Building a Burger Brand with the Laws of Growth

In Chapter 1 of How Brands Grow, Professor Byron Sharp compares modern marketing executives to nineteenth-century doctors who enthusiastically practiced bloodletting for 2,500 years, operating on anecdotal intuition, orthodox folklore, and untested theories rather than empirical observation. When marketing managers sit down to plan a new brand launch, conventional textbooks instruct them to segment the audience, define a tiny hyper-targeted niche, craft an elaborate unique selling proposition (USP), and engineer intense customer loyalty.

Decades of empirical data collected by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute across hundreds of categories and dozens of countries reveal that real consumer behaviour operates on very different laws:

One of the most persistent myths in brand management is that marketing should concentrate primarily on "heavy buyers" or "brand loyals." Marketers routinely cite the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule), claiming that 20% of their buyers generate 80% of their sales. However, empirical studies across consumer packaged goods, fast-food, and services show that the heaviest 20% of buyers typically generate only about 50% of category volume; and more importantly, light buyers represent the overwhelming numerical majority of any brand’s customer base.

For a new entrant like Bun Voyage, obsessing over loyalty programs, app points, or repeat-purchase retention schemes before securing broad market penetration is commercially backwards. You cannot retain customers who have never heard of you, and you cannot build loyalty among consumers who have never tasted your food.

When analyzing how consumers choose where to eat, marketing textbooks often claim that brands have distinct, loyal customer tribes; for instance, that “Shake Shack people” never visit McDonald's. In reality, the Duplication of Purchase Law demonstrates that competing brands share their customer base in direct proportion to the competitors’ market size. A Shake Shack buyer is virtually as likely to visit McDonald’s for a quick breakfast or lunch as any random fast-food diner.

To establish a realistic launch frame, Bun Voyage examined the Singapore Quick-Service Restaurant (QSR) environment using data from independent fast-food studies. Rather than treating these metrics as market share, the analysis strictly treats them as a competitive consideration proxy, evaluating the formidable baseline of category consideration that any newcomer must confront:

In Chapter 2 and subsequent research from Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute stresses that brands do not grow by convincing customers of profound philosophical differences. Consumers are distracted, busy people making split-second decisions. Advertising and branding work by refreshing and building mental structures that make the brand effortlessly identifiable at the moment of choice.

To accomplish this, a new brand must solve two complementary challenges:

1. Mental Availability (CEPs): Linking the brand to the specific occasions, moods, and situations when people decide to buy food.
2. Sensory Distinctiveness (DBAs): Equipping the brand with distinctive visual, physical, and verbal assets that stand out in cluttered digital feeds and physical streetscapes.

A strategy is only as robust as its physical execution. To achieve physical availability, a brand must be accessible where people live, work, transit, and scroll. Bun Voyage maps its market introduction across three structured phases: building foundational assets, generating broad initial reach and trial, and expanding physical and digital availability across Singapore.

In conventional corporate planning, success is frequently assessed through vanity metrics (social media follower counts, click-through rates, brand sentiment scores) that bear zero correlation to long-term commercial performance. As Byron Sharp demonstrates in How Brands Grow, brand loyalty metrics naturally reflect a brand's size rather than any mystical emotional bond.

The Bun Voyage measurement architecture is organized around The Flight Plan: a three-move framework designed to diagnose market progress across four concrete, empirical dimensions:

When I first conceived Bun Voyage, my thinking began where most creative marketing students start: with the sensory allure of the product. The idea of five country-inspired burgers (spiced paneer, tingling Szechuan chicken, black truffle provolone, French mushroom Gruyère, and local Singapore chilli crab) felt inherently exciting. I envisioned travel boarding passes, passport stamps, and a brand world that felt like an airport departure lounge.

However, immersing myself in Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow forced a profound intellectual pivot. The literature revealed that great creative concepts fail every single day not because their recipes are poor or their logos are uninspired, but because their founders confuse creativity with commercial mechanics. A brand does not survive on the admiration of a handful of passionate foodies. It survives by building mental availability among millions of distracted, occasional buyers and ensuring that when those buyers feel a hunger pang, purchasing the brand requires minimal physical, cognitive, or financial effort.

Bun Voyage became an exercise in balancing these two vital disciplines: using rich, travel-inspired storytelling to give the brand a joyful soul, while anchoring its launch in the unforgiving, evidence-based laws of penetration, distinctiveness, and availability.