"Branding is like toothbrushing"

Dagens Media

After several years of fairs of types such as Fields, Binet and Sharp, advertisers now understand the importance of placing the majority of their media budget on long-term brand building. However, the industry is still stuck in old wheel tracks, writes Clear Channels Karl Höglund, who gives his best tips on how to trigger associations with your brand.

In line with digitalization, advertising has become an integral part of our everyday lives. We are constantly reachable and thus constantly exposed to commercial messages. Cynically, we are just one data point in someone's media plan. Given that marketers now have so much data on what works, but perhaps most importantly what doesn't work, it is a mystery to me that one does not succeed better. If everyone now knows that short-term efforts inhibit long-term growth - why do advertisers (according to IPA) continue to spend 60 percent of their media budgets on such efforts?

Jenni Romaniuk, brand researcher and author of the book Building Distinctive Brand Assets, demonstrates the importance of being consistent and long-term in her communications in order to successfully create and maintain recognition and "mental availability". Among other things, how to work with color, logos, fonts, manners, icons, sounds, shapes and so on to trigger the cognitive or intuitive in human brains. So trigger associations to your brand. 

Read the full article on Dagens Media.

Stop giving money to Mares, Slovaks and others, it does not make sense, the expert advises

Expres

Influencer. In many years, the term that many people have great difficulty in pronouncing has been declining in all cases. Young children no longer want to be a doctor, an astronaut, or a footballer, longing for an “career” of an influencer. However, according to Australian expert Jenni Romaniuk, who runs the world's largest brand marketing research center, companies that appeal to and bet on influencers throw money through the window. Working with them brings nothing.

“The first reason is that you have no control what they say. The second is that although they have a large audience, you need to realize how many brands they promote. There are a number of them, and your business will be just one of many, ” said Australian Jenni Romaniukin an interview with Hospodářské noviny.

Read the full article on Expres.

Ehrenberg-Bass: Marketing needs to embrace its scientific status or risk a slow death

Marketing Week

Unless marketers can embrace marketing as a ‘young science’ that needs to be nourished they will lose their influence at the top table, argues Professor Jenni Romaniuk.

Marketing is a young science that needs to be nurtured and nourished if the industry wants to enter an “age of enlightenment”, according to professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science

Speaking today (10 October) at the Festival of Marketing, Romaniuk urged marketers to embrace marketing as science if they want to ensure the discipline has impact and influence within organisations and among consumers.

“With the changes marketing is facing with the C-suite and getting credibility with the board, can we afford to not take ourselves seriously as a marketing discipline?” asked Romaniuk.

“Can we afford to wait for that or will we just get rendered obsolete by the CFO in the company? We can move now and get there more quickly than if we have to wait for all of the people who don’t think marketing is a science to first die.”

Romaniuk argued that to enter an age of enlightenment, marketers need the humility to realise they can’t know everything about such a new science and some of their thinking may be wrong.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Romaniuk: Seven (costly) sins of brand marketing

MediaGuru

Jenni Romaniuk showed at the Brand Management conference what marketers can increase in price to boost their brand growth.

“No marketer wants to destroy his brand,” said Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, who is trying to collect data for evidence-based marketing and is also behind the book How to Build Brands, said at the outset. Even so, marketers often destroy their entrusted brand when they let themselves be carried away in their strategies by “intuition” or common belief that something works, even if it is not. The mistakes made by marketers are manifested not only by the loss of money and time, but also by wasted opportunities and, last but not least, by clearing up competition. 

Seven “costly sins of brand marketing” to watch out for, Jenni Romaniuk showed at this year’s Brand Management conference. 

Read the full article and interview on MediaGuru.

Interview with Jenni Romaniuk

Festival of Marketing

Jenni Romaniuk is a Research Professor of Marketing and Associate Director (International) at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute - the world’s largest centre for research into marketing.

Hi Jenni, thanks for chatting with us! Firstly, we’d love for you to tell us a little about yourself and what you do?

I am a Research Professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, based at the University of South Australia.  My primary goal is to discover and share new knowledge in marketing science. I specialise in how the stuff people hold about brands in their memories affects the choices they make, and how marketing activity affects the stuff in people’s heads. 

More specifically, my research areas are Mental Availability, Distinctive Assets and Brand Health measurement and metrics.  My research hobbies include Word of mouth and Buyer behaviour. 

You’ve recently written a book about future-proofing your brand’s identity which will be available at Festival of Marketing. What are some of your top tips for building distinctive brand assets?

