Category Entry Points Dissected: How They Really Contribute to Growth

A frequently cited, influential book in the marketing world is How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Category Entry Points (CEPs) play a prominent role in explaining how good marketing can work. Since the research of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has become more popular, CEPs have also increasingly appeared in our professional discussions and marketing strategies. A positive development for the enthusiast of evidence-driven marketing, but as we often see, the noise also increases as more people run away with new concepts.

The result: we see many different definitions of CEP, even more interpretations, CEPs that are not CEPs, and CEPs that are compared to, for example, USPs or category drivers that are simply not correct. As a result, the CEP is in danger of becoming a meaningless buzzword, while it is actually a valuable strategic tool for helping brands grow.

The VIA Consumer Insights Taskforce therefore felt it was high time to provide clarity. We look at what CEPs are, how they can be used to strategically drive growth, and the four most common mistakes marketers make when working with CEPs. To do this, we teamed up with Professor Jenni Romaniuk, co-author of How Brands Grow and Associate Director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. In this first of a two-part article, we focus on the two biggest pitfalls surrounding CEPs.

What are Category Entry Points (CEPs)?

CEPs are essentially moments when someone mentally enters a product or service category. Think of a long day at the beach when you feel like having a refreshing drink, or a birthday party where your neighbor tells you how much money he’s saved by buying solar panels and you suddenly think about buying one. These moments act as cues that trigger your memory to recall brands.

Research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute shows that linking a brand to as many of these relevant cues as possible increases mental availability. This increases the chance that your brand will be top-of-mind when someone is considering a purchase. In other words: the more often a brand pops up in the consumer's mind with relevant CEPs, the greater the chance of a (future) purchase.

Pitfalls in applying CEPs

Although CEPs seem clear in theory, in practice things often go wrong. We asked Romaniuk about the most common pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Read the full article in Adformatie.

Five steps to shake off that ‘heaviest of buyers’ mindset

‘Remember what it was like to know very little about a category’

When you work on a brand, you live and breathe it every day. Its existence pays your bills and puts food on your table, and you learn so much about it that, in memory terms, you look like the heaviest of buyers — with dense networks of brand memories that are easily retrievable anytime, anywhere. 

It’s also then easy to assume everyone else thinks the same way and lose touch with the thoughts and feelings of typical buyers, without even really knowing it. This can then lead you to (unconsciously) approve marketing activities that speak to the experienced, heavy buyers, but are incomprehensible to the new buyers, often inexperienced in the brand and possibly the category, that you need to attract to grow.

Here are some steps you can take to shake out of that heavy brand buyer mindset and see the world through the eyes of most and most useful category buyers.

(Really) Define your typical buyer

Most brand managers have a target market for their brand, defined by some personal characteristics. Historically these have been gender and age, but over time other characteristics have been adopted to ‘flesh out’ the picture of who is buying your brand.

Instead of a target market, define your typical (or most common) brand buyer. Then once you have done that, look at how many sales come from outside your brand’s typical buyer… and then decide to stop trying to use characteristics to define your brand’s buyers and instead embrace the heterogeneity that is your current customer base, and your future customer base. It’s only when you accept the diversity of your brand’s customer base can you plan to increase it. 

Remember, even for B2B or very frequently bought categories, any category is only a small part of people’s lives, and any brand an even smaller part within that. While this realisation reminds us of the diminished importance of the brand to the buyer, it amplifies the importance of marketing activity about the brand to the buyer.

Read the full article in MediaCat.

The only power that will make your brand famous: Fans

What really makes you famous? World-class advertising spend and physical distribution like Coca-Cola? Influencer collaborations like Nike? Content and shows like Paddy Power? Or all of them?

“Make my brand famous!” the CMO shouted. It makes sense, right? (Even if he did.) Being the most famous brand in a category means being the most recognizable and talked about brand. And that means winning the battle that Byron Sharp called “mental accessibility” in his famous book How Brands Grow. It means people will choose you and put you ahead of the competition.

So what actually makes you famous? World-class advertising spend and physical distribution like Coca-Cola? Influencer collaborations like Nike? Content and shows like Paddy Power? Or all of them?

How do you maintain your reputation? Can your brand afford the cost of continued reach and buzz? As one Pepsi customer once told me about their content strategy: “We have to keep feeding the beast, Christian!”

