Marketing science concepts every social pro needs to know

One of the most shocking things I see right now? No, it's not that old school creative directors still yearn for the 1980s to come back. It's that we don't spend enough time linking marketing effectiveness and experimentation. And social pros tend to suffer as a result.

The effectiveness camp has its famous names. Sharp. Ritson. Nelson-Field. Binet. Field. Romaniuk. The experimentation camp also has its big players. MSCHF. Parvez. Cessario. Karten. SURREAL. LADbible. And so on. Each tribe excels at championing its leaders.

You know what's missing? More discourse on where both camps can and should meet. The stuff Pollyanna Ward or Michael Corcoran talk about. We need more social marketing pros speaking marketing science language. This is my attempt to help you fill in those blanks.

Why This Matters

I've spent 15+ years basically in limbo. Either I'm a social strategy person, or a brand and comms strategy person, or the strange space in-between. I like the in-betweenness. It's where the good inputs turn into weird magic. Integrated backbone, social muscle.

Those good inputs can come from a range of sources, and it takes time to know which ones are worth trusting. Below is a condensed view of the most important fundamentals I keep coming back to.

The problem with social pros not spending time with this stuff is that it makes their jobs harder, because they struggle to justify the role of social, entertainment-driven comms and online fame, to the boss.

Here's a harsh truth: it doesn't matter if you're right, it matters if you can convince others you're right. And to get them to commit. By the end of this, I hope you'll have more references and bits of language that can help people see social in the same grown-up way you do.

Here are five core concepts any social pro should know…

The Law of Double Jeopardy: What It Means for Social Media

The Law of Double Jeopardy states that brands with lower market share have both fewer buyers and lower purchase frequency — and it applies universally across categories.

It’s a simple but powerful idea by Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk. And before you think your brand is special, I got some news. This happens across categories and markets. Sorry.

This doesn’t mean loyalty is dead. It means that, to grow, brands need to increase their market penetration. By targeting people who don’t buy very often, but doing loads of them in one go.

For organic social, this means you can use your existing follower base and FYP feeds to work as earned media channels. If something slaps, chances are other, lighter buyers will spot it. Simple enough, right?

For paid, you can go for a broader mix of people who make up your light buyers, through high reach comms. These are not designed to be interacted with or shared, but to be recognised or recalled. And sure, through retargeting pools you can also trigger an action later.

Mental Availability: Why Associations Beat Awareness

Mental availability is the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation, and it's one of the most important concepts in modern marketing science.

Awareness answers the question “do I know about you?”. Mental availability answers the question “what do I know you for?”. And people need to link the answer with a buying occasion.

Think “which airlines do I know” (Virgin) vs “I need to get to Europe cheaply” (Ryanair). You want to be mentally available in a way that fits the category (so people know what you’re selling), while standing out from competitors (so people know why they should choose you).

So the shift is from building awareness to building associations. When producing communications for social, be clear on what you want people to associate with you. Progressive has growing awareness, but also associations with adulthood (“don’t become your parents”).

Category Entry Points (CEPs): How to Make Social Work Harder

Category Entry Points (CEPs) are the specific buying situations and contexts you want your brand associated with when a consumer is ready to purchase.

In simple terms, these are the specific associations you want to build with any comms you do. They boil down to a few questions: why does someone buy? When do they buy it? Where do they buy it? With whom do they buy it? With what do they buy it? Use them often.

When workshopping content strategy for clients, I often use CEPs as the first ways into what we should be talking about. It ensures you’re developing comms that have potential for building effective brand associations. Anything below that is probably not worth doing.

Most people still misunderstand Ryanair’s early-2020s social media strategy. They weren’t on social to grill their customers just because. They were showing how far they’ll go to save costs on cheap flights. And those associations matter when thinking about your next trip.

Physical Availability: Closing the Loop Between Social and Sales

Physical availability means making your brand as easy to buy as possible, through distribution, shelf presence, and increasingly, presence in digital and AI-powered channels.

If mental availability is what makes your brand easy to think about, physical availability is how your brand becomes easy to buy. This is how you maximise chances of mental availability leading to a sale.

Some people talk about digital availability as well, which includes spaces like ecommerce, app stores and increasingly LLMs. But regardless of channel, what’s important is to be clear with yourself, and others, what the real contribution of social comms actually is.

Case studies will say things like “we did a campaign and sales went up by 30%”. Yay for you. But they often ignore the fact that, by investing in a campaign you might also have more distribution, or discounts, or something else, so it wasn’t all due to the comms.

The way you can map this out is by creating simple attribution mechanisms. Post purchase surveys. Occasional customer surveys. Ask people where they remember hearing from you. It’s not perfect (all attribution models are faulty AF), but it’s better than nothing.

When I worked on O2, we did measurement experiments where we were able to correlate some of the results on our socials with website visits and product and service sales. No experiment was perfect in itself, but collectively they started building a more robust picture.

Distinct Entertainment: The Attribution Problem Social Pros Ignore

Distinct entertainment refers to branded content that is both memorable and correctly attributed, ensuring that creative work builds equity for the right brand, not just general fun.

This is what ensures all your work gets attributed to the right brand. Studies show that 60% of brand work gets misattributed, so you’re basically playing slot machines with every new fancy social post.

When people say “branding upfront”, this goes beyond a logo. Think colours, type, characters, audio assets. Anything that helps people recall your brand in a buying situation, or recognise it at point of sale.

This doesn’t mean slapping assets into everything you do like there’s no tomorrow. It needs to feel integrated into the entertainment-first comms you do. Think about colours in accessories, the clothes that people wear, specific sounds, characters (hey Duolingo!), and so on.

System1 coined the term ‘distinct entertainment’ in their recent ‘The Long and the Short (form) of it’ study. They showed that a lot of social video, including from creators, suffers from poor brand attribution. Be entertaining, sure. But don’t forget all that fun needs to tie back to you.

About The Author

Rob Estreitinho (me!) is the founder of Salmon Labs, a strategy studio that helps marketers move fast and make things. He has 15+ years of experience working across social, brand, and comms strategy for brands including Amazon, Cadbury and O2.

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