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Double Jeopardy law - Ehrenberg Video

Hear Professor Andrew Ehrenberg describe the Double Jeopardy law in his own words.

This video was recorded in the late 1990s at London South Bank University, at what was to become the Ehrenberg Centre.

Do TV commercials need a USP ?

The answer would appear to be no, given that much advertising does not even make the slightest attempt at saying the brand is better than others.  But a fair amount of advertising does – so is this particularly good advertising ?  Does it work better ?

David Stewart, a Professor at University of Southern California, has published several important large content analyses of TV advertising.  The 1980s US TV ads (more than 2000)  were analysed in terms of 160 aspects of content, e.g.

• appeal based on enjoying life
• surrealistic visuals
• male principal character/ female principal character
• demonstration of results using product
• number of times brand name is mentioned
• health related information
• presence of a brand differentiating message

Such aspects of creative design were then correlated against the advertisements performance in laboratory pre-tests, specifically in terms of recall, comprehension and ‘persuasion shift’ (the difference in the % of respondents selecting the brand in a lottery before and then after exposure to the commercial).

With such a large list of creative design aspects many featured in too few ads to allow for meaningful analysis.  So only aspects that occurred reasonably frequently were reported, and they had to perform across product categories and new and established brands.  In some analyses these executional aspects were collapsed into about 25 factors.

Stewart and his co-authors concluded that “presence of a brand differentiating message” was the aspect of content that was most associated with the three measures of ad quality.  This would seem to be powerful empirical evidence of the value of a brand differentiating message.

Ahh, if only the secret to quality commericals were this simple.

The main reason that “presence of a brand differentiating message” came out well was that it was a very general (i.e. non specific) aspect.  One would hardly expected specific tactical aspects such as “photographic stills used in part of the commercial” or “number of camera cuts” to have been the key to effective advertising.  And it would be difficult for aspects such as “contained nutritional or health information” to perform across product categories.

And when the authors said that “brand differentiating message” performed best, they mean it was able to explain a tiny amount (a few percentge points) of the variation in the effectiveness variables.  Yes, the correlation was that weak.

So what are we to conclude ?  Advertising that you are better and different from the other brands is probably sometimes useful.  Probably when you really do have something believable and important to say.  Then it is relevant news, and your ad will be of more interest and better liked for it.

But a brand differentiating message is not essential for every ad, nor is it guaranteed to improve a TV commercial.

References:

Stewart, David W and David H Furse (1985), “The Effects of Television Advertising Execution on Recall, Comprehension, and Persuasion,” Psychology and Marketing, 2 (3), 135-60.

Stewart, David W and David H Furse (1986), Effective television advertising: a study of 1000 commercials. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Stewart, D. W. and S. Koslow (1989), “Executional Factors and Advertising Effectiveness: A Replication,” Journal of Advertising, 18, 21-32.

A problem with ad awareness norms to assess advertising quality

It is now common for market research agencies to promise their clients norms against which they can compare their advertising campaign.  For example, they might report…

“The new campaign for Fabulo achieved 37% ad awareness, this compares well to the average of 31% for new campaigns after 3 weeks”.

This sounds like good practice, but the norm is meaningless.

Better yet the research agency might compare against campaigns in a particular product category, or adjust for a particular GRP/TARP weight.  But this still isn’t good enough, GRPs (Gross Rating Points) tell us nothing about the reach and frequency of the campaign.

Worse still the metric confounds both media strategy effects and advertisement quality effects.  What is really needed is measurement immediately after the ad goes into the market, just of those consumers who had a potential exposure (OTS).  This can measure the ability of the advertisement to cut through and impact on memory structures, i.e. assess the quality of the advertisement live in-market.  Only then, when you know if the ad itself is working well or not, can you later use ad awareness metrics to evaluate the media strategy.

The concept of brand awareness has been hijacked by poor measures

When marketers first came up with the very worthy concept of brand awareness they were thinking, obviously, about the number of consumers who know the brand. Intuitively you would measure this by showing it to consumers and asking them if they are familiar with it. But last century this was expensive, phone surveys were cost effective but the brand couldn’t be shown (and printing pictures in mail surveys was expensive).

So rapidly the measures of brand awareness became verbal/written product category prompts, e.g. “what brands of fabric conditioner are you aware of ?” The problem with this type of measure is that it doesn’t really fit the concept. This measure doesn’t so much measure awareness as association of the brand with the product category cue. It also assumes that consumers can remember and say or write the brand name.

Some have argued that it is vital that consumers know that the brand is a member of a particular category. If that’s the case it can be measured directly (e.g. “what do Ben & Jerry sell?”). It is no credible argument that category cue prompted recall is a decent measure of brand awareness.

Another measure is to present the brand name and ask consumers if they recognise it. Again this tests the link only to the brand name. It doesn’t tell us how well other cues, like colour, cause the brand be recognised. And it tells us nothing about noticing, which is different from brand name cued recognition.

So unfortunately a good concept has been hijacked by cheap and convenient but poor measures.