After quitting soda and focusing solely on video game marketing at Waste, I realized there was one truth to all of this…

Fans are the lifeblood of eternal fame

Advertising, content marketing, PR, and collaborations are empty tools without the validation and support of a dedicated fan base. Your fans are people who are passionate about you. Loving you is part of who they are. Supporting you is part of their purpose in life.

It's clear that when it comes to fame, fans are priceless:

• Your fans will describe you with passion and in all their unique style in a way that no advertisement could.

• They will continue to talk about you even during your less active periods.

• They will share your content with higher credibility than any sponsored post you make.

• They will raise your reputation and create excitement in an unexpected way for you.

• They will create content and memes that fit the spirit of your brand culture.

• They will encourage more people to use your products because they want to share the growth journey and experience that ensures their passion will continue.

• Your fans will build on your fame in their circles because they will want to meet other people like them.

• They will initiate cultural rituals that will redefine what makes your brand famous in the first place.

• They will continue to stand behind you even when you lose your reputation. (Unless you make major mistakes that have damaged their trust beyond repair.)

Fan culture must be constantly nurtured

Fans can’t be bought. This isn’t like people who watch your ad once on YouTube or your Facebook followers. Fans emerge naturally from your user base when you adhere to the principles of excellence (and continually provide them with something to fuel their loyalty), openness (being willing to listen to your users and spot emerging trends), and empowerment (giving them control and allowing them to organize themselves).

This is not about satisfying desires, it’s about creating meaningful value exchanges between the brand and the fans in a transparent manner. At the end of the day, you’re giving them entertainment, identity, influence and belonging; they’re giving you revenue, loyalty, ideas and ongoing advocacy. In short, you’re the winner.

What did Larian do differently?

The impact of Larian Studios’ roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) is a good example of fan-driven fame. According to a report by VGI, the game’s revenue reached $657 million in 2023 and its player base increased to 875,000. All this was achieved by a relatively small and independent game studio.

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Are brands sacrificing customer loyalty in pursuit of ‘over-acquisition’?

Can a focus on customer retention only take a business so far, or do companies that ignore existing relationships run the risk of damaging their brand?

Does acquisition trump retention, or is valuing customer loyalty the best way to grow a sustainable business?

For the third consecutive year, Marketing Week’s exclusive Language of Effectiveness survey finds brands are far more interested in attracting new customers than measuring the impact of retention. The survey of more than 1,200 marketers finds new customer acquisition is a key effectiveness metric for 33% of brands, compared to 26.2% which measure customer lifetime value and 25.1% which analyse customer retention rates.

While the number of brands that prioritise measuring new customer acquisition has fallen from 2023 (46.4%) and 2022 levels (51.1%), greater value continues to be placed on attracting new buyers than understanding the contribution of existing ones. Is the concept of fighting for customer loyalty going out of fashion, or are there other factors at work?

“Hopefully marketers are catching up with the science,” says Jenni Romaniuk, research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. “The science tells us that acquisition is how you grow and that you can’t grow by retention alone. If you grow, you will get a bit more loyalty and a lot more acquisition.”

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Thinking differently about different thinkers

What if history's greatest thinkers had been marketers?

Marketing is a relatively young science, and so has borrowed from psychology, economics and other fields of research. In that spirit of borrowing from others, I now draw from some of history’s greatest thinkers and reimagine how their more memorable work could have turned out if they had been in the field of marketing instead.

First off, we have Einstein’s Theory of Relativity:  E=mc2 or Energy equals Mass x Speed of Light (squared). If Einstein had been a marketing academic and had developed the Theory of Retailing, he might have instead come up with the cautionary: Engagement = Marketers Crazy (extra) or the more hopeful Excellence = Managing CEPs (many)

Sir Issac Newton is particularly well known for his three laws of motion. I’d like to think that, in his role as marketing director for Apple, Newton might have instead come up with the following Three Laws of Marketing Mistakes:

Instead of Newton’s first law, the Law of Inertia, which can be summarised as: ‘An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced external force.’ We could have had: ‘A Distinctive asset stays a Distinctive Asset unless acted upon by an unbalanced Senior Marketing Executive.’

