Stand out or get lost.
An analysis of social media advertising effectiveness
The rapid rise of social media has reshaped digital marketing, allowing unprecedented cross-communication between organisations and consumers. Many marketing scholars and practitioners link social media advertising success to customer interaction, such as likes, comments, and shares. They argue that consumer engagement fosters active relationships with brands, leading to positive responses. These assumptions have led to underdeveloped research into how social media ads develop consumer brand memories.
This thesis rectifies the lack of research into developing consumer memories via social media advertising, focusing on Distinctive Assets – i.e., visual branding elements like logos, fonts, colours and taglines associated with brands in memory. Distinctive Assets can improve brand visibility and memory encoding, yet robust empirical guidelines are currently missing for incorporating them effectively into social media advertisements. This thesis also aims to provide guidelines for designing social media ads to enhance visual branding prominence and brand memorability.
Is suggestive branding…suggested?
This thesis aims to establish the prevalence of suggestive brand names, and the prevalence and effectiveness of suggestive Distinctive Brand Assets. Prevalence refers to how often suggestiveness is seen in the market in various contexts (i.e., different categories, industries, and countries). Effectiveness relates directly to how well-known the suggestive Distinctive Asset branding is (‘Fame’) and how well it is associated with the correct brand (‘Uniqueness’).
Are Distinctive Assets at your service?
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.
‘Pick Me, Pick Me!’: Standing Out in E-Commerce
In today’s cluttered shopping environments, brands must stand out from their competitors to be noticed. Online, increasing competititon means little attention is afforded to individual brands. The use of visual design elements on packaging, such as colours, logos, and text, help attract shopper attention. This thesis examines the impact of visual elements on brand prominence, both online and in-store, across 11 CPG categories in two studies. The main implication is that brand owners should prioritise the use of colour in both shopping environments. Besides colour, an appealing package design can attract attention. Larger brands have a prominence advantage over smaller brands, but small brands can achieve comparable prominence through distinctive visual elements. Moreover, private label brands are less prominent than national brands, likely due to a lack of advertising. For both small and private label brands, the task of building and using distinctive visual elements is of increased importance.
Assessing marketers’ intuitions about the strength of their Distinctive Assets
Distinctive Assets vary in strength and value. It is important that marketers know the strength of their assets to effectively brand their activities, and avoid misjudgement that can result in under-leveraged marketing budgets and undermining past efforts to build a strong brand identity. Marketing decisions are often made intuitively, based on professional judgement, rather than consumer derived data. This research explores the accuracy of intuitive judgements of asset strength, considering different thresholds for accuracy. It explores potentially important conditions relating to different characteristics of Distinctive Assets and the circumstances of marketers. Key results of this thesis include that marketers' judgements of Distinctive Assets are rarely accurate, and fame and uniqueness metrics are similarly misjudged, but in opposing directions. Consumer-based research is recommended to guide decisions about Distinctive Assets.
Sisters, not Twins. An Investigation of Visual Brand Identity Cohesion across a Product Portfolio
In today’s cluttered marketing environment visual brand identity is a crucial means to differentiate a brand from its competitors. Comprising clear, proprietary cues, the purpose of brand identity is to unify disparate brand elements in a manner that feels seamless to consumers. Representing both an opportunity and a threat to building a brand’s identity are line extensions, that is, when a product is launched under an existing brand name into the same category.
To communicate a strong visual brand identity, all products within a portfolio need to be connected to one another in terms of design. It is this unified visual message that enables consumers to perceive the products as members of a single brand family. A crucial means to achieve this cohesion is the visual similarity of Distinctive Brand Assets such as logos, colours, shapes, typefaces, characters, and styles. When effectively built and linked to the brand, these brand assets act as powerful mnemonic devices to improve brand learning, retention and accessibility from memory. Akin to a mental short cut, well established Distinctive Assets form heuristic devices that help shoppers to find their brands on-shelf.
This thesis presents three studies which investigate the coherence of visual brand identity, as well as key drivers of fragmentation, across products in a branded portfolio. In total, the scope of this research spans over 2100 products from 211 brands in 11 categories and three markets.
NOTE: The appendices for this Thesis are too large to post on the website. Please contact the Institute to obtain a full copy.
Benchmarking branding practices in the Australian wine industry
The Australian wine industry consists of a plethora of brands and contains a myriad of possible choice cues, i.e. brand name, variety, region, year, country of origin (COO), and awards. Consumers find choosing a wine to be a complex decision, therefore they rely on wine attributes to help provide them with knowledge of the product before trying it, and to make a purchase decision. Variety, region, and brand are frequently found to be the top three extrinsic wine attributes for consumers in Australia. Although this research is extensive, spanning multiple countries and different buying conditions e.g. retail versus on- premise, much of the research either uses an experimental design and limits branding to the brand name only. Branding literature characterises a brand as not just the brand name but as all the associations the brand has. Fundamentally, branding can be categorised into two types: direct branding – the brand name; - and indirect branding – logo images, fonts, and colours. These elements assist consumers in identifying a brand on shelf, which is vital in the cluttered wine category.
This research, therefore, will provide a descriptive understanding of the use of wine attributes and brand elements in the Australian wine industry. It will also provide insight into the relative importance of the attributes perceived by brand owners via the amount of space (prominence) they are given on label.
A two-dimensional typology of packaging elements to explore the packaging localisation of western brands in non-western markets
As cultural and language differences exist between Western and non-Western countries, in this respect, when Western brands are sold in the non-Western markets, marketers tend to modify the product packaging to achieve the desired communication outcomes.
Yet, while extensive studies have shown that localising elements (e.g., colour or pictorial cues) on packaging has a strong impact on consumer response in the non- Western markets, they have provided only fragmented views of this phenomenon. On the basis of literature review, two major knowledge gaps were identified. First, existing studies primarily looked at individual packaging elements. Second, these studies primarily focused on measuring the effects of packaging elements on consumer behaviour and well-established individual differences as moderating factors were overlooked.
Two studies in this thesis were conducted to provide systematic insights into the influence of packaging localisation of Western brands in non-Western markets.
Is Sharing Really Caring? A Descriptive Investigation of Brand Sharing for Distinctive Asset Types.
A cornerstone to visual brand identity, Distinctive Assets are non-brand name identity elements such as colours, logos and taglines, that are used to symbolise the brand. When Distinctive Assets are introduced to the brand they add a layer of rich sensory information that expands the way the brand is encoded and processed in memory. As such, they can make products easy to find and purchase by acting as mental shortcuts in shopping environments.
Whilst the advantages of unique Distinctive Assets are well-defined, brands principally operate in highly competitive markets where competitor actions limit their ability to develop and maintain uniqueness. This research aims to better understand competition for Distinctive Assets by investigating how different types are owned by individual brands, or inversely shared by competitors. It utilises an empirical approach and investigates brand competition for 1512 Distinctive Assets of 11 different types in 13 categories across 19 countries.
Distinctive assets and advertising effectiveness
This thesis investigates print advertising and specifically the impact of supplementing and substituting the brand name with distinctive assets. An experiment was designed to determine the relative effectiveness of advertisements using; 1) only the brand name; 2) the brand name and a distinctive asset; and 3) a distinctive asset instead of the brand name. Visual distinctive assets (e.g., logos, characters and colours) and verbal distinctive assets (e.g., slogans) were compared. The experiment spanned four categories, including products and services, planned and impulse purchases. The advertisements were placed in a virtual magazine administered using online page-flip software. All respondents were recruited via one of Australia’s largest online panels.
