DEEP BACKGROUND 07 OF 13 . CASUALS

What does the evidence say about where brand growth actually comes from?

From people who barely buy you. Across UK panel data on roughly 12,400 households, almost all of a brand's growth potential sat in its non-buyers and light buyers. For large brands, current heavy buyers held 17 per cent of it.


WHY THIS IS WORTH MONEY

This is the page where the strongest published challenge to fandom lives, so it goes first and it goes in full. A method that ducks this one does not deserve to be believed on anything else.

The practical stake is simple. If growth lives with your most devoted people, you invest in depth. If it lives with people who hardly know you, you invest in being easy to find and easy to buy. Those are different companies.


WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS


Double jeopardy, and it has not been broken in fifty years

Ehrenberg, Goodhardt and Barwise (Journal of Marketing, 1990) stated it plainly: "In any given time period, a small brand typically has far fewer buyers than a larger brand. In addition, its buyers tend to buy it less often." Small brands are punished twice.

Graham and colleagues (Australasian Marketing Journal, 2017) revisited it across thirty two differentiated replications spanning more than thirty five years and found "no boundary condition to the operation of the Double Jeopardy characteristic even in contexts that might initially suggest a challenge to its independence assumptions."


And the growth is in the people who barely buy you

Trinh, Dawes and Sharp (Marketing Letters, 2024) ran a simulation and an empirical study of purchases by roughly 12,400 UK households across brands and categories.

In the simulation, the largest share of a brand's sales growth potential came from non-buyers, 62 per cent on average, then current light buyers at 28 per cent. Current heavy buyers accounted for 10 per cent.

For a large brand with high penetration: 31 per cent of sales potential in current non-buyers, 52 per cent in current light buyers, 17 per cent in current heavy buyers. In the UK panel data, 66 per cent in non-buyers and 25 per cent in light buyers.

In their words, "almost any brand's headroom growth potential lies mostly in light or non-buyers of that brand. Even for large brands with high penetration the growth potential of light brand buyers eclipses heavy brand buyers."


And the audiences of competing brands look the same as each other

Anesbury, Winchester and Kennedy (Marketing Letters, 2017) examined "700 brands in more than 60 consumer packaged goods categories, for more than 160 variables" and documented "not only that brand user profiles seldom differ but also that they seldom change much over 3 to 6 years."

Read that alongside pillar one and the two findings agree. Demographics do not separate the buyers of one brand from the buyers of its rival. We arrived at that from the other side of the table, and it is why a Cone is placed on a domain rather than on a brand.


WHERE THIS LEAVES THE FANDOM ARGUMENT

Read quickly, all of the above is the opposite of start for and stay with your Fanatics.

Read carefully it is a scope condition rather than a contradiction. The Ehrenberg-Bass evidence base is established brands in mature categories, and for those they are right, which is why our own strategy for established things is to express one idea across the whole spectrum rather than pile more onto the devoted end. That play is a penetration play and it says out loud that over-serving your existing core is one of the two ways it goes wrong.

The Fanatic-first play belongs to new ideas, where there is no penetration to defend, no base to fall back on, and where reaching for volume without a base produces a one hit wonder.

And here is the paper that goes at that split directly, which we would rather print than have quoted at us.

Barker-Trowse, Dunn, Graham, Sharp and Corsi (Journal of Business Research, 2026) studied brands under one per cent market share over five years. Their finding: "even stable tiny brands have generally low levels of loyalty, often lower than expected (deficit loyalty). When tiny brands grow, their sales gains come primarily from increased penetration rather than purchase frequency. This challenges the idea that tiny brands depend on niche loyalty strategies."

So small does not automatically mean devoted, and a tiny brand that assumes it has superfans probably does not. That is a real correction to any loose reading of Fanatic-first, and it is worth taking.