The Second Law of Motion, or the Law of Acceleration, is a nice equation of: F=ma or Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration. This could have become: Funnels = muddled assumptions

The third law, which is the Law of Action and Reaction, is ‘For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. This could instead turn into ‘For every brand plan that prioritises retention, there is an equal and opposite budget that downgrades growth expectations’. OK, this does not roll off the tongue quite as easily as Newton’s law but is a useful cautionary reminder.

Read the full article on MediaCat.

The drawbacks of ‘renting’ Fame

When marketers employ celebrities they are simply renting fame

In Better Brand Health Professor Magda Nenycz-Thiel and I discuss the difference between ‘owning’ and ‘renting’ prominence, when trying to stand out in retail contexts. Here, I discuss how when marketers employ influencers, celebrities or other vehicles to promote the brand, they are similarly ‘renting’ their fame. Given the growth in activities in this sector I think it is timely to reflect on the risks associated with ‘renting’ fame from someone or something else.

What does it mean to rent ‘Fame’?

‘Renting’ fame involves partnering with a more well-known entity to boost your brand’s visibility among a target audience. This could mean collaborating with an influencer, celebrity, or a major event like the upcoming Olympics. The goal is to leverage the established fame of the other entity. However, this renting of another’s fame comes at a cost, and so its worthwhile to consider the risks to achieving a favourable outcome.

Beware the attention vampires

In a previous column, I discussed the vampire effect, where celebrities draw attention away from the brand. This happens because celebrities have established memory networks in buyers’ brains, making them feel familiar and attracting more attention. Influencers, who category buyers regularly follow, also have extensive memory networks, making them appear more like friends than strangers. Consequently, when your brand partners with these influencers, you risk the vampire effect, with more attention going to the influencer than the brand. 

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Can we please re-think political advertising?

I confess to being something of a politics nerd. I follow politics like other people follow sports.  But I loathe the tone of most political advertising — it feels like a race to the bottom to paint the country and other politicians in as poor light as possible. Who wants to view that? I sense I am not alone as surveys in many democracies reveal a decline in public engagement with politics and the voting process.

Therefore, as we face elections in the UK and USA, and the advertising spend is ramping up — I wonder if it is useful to rethink our ideas of how political advertising could work, to improve the experience for all.

For this column I was inspired by a project started by Andrew Ehrenberg a few decades ago — which looked at the ‘Form Advertising Takes’ (and became affectionately known as the ‘FAT’1 project). The dominant mental model of how advertising works was that advertising is about persuading people to buy. Under this model, advertisements are a ‘salesperson’ for the brand, and so need to have a compelling reason to buy, such as a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), or some way of convincing the buyer that this brand was different or better than other options.

As usual, Andrew questioned the prevailing wisdom and put forward a competing theory, that arose from his decades of research into buyer behaviour and brand performance. His ‘advertising as creative publicity’ model (later published in the Journal of Advertising Research), claims the most common role of advertising is to keep useful brand memories fresh in the minds of category buyers.

Only occasionally, when there is genuine new news, does advertising need to create new memories, but even then, we need to remember that new news is only new once, and after that first exposure, advertising with that message serves to remind and keep that brand memory fresh.

As one way to test what advertising does (rather than what it was intended to do), he asked different groups of people to view advertising and assess if it had persuasive or publicity qualities.

The project team, which included my colleague Professor Rachel Kennedy, found that only one third of advertising says things I did not already know, while half of advertising was judged to only remind me of the brand. This got get me thinking — what form does political advertising take?

Read the full article in MediaCat.

Mumbrella360: Ehrenberg-Bass Professor says ‘you’re poorly branding’ if you’re focusing on assets over your brand

Fame is a key metric for distinctive asset strength, and to get to that point, brands must remember the difference between asset using and asset building, according to Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Professor Jenni Romaniuk.

Speaking at Mumbrella360 on Thursday, the Research Professor of Marketing and Associate Director (International) explained the fame score, why it is so important, and if a brand wishes to use an asset as a proxy for their name, how they can get there.

The fame score – which is the proportion of category buyers who, when they experience an asset, think of the brand – is key to ensuring brand awareness is strong. It provides an unprompted opportunity to measure assets and test how distinctive they are.

Romaniuk stressed the importance of testing this unprompted.

“If you’re actually prompting distinctive asset measurement, it gives you inaccurate, inflamed fame scores – up to about 20 percentage points – which is really dangerous,” she said.

“If you want your asset to act as a proxy for your brand name, your fame score needs to be as close to 100% as possible, and messing around with the measurement can absolutely destroy that score.

