Not all Category Entry Points (CEPs) are equally valuable. The more often a CEP occurs, the greater the likelihood that category buyers will use this cue to think of brands in buying contexts. However, commonality has two dimensions: how many category buyers experience the CEP at all (CEP penetration) and how often the CEP is experienced (CEP frequency). Which matters most? In general the penetration of CEP usage among the wider category buyer market can be used to determine the attractiveness of a CEP for a brand to message and product portfolio development.

When developing a brand identity, marketers design brand elements (such as logos, colours, characters, and jingles) to visually and verbally represent the brand. These are referred to as Distinctive Assets. This research explores the Distinctive Asset types used by service brands, identifies the most unique asset types and compares these results to existing benchmarks for packaged goods. It finds that most Distinctive Asset types exist in current frameworks, with two new asset types documented - Access assets (employee uniforms, vehicles, stores and app icons) and Promotion assets (price displays and special offer icons). The asset types with the highest level of brand ownership for service brands were found to be face-based assets, app icons, logos, and fonts. Service brand assets have, on average, significantly higher brand ownership than packaged goods assets. This research contributes to the debate surrounding brand identity amongst service categories, and whether branding principles can be generalised from goods to services.

• Download Abstract
• Download Full Thesis

The most frequent reason marketers give for a pack re-design is the need to modernise or update. In this report, we examine what modernisation looks like, and how consumers react to modernised packs in comparison to the prior, presumably outdated versions.

While colour is often used on pack to distinguish different variants (e.g., red for cherry flavour, gold for premium), this research shows that the colours used by brands rarely match the colours expected by consumers.

The value of mass media advertising can be demonstrated by quantifying what happens when it is removed. The current study does this, extending the work of Hartnett, Gelzinis, Beal, et al. (2021) by documenting changes in market share for 365 U.S. brands from 22 consumer goods categories that stopped advertising for at least one year. Market shares of brands without advertising declined, on average, at a steady rate year over year. On average, market share declines were more common and substantial among small brands and those losing share before advertising ceased. That prior findings generalize to a new market and many new categories increases confidence in the results.

Key Question: How does eyes on screen vary across media?

Advertisers make media decisions based on reach data (e.g., ratings, impressions) and performance data (e.g., clicks). But little is known about how media and devices differ in how long viewers look at ads. Eye-tracking results compare eyes on screen across media on different devices.

For seven different types of co-advertising including advertising with another portfolio variant, retailer, non-profit, bundle partner, sporting event, and competitor, we find no evidence that co-advertising with another brand automatically leads to greater advertising memory and that category buyers rarely remember both brands.

In this report we investigate the idea of CEP ownership. We find that unique links between a brand and a CEP in category buyer memory are rare as most category buyers link multiple brands to each CEP. There is no evidence that owning or strong positioning on CEPs is linked to brand success.

It’s often thought, that if advertising is successful in encouraging sales then this should be able to be seen in a brand’s sales figures, and likewise if it fails to show in this month's sales then it can’t be working. This report is about when the sale impact occurs, when any effect can be vaguely seen, and when it likely can’t. And in turn, what this means for setting advertising budgets.

This report examines whether the famous ‘Net Promoter Score’ can predict revenue growth. Our evidence and a review of 20 past studies suggests NPS is not a leading indicator of growth, and managers should be cautious about spending on lifting NPS scores, and avoid over-reacting to changes in NPS scores.

In service sectors, customers (in this context, users) can choose from a range of channels to access their providers, for example through websites, mobile applications, or brick-and-mortar branches. Providing access point options for customers requires sizeable investment by the service provider. This report aims to encourage evidence-based channel management decisions and provides some foundational documentation of how customers use channels in a service category (banking).

We explored the primary objectives of targeted advertising and found that brand growth and equity were the most paramount to marketers. Analysis of 40 target markets and brand and category buying data indicates that, on average, target markets only encompass half of a brand’s existing buyer base. Actionable recommendations to improve targeted advertising decisions are provided.