What it does not settle is whether Fanatic-first is a rule, and we have never run it as one. It is one of three plays, and only Start, Build, Grow runs the sequence from the few to the many. Remake Your Market is for a business whose audience is misunderstood rather than absent, and it works by translating one renewed truth across all four behaviours at once rather than building outward from a base. The Superfandom play is for when depth beats breadth, and it scales the IP rather than the firm precisely because reaching the mass is expensive or structurally unlikely. Which play a brief points to is what the Cone read decides, not an assumption carried in ahead of it. So a finding that tiny brands do not depend on niche loyalty is not a finding against us, because niche loyalty is not what we prescribe. And a brand at 0.4 per cent of a packaged goods category is an established small brand in a mature market, not a thing being started. The distinction we draw is between defending penetration and having none, not between big and small.

The honest summary: on established brands in mature categories, Sharp is the better guide and we say so. On starting something, the burden of proof is on us, and this is where it sits.


WHERE THE EVIDENCE STOPS

Almost all of this evidence is packaged goods panel data. Categories where the purchase is rare, expensive or identity-laden are a different measurement problem and are not what was studied.

The concentration of buying is contested, not settled. Published estimates of the Pareto ratio range from around .59 on a one year window to .73 on longer windows, and the window is doing much of the work.

Excess loyalty for high share brands is a real published deviation from the Dirichlet model, found in 86 per cent of 422 categories in one large study. The model is a very good description, not a law.

None of this literature measures what a Cone measures. It measures who buys and how often, inside a category. It does not read what role a domain plays in somebody's life.


WHERE THE CONE SITS

Casuals engage through shared experience, which means they are there for who they are with. Your product is the venue for the friendship, not the reason for the evening.

The standard error is to treat them as failed Fanatics and educate them into caring more. That is how a brand produces deep content nobody at this position wants, in a tone that quietly tells them they are doing fandom incorrectly.

The right move is to work out the role you play inside their social context. Not what your thing means. What your thing lets them do together.

Growing something established, this is where your mass market begins, and on that ground Sharp is a better guide than we are.


WHAT TO DO ON MONDAY

Ask what your thing lets people do together, and answer it without using a single product feature.

If you cannot answer it, you do not yet have a proposition at this position, and every pound spent at that end is buying attention you cannot use.


Next is the widest end, and the number of times you can show somebody the same thing before it starts working against you.


SOURCES

Ehrenberg, A. S. C., Goodhardt, G. J., & Barwise, T. P. (1990). Double jeopardy revisited. Journal of Marketing, 54(3), 82-91. doi:10.1177/002224299005400307
Graham, C., Bennett, D., Franke, K., Henfrey, C. L., & Nagy-Hamada, M. (2017). Double jeopardy, 50 years on. Australasian Marketing Journal, 25(4), 278-287. doi:10.1016/j.ausmj.2017.10.009
Trinh, G. T., Dawes, J., & Sharp, B. (2024). Where is the brand growth potential? An examination of buyer groups. Marketing Letters, 35(1), 95-106. doi:10.1007/s11002-023-09682-7
Anesbury, Z., Winchester, M., & Kennedy, R. (2017). Brand user profiles seldom change and seldom differ. Marketing Letters, 28(4), 523-535. doi:10.1007/s11002-017-9437-2
Barker-Trowse, A., Dunn, S., Graham, C., Sharp, B., & Corsi, A. M. (2026). Tiny brands, big challenges: The limits of loyalty and the role of penetration in driving growth. Journal of Business Research, 204, 115864. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115864
Kim, B. J., Singh, V., & Winer, R. S. (2017). The Pareto rule for frequently purchased packaged goods. Marketing Letters, 28(3), 491-507. Mean Pareto ratio .73 across 22 categories. doi:10.1007/s11002-017-9442-5
McCarthy, D. M., & Winer, R. S. (2019). The Pareto rule in marketing revisited: is it 80/20 or 70/20? Marketing Letters, 30(2), 139-150. Average .67 across 339 non-CPG companies. doi:10.1007/s11002-019-09490-y
Jung, S.-U., Gruca, T. S., & Rego, L. L. Excess loyalty in CPG markets: A comprehensive examination. Journal of Empirical Generalisations in Marketing Science, 14(1). 422 categories, 5,126 brands; excess loyalty positively related to share in 86 per cent of categories. www.empgens.com/article/excess-loyalty-in-cpg-markets-a-comprehensive-examination/

Superfandom . Deep Background . https://superfandom.ai/science/casuals/
Matt Hart . published 2026-09-08 . last changed 2026-09-09