“We Remember 10% of What We Hear and 90% of What We Do.” Here’s Why BrandPRO Makes That Real.

You’ve probably heard the quote: “We remember 10% of what we hear and 90% of what we do.” It’s a popular shorthand for something important: learning tends to stick better when people actively practice.

It’s also worth noting that the exact “10/90” percentages are widely criticized as a myth (see the breakdown at Work-Learning Research). What is consistently supported, though, is the bigger idea: active learning and practice outperform passive listening.

That’s the same core argument we made in an earlier Local Strategy Partners post: Why simulations beat slide decks.

This post is the practical extension of that point—specifically, why BrandPRO is such a powerful way to train marketing judgment.

Why “Hearing Strategy” Doesn’t Build Strategic Judgment

Most marketing training still leans heavily on slide decks, frameworks, and case discussion. Those can be useful for introducing concepts—but they don’t force teams to make choices under constraints.

Active learning approaches are designed to raise participation, thinking, and application (see Harvard’s teaching guidance on Active Learning). Put simply: people don’t internalize strategy by watching it explained—they internalize it by making tradeoffs and living with outcomes.

This insight connects directly to a point we made earlier in our post, Why Simulations Beat Slide Decks: The Case for Experiential Learning in Marketing. Slides explain concepts. Simulations build judgment.

BrandPRO Turns Concepts Into Decisions

BrandPRO is a brand strategy simulation built around doing, not listening. As described on the official simulation page, BrandPRO is designed to help participants learn core brand strategy through decision-making in a competitive market.

In practice, that means teams must:

• define targeting and positioning,

• make product and pricing decisions,

• allocate resources across competing priorities,

• interpret market feedback and competitor moves,

• and iterate over multiple rounds.

StratX’s module overview describes this explicitly—participants prepare, analyze, and decide while practicing strategy fundamentals like targeting, positioning, product design, pricing, and communication (BrandPRO modules overview).

Why the Learning “Sticks” in Simulations

Simulations work because they create a tight loop: decision → consequence → reflection → improved decision.

MIT Sloan’s teaching resources explain why simulations have more impact than just listening or case discussion: learners see the immediate consequences of their choices and experience what it’s like to juggle competing priorities (MIT Sloan Teaching Resources: Management Simulations).

That loop is exactly what BrandPRO provides. Instead of remembering a framework as a set of bullets, participants remember it as a lived sequence of outcomes: we chose this… the market responded like that… next round we adjusted… and the result changed.

Tying It Back to Local Strategy Partners

If the earlier “simulations vs. slide decks” post explained why experiential learning matters, BrandPRO is the clearest demonstration of how to operationalize it.

Because it’s decision-based, BrandPRO supports what Local Strategy Partners emphasizes across its work—turning marketing into a structured decision discipline grounded in evidence and outcomes.

The Takeaway

The “10% vs. 90%” numbers may not be literal.
But the principle is rock solid:

If you want learning that transfers to real performance, people must practice making decisions—not just hear about them.

That’s the advantage of BrandPRO: it helps teams build strategy muscle memory, not just strategy vocabulary.

Have questions? Please reach out!