Comparison is the thief of brand growth

It is tempting to compare your brand to others when choosing which metrics to track – but comparison often leads to you measuring the wrong things and stalling growth.

Shakespeare once wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” However, if Shakespeare had grown up in my hometown of Whyalla, South Australia, that second line might have been, “Thou art more scorching, and more blistering.” Not quite as complimentary…

As normal as Shakespeare’s inclination to wax poetic is so is our desire to compare our own brands’ performance with, well, just about anything really. Competitors are often an easy place to turn to in order to satisfy that urge. Examples of competitor-based metrics strategy include:

• The Cheerleader: where you try to emulate the biggest brand in the category, aka the ‘They got that score, we can too!‘ approach. Note: this is best employed while alternating star jumps and claps.

• The Hercule Poirot: where you draw on your detective skills to work out why brands grew and echo any rising metrics for other growing brands, aka the ‘Aha, growth indicator detected, so let’s copy that!‘ approach.

• The Chameleon: where you co-opt scores achieved by an aspirational brand from another category and aspire to look like them, aka the ‘We want to be the Patagonia of yogurts!‘ approach.

• The (everything tastes like) Chicken: where you draw averages or top quartile benchmarks from a large database of brands without any consideration to whether other brands have been employing best practice aka the ‘Let’s aim for mediocrity and celebrate doing a bit better than it!‘ approach.

• The Optimist: where you select a positive quality and try to score the highest on this, aka the ‘What the world needs now, is <insert favourite emotion>, sweet <insert favourite emotion>’, approach. Note: This one is best sung.

However, focusing on other brands can be risky. Professor Scott Armstrong of The Wharton School, showed that managers who focused on beating rivals rather than their own profitability caused long term issues for the company. Focusing on other brands, even successful ones, can mislead when you don’t know the details on how they got there. You can misinterpret the cause of success, and fixate on the wrong metric, leading to poor decisions. Even with the right metrics, goal setting can be compromised. A smaller brand might set unrealistic expectations, while a bigger brand sets the soft goals that breeds complacency.

Yes, your marketing mix model might give you numbers to work with, but it needs to have the right data to do so. 

An alternative is to set goals that improve marketing practice as well as performance. Here are some metrics with objectives from sources other than competitors/other brands.

Read the full article in Marketing Week.

Effective sports sponsorship requires a different set of 4Ps

By taking note of the 4Ps of sports sponsorship – people, passion, prominence and partners – marketers will be in a better position to take advantage of opportunities.

Growing up as the eldest daughter of a sporting mad father in a time of only two TV channels in regional South Australia, I watched a lot of sport. This included the big events: football grand finals, the Ashes cricket series and the Olympics, but also perhaps less conventional programmes like Jack High (lawn bowls), Pot Black (snooker) and a show on Greco-Roman wresting whose name escapes me.

Given this year I get to fulfill a sporting dream and attend the World Cup, and I was recently invited to speak to sponsors of Australia’s greatest sporting invention – the AFL – it’s a good time to talk about sports sponsorship.

These are often costly investments, but there are ways to make the most of any spend.

In the spirit of ironic conformity, here are the 4Ps of effective sports sponsorship: people, passion, prominence and partners.

People

For a brand to grow, its marketing activities need to reach out and build brand memories among the non and very light buyers of the brand. This is hard, given the natural propensity of non-buyers to screen out advertising for brands they don’t buy – making cut through even harder to achieve.

Sporting events are where people of all different sorts come together united in a common cause of the sport, which provides the opportunity to break through the brand lens. If the sport is about team competition, there is the opportunity for cumulative reach, because each week each team faces a different competitor, bringing together a different combination of supporters.

But your brand’s reach can extend beyond the game, when considering all of the other opportunities around sporting events. Some examples include: the press conference, advertising of the game event, player events, highlights shown in news broadcasts or on social media. Understanding who is reached in each of those different environments is a valuable knowledge base to build an effective sports sponsorship.

Passion

Some people are sports mad, like my dad and his beloved Collingwood, others are along for the ride, but it is still easy to get caught up in the passion for competition.

In 2023, the Australian women’s soccer team, the Matildas, broke the record for the most-watched TV programme since the current ratings recording system began. This is because we, as a nation, got caught up in the passion of the game and the fever hit everyone.

But passion is a double-edged sword, and stirring too much passion for the game can mean your brand is ignored or forgotten.

It’s easier to make an ad that taps into an already existing passion for a team or a sport, because you are fishing in a shallow pond. Those emotions are easy to surface. It’s harder to get emotion that combines the sport and the brand.

I have spent many a year watching in frustration the big event sports ads, where (interchangeable) brands show different sports stars doing sporty things, occasionally in not so sporty places. I understand the impetus to celebrate the sport and the people who play it, but this should not be at the expense of the brand.

