While price promotions are generally a way for short term sales activation, successful advertising is both a short term response as well as a longer term brand building effect. Can they work together? Senior Marketing Scientist Dr Steven Dunn answers: Is running advertising and price promotions at the same time good practice? Or should we try to limit price promotion activities when we run a campaign?

Average purchase frequency and penetration are measures of the loyalty of a brand’s customer base as well as how big the brand’s customer base can be. When a brand successfully grows its market share, we see penetration increase more than loyalty. This shows that growth requires improving the brand’s reach into the entire base of category buyers and that you need to nudge the propensity of all potential buyers. Marketing Scientist Alicia Barker answers: How do you distinguish between frequency and penetration? And what time frame should we use to break down usage penetration?

In this Question of the Week, we investigate what makes a buyer think of a brand when approaching new categories. Marketing Scientist David Thorpe answers: How do you identify and prioritise category entry points? And, how do you determine which CEPs are actually worth investing in?

Senior Marketing Scientist Kirsten Victory answers: Do new launches have to be superior or better than other brand launches to be successful?

Although short-term redesigns often result in increased sales due to being linked with seasonality effects or increased Physical Availability, we caution marketers to be careful: no change should be so great that it ruins your brand’s identity. Knowing and maintaining your brand’s Distinctive Assets are the recipe to success. Senior Marketing Scientist William Caruso answers: What is the impact on sales and brand perceptions from on-pack changes? What is reasonable to expect in terms of short-term sales and long-term brand impact?

Dr Zachary Anesbury discusses Ehrenberg’s Law of Buying Frequencies and the importance of Mental and Physical Availability on your brand. The good news is, that there is behavioural loyalty towards brands within commodity or staple categories.

Professor Rachel Kennedy explains longevity is dependent on a number of factors and shares her top tips for getting the most out of your campaigns. 

Senior Marketing Scientist Peilin Phua discusses the importance of an extremely useful analysis called Conditional Trend Analysis (CTA) that Gerald Goodhardt developed with Andrew Ehrenberg and originally published in 1967.

1984 was the year that Prof Gerald Goodhardt, Prof Andrew Ehrenberg and Dr Christopher Chatfield published the paper “The Dirichlet” in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. The paper provides you with 3 essential explanations to understand buyer behaviour.

We are seeing an uptick in customer acquisition in certain categories due to COVID and other contextual changes. Now that we have these customers, and they are repeat buying, how do we retain them? We believe we have strong Physical Availability. Do we turn our attention to Mental Availability? If so, what are best practices?