Theses
Showing 21 resultsOut of Sight… What Happens to Brand Share, Penetration, and Loyalty When Advertising Stops?
- PhD
- Peilin Phua
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.
A bottle by any other name… What effect do product and messaging attributes have on the choice of low-carbon wine packaging?
- Masters
- Jake Mesidis
Despite often being considered natural and non-polluting, the wine industry produces carbon dioxide emissions much like any other industry. While the industry has made great progress in the vineyard and winery to reduce its carbon emissions, the largest area of carbon emissions has not yet been tackled head on. This area is the production, transportation, and filling of conventional glass wine bottles, which accounts for over two-thirds of the Australian wine industry’s total CO2 output.
The most obvious solution to this issue is to change the packaging format and material. Most alternative wine packages are 40-51% more carbon efficient than their glass counterparts. However, for winemakers, there is little literature to provide them with evidence of how moving towards more sustainable practices will affect their business. Additionally, previous research on alternative wine packaging has found that less familiar wine packages and wine packaging attributes are less preferred than more familiar options. Given that low-carbon wine packaging appears to be facing an uphill battle (despite being the most effective pathway to reducing the wine industry’s carbon emissions), the question for winemakers becomes how they can get consumers to choose these packages on the shelf.
The thesis aims to start to answer this question.
Documenting patterns in advertising post-testing measurement
- Masters
- Emily Gray
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.
An Investigation of Deviations in Brand Image Data
- Masters
- Anna Gregoric
For many decades brand image, a well-known marketing concept, has been the subject of much academic research and interest. Within the marketing literature there is an extensive body of research illustrating how to conceptualise and measure brand image. Nonetheless, there are still significant knowledge voids. In particular, the literature over-emphasises researching different methods and approaches for the measurement of brand image. By comparison, studies focusing on understanding recurring patterns, deviations and thus, results’ interpretation for brand management in the marketplace, are far more limited. This is problematic because it can lead companies to make un-informed decisions and poor marketing choices.
To address this issue, this thesis undertook research on brand image results with an emphasis on known patterns and deviations, analysing 70 pre-existing data sets covering different product categories, multiple time periods and multiple countries.
Understanding and predicting new line extension success
- PhD
- Kirsten Victory
The practice of capturing more business and growing brands through launching new products continues to reign. Thousands of new consumer products are launched each year, equating to a new launch every two minutes in the United States. A common belief is that 80% of new products fail. While the actual failure rate is much lower at 40%, success is rarely guaranteed. Brands make decisions about allocating resources to shorten the odds of success, but these resources are often limited, and priorities are needed. This leads to two broad questions: 1) ‘How do successful new products perform?’ and 2) ‘When are they more successful?’.
This thesis documents the success of new line extensions (NLEs) on key performance indicators and investigates key marketing conditions in NLE success.
NOTE: The full version of this Thesis is not yet available to be shared. We will post it to the website soon.
Evolution, Not Revolution! An Investigation Into How To Effectively Redesign Consumer Packaged Products
- PhD
- William Caruso
It is widely accepted that branding and consumer packaging design is important to meet marketing objectives. However, 9 out of 10 redesigns fail to deliver a meaningful sales lift. This thesis investigates the factors that influence success, key drivers of redesign similarity, and consumer responses to redesigns. In total, this research includes 1336 old and new images of redesigns from 744 brands in 25 categories across the globe. This thesis has three studies. The first aims to establish the extent to which newly redesigned packaging is similar to previous designs. The second explores the factors (such as; advertising, research, redesign, brand and managerial) which could contribute to a successful redesign. The final study investigates the relationships between modernity, likeability, familiarity, and purchase intent of packaging redesigns.
Sisters, not Twins. An Investigation of Visual Brand Identity Cohesion across a Product Portfolio
- PhD
- Ella Ward
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.
Increasing food intake of the elderly with extrinsic food-cues
- Masters
- Hei Tong Lau
The prevalence of malnutrition among the elderly is high - up to 70% of aged care facility residents are malnourished in Australia and other developed countries. Malnutrition in the elderly is problematic because it is associated with poor health outcomes. However, malnutrition does not result from a lack of available food in residential aged care; instead, it is related to an inadequate intake of available food. Therefore, strategies must be developed to help aged care residents consume more food. Although the majority of previous studies that aimed to increase the elderly's food intake have focused on intrinsic food elements (e.g. manipulating the food's taste or texture), this thesis has used extrinsic cues in its investigation.
The Great Outdoors: An Investigation into the Value of Out-of-Home Advertising
- Masters
- Danielle Talbot
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.
Using Double Jeopardy to Forecast Small Brand Growth
- Masters
- Alicia Barker
Small brands have proliferated in recent years in certain markets. This has led to a surge in interest in understanding how small brands grow. Industry and (some) academic publications claim that ‘niche’ positioning strategies - described as aiming for unequivocal loyalty from a handful of specially targeted consumers - best situates a small brand for growth. However, this challenges the widely observed empirical pattern known as Double Jeopardy, which illustrates that growth is actually achieved more so through penetration than loyalty. Double Jeopardy shows that true ‘niche’ brands are those that achieve ‘niche’ outcomes by acquiring excess loyalty than what is expected for their brand size. This is one of five known deviations from Double Jeopardy, along with its counterpart ‘change-of-pace’ or deficit loyalty. Furthermore, there is also evidence to show that benchmarking a small brand against the Double Jeopardy line could indicate the future potential for share growth or decline.