Direct Line understands the power of characters in unlocking branded recall

Marketing Week

Direct Line has replaced one of the most effective brand campaigns of recent years with a new approach that promises similar success, all thanks to the team’s understanding of distinctive brand assets.

In every marketing decade there are a couple of brands that everyone follows. Not just because the brand is brilliant, but because those in charge of it are so far ahead of everyone else that you have to keep an eye on what they do next.

Three decades ago we all looked to Levi's, then to Boddingtons and to Tango, then Gillette, on to Skoda and First Direct, and then spectacular work at Stella Artois and Häagen-Dazs and Cadbury, to Dove, then Tesco and most lately John Lewis.

Each brand, and the team behind it, had its moment in the marketing sun. A six- or seven-year spell when the brand could do no wrong and its strategic excellence begat tactical effectiveness, which built brand equity, which fed more tactical effectiveness. A super-collider of marketing effectiveness that built and built and built.

At the moment, it is very much Direct Line that is building the energy and deriving the most attention from savvy marketers. Mark Evans and his team of flying effectiveness monkeys are smashing it and, as various industry gongs and effectiveness prizes testify, they have their shit well and truly together.

Eventually, as history teaches us, this team will diffract and defect across the industry and the brand will fade from its current power place. But not for a while and certainly not yet.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Connecting the dots for Coca-Cola

Marketing Tribute

What is the advice to Coca-Cola with regard to outdoor advertising and the use of its own 'heritage'?

“Our advice is to consistently focus on your own distinctive brand assets, the distinctive elements of a brand, as described in Jenni Romaniuk's Building Distinctive Brand Assets. Although this book didn't appear until 2018, Coca-Cola's marketers have long known the importance of communicating consistently. The bottle is a strong element and by always communicating that clearly in combination with the name, strong brain connections are made. Even if you quickly walk past the message, there is a good chance that you will link the combination of color and bottle to Coca-Cola. And then you probably haven't even seen the literal brand name. Good job Coca-Cola. "

Read the full article on Marketing Tribute.

Short-term shame? Completely unjustified!

Adformantie.

The lessons from Sharp, Binet and Field still matter, but you shouldn't be ashamed of your short-term strategy.

Last week, during Koffiedik Kijken 2020, it was back: the cry for help from marketers to stop with that short-term focus. Rabobank's Dorkas Koenen predicted - or actually hoped - that by 2020 marketers will really stop focusing on quick profit and product-oriented communication. "The trick no longer works," said Koenen. "It breaks brands," David Snellenberg also wrote in an emergency letter to Adformation last year.

Lately, it has become popular among marketers to cite publications by Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow) and The long and the Short of it by Les Binet and Peter Field. They show that successful brand building is due to conservatism. If you stick to your brand identity to a certain extent, focus on building brand associations, appeal to the widest possible audience and (as Nike's Phill Knight calls it) create an 'emotional tie' with your target audience, that promises greater market share in the long run . In other words, slow and steady wins the race. Something I myself have preached with great frustration for a long time.

Read the full article on Adformantie.

Make it stick

Adformatie

Do you already have the connection between emotion and your brand in order?

How do you increase the effectiveness of advertisements?

Annelies Wittenberg and Folkert van Oorschot, research consultants at Validators, answer this question in a series of four blogs, written especially for Adformation. In these blogs you will learn about the BEST CREATION Framework, which underlies the creation tests of Validators. It covers four elements that increase the effectiveness of your creation: Breakthrough, Engage, Stick and Trigger. In this blog Annelies tells you more about how your brand will stay in the memory of a consumer as best as possible.

Typically, there is a significant amount of time between the time an ad catches a consumer's attention and the buying moment. That is why it is important that an advertisement leaves a mark in a consumer's memory. This can be an image, a message, a smell, a feeling, a thought, or any other association between advertising and brand. Often these associations are not even consciously processed.

Read the full article on Adformantie.

"Is digital marketing a bubble?"

Dagens Media

Really missing all online marketing effect? The best way to find out is to experiment and not let other advertisers' experience become a general truth, writes Iprospect's Erik Luhr and Martin Styrhagen.