Some people will disagree with me saying it is a good concept, and that what matters to the marketer is whether or not the brand is noticed or recalled in potential buying situations. I agree, and this is what we call, for want of a better name, brand salience.

Media buyers fail to deliver reach

It’s a provocative title, but it could have been worse – “media buyers don’t understand media” is almost as apt. The reality of modern media buying is that media agencies are essentially buyers of media, not planners. They have been pushed into this situation by uneducated advertisers who find it hard to know what is good media strategy from bad, but do appreciate costs. So media agencies have squeezed out costs, and by and large this has meant that their investment in media knowledge has shrunk to almost nil.

It’s a sad situation for advertisers, but of their own making, though Universities also share much of the blame for sending graduate marketers out into the world with almost no training in media.

Yesterday I came across an example of the distorted crazy market for media. According to Regional Television Marketing figures, 36% of Australia’s population lives in regional areas, but just 17% of the marketing dollars spent by national advertisers appear on our television screens. This is in spite of these regional areas featuring some large cities, and a population with higher than average spending power.

Why do big brands ignore regional TV ? They distribute their brands into regional Australia, but they don’t advertise them there. The reason is that regional TV is more difficult to buy, i.e. more costly for media agencies, it can’t be bought from a “single desk”. Also media agencies, under pressure to demonstrate their “buying power”, bulk buy metro TV space in advance. They seldom do this for regional TV. So they have a huge incentive to shift the space they have, if they don’t sell this their profits take a serious blow.

So it’s common practice to recommend metro TV and ignore regional TV. This can be subtle, just part of the company culture where all the attention goes to metro TV, or overt where regional TV is actively discouraged – this is unethical behaviour, but it happens.

So, for an Australian advertiser, the most simple cost effective way of gaining some pure reach is to split out some of the metro TV budget and allocate it to regional TV. It’s an astonishingly easy way to enhance the sales effectiveness of the ad spend.

I’m sure there are hundreds of similar examples, around the world, of silliness in the media buying industry.

Should cheap low quality ads be charged more for their TV air time ?

Now that the US has finally got ratings for the commercial breaks (via minute by minute recording) the TV networks are all interested in maximising their ratings during the break (ie not losing too many viewers while the ads are on). Which is all good news for advertisers.

One of the things that affects viewing of the ad breaks is the quality of the ads. Low quality ads turn viewers away, and ruin things for all the other advertisers. Put around the other way, poor quality ads enjoy a bit of a ‘free ride’ on the audiences retained by the good quality ads. So should networks give discounts for higher quality, more entertaining advertisements ? And charge more for annoying and boring advertisements ?

Advertising agencies should encourage it, as it would be a further incentive for marketers to commission bigger budget advertisements. In fact it is potentially a win-win situation for everyone. Consumers get ads they actually want to watch. Advertisers get a financial incentive to produce these ads. And networks that feature higher quality ads should enjoy better ratings.

I’m hopeful that innovative networks will begin offering pricing along these lines and/or agencies or clients will start negotiating deals along these lines.

Differentiation vs Distinctiveness

Differentiation’s role in marketing strategy is rethought in this journal article (which builds on an earlier report for corporate members). It presents a small mountain of varied empirical evidence, including direct measures of perceived difference:

Romaniuk, Jenni, Byron Sharp, and Andrew Ehrenberg (2007), “Evidence concerning the importance of perceived brand differentiation,” Australasian Marketing Journal, Vol.15 (2), pages 42-54.

(Download journal version of differentiation)

Differentiation (a benefit or “reason to buy” for the consumer) and Distinctiveness (a brand looking like itself) are different things. This isn’t just semantics, as any lawyer or judge will tell you. Distinctiveness (branding) is legally defensible, while differentiation is not (other than time limited patent protection).

Market-based Assets (early article)

Here is my 1995 article which introduced the term “Market-based Assets” which was picked up by Raj Srivastava in his excellent 1998 JM article “Market-Based Assets and Shareholder Value”:

Sharp, Byron (1995), “Brand Equity and Market-Based Assets of Professional Service Firms,” Journal of Professional Services Marketing, 13 (1), 3-13.My article is very hard to obtain now, I couldn’t find it on the web and even on my computer it was in an old file format. So before it is lost to the world I thought I should post it here. It might be of interest to some readers.

Do Loyalty Programs Increase Brand Loyalty ?

Back in 1997 Anne Sharp and I published the first empirical evaluation of a large scale loyalty program:

Sharp, Byron; Sharp, Anne (1997) “Loyalty Programs and their Impact on Repeat-purchase Loyalty Patterns”, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol 14, No. 5, p.473-486.

By using Dirichlet benchmarks we were able to assess the loyalty program’s affect on repeat-buying while avoiding the problem of self-selection (i.e. more loyal buyers of the brand are more likely to join the program). We documented weak effects.

Since this study we, and others have done more work. All using real world panel (i.e. individuals repeat buying) data. This evidence will be brought together in a forthcoming report, and possibly a chapter in my forthcoming book “How Brands Grow”.