The closest to achieving this combination of brand and sport is McDonald’s ‘Wanna go to McDonald’s?’ for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Read the full article Marketing Week.

‘It’s not just one dip and done’: Why Dolmio is bringing back its puppets

In 2015, Australian television audiences saw what would be the last of Dolmio’s famously expressive puppet family for more than a decade.

The Muppet-style Italian characters, which had spent years causing kitchen chaos on Australian screens, were quietly put away and removed from above-the-line marketing as the Mars-owned brand pursued a more realistic depiction of family life and mealtimes.

Now, 11 years later, Dolmio is joining a wider revival of brand mascots, as marketers reassess the “cringe” factor that pushed many characters out of advertising and look to repurpose recognisable assets for a social-first media market.

“They are some of the most recognisable, distinctive and enduring assets we have as a brand,” says Shae Tsekouras, portfolio marketing manager at Mars.

Speaking to Mumbrella, Tsekouras said the puppets had never completely disappeared from the brand; despite being taken off screen, they still maintained a spectral presence on Dolmio’s website.

“They have been a part of our story ongoing, just not at the forefront,” she says. “They were taken off screen to prioritise other key messages during that time.”

Those messages took Dolmio in a markedly different creative direction.

In Australia, that included the 2015 Pepper Hacker campaign, which used the Dolmio pepper grinder to shut down the technology competing for attention at the family dinner table.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the brand moved further towards a more austere realism, with British actor Dominic West starring in its 2017 “No Drama” campaign.

As marketing academic Jenni Romaniuk recently told Mumbrella, the issue was not necessarily that mascots were ineffective: they had just become uncool.

“I think it was just a bit of cringe value, like jingles,” she said. “We’ve known for ages that jingles are effective; they stick in our brains. But it was just a little bit of a cringe factor – it wasn’t really cool anymore, and I think mascots were the same.”

But with Dolmio approaching its 40th anniversary, Mars began reconsidering what it had been sitting on.

The opportunity, Tsekouras says, was to use the characters’ recognisability to reconnect with existing consumers while introducing the Dolmio family to a new generation.

“Locally… utilising such distinctive assets to reconnect with existing users with the brand and a deeper emotional level. But also engaging [a] new generation with a brand, it’s obviously really critical moving forward,” Tsekouras said.

She stresses that rather than a one-off anniversary gimmick, the puppet revival will play a longer-term role over the next three-to-five years in Dolmio’s advertising.

“It’s not just one dip and done,” she adds.

Read the full article in Mumbrella.

Mascots are back, thanks to social media, but did they ever go away?

Social media has ushered in a new era for one of advertising’s oldest tools: the brand mascot. Characters that once operated only within advertising now live continuously across Tiktok, Instagram and other social platforms. As Zac Nikolovski reports, it means you need to be ready to see a whole lot more.

With a new crop of brand mascots appearing in the US — for Crocs, Apple, and Intermarche among others — and with the Dolmio puppets returning in Australia, you may be tempted to conclude adland’s uncoolest tool is back.

But Steve Coll – formerly M&C Saatchi’s team leader behind the Australian Retirement Trust’s big blue monster Artie and earlier in his career worked on Louis the Fly for Euro RSCG – is not convinced.

“I’m not sure if I can comment on them coming back, because I’m not sure that mascots have ever really gone away,” Coll told Mumbrella.

“I think they’ve always been received as a great way to get brand recognition.”

What has changed, he argues, is the arena. Social media has given mascots somewhere to exist beyond individual campaigns, allowing characters to develop personalities, respond to audiences and produce a near-continuous stream of content in a way that television and packaging never could.

“I think what brands have shown recently is that the social media platforms really reward brands that lean into making their characters relevant for today’s audiences on those platforms.”

The basic job of the mascot remains much the same. At M&C Saatchi, Coll’s team created Artie to make the decidedly unsexy world of superannuation memorable.

“There’s not a lot that’s memorable around that,” Coll said. “It’s a difficult category to make things memorable in. I think that’s where Artie played an incredibly important role.”

Australians could be “sitting on a monster” without realising it.

“He was very cleverly, strategically and creatively linked with both memorability, but also what we wanted the audience to ask themselves,” Coll said.

Hardwired for attention

For Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research professor Jenni Romaniuk, whether considered fashionable or not, mascots have long possessed qualities that make them unusually powerful brand assets.

Part of the problem, she argues, is that effectiveness and creative coolness have not always been the same thing, leading mascots to feel outdated.

“I think it was just a bit of cringe value, like jingles,” she told Mumbrella. “We’ve known for ages that jingles are effective, they stick in our brains. But it was just a little bit of a cringe factor – it wasn’t really cool anymore and I think mascots were the same.”

Cool or not, Romaniuk said mascots possess one deceptively simple advantage: they have faces.

