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.

Jenni Romaniuk: don't trust me, trust science. It leads to smarter decisions

The correct measurement of brand health is one of the most valuable tools for marketers, emphasized Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM (43/2023) , which took place shortly after her presentation at the Brand Management 2023 conference. As a New Year's gift, a conversation with a professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of the expert bestsellers How Brands Grow — Part 2, Building Distinctive Brand Assets and last year's news Better Brand Health, we present it in full.

In 2019, when you performed in Prague for the first time, you spoke about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

This time you focused on measuring the health of brands, about which you published a publication this year. Can you introduce your work?
Anyone involved in monitoring brand health wants to understand why to do it and how to do it right. For years, people have told me that measurement frustrates them. They don't like how it works and see no use for it. So the goal is to make the most of what is often one of the biggest spenders in a marketer's research budget. Because when done right, it can be one of the most valuable tools at their disposal.

As I understand it, you are trying to get into the minds of the shoppers. It is so?
It's about understanding whether you've laid the right foundation so that the next time someone is in a buying situation, they're more likely to consider your brand. And in addition to knowing how to measure these basics and how to interpret the obtained data.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Jenni Romaniuk: properly measuring brand health is one of the most valuable tools

Don't believe me, trust science - it leads to smarter decisions, says Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM. A professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and a leading expert on brand value spoke at the Brand Management conference after four years.

In 2019, you spoke in Prague about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Romaniuk’s new book merits attention

The old chestnut that marketing departments know that half their marketing communications budget works, but not which half, is thankfully long dead and buried. Its demise helped by pioneering studies of how advertising works by JWT in 1960’s London; built on by planners like Alan Hedges and later Paul Feldwick in later decades; with newer critical insights from Les Binet and Peter Field.

Studies from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reported on by the redoubtable Professor Byron Sharp have also helped immeasurably. Sharp’s blockbuster 2012 publication, How Brands Grow, has gone into numerous editions and achieved best-seller status. He postulated a series of ‘laws’ for marketing managers; salience rather than positioning, distinctiveness rather than differentiation.

Sharp also addressed reaching not teaching, continuous activity rather than bursts. He had the audacity to nobble one of the longest established icons of marketing practice; USP in favour of making relevant associations and building memory structures. Like another messiah 2,000 years earlier he then encapsulated his commandments down to two; mental availability and physical availability.

One suspects the professor would have approved of the comparison. Sharp’s capacity for pithy phrasemaking and flair for communication means that his main conclusions are now widely shared across the business. Inevitably, some of his pronouncements have attracted criticism, particularly from fellow academics who can often make ground hurling look tame.

Sharp’s tendency to dismiss niche brands as small brands that lack the ambition to be more successful has been effectively rebutted in several case studies. Since the initial publication of How Brands Grow 11 years ago, there has been a steady stream of publications expanding on the initial thesis. The publications collectively represent a comprehensive guide to successful brand management.

How Brands Grow Part 2 appeared in 2014 with Sharp joined by Dr Jenni Romaniuk, also a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in South Australia. Four years later, she published Building Distinctive Brand Assets, an expanded thesis on one of the key components of a successful brand; colour, logos, copy lines, symbols, characters, visual and verbal tone.

Faults

Romaniuk has now written a new book covering another critical area of brand management (measurement) entitled Better Brand Health; Measure & Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The self-confident approach of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is evident from the preface where the author wastes no time in outlining the faults of most current brand tracking studies.

The faults are explained under three headings: philosophy, fads, fear. Determining that they adopt the wrong philosophy by concentrating on heavy and loyal buyers; the E-B academics have tended to focus on low level or non-buyers as they are key to future growth. Romaniuk  is also critical of ‘fads’; that is adding new measures for the hell of it, leading to ‘fear’ of dropping measures.

The measures have a tendency to become superfluous, resulting in bloated questionnaires. The author then reminds us of the three most important ‘laws’ of brand growth which form a backdrop to the book; brands grow by adding new buyers all the time, all brand buyer profiles are similar, and your brand’s main competitors are the biggest brands in the category.

Read the full article on Marketing.ie.

