​​If the purpose of your advertising and PR is to encourage... ​​
... visits to your website
​​... visits to your dealerships/branches/stores
​​... calls to your call centre
​​... online search for your brand

​​...then you should use these metrics to evaluate your advertising.

​​This has been standard practice for many years for any professional marketing department. So I hardly need write about it... but lately it’s been suggested that such metrics might have other uses. In particular, “share-of-search” has been touted as something of a miracle metric: cheap and predictive (but of what?).

​​In the words of famous scientist Carl Sagan “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. So let’s have a look at the claims for share-of-search, and some evidence.

This short article focuses instead on how to do the advertising, specifically what to change and what to keep consistent in order to get the most value from those advertising dollars. We suggest a review of your CEPs to assess potential changes on two dimensions: incidence and context. This will help evolve your messaging strategy (if necessary) to meet the conditions of the day, without compromising the brand’s longer term Mental Availability building efforts.

Marketers today are better educated about alternatives, and about the problems with focus groups, but the drama and speed of focus groups makes them attractive.

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.

Discusses the factors to consider when creating the identity of a new brand launch.
• To design a good sub-brand or variant brand identity you first need a clear strategy for the parent brand.
• Always remember to protect the parent first, and make sure any sub-brand or variant brand identity decisions ‘cause no harm’.
• Use brand identity as a bridge that links the parent and the sub-brand, don’t create more difference than similarity.
• When creating a new asset for a new variant, avoid the obvious (e.g. green = natural) as this will be easy for competitors to copy.

This article was also published on WARC as part of a series of articles on brand architecture in the digital age.

Marketing Week reports that a number of companies have appointed Chief Growth Officers, e.g. Conagra, Coty, Colgate-Palmolive, and Coca-Cola. So what is a Chief Growth Officer?
All of these companies are sponsors of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, a tribute to how they take marketing and business growth seriously.

Marketers constantly seek new attention-grabbing advertising tactics. And for good reason, because each time an ad fails to capture the attention of potential buyers, precious advertising dollars are wasted. Does a second brand aid advertising impact?

Distinctive Assets are created by the brand’s marketing activities, and when done well—like M&M’s, Fructis and Weet-Bix—they can activate a rich vein of thoughts. Yet there are also risks. The appeal of Distinctive Assets can lead marketers to make poor choices about assets for their brand, particularly when they’re considering (or have been told) it’s time for a change.

Businesses often keep valuable reports and plans for only a few years. They lose them, or delete them, thinking the past is no longer relevant. But doing so throws away important organisational memory.

The performance of market leading brands depends enormously on the growth of the categories in which they compete. Therefore, the question “how to grow category sales, under what conditions” becomes fundamental to ensure that the resources (financial, people and time) are focused on the best investments to drive category growth.