Read the full article on Mumbrella.

Media planning: An intervention

Dear Marketers,

It’s because I care about you, that I have to let you know that you aren’t making very good media choices right now. I understand, its challenging with so many platforms and changing algorithms that you naturally want to experiment and experience the thrill of a new media format. I get it, I do. But you keep making the same mistakes over and over again, blowing the budget, chasing the next ‘media’ high. Now I see you’re about to repeat these mistakes again with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is my effort to intervene, get you back on the right path.

Due to my lack of experience in staging interventions, I asked ChatGPT to suggest some steps. So here it goes!

Step 1: Educate myself

You might ask, who am I to question your media choices? I don’t claim to be a media expert, but nonetheless have watched you struggle with your media planning choices over the past decades. For example I recall Super Bowls where you blew millions of dollars on a ‘user-generated’ ad, only to discover users can’t generate ads (if they could, they would work in advertising!) I was also there, holding your hand, when you discovered the real cost of ‘free’ viral views, and I listened as you justified the expensive foray into facial expression coding because it could tell you, without much doubt, that someone…smiled. It makes me sad to see you repeatedly heartbroken after the new medium, new technology or new toy you fall in love with fails to live up to your expectations.

Step 2: Gather a supportive team

Luckily, I have some media and advertising researchers to provide me with valuable empirical knowledge about media planning. Virginia, Rachel, Steve, Nicole, Nico and Aaron, are just some of the people in my ‘go to’ team for media knowledge. Examples of their work are at the end of this column. Who is your media knowledge support team? Is it knowledge from an independent source with no skin in the game, or MADAR (Media Advertising Disguised as Research)?

Step 3: Choose a right time and place for the discussion

This month’s theme is about whether ‘old’ media is back, so I feel that this is a timely discussion. It’s only when you realise how your decisions have distracted you from the bigger picture that you can understand why ‘old’ media went out of favour. ‘Old’ media has been the sacrificial lamb, paying the price for your addiction. You blamed the audience, the measurement, the inability to interact with viewers, but the issue doesn’t sit with the audience, but with you…. you forgot what’s important, metrics such as reach, branding and building useful brand memories, and instead got sucked into an engagement vortex…

Read the full article on MediaCat Magazine.

Is laughter the best growth medicine?

If humour distracts from the brand rather than embed it in memory, the joke's on you!

I can’t tell a joke. I love jokes, but I can never remember them well enough repeat without screwing ins one way. One of my favourite jokes in a beer ad*. I never remember the brand, just that it has ‘beer’ ‘dog’ and ‘a man pretending to be blind’. We like to laugh and some brands make us laugh in advertising. So why don’t we mentally reward brands that makes us laugh? Its because when what is memorable is unrelated to buying, so is advertising’s effect.

When it comes to emotions in advertising, you need to think beyond the joke to get the last laugh. There are some common areas where marketers (and researchers) draw faulty conclusions about humour, and other emotions, in advertising:

If the joke works the ad works

A key role of advertising is to build useful brand memories. The danger with any joke is it sucks up all the viewer’s cognitive energy and none is left over for the brand or the message. This is a form of ‘vampire effect’ that has been found for celebrities in advertising. A well-known celebrity gets more attention than an equally attractive but unknown model, and this extra attention is at the expense of attention to the brand (see Efrgen paper in key references). A good joke makes you think, but often about something irrelevant to the brand or the category. The effort to generate the emotion is then wasted. An effective joke in advertising channels that cognitive attention to the brand and message, not away from it.

If someone loves the joke, they will love the brand

Another common error is misunderstanding how emotions add value to the brand. It’s not about emotion-to-transfer, but rather emotion-as-transport. The value is not in the emotion itself, but that the emotional response can help create deeper processing of the memories you want to embed. The emotion-as-transport model means to make it work, you need to clearly articulate the cargo you want the emotion to carry. This cargo is (hopefully) the brand and the message.  

Read the full article in MediaCat Magazine.

Exploring Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk

In a world where brand perception can make or break market success, understanding your brand’s health might be more crucial than ever. I interviewed Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who after co-authoring “How Brands Grow 2,” together with Byron Sharp now brings clarity to the concept of brand health in her new and aptly named book, “Better Brand Health.”

Interviewer (Coen):

“Jenni, could you share a bit about yourself before we dive in?”