“They typically have a face, they speak, they have a personality… they draw attention just like any other face does because we are hardwired sociologically that whenever we come into a room or see a scene, if there’s faces there, we will immediately look at them,” she said.

There is another advantage that has little to do with affection and considerably more to do with control. Celebrities and ambassadors age, change and occasionally behave in ways their sponsors would rather they didn’t. A mascot belongs entirely to the brand.

“Mascots, they’re yours. You own them, you can control them, you get to decide how they look, how they sound. It’s the ultimate Svengali project essentially for a brand.”

That control also gives mascots longevity. While a human face may no longer fit a brand a decade or two down the track, a character can be refreshed, revoiced and reinvented, all while retaining the memories consumers have attached to it.

“The benefit is that, even though it might not have appeared for a long time, there is an audience that will remember it. It’s much easier to refresh latent memory structures than it is to build new ones. But of course, only certain cohorts of people have that,” she said.

“If you’ve got a mascot only millennials will know and Gen Alpha won’t, that’s okay because it’s the millennials that are buying the breakfast cereal for their kids and part of their buying is remembering what they enjoyed as a child.”

Read the full article in Mumbrella.

You don’t need a bespoke luxury-style branding strategy to succeed as a luxury brand

Luxury marketing doesn’t need to create its own ‘laws of growth’ for brands to succeed; there are some law-like patterns that luxury categories share with others and understanding them will make luxury brand marketing stronger.

I am not a fan of extreme sports. I once tandem skydived and all I got out of it was a video of me looking like an upset pufferfish (I breathed in at the wrong time).

But I am a fan of extreme research, where we take what we know and test it in unusual and unexpected waters. I am also a fan of fashion and shopping, which made it irresistible to test some fundamental patterns in buyer behaviour and brand perceptions in a Luxury brand context, because of the long standing belief that “luxury is different”.

What comes to mind when you think of luxury? Brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Balenciaga, with their iconic designs, gorgeous retail outlets, and often eye-watering prices. Think about the last luxury product you bought… it’s a world apart from your last toothpaste purchase. Or is it?

Examining how brands are bought and how buyers think about brands forms the foundations of effective marketing and because of their regularity – can be thought of as ‘empirical laws’.

But these empirical laws do not hold all the time, everywhere – even gravity is weaker on a mountain top.

With a limited customer base (not everyone can afford $5,000 for a handbag) it’s easy to assume loyalty is essential to growth, and that offering something different/unique/exclusive is needed to achieve that loyalty.

A challenge for the sector, particularly for small brands, is the difficulty in getting luxury brand data. Indeed many academic papers on the topic are conducted with university or M-turk samples due to the cost of getting real luxury buyers for research.

We are fortunate to have invested in some data on luxury buying and perceptions of luxury brands, collected from luxury buyers. Does luxury marketing need to create its own ‘laws of growth’ for brands to succeed? Let’s look at some empirical laws and see how luxury categories perform.

Read the full article in Marketing Week.

Leaning on meaning could undermine your distinctive assets

In her first column for Marketing Week, Ehrenberg-Bass’s Jenni Romaniuk, illustrates the impact of trying to integrate ‘meaning’ into the four stages of distinctive asset creation.

When embarking on the journey to build distinctive assets, the first hurdle is deciding which assets to build. A smorgasbord of options are available, and no single right answer, even when all the crappy options are removed. It might seem easy to decide when there are multiple right answers, I mean, how can you go wrong? The challenge is often not the decision itself but explaining it to others afterwards.

Looking for an asset with ‘meaning’ seems like a useful tactic to provide an explanation for your choice. Meaning in this context refers to any association evoked by the asset prior to selection as a brand’s distinctive asset. For example, choosing the colour yellow because it is ‘uplifting’, a picture of a flower because it shows ‘naturalness’, or Snoop Dogg because he is ‘cool’. Leaning on meaning makes it easy to explain why you selected asset B over A and C.

But what is the price of this easy explanation?

Using meaning to select an asset might not only compromise selection, but also future asset building, use and protection.

As Figure 1 illustrates, there are four broad stages in the distinctive asset creation process. Let’s see how meaning can affect each of these stages.

Selection: Leaning on meaning can reduce uniqueness

In this stage, we choose assets to build. First, let go of the idea that there is only one right choice. Brands in the same category show us time and time again that many different colour assets could work, as could many different shapes or faces. It’s not about picking a winner, it’s about picking a contender. Whether it becomes a winner or not depends on the stages that follow selection.

You do need to avoid two major pitfalls when using meaning to select an asset:

1. Reduced distinctiveness – as it may lead multiple brands, accessing the same source, to select the same asset (eg, let’s use green to boost the perception we are a sustainable organisation, or slant the font upwards to show we are rising up). An asset shared across competitors is a weak asset.