Jenni Romaniuk: "The priority is to increase the customer base"

Great turnout at Boussias Events' How Brands Grow

With a large participation of executives from the field of marketing and branding, Boussias Events' "How Brands Grow" took place yesterday, June 15, with keynote speaker Jenni Romaniuk, distinguished author, researcher, professor and International Director of the world's No. 1 research organization for brand management, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia.

In her first meeting with the Greek public, Romaniuk argued for the priority that should be given to increasing a brand's customer base over aiming to increase customer loyalty.

Building loyal buyers or targeting specific, niche market audiences may seem like logical decisions, however, data shows that as tactics they do not enhance brand growth. He also emphasized that since the goal is to grow the customer base, the means is to reach as many people as possible.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.

In Clear Focus

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk, May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They discuss how brands grow and why small brands should adjust expectations when assessing brand metrics.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk (Part 2), May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They dive deeper into unpacking the key concepts for understanding and improving brand health.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia: How do brands grow?

The application of evidence-based marketing can leave room for what really has value for the development of a brand. However, it takes courage from marketers to question even their own assumptions, which until now have defined their actions. After all, does one need to worry about brand rejection when one has not calculated Mental Availability? Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute provides guidance.

Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of the University of South Australia, is coming to Greece for the first time, on June 15, as a keynote speaker at How Brands Grow, to present to marketeers and advertisers of the Greek market updated research data on braning, as well as her recently published book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The book is the "natural" continuation of the successful "How Brands Grow Part 2 – Revised!", which he co-authored with Byron Sharp, Professor and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of the best seller "How Brands Grow: What marketers do I don't know". Shortly before her speech, she shares with MW readers useful insights on the value of brands, Mental Availability.

MW: How can evidence-based marketing be applied and what are its results?

Jenni Romaniuk: Applying evidence-based marketing highlights the areas we need to prioritize and identifies those areas we could ignore or leave further behind. In a world of limited time and often data overload, having clear priorities helps improve our efficiency. Leverage evidence-based marketing to create a framework for core efforts. The framework helps us choose the metrics and results we need to check to determine if our brand is on track. Eliminating signs that can distract us is also very helpful. Efforts to create more loyal buyers or target more specific market segments may seem logical, however there is evidence that as tactics they do not enhance brand development. This means we can shift our efforts away from ineffective ideas that simply drain our time and budget. Therefore, by applying evidence-based marketing, we are able to use our resources more effectively.

Can you explain the Laws of Brand Growth to us?

Similar to the laws of Physics, there are several Laws of Brand Development. One of the most important is the Law of Double Jeopardy. This law states that small brands "suffer" doubly. Smaller brands have fewer buyers (first risk), who are slightly less loyal (second risk), compared to buyers of larger brands. Other laws, such as Similar Buyer Profiles, highlight how brands compete, while the Natural Monopoly Law focuses on the core advantage of big brands, which is known to people who know little about the category.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.

Branderman

Jenni Romaniuk | Unpacking Brand Health, May 2023

Branderman host Hernán Braberman, speaks with Professor Jenni Romaniuk for the second time. They discuss brand health and the significance of packaging in building and refreshing memory structures.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify & Google Podcasts.

Jenni Romaniuk on better brand health

The Ehrenberg-Bass professor explains the principles and pitfalls of brand health tracking.

When it came time for Jenni Romaniuk, international director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, to write a new book, she thought about Adam Grant.

Romaniuk had heard the popular science author say that before he decides to write about something he asks himself whether he’d be happy talking about it for the next two years, and she thought: ‘Okay, that’s a good criteria.’

That is not the only reason that Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World exists, of course. For another thing, Romaniuk was eminently qualified to write the book. Maybe even uniquely so. She is one of the world’s foremost experts on brand growth and distinctive assets, and she has spent a decade both practising and studying brand health tracking.

With one foot in the private sector and the other in academia, Romaniuk could get to grips with the pointy end of brand health tracking – designing questionnaires for companies, analysing results, etc – and then direct research to fill in the gaps whenever she was unsatisfied with the level of knowledge.

Better Brand Health brings together Romaniuk’s practical insights and research findings and grounds them within the established framework of brand growth to create a comprehensive guide to measuring people’s attitudes and memories. 