IF OUR INDUSTRY does not adopt a scientific approach to how marketing works or does not work, it will lose its influence, says Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science . We are prepared to agree, which is perhaps why it feels a little sad to see how a poorly substantiated article that drives the thesis that all online marketing has no effect has been extensively shared on social channels in recent weeks.

The article is called "The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online advertising" , and as the article title suggests, the authors believe that our industry to half (50 percent of all media investment is digital) is built on a false belief in the effect in digital marketing.

Read the full article on Dagens Media.

3 reasons for a logo in your commercial

Adformatie

Add or not add logo to your advertisement; what effect does that have on how the viewer experiences the spot and the brand?

Ster investigated this question for CheapTickets.nl with the help of Ster AdMeasure .

To logo or not to logo?

CheapTickets.nl , the number one travel website in the Netherlands, has recently launched their new campaign. Whatever the reason for your trip, everyone can go to CheapTickets. With their new campaign they focus on brand awareness and branding:

“The aim of the campaign is to increase our brand awareness, to further build on a positive brand image in order to ultimately create brand preference.” — Joost de Wit, Lead Branding & Engagement

To increase brand awareness, it is of course important that viewers get a good idea of ​​who the sender of the campaign is. Showing a logo in the spot is an efficient way to clarify the sender and build your brand awareness.

Does a logo derive?

However, there may be resistance around showing a logo in the spot, for example because of the fear that a commercial will be less liked with a logo. Or maybe because a logo actually derives from the message of the commercial and the surprise effect is gone. Some brands therefore opt for a more pragmatic variant of the logo: a neutral or transparent version. However, these choices are often made based on gut feeling.

CheapTickets.nl faced the same question and considerations in their new campaign. There was a need for data to not only choose on the basis of taste.

To help them with this assessment, we tested three variations of the spot among the target group in AdMeasure, Ster's innovative research tool. Each respondent assessed one of the three spots and the results were compared.

The variants were:

• With the logo only visible at the end

• With the normal logo constantly in view

• With a more subtle, white logo constantly in view

Read the full article on Adformatie.

Don't burn long term for short term

MediaCat

We met Jenni Romaniuk, International Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the Festival of Marketing.

You have a message from Jenni Romaniuk, International Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, which we met at the Festival of Marketing: “Yes, you can only plan for the next quarter, but remember that what you do will have an impact beyond the next quarter.”

Your new book Building Distinctive Brand Assets has been released. Can you tell us about the book?

The book briefly describes how to use, measure and apply your brand identity. One of our problems with brand identities was to determine how to understand that you have a good brand identity. How will you know that you have a strong brand identity? What will you be able to change, how will you know if what you are doing is working? I've gathered all this in one place so you can understand how distinctive values ​​work.

How can marketers identify brand identity elements that can translate into distinctive values?

First of all, most brands have a history. So, you should go back and look at your history. What have you consistently applied? For example, you may have been using the same packaging for a very long time, or you may have used the same person for a long time in your ads. You may have used the same color, the same image, or the same style of ads in the background. When you look back at your history, you will realize that there are things that you repeat, both intentionally and unintentionally. These are your starting points. See how strong these are. Then look at what your competitors are doing; because you are fighting against your opponents in people's memory. Once you have gathered all this information and looked at your competitors, you can see how you can combine them and develop a distinctive value.

Read the full interview on MediaCat.

Moments of consumption, not consumer segments

Médiář

In the next chapter, Mark Cichon focuses on key strategies that can affect the category of occasional shoppers. In particular, we will look at the evidence and examples that encourage marketers and agencies to focus on creating products and services that address key moments of consumption - and therefore reach a wide range of users.

Read the full article on Médiář.

"Branding is like toothbrushing"

Dagens Media

After several years of fairs of types such as Fields, Binet and Sharp, advertisers now understand the importance of placing the majority of their media budget on long-term brand building. However, the industry is still stuck in old wheel tracks, writes Clear Channels Karl Höglund, who gives his best tips on how to trigger associations with your brand.

