How Brands Grow: Byron Sharp's evidence-based rules, turned into a content plan for brands in Muscat

Many brands in Muscat plan their Instagram as if they were talking to a fan club: loyal customers, inside jokes, rewards for regulars. It feels warm. According to Byron Sharp, it’s also a slow way to grow.

Sharp is a marketing scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia. His book How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (2010) pulls together decades of research on how people actually buy, and it challenges a lot of comfortable marketing habits. It’s not a creative book, but it changes how you plan creative work.

Here’s our short version, and how we turn it into content for brands in Oman.

1. Growth comes from more buyers

Sharp’s central finding is that bigger brands are bigger mainly because more people buy them, not because their buyers are dramatically more loyal. He describes a pattern called double jeopardy: smaller brands have fewer buyers, and those buyers are also a little less loyal.

The lesson for your content plan is simple. A campaign that only speaks to your existing followers can keep them happy, but it rarely moves the business much. Most of your effort should go into reaching people who don’t follow you yet, and probably don’t think about you at all.

2. Your biggest audience is light buyers

Look at almost any brand’s customers and you’ll find many people who buy only occasionally. Sharp argues that these light buyers matter a lot for growth, because there are so many of them.

They are not watching your stories every day. They see you for a second, between other posts, maybe a few times a year. So each piece of content has to work for someone who knows almost nothing about you:

• Show the brand early, in the first seconds of a reel, not only in the last frame.
• Make the product and the moment of use obvious, even with the sound off.
• In Meta ads, favour broad reach over tiny, hyper-targeted audiences of people who already know you.

3. Be easy to think of

Sharp calls it mental availability: the chance that your brand comes to mind when someone is in a buying situation. Hungry after work, looking for a gift, needing a dentist on a weekend.

For content, this means linking your brand to those real moments, again and again. A café in Muscat doesn’t need another post saying "best coffee". It needs reels that show the exact situations when people want it: the early meeting, the late study session, the Friday catch-up. The more real situations you connect your brand to, the more ways people have to remember it.

4. Be easy to buy

The other half is physical availability: being easy to find and easy to buy. Sharp treats this as just as important as advertising.

Online, that’s your Instagram bio, your WhatsApp link, your location pin, your delivery apps and your opening hours. Great videography is wasted if the viewer can’t work out where you are or how to order in two taps. Before you spend on a new shoot, check that every path from a post to a purchase actually works.

5. Distinctive beats different

One of the book’s most useful ideas: customers rarely see brands as very different from each other, so chasing a unique claim often matters less than being instantly recognisable. Sharp recommends building distinctive brand assets, such as colours, logos, shapes, characters, sounds and taglines, and using them consistently.

This is where content production comes in. Pick a small set of assets and repeat them in every video: the same colour in the first frame, the same sound at the start, the same on-screen presenter or the same framing for product shots. Changing your look every month feels fresh to you, but to a light buyer it looks like a different brand.

6. Stay visible all year

Because memories fade, Sharp argues for staying present continuously rather than running one big campaign and then going quiet. Steady reach keeps your brand in mind for the moments when people are ready to buy, which you can’t predict.

In practice, a modest, always-on Meta ads budget with regular new videos is often better than spending everything around one launch, then disappearing for months.

A quick How Brands Grow check for your brand

1. Ask what share of your content is made only for existing fans, and shift some of it toward newcomers.
2. List five real situations when people in Oman need what you sell, and plan one reel for each.
3. Choose two or three distinctive assets and use them in every post for the next three months.
4. Test the path from your Instagram to a purchase on your own phone.
5. Replace stop-start campaigns with a steady weekly rhythm of content and reach.

Want to know how easy your brand is to recognise and buy from on Instagram? Ask us for a free Instagram analysis and we’ll send you a short, honest report on WhatsApp.

Summary and commentary by the NoOr team, based on Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (2010). Ideas are paraphrased, not quoted.