Jenni Romaniuk:

I’m immersed in the science of branding, serving as a research professor and the associate director international at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. My passion lies in dissecting and enhancing the understanding of how brands grow and remain healthy in the consumer’s mind, which is the centerpiece of my book.”

Coen:

“Jenni, your pioneering approach has had a big impact on branding. Can you delve into the philosophy that underpins your writing methodology?”

Jenni Romaniuk:

“Writing, for me, is an expedition into the heart of branding. It requires an unwavering commitment to understanding and an unquenchable curiosity. In my work, particularly in ‘Better Brand Health,’ I strive to weave a narrative grounded in empirical evidence while also elevating the discourse on branding. The philosophy that drives me is one of relentless pursuit of knowledge — to challenge existing assumptions, to venture into uncharted territories, and to return with solid insights that help the branding field forward. It’s about crafting a narrative that’s not only reflective of my personal growth but also equips the readers with practical tools to navigate the complexities of modern branding.”

Read the full article on Medium.

Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s (brand) relevance?

Given it is the season of marketers donating to celebrities via Super Bowl advertising, I want to talk about using faces as Distinctive Assets. Faces draw category buyer attention because we are social/tribal beings. In any new environment, our attention naturally goes to any faces present. Are they familiar or unfamiliar, friend or foe, do I need to deploy a ‘fight or flight’ response or can I relax? One of the most valuable ways to use a face is to turn it into a Distinctive Asset, so it evokes the brand for category buyers. This makes it both familiar and relevant to the buyer. 

The power of a celebrity face as a Distinctive Asset

‘Tis Super Bowl season, where advertisements have an abundance of celebrities, and many of which are ad hoc efforts to grab attention. However, some brands have ongoing paid endorser relationships with celebrities. Dr Cathy Nguyen, Dr Lucy Simmonds and I wanted to see if it was the power of the face, or whether knowing the celebrity’s name made a difference to the celebrity’s strength as a Distinctive Asset.

In an empirical study across celebrity-brand pairs for actors, musicians, and sports stars, we found that if someone could put a name to the celebrity face, they were on average four times more likely to link that celebrity to a brand they were paid to endorse. For example, those who knew that face was Jennifer Aniston were more likely to link her to Aveeno, than those who did not know her (27% versus 5%). Therefore, a celebrity face is a more powerful Distinctive Asset when someone knows their name. 

The power of faces to draw attention to advertising

In another project led by Julian Major, we tested whether Distinctive Assets did a better job of drawing attention to an online banner advertisement than the brand name. Included were three face assets with mid-level Fame (% of category buyers that link the brand to the asset). These assets were the faces for Dos Equis, (Uncle) Ben’s and Old Spice.

The experiment involved reading articles on a mock website with online advertising. All respondents saw the same ad with the same face in the same story, the only difference is one group linked the face to a brand, while the other group did not. The test was to if they remembered the advertisement after an unrelated task. If brand relevance doesn’t matter, these scores will be the same.

The results below show that post-exposure advertisement recognition is significantly higher if the face is a Distinctive Asset. Therefore, a previously unknown face works better when it becomes known as a Distinctive Asset. 

Read the full article in MediaCat Magazine.

Tuning out the noise to better hear the quiet consumer

Is your brand tracking blocking your growth? Jenni Romaniuk, international director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explains all to dentsu’s Dave Winterlich, on this week’s Inside Marketing podcast.

It’s time to take a closer look at how we measure brand health, says Jenni Romaniuk, author of books such as Better Brand Health; Building Distinctive Brand Assets; and How Brands Grow Part 2 – revised. From the institute’s base at the University of South Australia, she and her colleagues are known worldwide for advancing marketing knowledge and busting pseudoscience and marketing myths. Among the top fallacies is an over-emphasis on heavy users – our most loyal customers.

“One of the reasons I wrote a book on brand health tracking was because I was concerned that we were kind of missing the point,” says Romaniuk. Too often the impetus is to “dive in”, trying to separate out heavy users to look at them, she explains. In fact, “You actually have to separate out the light and non-buyers because they’re the ones that are hard to hear.”

She likens it to a full room with 100 people, 10 of whom are yelling. It’s the others who should be of most interest to you but our focus on heavy users drowns them out.