2. Blinded weakness – a positive meaning can blind you to the asset’s drawbacks, such as links to a competitor, because you hope the benefit from the meaning will overcome any drawbacks. For example, using a cartoon bear character because it connects with kids when competitors also use a similar style of character.

Building: Leaning on meaning can make it harder to build strong assets

This stage is the grunt work of creating memory links between the brand name and the asset in as many category buyers as possible. As a memory objective this involves expanding the buyer’s associative network of what can evoke the brand name to include this asset. Tactically, this means widespread co-presentation of the asset with the brand name – where the buyer notices the brand name and the asset together, to form the link in memory.

To achieve this outcome is a challenge as both the brand and the asset must stand out in a sea of creative elements, employed for their attention-getting properties.

Prior asset meaning makes this challenge even more difficult as the mental competition is not just what is in the environment but also what is already in the buyer’s memory. This makes it harder for co-presentation to succeed. The brand needs to get attached to the asset’s memory network and the stronger that is, the more muscle the brand needs to be able to squeeze itself in.

When experiencing the asset leads the viewer to go off onto a mental tangent, rather than process the brand, they can fail to make or refresh the desired brand-asset link. For example, seeing an image of a rose reminds you of the fabulous Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner War of the Roses movie, which then reminds you that you haven’t seen Romancing the Stone for ages and… lo and behold… you fail to register the Lancashire tea brand sitting next to the rose image.

Read the full article in Marketing Week.

Category Entry Points Dissected: How They Really Contribute to Growth

A frequently cited, influential book in the marketing world is How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Category Entry Points (CEPs) play a prominent role in explaining how good marketing can work. Since the research of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has become more popular, CEPs have also increasingly appeared in our professional discussions and marketing strategies. A positive development for the enthusiast of evidence-driven marketing, but as we often see, the noise also increases as more people run away with new concepts.

The result: we see many different definitions of CEP, even more interpretations, CEPs that are not CEPs, and CEPs that are compared to, for example, USPs or category drivers that are simply not correct. As a result, the CEP is in danger of becoming a meaningless buzzword, while it is actually a valuable strategic tool for helping brands grow.

The VIA Consumer Insights Taskforce therefore felt it was high time to provide clarity. We look at what CEPs are, how they can be used to strategically drive growth, and the four most common mistakes marketers make when working with CEPs. To do this, we teamed up with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, co-author of How Brands Grow and Associate Director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. In this first of a two-part article, we focus on the two biggest pitfalls surrounding CEPs.

What are Category Entry Points (CEPs)?

CEPs are essentially moments when someone mentally enters a product or service category. Think of a long day at the beach when you feel like having a refreshing drink, or a birthday party where your neighbor tells you how much money he’s saved by buying solar panels and you suddenly think about buying one. These moments act as cues that trigger your memory to recall brands.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that linking a brand to as many of these relevant cues as possible increases mental availability. This increases the chance that your brand will be top-of-mind when someone is considering a purchase. In other words: the more often a brand pops up in the consumer's mind with relevant CEPs, the greater the chance of a (future) purchase.

Pitfalls in applying CEPs

Although CEPs seem clear in theory, in practice things often go wrong. We asked Romaniuk about the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Read the full article in Adformatie.

Five steps to shake off that ‘heaviest of buyers’ mindset

‘Remember what it was like to know very little about a category’

When you work on a brand, you live and breathe it every day. Its existence pays your bills and puts food on your table, and you learn so much about it that, in memory terms, you look like the heaviest of buyers — with dense networks of brand memories that are easily retrievable anytime, anywhere. 

It’s also then easy to assume everyone else thinks the same way and lose touch with the thoughts and feelings of typical buyers, without even really knowing it. This can then lead you to (unconsciously) approve marketing activities that speak to the experienced, heavy buyers, but are incomprehensible to the new buyers, often inexperienced in the brand and possibly the category, that you need to attract to grow.

Here are some steps you can take to shake out of that heavy brand buyer mindset and see the world through the eyes of most and most useful category buyers.

(Really) Define your typical buyer

Most brand managers have a target market for their brand, defined by some personal characteristics. Historically these have been gender and age, but over time other characteristics have been adopted to ‘flesh out’ the picture of who is buying your brand.

Instead of a target market, define your typical (or most common) brand buyer. Then once you have done that, look at how many sales come from outside your brand’s typical buyer… and then decide to stop trying to use characteristics to define your brand’s buyers and instead embrace the heterogeneity that is your current customer base, and your future customer base. It’s only when you accept the diversity of your brand’s customer base can you plan to increase it. 

Remember, even for B2B or very frequently bought categories, any category is only a small part of people’s lives, and any brand an even smaller part within that. While this realisation reminds us of the diminished importance of the brand to the buyer, it amplifies the importance of marketing activity about the brand to the buyer.

