Generational labels are widely used in popular culture to signal the values or behaviours of specific groups, making them appealing to advertisers. This paper reviews generational segmentation in advertising research and examines its practice through interviews with advertising practitioners. The paper provides an extended literature review, insights, and implications for research and practice. While generational segmentation is a convenient way to signal a cohort within the market, it should not restrict the target market. Generational labels highlight the need to understand a broader audience, especially in an industry dominated by younger professionals. However, these labels must be used thoughtfully to avoid stereotypes and create inclusive ads that resonate across all ages. We encourage advertisers and researchers to focus on shared values and behaviours across generations rather than on emphasising differences. A cross-generational approach that targets the broad market is more sustainable, supporting long-term brand building and increasing mass market awareness.

Cheah, I., & Phua, P. (2024). Generational advertising: literature review and practitioner insights on key pitfalls and implications. International Journal of Advertising.

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Understanding music listening behaviour benefits those seeking to market music to the general population and those choosing music to feature in retail environments or advertising. In particular, understanding how consumers consume different genres is important. There are, however, two conflicting bodies of knowledge. One finds segments of music listeners who differ on music genre preferences, while the other finds (media and brand) user profiles are more similar than different. Our research provides additional evidence by surveying over 1,000 representative respondents in the United States regarding their listening behaviour of 13 music genres. The proportion of listeners of each genre is compared with the average profile for all genres using those segmentation variables previously found to cause differing genre preferences (e.g., age and income). While some minor differences exist, notably that younger listeners prefer electronica/dance, the overall results show genre user profiles are more similar than different. The theoretical implication is that using approaches designed to find minor differences will do precisely that and magnify them. At the same time, for those marketing music in the industry, achieving a broader market coverage may be more effective in expanding their listener bases than focusing on narrower segments.

Anesbury, Z., Davies, C., Page, B., Driesener, C., Yang, S., Bruwer, J. (2024), "How heterogeneous are music genre listeners?". Forthcoming in the Australasian Marketing Journal.

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The visual design of consumer packaged products is crucial for brand success, as consumers learn to recognise pack styles and look for these in buying situations. Therefore, any pack redesign is risky, as the change could interfere with consumers’ ability to find and buy the brand. Market research is often undertaken to reduce the risk of poor pack redesign decisions. Many different approaches are available, meaning marketers must select an appropriate method to increase the chance of pack redesign success. As such, our paper investigates the role of market research in packaging redesign performance. The findings challenge the assumption that conducting pack redesign research will boost its success.

Caruso, W., Romaniuk, J., Anesbury, Z., Page, B., Williams, J. (2024), "The Role of Market Research in Pack Redesign Performance". Forthcoming in the International Journal of Market Research (A).

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This research develops a new metric (PBCM) that can identify products within a portfolio that are eroding visual branding cohesion. We show how this new measure gives results equivalent to consumer evaluations of cohesion, without costly and time intensive data collection. The sampling frame for this research is 10 portfolios from five categories (dry dog food, instant coffee, toothpaste, shower gel and chewing gum) in the United Kingdom. In addition, 626 consumers were surveyed to investigate how PBCM affects a consumer’s ability to match an individual product back to its portfolio and recall the brand name. We find that products from high cohesion portfolios have significantly higher (17%) correct brand recall than those from low cohesion portfolios and are matched back to their portfolio by more than twice as many respondents (79% v 35%), significantly faster (2.3 vs. 3.8 minutes).

Ward, E., Romaniuk, J., Trinh, G., Beal, V., Dawes, J., (2024), "Standing out while fitting in: an objective measure of visual branding cohesion across a product portfolio". Forthcoming in the International Journal of Market Research

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This paper presents a review of existing conceptualisations and operationalisations of mobile app stickiness to identify discrepancies and ambiguities within the marketing literature. It highlights overlap between mobile app stickiness and two other concepts: mobile app loyalty and mobile app engagement. Subsequently, the paper outlines a future research program clarifying the most pressing conceptual and empirical work required to advance this body of knowledge. The resulting contribution is twofold. So far, mobile app stickiness has been theorised and appraised in disparate ways, often used interchangeably with other notions with a level of confusion, hindering knowledge development. At the same time, this review’s practical benefits arise from: i) a concise synthesis of academic work on stickiness, facilitating comparisons with industry practices and the translation of past findings into
marketing strategies; and ii) a rationalisation of the research opportunities that lie ahead, fostering potential knowledge exchange between academia and practice.

Kostopoulos, I., Stocchi, L., Pourazad, N., Michaelidou, N., (2024), "Mobile App Stickiness: A Review and Future Research Program". Forthcoming in the Journal of Strategy Marketing.

