Our 10 principles

Why we exist

Marketing should help companies grow, make better decisions, understand customers, build brands, reduce wasted resources and create long-term value.

In Slovakia, however, it is still often reduced to advertising, creative work, social media, lead generation or short-term campaigns. Quality findings get lost among personal opinions, fashionable trends, conference buzzwords and superficial interpretations of data.

FAME is being created as an open professional platform for people who want to make better marketing decisions, improve marketing’s professional reputation and help it be seen as a discipline that can responsibly contribute to growth, competitiveness and long-term company value, rather than as a cost.

How we understand evidence-based marketing

Evidence-based marketing is neither dogma nor a list of eternal truths. It is a culture of better decision-making: we seek the best available evidence, assess it in the right context and are ready to change our minds when more robust findings emerge.

For every important claim or recommendation, we therefore ask:

• What is it based on?
• In what context does it apply, and what are its limits?
• What could show that we are wrong?

Our 10 principles

1. Marketing is a discipline of growth and decision-making, not just communication

Marketing neither begins nor ends with “What campaign shall we run?”. It is a strategic discipline across all 4Ps: from understanding the market, customers and category through developing the offering, pricing and distribution availability to brand building, measurement and resource allocation.

Good marketing helps answer more important questions: Where is there room for growth? Whom do we need to win over? How do people decide? What prevents them from buying? And how will we know whether our decisions work?

2. We weigh the strength of evidence

Not all data and claims carry the same weight. A meta-analysis, an experiment or a repeatedly replicated empirical pattern is a different type of evidence from a commercial report, a case study, an expert framework or one person’s experience.

All can be useful if we openly state their methods, context, limits and possible biases. Problems arise when one successful campaign is presented as a universal law or an opinion poses as evidence.

3. Brands grow mainly by gaining more buyers

In most markets, brands grow mainly by expanding penetration. Loyalty, retention and customer relationships have their place but alone are usually insufficient for substantial growth.

We therefore take empirical regularities and models of buying behaviour seriously: NBD-Dirichlet, Double Jeopardy, Duplication of Purchase, repertoire buying, the importance of light buyers, buyer moderation (the natural tendency of extreme buying to move towards the average over time) and brand-size effects.

4. We build mental and physical availability

A brand has a greater chance of being considered when people can easily recall it in buying situations (mental availability) and can easily find, understand and buy it (physical/digital availability).

Being known is not enough. A brand must be easy to recall at the right moment, helped by consistent use of its distinctive assets.

5. We build brands for future buyers too

At any moment, a large proportion of future buyers are outside the buying window.

Short-term activation helps capture existing demand. Long-term brand building creates and refreshes memory traces so the brand is easier to recall and more likely to be chosen when the need arises.

Effective marketing needs both time horizons and cannot be assessed solely by immediate responses.

6. Measurement should help decisions, not create an illusion of precision

Clicks, impressions, engagement, leads, NPS, brand tracking, share of search, attribution models, marketing mix modelling, experiments and surveys can all be useful. Every tool measures something different and has limits.

Digital attribution is not automatically evidence of incrementality. Retargeting may claim credit for people who would have bought without it. Search often captures existing demand, and engagement is not automatically an indicator of brand growth.

7. Advertising works through attention, memory and emotion

People rarely seek out advertising and pay little attention to brands. The role of advertising is therefore often not only to persuade but, above all, to create and refresh memory traces.

Rational information has its place, particularly during active consideration. Communication must also work when attention is low and amid competitive noise. Simplicity, creativity, emotion, ease of processing, recognisability and continuity help it do so.

8. B2B, services and complex products are not exceptions to human decision-making

A longer buying cycle, higher risk and more decision-makers change the buying process, not the basic principles of human psychology.

Memory, attention, familiarity, simplicity, trust, perceived risk and social proof also operate in B2B, banking, IT, professional services and other complex categories.

9. We assess price, promotions, loyalty and customer experience in market reality

Discounts and promotions can increase sales in the short term, but part of their effect often comes from existing customers or purchases shifted in time. Used poorly, they can reduce margins, change reference prices and weaken a brand’s pricing power.

Loyalty programmes can be useful in specific situations but alone usually do not change the market’s basic structure.

Customer experience has great value, particularly when it removes friction, reduces effort and supports availability or repeat purchase. It does not, however, replace acquisition or automatically drive growth.

10. Marketing must speak the language of finance and business strategy

For marketing to be part of company management, talking about impressions, clicks, engagement or creativity is not enough. It must understand growth, margin, profitability, cash flow, pricing power, market share, risk, investment horizons, the customer base and the company’s long-term value.

If you want to do marketing that stands up to evidence and business scrutiny, join FAME

Find more information about membership at: Membership →