Read the full article in MediaCat.

The only power that will make your brand famous: Fans

What really makes you famous? World-class advertising spend and physical distribution like Coca-Cola? Influencer collaborations like Nike? Content and shows like Paddy Power? Or all of them?

“Make my brand famous!” the CMO shouted. It makes sense, right? (Even if he did.) Being the most famous brand in a category means being the most recognizable and talked about brand. And that means winning the battle that Byron Sharp called “mental accessibility” in his famous book How Brands Grow. It means people will choose you and put you ahead of the competition.

So what actually makes you famous? World-class advertising spend and physical distribution like Coca-Cola? Influencer collaborations like Nike? Content and shows like Paddy Power? Or all of them?

How do you maintain your reputation? Can your brand afford the cost of continued reach and buzz? As one Pepsi customer once told me about their content strategy: “We have to keep feeding the beast, Christian!”

After quitting soda and focusing solely on video game marketing at Waste, I realized there was one truth to all of this…

Fans are the lifeblood of eternal fame

Advertising, content marketing, PR, and collaborations are empty tools without the validation and support of a dedicated fan base. Your fans are people who are passionate about you. Loving you is part of who they are. Supporting you is part of their purpose in life.

It's clear that when it comes to fame, fans are priceless:

• Your fans will describe you with passion and in all their unique style in a way that no advertisement could.

• They will continue to talk about you even during your less active periods.

• They will share your content with higher credibility than any sponsored post you make.

• They will raise your reputation and create excitement in an unexpected way for you.

• They will create content and memes that fit the spirit of your brand culture.

• They will encourage more people to use your products because they want to share the growth journey and experience that ensures their passion will continue.

• Your fans will build on your fame in their circles because they will want to meet other people like them.

• They will initiate cultural rituals that will redefine what makes your brand famous in the first place.

• They will continue to stand behind you even when you lose your reputation. (Unless you make major mistakes that have damaged their trust beyond repair.)

Fan culture must be constantly nurtured

Fans can’t be bought. This isn’t like people who watch your ad once on YouTube or your Facebook followers. Fans emerge naturally from your user base when you adhere to the principles of excellence (and continually provide them with something to fuel their loyalty), openness (being willing to listen to your users and spot emerging trends), and empowerment (giving them control and allowing them to organize themselves).

This is not about satisfying desires, it’s about creating meaningful value exchanges between the brand and the fans in a transparent manner. At the end of the day, you’re giving them entertainment, identity, influence and belonging; they’re giving you revenue, loyalty, ideas and ongoing advocacy. In short, you’re the winner.

What did Larian do differently?

The impact of Larian Studios’ roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) is a good example of fan-driven fame. According to a report by VGI, the game’s revenue reached $657 million in 2023 and its player base increased to 875,000. All this was achieved by a relatively small and independent game studio.

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Are brands sacrificing customer loyalty in pursuit of ‘over-acquisition’?

Can a focus on customer retention only take a business so far, or do companies that ignore existing relationships run the risk of damaging their brand?

Does acquisition trump retention, or is valuing customer loyalty the best way to grow a sustainable business?

For the third consecutive year, Marketing Week’s exclusive Language of Effectiveness survey finds brands are far more interested in attracting new customers than measuring the impact of retention. The survey of more than 1,200 marketers finds new customer acquisition is a key effectiveness metric for 33% of brands, compared to 26.2% which measure customer lifetime value and 25.1% which analyse customer retention rates.

While the number of brands that prioritise measuring new customer acquisition has fallen from 2023 (46.4%) and 2022 levels (51.1%), greater value continues to be placed on attracting new buyers than understanding the contribution of existing ones. Is the concept of fighting for customer loyalty going out of fashion, or are there other factors at work?

“Hopefully marketers are catching up with the science,” says Jenni Romaniuk, research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. “The science tells us that acquisition is how you grow and that you can’t grow by retention alone. If you grow, you will get a bit more loyalty and a lot more acquisition.”

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Thinking differently about different thinkers

What if history's greatest thinkers had been marketers?

Marketing is a relatively young science, and so has borrowed from psychology, economics and other fields of research. In that spirit of borrowing from others, I now draw from some of history’s greatest thinkers and reimagine how their more memorable work could have turned out if they had been in the field of marketing instead.

First off, we have Einstein’s Theory of Relativity:  E=mc2 or Energy equals Mass x Speed of Light (squared). If Einstein had been a marketing academic and had developed the Theory of Retailing, he might have instead come up with the cautionary: Engagement = Marketers Crazy (extra) or the more hopeful Excellence = Managing CEPs (many)

Sir Issac Newton is particularly well known for his three laws of motion. I’d like to think that, in his role as marketing director for Apple, Newton might have instead come up with the following Three Laws of Marketing Mistakes:

Instead of Newton’s first law, the Law of Inertia, which can be summarised as: ‘An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced external force.’ We could have had: ‘A Distinctive asset stays a Distinctive Asset unless acted upon by an unbalanced Senior Marketing Executive.’