In line with digitalization, advertising has become an integral part of our everyday lives. We are constantly reachable and thus constantly exposed to commercial messages. Cynically, we are just one data point in someone's media plan. Given that marketers now have so much data on what works, but perhaps most importantly what doesn't work, it is a mystery to me that one does not succeed better. If everyone now knows that short-term efforts inhibit long-term growth - why do advertisers (according to IPA) continue to spend 60 percent of their media budgets on such efforts?

Jenni Romaniuk, brand researcher and author of the book Building Distinctive Brand Assets, demonstrates the importance of being consistent and long-term in her communications in order to successfully create and maintain recognition and "mental availability". Among other things, how to work with color, logos, fonts, manners, icons, sounds, shapes and so on to trigger the cognitive or intuitive in human brains. So trigger associations to your brand. 

Read the full article on Dagens Media.

Stop giving money to Mares, Slovaks and others, it does not make sense, the expert advises

Expres

Influencer. In many years, the term that many people have great difficulty in pronouncing has been declining in all cases. Young children no longer want to be a doctor, an astronaut, or a footballer, longing for an “career” of an influencer. However, according to Australian expert Jenni Romaniuk, who runs the world's largest brand marketing research center, companies that appeal to and bet on influencers throw money through the window. Working with them brings nothing.

“The first reason is that you have no control what they say. The second is that although they have a large audience, you need to realize how many brands they promote. There are a number of them, and your business will be just one of many, ” said Australian Jenni Romaniukin an interview with Hospodářské noviny.

Read the full article on Expres.

Ehrenberg-Bass: Marketing needs to embrace its scientific status or risk a slow death

Marketing Week

Unless marketers can embrace marketing as a ‘young science’ that needs to be nourished they will lose their influence at the top table, argues Professor Jenni Romaniuk.

Marketing is a young science that needs to be nurtured and nourished if the industry wants to enter an “age of enlightenment”, according to professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science

Speaking today (10 October) at the Festival of Marketing, Romaniuk urged marketers to embrace marketing as science if they want to ensure the discipline has impact and influence within organisations and among consumers.

“With the changes marketing is facing with the C-suite and getting credibility with the board, can we afford to not take ourselves seriously as a marketing discipline?” asked Romaniuk.

“Can we afford to wait for that or will we just get rendered obsolete by the CFO in the company? We can move now and get there more quickly than if we have to wait for all of the people who don’t think marketing is a science to first die.”

Romaniuk argued that to enter an age of enlightenment, marketers need the humility to realise they can’t know everything about such a new science and some of their thinking may be wrong.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Romaniuk: Seven (costly) sins of brand marketing

MediaGuru

Jenni Romaniuk showed at the Brand Management conference what marketers can increase in price to boost their brand growth.

“No marketer wants to destroy his brand,” said Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who is trying to collect data for evidence-based marketing and is also behind the book How to Build Brands, said at the outset. Even so, marketers often destroy their entrusted brand when they let themselves be carried away in their strategies by “intuition” or common belief that something works, even if it is not. The mistakes made by marketers are manifested not only by the loss of money and time, but also by wasted opportunities and, last but not least, by clearing up competition. 

Seven “costly sins of brand marketing” to watch out for, Jenni Romaniuk showed at this year’s Brand Management conference. 

Read the full article and interview on MediaGuru.

Interview with Jenni Romaniuk

Festival of Marketing

Jenni Romaniuk is a Research Professor of Marketing and Associate Director (International) at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute - the world’s largest centre for research into marketing.

Hi Jenni, thanks for chatting with us! Firstly, we’d love for you to tell us a little about yourself and what you do?

I am a Research Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, based at the University of South Australia.  My primary goal is to discover and share new knowledge in marketing science. I specialise in how the stuff people hold about brands in their memories affects the choices they make, and how marketing activity affects the stuff in people’s heads. 

More specifically, my research areas are Mental Availability, Distinctive Assets and Brand Health measurement and metrics.  My research hobbies include Word of mouth and Buyer behaviour. 