“That’s one of the big problems of brand health tracking. It has been so heavily weighted, either implicitly or explicitly, to the heavy loyal buyer that we haven’t been able to see opportunities for growth,” she says.

Read the full article on Irish Times.

If AI took over making marketing decisions, would anyone notice?

Welcome! At the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for (*gulp) many decades now, I have the privilege to see a wide variety of great research, some of which is under appreciated because it was ahead of its time, and/or it missed getting the publicity it deserved. My aim for this column is spotlight some cool past research and show how this knowledge can help us with today’s problems. 

Hype/angst about AI taking over jobs is rampant, and marketing is no exception. Tasks such as creating digital content, direct marketing emails, or desk market research, are now routinely done by AI products.  With tasks that are repetitive or involve synthesizing vast amounts of information, human brains are competing with (and often losing against) the ChatGPTs, Bards, Geminis and Claudes of the world.  

While this causes angst amongst the Assistant Social Media Managers of the world, experienced marketers are feeling more secure, trusting their experience makes them less easily replaceable by an AI tool. But how safe should experienced marketers feel?

Read the full article on MediaCat.

Jenni Romaniuk: don't trust me, trust science. It leads to smarter decisions

The correct measurement of brand health is one of the most valuable tools for marketers, emphasized Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM (43/2023) , which took place shortly after her presentation at the Brand Management 2023 conference. As a New Year's gift, a conversation with a professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of the expert bestsellers How Brands Grow — Part 2, Building Distinctive Brand Assets and last year's news Better Brand Health, we present it in full.

In 2019, when you performed in Prague for the first time, you spoke about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

This time you focused on measuring the health of brands, about which you published a publication this year. Can you introduce your work?
Anyone involved in monitoring brand health wants to understand why to do it and how to do it right. For years, people have told me that measurement frustrates them. They don't like how it works and see no use for it. So the goal is to make the most of what is often one of the biggest spenders in a marketer's research budget. Because when done right, it can be one of the most valuable tools at their disposal.

As I understand it, you are trying to get into the minds of the shoppers. It is so?
It's about understanding whether you've laid the right foundation so that the next time someone is in a buying situation, they're more likely to consider your brand. And in addition to knowing how to measure these basics and how to interpret the obtained data.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Jenni Romaniuk: properly measuring brand health is one of the most valuable tools

Don't believe me, trust science - it leads to smarter decisions, says Jenni Romaniuk in an interview for MAM. A professor from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and a leading expert on brand value spoke at the Brand Management conference after four years.

In 2019, you spoke in Prague about the seven sins of marketing. Have there been any new ones since then?
Not exactly. Rather, I noticed different ways of doing old things. For example, before covid there were far more people who wanted to disrupt everything. Now it seems to me that on the contrary, the trend is that people jump much faster on the wave of criticism of any changes. It would be good to find a middle ground.

Read the full article on Marketing & Media.

Romaniuk’s new book merits attention

The old chestnut that marketing departments know that half their marketing communications budget works, but not which half, is thankfully long dead and buried. Its demise helped by pioneering studies of how advertising works by JWT in 1960’s London; built on by planners like Alan Hedges and later Paul Feldwick in later decades; with newer critical insights from Les Binet and Peter Field.

Studies from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute reported on by the redoubtable Professor Byron Sharp have also helped immeasurably. Sharp’s blockbuster 2012 publication, How Brands Grow, has gone into numerous editions and achieved best-seller status. He postulated a series of ‘laws’ for marketing managers; salience rather than positioning, distinctiveness rather than differentiation.

Sharp also addressed reaching not teaching, continuous activity rather than bursts. He had the audacity to nobble one of the longest established icons of marketing practice; USP in favour of making relevant associations and building memory structures. Like another messiah 2,000 years earlier he then encapsulated his commandments down to two; mental availability and physical availability.

One suspects the professor would have approved of the comparison. Sharp’s capacity for pithy phrasemaking and flair for communication means that his main conclusions are now widely shared across the business. Inevitably, some of his pronouncements have attracted criticism, particularly from fellow academics who can often make ground hurling look tame.

Sharp’s tendency to dismiss niche brands as small brands that lack the ambition to be more successful has been effectively rebutted in several case studies. Since the initial publication of How Brands Grow 11 years ago, there has been a steady stream of publications expanding on the initial thesis. The publications collectively represent a comprehensive guide to successful brand management.

