence of 'bigness' in brand building lies not just in being the largest in terms of market share or revenue but also in crafting a narrative that positions your brand as a significant player. This involves not only being big but also ensuring that your audience perceives your brand as the biggest, or at least as a leader in some respect.  

'Bigness' signals popularity and on a fundamental level, safety—an intrinsic human motivation. Being the most popular brand in a category inherently reassures consumers that your brand is a safe, trustworthy choice. In uncertain economic times, this signal of reliability becomes even more valuable.

As social animals, humans are drawn to follow what we see others around us doing, more so than taking a chance on something unusual. Why? Because if it’s a safe choice for everyone else, it’s probably a safe choice for us too. In uncertain times, people seek the certainty of popular brands.  

If your preferred flavour of science is more physics than sociology, another way to get your head around the ‘bigness’ effect for brands is to understand it in the same way astronomers think about mass and gravity. Big brands have a stronger gravitational pull. You want your brand to be thought of as a Jupiter not a Pluto.  

For some time now, I’ve been seeing patterns leading to ‘bigness’ and perceived popularity sitting at the heart of how brand advantage accelerates business growth. It shows up in lots of ways through the theoretical principles of marketing science and importantly, in the measurement of brand perceptions and preferences we do with real people.  

• Brand and Campaign Fame  
• Excess Share of Voice
• The Double Jeopardy Effect
• Social Proof and the Bandwagon Effect
• Brand Salience and Top-of-mind Awareness
• Network Effects
• Brand Halo Effect
• Information Cascade Theory

You can look all of these up but I’ll save you the time; it all equates to being perceived as ‘the big one’ in your category.

Big is good but we can’t just click our fingers and be big, or even stay big. So what can marketers do to help their brand gain a ‘bigness’ advantage? It starts with category context.  

In your target customers' minds, how big they see your brand depends on how they compare you with other brands that they think offer something similar.

Be the biggest …and make sure everyone knows it  

Coca-Cola has long established itself as the foremost soft drink globally, leveraging its pervasive presence and iconic marketing to reinforce its dominance. Coca-Cola's 'bigness' isn't just about market share; it’s about being ingrained in popular culture and becoming synonymous with the soft-drink category drivers of refreshment and happiness. As just one example of Coca-Cola’s commitment to the bigness strategy, next time you’re at the supermarket take a look at how big Coke’s shelf facing appears versus every other drink. Over Christmas, I bet they’ll have bought supermarket floor space to ensure Coke products are spilling off the shelf in big stacks of cans and bottles, way more than they’ll actually sell. It’s all about signaling that they’re absolutely the biggest drink in the world. The key lesson here is that if you’re already the category leader in actual size, don’t rest on your laurels – work hard to make sure your brand is famously and indisputably the big one.

Act bigger than you are  

Afterpay, the 'buy now, pay later' fintech company, was founded in Australia in 2014. They had huge competition from big banks offering personal loans and other long-established brands like Instant Finance. Of course, there were some innovative aspects of their offering designed to appeal to the changing preferences of a new generation of shoppers, but it wasn’t the product alone that propelled them to success. They became established by targeting younger shoppers of online retailers, and accelerating perceptions of ‘bigness’ with influencer marketing in social media. They then saw an opportunity to appear even bigger by quickly forming partnerships with brick and mortar retailers to give them a widespread presence in the mainstream shopping landscape. The next ‘bigness’ signal came with expansion to new markets like New Zealand, USA and UK and making sure that all their domestic Australian customers knew about this rapid expansion. They are now seen as a global player with the inherent trust that comes with that perception of global dominance …even though their number of active users only totals the size of one small city.  

Create a new category to be the biggest in.  

Netflix took on huge multi-national video rental companies with a unique subscription model for DVD rental, then they switched categories again. As the concept of streaming movies and TV shows emerged, Netflix leveraged their existing customer base of DVD rental customers to position themselves as the biggest new player in streaming entertainment. While Netflix is primarily a digital brand, they were quick to establish partnerships with TV hardware manufacturers to then gain physical brand real estate – they had Netflix buttons on remote controls sitting prominently on coffee tables around the world. They also recognised their luck when the phrase ‘Netflix and chill’ caught on in popular culture. Even when the phrase took on a somewhat dodgy connotation, Netflix stood back and allowed it to signal the popularity of their brand.

For marketers in New Zealand and Australia navigating economic downturns, embracing the concept of 'bigness' in branding is more important than ever. Craft a marketing strategy that reinforces perceptions of 'bigness' to build an aura of prominence, safety and trust. By signaling market dominance, a brand will feel like a safer choice and will be more likely to emerge from downturns as an even stronger leader.

Remember that 'bigness' isn't merely about actual size; it's about perception and positioning. That’s why TRA’s Brand Edge model includes a measure of how many people in the market perceive the brand to be “on the way up” relative to competitors. This gives us an understanding of how well a brand is projecting dominance and momentum in their category and is one of three main factors we look at in determining your overall brand advantage.

Talk to us about measuring the perceived ‘bigness’ of your brand and how we can help you craft a strategy for category dominance.