The Second Law of Motion, or the Law of Acceleration, is a nice equation of: F=ma or Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. This could have become: Funnels = muddled assumptions

The third law, which is the Law of Action and Reaction, is ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. This could instead turn into ‘For every brand plan that prioritises retention, there is an equal and opposite budget that downgrades growth expectations’. OK, this does not roll off the tongue quite as easily as Newton’s law but is a useful cautionary reminder.

Read the full article on MediaCat.

The drawbacks of ‘renting’ Fame

When marketers employ celebrities they are simply renting fame

In Better Brand Health Professor Magda Nenycz-Thiel and I discuss the difference between ‘owning’ and ‘renting’ prominence, when trying to stand out in retail contexts. Here, I discuss how when marketers employ influencers, celebrities or other vehicles to promote the brand, they are similarly ‘renting’ their fame. Given the growth in activities in this sector I think it is timely to reflect on the risks associated with ‘renting’ fame from someone or something else.

What does it mean to rent ‘Fame’?

‘Renting’ fame involves partnering with a more well-known entity to boost your brand’s visibility among a target audience. This could mean collaborating with an influencer, celebrity, or a major event like the upcoming Olympics. The goal is to leverage the established fame of the other entity. However, this renting of another’s fame comes at a cost, and so its worthwhile to consider the risks to achieving a favourable outcome.

Beware the attention vampires

In a previous column, I discussed the vampire effect, where celebrities draw attention away from the brand. This happens because celebrities have established memory networks in buyers’ brains, making them feel familiar and attracting more attention. Influencers, who category buyers regularly follow, also have extensive memory networks, making them appear more like friends than strangers. Consequently, when your brand partners with these influencers, you risk the vampire effect, with more attention going to the influencer than the brand. 

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Can we please re-think political advertising?

I confess to being something of a politics nerd. I follow politics like other people follow sports.  But I loathe the tone of most political advertising — it feels like a race to the bottom to paint the country and other politicians in as poor light as possible. Who wants to view that? I sense I am not alone as surveys in many democracies reveal a decline in public engagement with politics and the voting process.

Therefore, as we face elections in the UK and USA, and the advertising spend is ramping up — I wonder if it is useful to rethink our ideas of how political advertising could work, to improve the experience for all.

For this column I was inspired by a project started by Andrew Ehrenberg a few decades ago — which looked at the ‘Form Advertising Takes’ (and became affectionately known as the ‘FAT’1 project). The dominant mental model of how advertising works was that advertising is about persuading people to buy. Under this model, advertisements are a ‘salesperson’ for the brand, and so need to have a compelling reason to buy, such as a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), or some way of convincing the buyer that this brand was different or better than other options.

As usual, Andrew questioned the prevailing wisdom and put forward a competing theory, that arose from his decades of research into buyer behaviour and brand performance. His ‘advertising as creative publicity’ model (later published in the Journal of Advertising Research), claims the most common role of advertising is to keep useful brand memories fresh in the minds of category buyers.

Only occasionally, when there is genuine new news, does advertising need to create new memories, but even then, we need to remember that new news is only new once, and after that first exposure, advertising with that message serves to remind and keep that brand memory fresh.

As one way to test what advertising does (rather than what it was intended to do), he asked different groups of people to view advertising and assess if it had persuasive or publicity qualities.

The project team, which included my colleague Professor Rachel Kennedy, found that only one third of advertising says things I did not already know, while half of advertising was judged to only remind me of the brand. This got get me thinking — what form does political advertising take?

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Mumbrella360: Ehrenberg-Bass Professor says ‘you’re poorly branding’ if you’re focusing on assets over your brand

Fame is a key metric for distinctive asset strength, and to get to that point, brands must remember the difference between asset using and asset building, according to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Professor Jenni Romaniuk.

Speaking at Mumbrella360 on Thursday, the Research Professor of Marketing and Associate Director (International) explained the fame score, why it is so important, and if a brand wishes to use an asset as a proxy for their name, how they can get there.

The fame score – which is the proportion of category buyers who, when they experience an asset, think of the brand – is key to ensuring brand awareness is strong. It provides an unprompted opportunity to measure assets and test how distinctive they are.

Romaniuk stressed the importance of testing this unprompted.

“If you’re actually prompting distinctive asset measurement, it gives you inaccurate, inflamed fame scores – up to about 20 percentage points – which is really dangerous,” she said.

“If you want your asset to act as a proxy for your brand name, your fame score needs to be as close to 100% as possible, and messing around with the measurement can absolutely destroy that score.

Read the full article on Mumbrella.