We spoke to her about some of the core concepts in her book, and some of the ways that marketers get it wrong when they set out to measure brand health.

Let’s start off simple. What are brand health metrics?

Brand health metrics are where we try to capture what effect we've had on a category by memories. There’s a whole range of different metrics under that umbrella, but it’s all about getting a window into the category and how what’s been going on in the marketplace has changed how people think and feel about brands. So brand health metrics, in the broadest sense, are anything dealing with memory.

One of the things you set out early on in the book is the mantra, ‘design for the category, analyse for the buyer, report for the brand’. Can you explain what that means and why it's important?

Basically, it points to three of the things that people get wrong or misunderstand.

‘Design for the category’ means you should have a brand-health tracker that any brand in your category would be happy to use. It shouldn't be just about you. If another brand in the category, whether it's a bigger brand or a smaller brand, would not use it, then you’ve got biased measurement. You don’t want that because you don’t know where your brand is going to be in the future. You might be a big brand now, but imagine you launch another brand in the category – then you’ve got to look at it through a small lens, and you’re going to have to design a totally new tracker and that seems a bit counterproductive, particularly when we know how brands compete. Your biggest competitors are the bigger brands.

‘Analyse for the buyer’. It's amazing how often people will ask for cuts by gender, age, life cycle, economic state, and not realise that the differences between them are trivial. Most of those differences are actually driven by the number of buyers or non-buyers of the brand you have in that segment.

Read the full article in Contagious.

Uncensored CMO

Better Brand Health – Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass, April 2023

Uncensored CMO host, Jon Evans, interviews Professor Jenni Romaniuk.They discuss Jenni’s new book Better Brand Health and answer the question, can you have too many distinctive assets?

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Nils Andersson Wimby: Better Brand Health – reading candy for those already brand-savage

“People don't care about brands or advertising. That insight is proven in research. What I really like about this book is that it takes its starting point in that insight, and then applies it to the measurement of marketing," writes Nils Andersson Wimby.

In recent years, trends around how to measure the effect of marketing have been characterized by digital metrics and real-time data. But "what gets measured gets done", and the focus on tactical, digital and rapid optimization has led to a short-term focus and poorer effectiveness of marketing, as shown in studies by e.g. Binet & Field.

Because while the dashboard-driven, detailed and mobile measurement of tactical/digital communication has developed strongly, little focus has been placed on developing the long-term measurement methodology. Brand Tracking has continued to do well with measurements of awareness, consideration and a couple of casually selected brand attributes. Sluggish, expensive and boring and unfashionable, the uninitiated thought. But nothing could be further from the truth, this is the measurement that is clearly linked to long-term value creation, which looks beyond clicks and conversions and aims at market shares and reduced price elasticity .

When Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute now releases a book about how to fine-tune your measurement to match the research from "How Brands Grow", then brand geeks breathe a sigh of relief. Build Better Brands promises just this: A handbook on how to translate the knowledge of Mental and Physical Avaliability into measurement methodology.

Read the full article on Resume.

Call to Action

Jenni Romaniuk, March 2023

Professor Jenni Romaniuk was interviewed by Call to Action podcast host, Giles Edwards. They discuss her new book Better Brand Health and some of the frustrations around brand health tracking.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The WARC Podcast

WARC Talks better brand health tracking, March 2023

WARC‘s Lena Roland spoke with Professor Jenni Romaniuk about how brands can get the most out of their brand health tracker.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

The Sleeping Barber

Better Brand Health, with Jenni Romaniuk, March 2023

Professor Jenni Romaniuk and The Sleeping Barber hosts, Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros discuss Better Brand Health.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify & Google Podcasts.

Insight Rockstars

Better Brand Insights – by Jenni Romaniuk, March 2023

“I think a lot of brand trackers are not fit for purpose in that they were designed in an era where the loyal/ heavy buyer was the person we were most interest in”. Professor Jenni Romaniuk and Insight Rockstars host, Frank Buckler discuss brand trackers and why they are important.

Listen to the full podcast episode on Apple, Spotify & Google Podcasts.