Rachel Kennedy

Brand Advertising As Creative Publicity

ABSTRACT Our view of brand advertising is that it mostly serves to publicize the advertised brand. Advertising seldom seems to persuade. Advertising in a competitive market needs to maintain the brands broad salience-being a brand the consumer buys or considers buying. This turns on brand awareness, but together with memory associations, familiarity, and brand assurance. Publicity can also help to develop such salience. This publicity view of advertising should affect both the briefs that are given to agencies (e.g., that cut-through is more important than having a persuasive selling proposition) and how we then evaluate the results. But since few advertisements seem actively to seek to persuade, how much do the advertisements themselves have to change, rather than just how we think and talk about them?

Is the Multi-Platform Whole More Powerful Than Its Separate Parts? Measuring the Sales Effects of Cross-Media Advertising

ABSTRACT Cross-media campaigns are becoming a norm, yet there is a lack of knowledge on how they impact sales. This paper documents the sales response to cross-media campaigns and finds that, when online advertising is added to a television campaign, the extra reach achieved is primarily duplicated. Regularly a single television exposure stimulates sales among those exposed, with online advertising demonstrating a similar yet less consistent response. We do not find evidence of a synergy in sales impact, where the sum effect of exposure to both television and online is greater than the parts. We highlight challenges with such single-source research.

In 25 years, across 50 categories, user profiles for directly competing brands seldom differ: affirming Andrew Ehrenberg’s principles

ABSTRACT It has been claimed that the user profiles of directly competing brands seldom differ. This surprises many in marketing, leading to some doubts about the validity of the claim. In the empirical generalization tradition, the authors: re-examine the previous claim using newer data; consider the scope of the claim in terms of brands in emerging markets, private labels, variants, and composite segments; and discuss potential boundary conditions. Despite attempts by marketers to differentiate brands and provide customized features for distinct target audiences, the evidence of the current study confirms that user profiles of directly competing brands seldom differ.

Competing retailers generally have the same sorts of shoppers

It is widely thought that different retailers appeal to different types of users or should do so. However, we found that the demographic, attitude and media profiles of users of competing retailers tend to be much the same. We conclude that substitutable retailers usually compete in a largely unsegmented mass market.

How Clutter Affects Advertising Effectiveness

ABSTRACT Consolidating past findings on clutter with analysis of four new data sets, we document the empirical patterns for how advertising works in television and radio with different levels of clutter. We find that advertising avoidance is similar in low and high clutter environments, so when there is more clutter, audiences really do see more advertisements. Doubling the clutter, however, does not halve the number of advertisements recalled, and in less clutter audiences are less likely to correctly identify the advertised brand in commercials they do recall. Overall, we find that the impact of clutter is not large, especially when compared to creative elements of executions.

Is Once Really Enough? Making Generalizations about Advertising's Convex Sales Response Function

ABSTRACT This article examines the generalizability of convex-shaped advertising response functions. Using single-source data, we analyzed the response functions of brands in four consumer goods categories. This study supports the prior finding that convex response functions are typical, but not universal. While the convex response function is found to apply across a range of conditions, more work is needed to understand measurement issues, exceptions, and boundary conditions.

Creative That Sells: How Advertising Execution Affects Sales

Advertising creative is widely accepted as critical to advertising success. However, generalizations of what works in applied settings across different conditions are few. The present study replicates the seminal work of Stewart and Furse (1986), who investigated the effect of more than 150 creative devices on several copy-testing measures of advertising effectiveness. We replicate the analysis using the original codebook but examine the link to in-market, short-term sales effectiveness. We use a large sample of 312 television ads from several product categories aired in multiple countries. Our findings indicate that the codebook remains relevant for characterizing current advertising practices but many of the creative devices found most (or least) effective differ to those from the original study. Similar to Stewart and Furse (1986), no single creative device can do much alone to explain sales effectiveness. There is no one simple cookbook for making sales effective advertising, though such research offers some important guidelines.

How to use neuromeasures to make better advertising decisions

ABSTRACT Neuromeasures show promise for measuring responses to advertising that respondents cannot accurately verbalize, but their application to advertising is in its infancy. This article identifies issues with implementing such measures for better advertising decision making and discusses future research priorities. It cautions marketers not to believe all that is claimed and recommends further systematic testing of the measures. It provides buyers of neuroscientific research with questions that the authors believe should be asked of vendors. The authors encourage vendors to develop robust answers underpinned by empirical validations, which will advance advertising understanding and practice.

The Total Long-Term Sales Effects of Advertising: Lessons from Single Source

ABSTRACT This article brings together the knowledge gained from two different approaches to analyzing single source data: aggregate-level experimental split-cable tests and individual-level analysis without experimental controls. From very different approaches, two common findings emerge: If advertising is to be sales effective in the long term, it must first work in the short term. Advertising typically has a half-life of three to four weeks. In terms of scheduling, a continuity strategy appears preferable. There may be conditions under which bursting is more appropriate, but these circumstances are not yet at all well documented.

Brand Growth at Mars, Inc.: How the Global Marketer Embraced Ehrenberg's Science with Creativity

ABSTRACT Can science help brands grow? Mars, Inc. has embarked on a program to apply the marketing laws originally developed and promoted by Andrew Ehrenberg. Mars has discovered that both creativity and science can—and should—work together. Just as an architect marries creativity with the laws of physics, marketers should construct brand plans that embrace the laws of growth. Mars executives are learning that creativity is more productive when unleashed within known boundaries of buyer behavior. The authors share some lessons from a continuing journey that may help others also make the transformation to a marketing science culture.