To facilitate brand growth, brands should look to grow distribution and invest in high reach advertising to increase brand salience, so that consumers notice it while they are in the store. The combined need for product distribution and advertising spend raises a challenge for manufacturers. With limited resources, they need to decide how to allocate budgets and effort to distribution and advertising to grow their brands. However, there is limited empirical evidence that directly compares the relative effects of product distribution and advertising on market share growth, as previous studies have typically examined one or the other. This thesis looks to bridge this gap, investigating how best to combine product distribution and advertising to drive brand growth. To study this issue, this research analysed weekly store scanner sales data from 22 mature consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories, including 9,909 brands and 97,828 variants, sold in the United States over six years (2014–2019). These data were matched with brand-level advertising spending in the same timeframe to investigate the effects of advertising and distribution depth on brand-level market share deviation (MSD) from the expected market share derived by the Reibstein-Farris model (velocity curve) and a given level of distribution breadth.

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Brand purpose has gained much attention in the marketing industry over the last decade and has been championed by some of the biggest consumer goods companies worldwide. For this thesis, brand purpose is defined as “...a brand’s prolonged and publicised commitment to an environmental/social objective which has the aim of providing an altruistic benefit to those that buy the brand”. There are many positive outcomes touted for what a brand purpose marketing strategy can achieve; including an increase in sales, higher levels of loyalty, the ability to differentiate the brand, and sustain a price premium. However, most of these claims are not based on empirical evidence. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by emphasising what is arguably the most crucial gatekeeper step: consumers' awareness of the brand's purpose. This is essential because for the brand purpose to affect consumers' behaviour and attitudes, they must first be aware of it.

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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.

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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’).

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The thesis tracks whether market share growth and decline remain stationary and how the brands grow and decline over a long period. It used big data of around 649 consumer package goods (CPG) categories and 3,899 brands that remained in the market from 2009 to 2019. The thesis provides marketing practitioners with many important insights. First, the findings highlight the importance of launching new brands in the low-competition categories, where brands do not have much difference in their market shares. Second, managers need to execute long-term marketing strategies to maintain their share growth by increasing the number of category buyers and avoiding investment in the categories that lose the size of their overall sales. Finally, the findings debunk the myths of the effectiveness of promotions and frequently changing the unit price by showing its inefficiency in growing a brand’s market share over a long period.

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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.

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The focus of this thesis is on the measurement of mental availability in response to brand advertising, through a differentiated replication and extension of the work of Vaughan et al. (2021) and Vaughan (2016). This research addressed two methodological limitations of the prior work that used Mental Availability (MA) Metrics. The study demonstrates that MA Metrics are a suitable tool for measuring change in mental availability for brands following advertising, and explores a new measure of Number of Associations (NOA). It builds on the knowledge around the instability of brand attribute measures at the individual level and the role of advertising in building and refreshing relevant memories.

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This research looks at the effects of stopping branded paid search advertising for small online-only Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) brands on sessions, transactions, and sales. Over the nine experiments, our results show no effect of stopping branded paid search advertising on the critical dependent variables mentioned above. That suggests that small online-only DTC brands would be better off spending their money on alternative online growth strategies, such as improving organic search results (SEO), buying generic search terms, or buying online display ads, rather than on branded paid search advertising.

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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.

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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.

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