Media planning: An intervention

Dear Marketers,

It’s because I care about you, that I have to let you know that you aren’t making very good media choices right now. I understand, its challenging with so many platforms and changing algorithms that you naturally want to experiment and experience the thrill of a new media format. I get it, I do. But you keep making the same mistakes over and over again, blowing the budget, chasing the next ‘media’ high. Now I see you’re about to repeat these mistakes again with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is my effort to intervene, get you back on the right path.

Due to my lack of experience in staging interventions, I asked ChatGPT to suggest some steps. So here it goes!

Step 1: Educate myself

You might ask, who am I to question your media choices? I don’t claim to be a media expert, but nonetheless have watched you struggle with your media planning choices over the past decades. For example I recall Super Bowls where you blew millions of dollars on a ‘user-generated’ ad, only to discover users can’t generate ads (if they could, they would work in advertising!) I was also there, holding your hand, when you discovered the real cost of ‘free’ viral views, and I listened as you justified the expensive foray into facial expression coding because it could tell you, without much doubt, that someone…smiled. It makes me sad to see you repeatedly heartbroken after the new medium, new technology or new toy you fall in love with fails to live up to your expectations.

Step 2: Gather a supportive team

Luckily, I have some media and advertising researchers to provide me with valuable empirical knowledge about media planning. Virginia, Rachel, Steve, Nicole, Nico and Aaron, are just some of the people in my ‘go to’ team for media knowledge. Examples of their work are at the end of this column. Who is your media knowledge support team? Is it knowledge from an independent source with no skin in the game, or MADAR (Media Advertising Disguised as Research)?

Step 3: Choose a right time and place for the discussion

This month’s theme is about whether ‘old’ media is back, so I feel that this is a timely discussion. It’s only when you realise how your decisions have distracted you from the bigger picture that you can understand why ‘old’ media went out of favour. ‘Old’ media has been the sacrificial lamb, paying the price for your addiction. You blamed the audience, the measurement, the inability to interact with viewers, but the issue doesn’t sit with the audience, but with you…. you forgot what’s important, metrics such as reach, branding and building useful brand memories, and instead got sucked into an engagement vortex…

Read the full article on MediaCat Magazine.

Is laughter the best growth medicine?

If humour distracts from the brand rather than embed it in memory, the joke's on you!

I can’t tell a joke. I love jokes, but I can never remember them well enough repeat without screwing ins one way. One of my favourite jokes in a beer ad*. I never remember the brand, just that it has ‘beer’ ‘dog’ and ‘a man pretending to be blind’. We like to laugh and some brands make us laugh in advertising. So why don’t we mentally reward brands that makes us laugh? Its because when what is memorable is unrelated to buying, so is advertising’s effect.

When it comes to emotions in advertising, you need to think beyond the joke to get the last laugh. There are some common areas where marketers (and researchers) draw faulty conclusions about humour, and other emotions, in advertising:

If the joke works the ad works

A key role of advertising is to build useful brand memories. The danger with any joke is it sucks up all the viewer’s cognitive energy and none is left over for the brand or the message. This is a form of ‘vampire effect’ that has been found for celebrities in advertising. A well-known celebrity gets more attention than an equally attractive but unknown model, and this extra attention is at the expense of attention to the brand (see Efrgen paper in key references). A good joke makes you think, but often about something irrelevant to the brand or the category. The effort to generate the emotion is then wasted. An effective joke in advertising channels that cognitive attention to the brand and message, not away from it.

If someone loves the joke, they will love the brand

Another common error is misunderstanding how emotions add value to the brand. It’s not about emotion-to-transfer, but rather emotion-as-transport. The value is not in the emotion itself, but that the emotional response can help create deeper processing of the memories you want to embed. The emotion-as-transport model means to make it work, you need to clearly articulate the cargo you want the emotion to carry. This cargo is (hopefully) the brand and the message.  

Read the full article in MediaCat Magazine.

Exploring Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk

In a world where brand perception can make or break market success, understanding your brand’s health might be more crucial than ever. I interviewed Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who after co-authoring “How Brands Grow 2,” together with Byron Sharp now brings clarity to the concept of brand health in her new and aptly named book, “Better Brand Health.”

Interviewer (Coen):

“Jenni, could you share a bit about yourself before we dive in?”

Jenni Romaniuk:

I’m immersed in the science of branding, serving as a research professor and the associate director international at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. My passion lies in dissecting and enhancing the understanding of how brands grow and remain healthy in the consumer’s mind, which is the centerpiece of my book.”

Coen:

“Jenni, your pioneering approach has had a big impact on branding. Can you delve into the philosophy that underpins your writing methodology?”