You’ve recently written a book about future-proofing your brand’s identity which will be available at Festival of Marketing. What are some of your top tips for building distinctive brand assets?

Yes, brand identity is an area where I see actions taken with the best of intentions, but unfortunately many mistakes are made due to lack of metrics and long-term strategy.  The aim of the book is to bring together, in one place, an understanding of strategy, measurement and tactics to Building Distinctive. 
The three headline tips I would have are:

1. Don’t make life hard for yourself through poor asset selection – Use metrics and knowledge to avoid assets that will be more difficult to build.  There are no best assets, but there are definitely worse ones. 

2. Think menu rather than meal – Select your set of assets like you would a restaurant menu, so you can choose the best one each time for the branding context. Too often assets are treated in isolation, rather than how the set of assets work together in all branding contexts. 

3. Make ‘no’ your default response to change – If you select smartly, your brand’s Distinctive Assets should outlast you.  Too often investments in Distinctive Assets are abandoned for no valid reason.  Only change if there is a strategic advantage in doing so.

Read the full interview on the Festival of Marketing blog.

Marketing Journal Podcast: What the Marketing Bible 'How Brands Grow' by Byron Sharp says

Focus Agency

The most important source of information marketers can read in their lives. This is how renowned marketing professor Mark Ritson refers to the book How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. In this podcast, you'll learn the most important things you can find in it.

How to build brands? This question has many answers. There are a number of approaches, and this diversity sometimes resembles the "school of thought" in the field of psychology. Experts argue which way is the right one. The layman (but also some marketer) is surprised. Is there any compass in this mix of uncertainty showing what really works? Yes, it's called " How Brands Grow ". This book was published by Byron Sharp in 2010, followed in 2016 by Jenni Romaniuk as its co-author.

In the Czech Republic strongly resonated performances Mark Ritson at the last Festival Marketing and its expertise is also involved in making this year's lineup. In his Making a Marketer document , the first question is: “We marketers like to say that our decision is based on evidence. Where to go when looking for data, what works and what doesn't? ”

Ritson then replies: “Lots of marketing is not based on evidence. It is either based on ignorance of empirical data, or was created on distorted half-truths designed to sell one thing to marketers instead of another. Since I have a Ph.D. in marketing, it is natural for me that when you say something, you have found empirical evidence to support it. This will take you to certain places . This will take you to Byron (Sharp) and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute , because they have everything fantastically empirically grounded. The quality, application and insights of Les Binet and Peter Field's work, together with ' How Brands Grow ', form the most important corpus of information.”

And much of this most important information is available today . It was exactly what the "How Brands Grow" books said I was talking to Jan Patera, a former long-time marketing journalist from Marketing & Media and later Marketing Sales Media, who is now helping Blue Events design their conference program. Thanks to him in May of this year, he performed in Prague Les Binet and already in the Wednesday, October 2 at the conference have Brand Management in 2019 a chance to hear one of the main characters Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and co-author of the second edition of "How Brands Grow" Jenni Romaniuk.

Read the full article on Focus Agency.

Iconic Australian shopping centre brand Westfield to expand across Europe

The New Zealand Herald

What started in the backstreets of Blacktown is now coming to Paris and Prague after winning over London and New York. But there's a drawback to this Aussie success.

When the residents of Paris and Prague, Stockholm and Warsaw head out for some retail therapy this weekend they'll notice a new, unfamiliar and very Australian name taking pride of place on their local shopping centre.

Westfield, a brand born in Sydney's western suburbs, is taking over Europe.

Already a big deal in New Zealand, the US and UK, it's now on the march to France, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Poland, as it becomes one of Australia's most successful retail brands.

Jenni Romaniuk, a research professor at Uni SA's Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets, said bringing Westfield to major centres across Europe was a smart move.

"Even the people who like online shopping also like going to a shopping centre because it's a social event. So having a strong international brand in that space creates economies of scale," Prof Romaniuk said.

Read the full article in The Herald.

