Role of advertising in brand extension evaluations: A construal level perspective
This research investigates the effectiveness of various advertising appeals in improving the evaluations of low-fit brand extension. Specifically, over five experimental studies, it examines the effectiveness of abstract vs concrete, desirability vs feasibility, and promotion vs prevention advertising appeals for low-fit brand extension. It also considers how the effectiveness differs across two consumer-side factors: social power and consumer decision journey. The results reveal that advertising appeal that evokes high-level construal enhances the perception of brand-extension fit, thereby leading to better low-fit brand extension evaluation. Furthermore, advertising appeals that match with consumer social power or stage in decision stage in terms of construal-level are processed more fluently, which in turn improves low-fit brand extension evaluations.
Should birds of a feather co-advertise together?
New product variants are often introduced as a strategic activity to achieve profit and company goals, react to a changing market, or to appeal to variety seeking behaviour. As new product introductions have a failure rate of approximately 40%, there is opportunity to understand how advertising can help variants succeed. A potential advertising strategy to help variants succeed is portfolio co-advertising, this is where two brands from the same brand portfolio (e.g., a core brand and variant) share a single advertisement. This research investigates whether co-advertising helps or hinders ad and brand memorability for brand portfolios. The findings show that portfolio co-advertising has no effect on ad recognition or correct brand recall. Additionally, users of two brands within a portfolio do not exhibit higher ad recognition than users of one brand.
Out of Sight… What Happens to Brand Share, Penetration, and Loyalty When Advertising Stops?
Despite widespread appreciation for the importance of advertising, brands are often observed to stop their advertising. Some publicly listed companies even cease advertising for an entire year. Scholarly attention to extended advertising cessation is new, with only one study empirically documenting brand sales change after extended periods of advertising cessation of a year and longer.
This thesis provides evidence of the value of advertising by extensively quantifying the impact of its absence. It examines Nielsen’s Ad Intel and Consumer Panel data (2010 to 2015) in the United States. Matched advertising expenditure and consumer purchases are used to quantify market share, brand penetration, and loyalties for 365 brands over six years where advertising ceased at some point for different lengths of time. This research uses a Many Sets of Data (MSoD) approach across 22 consumer package goods (CPG) product categories to seek Empirical Generalisations (EGs). This thesis tests if prior findings hold (EGs) by investigating a different market, additional categories, and different cessation periods. Statistical tests and effect sizes are also provided. This thesis comprises four studies exploring various aspects of advertising cessation.
NOTE: The full version of this Thesis is not yet available to be shared. We will post it to the website soon.
Documenting patterns in advertising post-testing measurement
Post-testing surveys provide advertisers measures of consumer response to advertising and are used to evaluate campaign performance. Performance of campaigns is evaluated against benchmarks that are specific to a market research provider’s databank and/or the advertiser’s conditions. This thesis independently reviews post-test survey data to better understand how ads perform across a large collection of intermediate measures, how scores vary across conditions and explores the relationship between these measures.
The empirical findings in this thesis provide new understanding of post-test survey scores with real-world data. The information gained from this research provides marketers with an understanding of when scores can be compared and when they cannot. Along with understanding the relationships between measures, they may help explain ad performance. This helps to ensure that marketers and brand owners make fair assessments based on informed answers on whether ad campaigns have reached realistic targets.
The Great Outdoors: An Investigation into the Value of Out-of-Home Advertising
Determining the effectiveness of any advertising medium is a complex problem for media and advertising practitioners. They face a growing number of media vehicles within each platform, which are all fighting for both the attention of consumers, and the budgets of advertisers. The abundance of academic research to date has provided little guidance in making evidence-based selection of media, especially for out-of-home (OOH).
The broad objectives of this research are to: (1) understand the key reasons why practitioners use OOH and its varying formats; (2) evaluate the execution tactics found to contribute to OOH advertising effectiveness across formats; and (3) understand the current measurement methods considered important to evaluating OOH advertising.
Do brands that grow advertise differently to those that do not?
Market share stationarity is the norm in established categories and developed markets with growth (or decline) clearly the exception. Nonetheless, growth targets remain common practice in business and marketing plans.
Advertising is a key scalable tool and one of the large budget items marketers have to help achieve growth. Yet there is limited generalisable evidence and knowledge to inform how much to spend on advertising and how to allocate budgets across media and time. The purpose of this study is to understand whether growing brands advertise differently to non-growing brands, with a focus specifically on advertising budgeting and media planning.
NOTE: The appendices for this Thesis are too large to post on the website. Please contact the Institute to obtain a full copy.
Is Anyone Listening? Audience and Media Factors Influencing Radio Ad Avoidance
Marketing managers aiming to grow their brands by increasing brand penetration are advised to reach as many category buyers as possible with their brands’ advertising. Radio continues to be a high-reach advertising medium, but as with TV ratings, radio audience ratings may overstate reach and exposure quality. Ad avoidance benchmarks allow advertisers to convert radio ratings from an opportunity-to-hear to a lower number of customers effectively reached with sufficient exposure. The current ad avoidance benchmark for radio advertising is that up to a third of the program audience, between 22% and 32% (Generali, Kurtzman & Rose 2011), is lost due to switching stations when the ads come on.
This thesis updated this radio ad avoidance benchmark, using the latest, most accurate means of measuring the radio audience, the portable people meter (PPM).
Attention to commercial and public health executions: Examining advertising effectiveness using psychophysiology
Advertising is an essential component of the marketing mix, and advertising effectiveness is critical for commercial and social marketers (Wood 2009). A key element for effective brand and social advertising is to capture at least some attention from viewers (Bellman et al. 2017). Such attention increases the probability of building and refreshing the associations in consumers’ memories that help lead to reinforcing or changing their behaviour
Attention to, and building memories from, advertising has traditionally been measured using a consumer’s self-reported recall. Recall as an attention metric has numerous limitations that neuromeasures (also referred to as neuromarketing) can overcome. Psychophysiological neuromeasures, such as eye- tracking and biometrics (heart rate and skin conductance), provide information from the body to gauge what is happening in the mind. Consequently, there have been numerous calls for further research into the reliability and validity of psychophysiological measures for advertising effectiveness research.
This thesis aims to advance knowledge on how psychophysiological measures can be used to understand how consumers process advertising. In three distinct studies, this thesis provides greater understanding of four influences on consumer attention.
More than meets the eye. The effect of audio branding tactics on video advertising memory metrics.
For video advertising to have subsequent effects in-market, viewers need to know which brand is advertised. Therefore, it is imperative that viewers not only see and/or hear ads, but that they also register the brand. The most direct way to communicate the brand to viewers is via the brand name. Brand name execution varies with respect to modality (audio or visual), timing, and frequency; with each playing a role in how the brand is noticed and registered.
The objective of this thesis is to understand how to best use audio branding in video advertising to inform creative decision making and enhance the memorability of branding in ads. Specifically, memorability was examined using two key memory measures: free brand recall and brand recognition.
Better Together? An examination of price promotion and advertising interaction effects
In consumer packaged goods industries, manufacturers allocate the vast majority of their marketing budgets towards two activities - price promotions (i.e., temporary price reductions) and advertising. It has often been proposed that manufacturers should coordinate the two activities, as a way to leverage potentially large interaction effects and increase their overall sales effects.
Despite the pronouncements of large interaction effects, the limited research to date has not provided clear nor consistent findings as to the likelihood of these interaction effects. Accordingly, there have been repeated calls for research to further investigate and understand price promotion and advertising interaction effects.
The overarching objective of this thesis is to determine whether concurrent price promotions and advertising are likely to produce positive, negative, or no interaction effects.