Jenni Romaniuk:

“Writing, for me, is an expedition into the heart of branding. It requires an unwavering commitment to understanding and an unquenchable curiosity. In my work, particularly in ‘Better Brand Health,’ I strive to weave a narrative grounded in empirical evidence while also elevating the discourse on branding. The philosophy that drives me is one of relentless pursuit of knowledge — to challenge existing assumptions, to venture into uncharted territories, and to return with solid insights that help the branding field forward. It’s about crafting a narrative that’s not only reflective of my personal growth but also equips the readers with practical tools to navigate the complexities of modern branding.”

Read the full article on Medium.

Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s (brand) relevance?

Given it is the season of marketers donating to celebrities via Super Bowl advertising, I want to talk about using faces as Distinctive Assets. Faces draw category buyer attention because we are social/tribal beings. In any new environment, our attention naturally goes to any faces present. Are they familiar or unfamiliar, friend or foe, do I need to deploy a ‘fight or flight’ response or can I relax? One of the most valuable ways to use a face is to turn it into a Distinctive Asset, so it evokes the brand for category buyers. This makes it both familiar and relevant to the buyer. 

The power of a celebrity face as a Distinctive Asset

‘Tis Super Bowl season, where advertisements have an abundance of celebrities, and many of which are ad hoc efforts to grab attention. However, some brands have ongoing paid endorser relationships with celebrities. Dr Cathy Nguyen, Dr Lucy Simmonds and I wanted to see if it was the power of the face, or whether knowing the celebrity’s name made a difference to the celebrity’s strength as a Distinctive Asset.

In an empirical study across celebrity-brand pairs for actors, musicians, and sports stars, we found that if someone could put a name to the celebrity face, they were on average four times more likely to link that celebrity to a brand they were paid to endorse. For example, those who knew that face was Jennifer Aniston were more likely to link her to Aveeno, than those who did not know her (27% versus 5%). Therefore, a celebrity face is a more powerful Distinctive Asset when someone knows their name. 

The power of faces to draw attention to advertising

In another project led by Julian Major, we tested whether Distinctive Assets did a better job of drawing attention to an online banner advertisement than the brand name. Included were three face assets with mid-level Fame (% of category buyers that link the brand to the asset). These assets were the faces for Dos Equis, (Uncle) Ben’s and Old Spice.

The experiment involved reading articles on a mock website with online advertising. All respondents saw the same ad with the same face in the same story, the only difference is one group linked the face to a brand, while the other group did not. The test was to if they remembered the advertisement after an unrelated task. If brand relevance doesn’t matter, these scores will be the same.

The results below show that post-exposure advertisement recognition is significantly higher if the face is a Distinctive Asset. Therefore, a previously unknown face works better when it becomes known as a Distinctive Asset. 

Read the full article in MediaCat Magazine.

Tuning out the noise to better hear the quiet consumer

Is your brand tracking blocking your growth? Jenni Romaniuk, international director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explains all to dentsu’s Dave Winterlich, on this week’s Inside Marketing podcast.

It’s time to take a closer look at how we measure brand health, says Jenni Romaniuk, author of books such as Better Brand Health; Building Distinctive Brand Assets; and How Brands Grow Part 2 – revised. From the institute’s base at the University of South Australia, she and her colleagues are known worldwide for advancing marketing knowledge and busting pseudoscience and marketing myths. Among the top fallacies is an over-emphasis on heavy users – our most loyal customers.

“One of the reasons I wrote a book on brand health tracking was because I was concerned that we were kind of missing the point,” says Romaniuk. Too often the impetus is to “dive in”, trying to separate out heavy users to look at them, she explains. In fact, “You actually have to separate out the light and non-buyers because they’re the ones that are hard to hear.”

She likens it to a full room with 100 people, 10 of whom are yelling. It’s the others who should be of most interest to you but our focus on heavy users drowns them out.

“That’s one of the big problems of brand health tracking. It has been so heavily weighted, either implicitly or explicitly, to the heavy loyal buyer that we haven’t been able to see opportunities for growth,” she says.

Read the full article on Irish Times.

If AI took over making marketing decisions, would anyone notice?

Welcome! At the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for (*gulp) many decades now, I have the privilege to see a wide variety of great research, some of which is under appreciated because it was ahead of its time, and/or it missed getting the publicity it deserved. My aim for this column is spotlight some cool past research and show how this knowledge can help us with today’s problems. 

Hype/angst about AI taking over jobs is rampant, and marketing is no exception. Tasks such as creating digital content, direct marketing emails, or desk market research, are now routinely done by AI products.  With tasks that are repetitive or involve synthesizing vast amounts of information, human brains are competing with (and often losing against) the ChatGPTs, Bards, Geminis and Claudes of the world.  

While this causes angst amongst the Assistant Social Media Managers of the world, experienced marketers are feeling more secure, trusting their experience makes them less easily replaceable by an AI tool. But how safe should experienced marketers feel?

Read the full article on MediaCat.