Effectiveness, innovation and the future of marketing: Marketing Week at The Festival of Marketing

Marketing Week

This year’s Festival of Marketing will see our key editorial themes come to life across two days on the Marketing Week Strategy and Leadership stage and beyond – with the help of some of the biggest names in the industry.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson, Ogilvy UK vice-chairman Rory Sutherland, WPP CEO Mark Read and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Jenni Romaniuck are among the big names that will appear on Marketing Week’s Strategy and Leadership Stage at the Festival of Marketing next month.

Returning for a second year, the stage will bring to life key strategic and leadership issues including marketing effectiveness and measurement, innovation, and the future role and responsibilities of the marketer. Elsewhere at The Festival, we will tackle key challenges including attracting young people into the industry, as well as showcase best practice.

Read the full article in Marketing Week.

Study finds larger creative more likely to engage

Biz Report

According to new data, size does matter where advertising is concerned. but, is simply having oversized ads enough? We asked a digital expert to weigh in on how size matters - but so do other aspects of a campaign.

"The best advice for digital creatives is to use simple animation with large brand assets and a clear visual hierarchy. While Adelaide is focused on the quality of media, we're impressed by the research from System 1 on fluent devices and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute on distinctive brand assets. As attention data becomes more integrated in to marketing decision systems, innovative marketers will use media quality as a guide for what type of creative they should use. For example, in low attention environments a simple logo might be best," said Guldimann.

Read the full article in Biz Report.

Want to be more effective? Here’s five ideas to consider

WARC

As the marketing industry descends on Cannes, David Tiltman says it’s time to raise the level of debate around effectiveness.

Today WARC launches a new white paper: Anatomy of Effectiveness. It’s a distillation of the current evidence, case studies and thinking around effective advertising.

Why do this at Cannes Lions, a celebration of creative excellence?

Well creativity, as the report shows, remains one of the most powerful tools for driving effective marketing – when it is properly applied.

But what sort of creativity? And what kind of framework should it sit in? With what budget behind it? In what channels?

Those are the kinds of question that broad-brush studies of the business impact of creativity tend to ignore. But they’re exactly the sort of questions WARC’s clients in both agencies and advertisers come to us with. They’re the questions we try to answer in the content we commission, the analysis we produce, and the sessions we run (including at Cannes). And they’re the questions we try to address with the new white paper.

Read the full article on WARC.

Anatomy of effectiveness: A white paper by WARC

WARC

Summarises current thinking about how to advertise effectively, given the current sense that advertising is not driving the growth it should be.

• Brands should invest in excess share of voice, but the biggest driver of results is brand and market size.

• The general optimum split of marketing investment is 60% for long-term brand building and 40% for short-term activation.

• Creative emotional campaigns drive long-term effectiveness but even short ads can drive certain emotions.

• Reach is still the foundation of media effectiveness, multi-channel integrated campaigns are more effective than single-channel campaigns, and the frequency capping techniques online are a growing trend.

• All researchers emphasise simplicity, distinctiveness and uniqueness to improve brand recognition; fluent devices and distinctive brand assets are examples of assets that help brands stand out.

Read the full article on WARC.

The Sydney suburb with a secret Woolworths hiding in plain sight

News.com.au

This Woolworths is so small and behind the times, it doesn’t even say Woolies on the store. It’s a mystery why it even exists.

On a tidy shopping strip in a quiet corner of Sydney sits something that, in retail terms, is now unique.

Locals pop in and out all day long, some oblivious that their local supermarket is something you’ll see nowhere else.

But it’s not some newfangled concept store — a glimpse into the way we’ll shop into the future. Or the first Australian opening for an international retail giant.

Rather it’s a look back into the past, a glance into the world of supermarkets’ past. The residents of Jannali, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, are picking up their groceries from the last of its kind.

The name above the door may be unfamiliar, but the company behind it is one of Australia’s biggest — Woolworths.

Jannali is the suburb with a secret Woolies. And it’s one of the country’s strangest Woolworths at that.

Welcome to Australia’s last ever Flemings supermarket. There were once scores of stores; now this single branch remains.

Read the full article on News.com.au