One might think that the behaviour patterns of physicians prescribing drugs to patients would be completely different to the grocery buying patterns of households. Yet the analysis in this report shows that physicians’ patterns of prescribing drugs follow the same laws of marketing seen many, many times before.

Deep Dive into Category Growth

Join Professor Magda Nenycz-Thiel as we take a deep dive into Category Growth. In this presentation, Magda covers the importance of category growth to brand growth. She explores which brands benefit the most, the odds of category growth, and growth strategies given category maturity.

You should not buy additional exposures close in time (eg same night, day, week).
How close is close? That depends on the size of your budget, if it is very large then spreading out your advertising means aiming for most consumers to see your advertising every week. For most brands with smaller budgets it will be something like every month or quarter.
Today, many brands still blow their budget in a short period where some people see their ads multiple times in a single evening, and then we all go weeks or months without seeing any.

Once upon a time, marketing theory advocated targeting a brand’s loyalists (ie more frequent buyers, otherwise known as a brand’s fans). The popularity of this idea, especially at board level, meant every marketer was under pressure to launch a loyalty scheme. All brands have some customers who are worth much more than others, but the idea that these buyers are an easy source of sales growth is flawed.

Revenue growth is an economic imperative for all businesses. However, management often fail to use forecasting science for setting growth objectives, instead basing targets on intuition and negotiation. It is important to develop an evidence-based understanding of the realistic bounds and likely sources of growth.

How can big brands continue to grow?

In today’s Question of the Week, Dr Arry Tanusondjaja answers the question: how can big brands continue to grow? Arry discusses brand growth for big and small brands, across different categories. He outlines the key growth levers for big brands, and explains why you need to consider growth of the category, rather than just focusing on your own market share objectives.

Net Promoter Scores bounce up and down from survey to survey. This spurious variation is likely to force managers to come up with spurious explanations.
We advise against NPS tracking, but if you must do it, use the mean average willingness to recommend scores instead of ‘Net’ scores.

Advertising is a significant waste of time, money and effort when it fails to signal the brand and refresh (or build) brand related memories. Of the branding tools available to advertisers, audio branding has received little research attention and consequently, there is limited evidence to guide how often and when to say the brand name in advertising. In this study we sought to identify the audio branding tactics that most affect brand memory linked to video advertising exposures.

This report compares Distinctive Asset types for their brand ownership potential, that is, the probability to be unique to one brand in consumer memory. We discover that Characters, Logos and Fonts offer a higher probability of brand ownership, while there is more competition to own colour assets. However, all asset types have ‘successes’ and ‘failures’, suggesting that selection, investment, and execution matter a great deal.

To grow, brands have to attract new buyers, yet consumers keep returning to brands already in their repertoires (loyalty). This exploratory report investigates how often new brand buying occurs and what disrupts habitual repeat brand buying behaviour.

Marketing professional services requires knowledge of how brands compete, grow and decline, and this is the same for both products and services. Understanding your service brand's distinctive assets will help amplify the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.

Premiumisation is about more than simply launching a premium brand – and even if it does involve a premium brand, marketers need to guard against making assumptions about who will buy it and where, according to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Any measure of Distinctive Assets needs to deliver the key metrics of Fame and Uniqueness, which allow the Assets to be evaluated on the Distinctive Asset Grid. To properly gauge uniqueness, respondents must be free to elicit competitor brands, and as many as they can. The measurement task should, if possible, mimic real-world retrieval which is retrieval of the brand, in the absence of the brand, from a cluttered (mental and physical) environment.

This report outlines the current 'best practice' evidence-based principles along with recommendations for purchasing and scheduling advertising space. These recommendations fit with what is known about how brands grow.
The aim of any media strategy should be to minimise the time between any category purchase (ie when they could/might buy your brand) and the last advertising exposure to reach their brain.