How Brands Grow Part 2 appeared in 2014 with Sharp joined by Dr Jenni Romaniuk, also a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in South Australia. Four years later, she published Building Distinctive Brand Assets, an expanded thesis on one of the key components of a successful brand; colour, logos, copy lines, symbols, characters, visual and verbal tone.

Faults

Romaniuk has now written a new book covering another critical area of brand management (measurement) entitled Better Brand Health; Measure & Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The self-confident approach of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is evident from the preface where the author wastes no time in outlining the faults of most current brand tracking studies.

The faults are explained under three headings: philosophy, fads, fear. Determining that they adopt the wrong philosophy by concentrating on heavy and loyal buyers; the E-B academics have tended to focus on low level or non-buyers as they are key to future growth. Romaniuk  is also critical of ‘fads’; that is adding new measures for the hell of it, leading to ‘fear’ of dropping measures.

The measures have a tendency to become superfluous, resulting in bloated questionnaires. The author then reminds us of the three most important ‘laws’ of brand growth which form a backdrop to the book; brands grow by adding new buyers all the time, all brand buyer profiles are similar, and your brand’s main competitors are the biggest brands in the category.

Read the full article on Marketing.ie.

Jenni Romaniuk: "The priority is to increase the customer base"

Great turnout at Boussias Events' How Brands Grow

With a large participation of executives from the field of marketing and branding, Boussias Events' "How Brands Grow" took place yesterday, June 15, with keynote speaker Jenni Romaniuk, distinguished author, researcher, professor and International Director of the world's No. 1 research organization for brand management, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia.

In her first meeting with the Greek public, Romaniuk argued for the priority that should be given to increasing a brand's customer base over aiming to increase customer loyalty.

Building loyal buyers or targeting specific, niche market audiences may seem like logical decisions, however, data shows that as tactics they do not enhance brand growth. He also emphasized that since the goal is to grow the customer base, the means is to reach as many people as possible.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.

In Clear Focus

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk, May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They discuss how brands grow and why small brands should adjust expectations when assessing brand metrics.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Better Brand Health with Jenni Romaniuk (Part 2), May 2023

In Clear Focus host, Adrian Tennant, speaks to Better Brand Health author, Professor Jenni Romaniuk. They dive deeper into unpacking the key concepts for understanding and improving brand health.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia: How do brands grow?

The application of evidence-based marketing can leave room for what really has value for the development of a brand. However, it takes courage from marketers to question even their own assumptions, which until now have defined their actions. After all, does one need to worry about brand rejection when one has not calculated Mental Availability? Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute provides guidance.

Jenni Romaniuk, Researcher and Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of the University of South Australia, is coming to Greece for the first time, on June 15, as a keynote speaker at How Brands Grow, to present to marketeers and advertisers of the Greek market updated research data on braning, as well as her recently published book, Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World. The book is the "natural" continuation of the successful "How Brands Grow Part 2 – Revised!", which he co-authored with Byron Sharp, Professor and Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of the best seller "How Brands Grow: What marketers do I don't know". Shortly before her speech, she shares with MW readers useful insights on the value of brands, Mental Availability.

MW: How can evidence-based marketing be applied and what are its results?

Jenni Romaniuk: Applying evidence-based marketing highlights the areas we need to prioritize and identifies those areas we could ignore or leave further behind. In a world of limited time and often data overload, having clear priorities helps improve our efficiency. Leverage evidence-based marketing to create a framework for core efforts. The framework helps us choose the metrics and results we need to check to determine if our brand is on track. Eliminating signs that can distract us is also very helpful. Efforts to create more loyal buyers or target more specific market segments may seem logical, however there is evidence that as tactics they do not enhance brand development. This means we can shift our efforts away from ineffective ideas that simply drain our time and budget. Therefore, by applying evidence-based marketing, we are able to use our resources more effectively.

Can you explain the Laws of Brand Growth to us?

Similar to the laws of Physics, there are several Laws of Brand Development. One of the most important is the Law of Double Jeopardy. This law states that small brands "suffer" doubly. Smaller brands have fewer buyers (first risk), who are slightly less loyal (second risk), compared to buyers of larger brands. Other laws, such as Similar Buyer Profiles, highlight how brands compete, while the Natural Monopoly Law focuses on the core advantage of big brands, which is known to people who know little about the category.

Read the full article on Marketing Week Greece.