An intelligent CMO recently said to me that in some countries they have to set frequency targets, because even the monthly penetration on their top brand is super high.

This situation is an unusual one yet it doesn’t contravene the established laws of growth.

Double Jeopardy tells us that penetration and purchase frequency are strongly linked. This is because the underlying story is that brand growth comes from nudging all category buyers to buy the brand a bit more often. This includes the super light/infrequent buyers of the brand – remember that most of any brand’s buyers buy much less frequently than the brand’s average purchase frequency; even for very large brands.

For most brands this nudge in their propensity to buy the brand shows mostly in its weekly, monthly (etc) penetration metric. But if the brand is already exceedingly popular it will show more in its frequency metric.

To nudge all these category buyers, especially the lightest, requires improving the brand’s mental and physical availability.

Often this means removing barriers to purchase/consumption, and finding ways of fitting into more people’s lives more often, e.g.

• no one thinks of us for breakfast
• when someone wants to buy just one bottle we don’t let them
• it’s impossible to buy our brand at the beach
• people don’t realise we also sell insurance

So in practice a frequency strategy is really the same as a penetration strategy. Or it should be. Sometimes, though, talk of a frequency strategy sends marketers off in the wrong direction – e.g. targeting their heaviest buyers, falling for ‘the heavy buyer fallacy’.

Perhaps it’s best not to talk of penetration or frequency strategies. Instead we can talk of a reach and availability strategy. Making every available buyer a tiny bit more likely to buy our brand tomorrow.

There’s more on this in our report on Penetration vs Loyalty.