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Purpose
The front label on wine bottles are important for identifying the brand and aiding purchase. Many brands are part of brand families, with the sub-brands linked to the overall brand family. This research provides an overview of how the front label varies across product portfolios of wine brands, noting the importance placed on branding elements and the level of consistency in their use across the brand portfolio.
Approach
We propose and test a new method to measure branding consistency on labels from the same brand family. Two coding frameworks were created. The first recorded the incidence of brand elements and wine attributes. The second coded wine labels within a company’s portfolio based on the consistency of various brand elements. A total of 3000 branding elements and wine attributes from 300 wine labels were examined across 60 wine brands from a list of Australian wineries.
Findings
Grape variety, brand name, and region are used across >90% of wine labels. Branding is presented more prominently than wine attributes. Sub-brand, region, price, and variety did not influence branding consistency. Logo presence, logo image on label, and colour elements contribute to the greatest variation in branding consistency across a product portfolio.
Originality/value
This study proposes and tests a novel method to measure branding consistency on wine labels and explores the extent to which consistent branding is used across product portfolios. Descriptive research is the first step to theory building. We provide industry norms for attribute use and a measure of branding consistency for product portfolios giving valuable descriptive knowledge.

Jeffery, T., Hirche, M., Faulkner, M., Page, B., Trinh, G., Bruwer, J., Lockshin, L. (2016), "Branding consistency across product portfolios in the wine industry". Forthcoming in the International Journal of Wine Business Research.

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Our research explores differences in cognitive evaluative measures of consumer buying behaviour and advertising’s effectiveness across age groups. We seek to ascertain if older segments show dissimilar memory structures and cognitive processes than younger targets, or if modern advertising approaches are simply lacking reach among older consumers. Our main measure of interest is mental availability – i.e., the ease at which a brand comes to mind in buying situations. We compare the scores of three underlying mental availability metrics across age groups and find differences primarily for associative penetration, a proxy for advertising reach. We then examine differences in other important cognitive evaluative measures of advertising effectiveness, such as the purchase funnel (narrowing down of alternatives for purchase) and product category knowledge. We detect additional differences that further illustrate why there are likely limits to advertising’s reach amongst older consumers. Hence, we stress the importance of using these cognitive evaluative measures to appraise the effectiveness of inclusive, cross-age advertising strategies in theory and practice.

Mecredy, P., Stocchi, L., Feetham, P. (2024), "Out of Reach or Out of Mind? Differences in Advertising’s Effectiveness Across Age Groups". Forthcoming in International Journal of Advertising.

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This research reveals the presence, in online survey data, of a key pattern documented in psychology lab research: the Mirror Effect. The Mirror Effect occurs when unfamiliar stimuli are unexpectedly recognised as accurately as familiar stimuli, or more accurately. Using a set of familiar and unfamiliar words (as determined by lexical frequency), we first report that we can robustly replicate psychology lab research in an online survey, detecting the Mirror Effect. We then apply the same analytical approach to surveying consumer recognition of everyday brands (supermarkets, banks, and car brands). We find that unfamiliar brands can be recognized with the same level of accuracy as familiar brands, and this effect is stronger than age and gender memory biases present in the data. However, we detect a boundary condition for branded apps, which are extremely unfamiliar brands competing in highly fragmented marketplaces, so very few get downloaded or used. For these digital brands, we find a Concordant Effect, as most respondents find it difficult to recognise highly unfamiliar branded apps (i.e., those with fewer than 5,000 downloads). The Mirror Effect re-emerges for highly experienced app users. These results demonstrate the implications of a generalisable empirical pattern from cognitive psychology for branding and advertising theory. The outcomes of this research also translate into practical guidelines for brand performance measurement via online surveys, mitigating recognition memory bias for the development of marketing strategies based on more accurate interpretation of empirical evidence.

Stocchi, L., Bellman, S., Pourazad, N., Michaelidou, N., & Wright, M. (2024). The mirror effect in online survey data: Evidence and implications for marketing theory and strategy. Psychology & Marketing, 1–16

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The NBD-Dirichlet Model is used in marketing to model buying behaviour in competitive, repeat-purchase markets and to estimate brand performance measures. For the marketing practitioner, comparison of the actual, observed in-market values with theoretical values produced by the model suggests the model generalises across a very wide range of category and brand contexts. However, even the developers of the original model have long called for ongoing endeavours to continually improve upon the measure of model fit. In this paper, we put forward an alternative approach for estimation of the parameters to the model, which produces a model that corrects for a systematic error in the estimates for large brands and improves fit of the model overall.

Danenberg, N., Nay, P. (2024). "New approaches to estimating NBD-Dirichlet model parameters, from measuring goodness-of-fit using Euclidean Distance". Forthcoming in Social Science Research Network.

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New product introductions, particularly line extensions (LEs), are common in consumer goods categories with no guarantee for success. Despite their commonality, brands that introduce LEs lack benchmarks about what success to expect. This study investigates the success of 36,994 LEs in each quarter for the first three years after introduction. Four indicators are calculated using consumer panel data to benchmark how long LEs survive (failure rate), how competitive they are in the category (market share) and how they are adopted by category buyers (penetration and repeat buyer rate). This research can help guide new product investment decisions because it provides context on what is feasible to achieve. Four market success measures are used, a departure from past benchmarking research which uses practitioner evaluation on metrics seldom used in practice. We provide 4 guidelines about when and how to measure LE and new product success more broadly.

Victory, K., Tanusondjaja, A., Nenycz-Thiel, M., Romaniuk, J. (2024). “Are there generalizable patterns in line extension performance”. Forthcoming in the Journal of Product & Brand Management.

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