Yes, brand identity is an area where I see actions taken with the best of intentions, but unfortunately many mistakes are made due to lack of metrics and long-term strategy.  The aim of the book is to bring together, in one place, an understanding of strategy, measurement and tactics to Building Distinctive. 
The three headline tips I would have are:

1. Don’t make life hard for yourself through poor asset selection – Use metrics and knowledge to avoid assets that will be more difficult to build.  There are no best assets, but there are definitely worse ones. 

2. Think menu rather than meal – Select your set of assets like you would a restaurant menu, so you can choose the best one each time for the branding context. Too often assets are treated in isolation, rather than how the set of assets work together in all branding contexts. 

3. Make ‘no’ your default response to change – If you select smartly, your brand’s Distinctive Assets should outlast you.  Too often investments in Distinctive Assets are abandoned for no valid reason.  Only change if there is a strategic advantage in doing so.

Read the full interview on the Festival of Marketing blog.

Marketing Journal Podcast: What the Marketing Bible 'How Brands Grow' by Byron Sharp says

Focus Agency

The most important source of information marketers can read in their lives. This is how renowned marketing professor Mark Ritson refers to the book How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp. In this podcast, you'll learn the most important things you can find in it.

How to build brands? This question has many answers. There are a number of approaches, and this diversity sometimes resembles the "school of thought" in the field of psychology. Experts argue which way is the right one. The layman (but also some marketer) is surprised. Is there any compass in this mix of uncertainty showing what really works? Yes, it's called " How Brands Grow ". This book was published by Byron Sharp in 2010, followed in 2016 by Jenni Romaniuk as its co-author.

In the Czech Republic strongly resonated performances Mark Ritson at the last Festival Marketing and its expertise is also involved in making this year's lineup. In his Making a Marketer document , the first question is: “We marketers like to say that our decision is based on evidence. Where to go when looking for data, what works and what doesn't? ”

Ritson then replies: “Lots of marketing is not based on evidence. It is either based on ignorance of empirical data, or was created on distorted half-truths designed to sell one thing to marketers instead of another. Since I have a Ph.D. in marketing, it is natural for me that when you say something, you have found empirical evidence to support it. This will take you to certain places . This will take you to Byron (Sharp) and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute , because they have everything fantastically empirically grounded. The quality, application and insights of Les Binet and Peter Field's work, together with ' How Brands Grow ', form the most important corpus of information.”

And much of this most important information is available today . It was exactly what the "How Brands Grow" books said I was talking to Jan Patera, a former long-time marketing journalist from Marketing & Media and later Marketing Sales Media, who is now helping Blue Events design their conference program. Thanks to him in May of this year, he performed in Prague Les Binet and already in the Wednesday, October 2 at the conference have Brand Management in 2019 a chance to hear one of the main characters Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and co-author of the second edition of "How Brands Grow" Jenni Romaniuk.

Read the full article on Focus Agency.

Iconic Australian shopping centre brand Westfield to expand across Europe

The New Zealand Herald

What started in the backstreets of Blacktown is now coming to Paris and Prague after winning over London and New York. But there's a drawback to this Aussie success.

When the residents of Paris and Prague, Stockholm and Warsaw head out for some retail therapy this weekend they'll notice a new, unfamiliar and very Australian name taking pride of place on their local shopping centre.

Westfield, a brand born in Sydney's western suburbs, is taking over Europe.

Already a big deal in New Zealand, the US and UK, it's now on the march to France, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Poland, as it becomes one of Australia's most successful retail brands.

Jenni Romaniuk, a research professor at Uni SA's Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets, said bringing Westfield to major centres across Europe was a smart move.

"Even the people who like online shopping also like going to a shopping centre because it's a social event. So having a strong international brand in that space creates economies of scale," Prof Romaniuk said.

Read the full article in The Herald.

Effectiveness, innovation and the future of marketing: Marketing Week at The Festival of Marketing

Marketing Week

This year’s Festival of Marketing will see our key editorial themes come to life across two days on the Marketing Week Strategy and Leadership stage and beyond – with the help of some of the biggest names in the industry.

Marketing Week columnist Mark Ritson, Ogilvy UK vice-chairman Rory Sutherland, WPP CEO Mark Read and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s Jenni Romaniuck are among the big names that will appear on Marketing Week’s Strategy and Leadership Stage at the Festival of Marketing next month.

Returning for a second year, the stage will bring to life key strategic and leadership issues including marketing effectiveness and measurement, innovation, and the future role and responsibilities of the marketer. Elsewhere at The Festival, we will tackle key challenges including attracting young people into the industry, as well as showcase best practice.

Read the full article in Marketing Week.

Study finds larger creative more likely to engage

Biz Report

According to new data, size does matter where advertising is concerned. but, is simply having oversized ads enough? We asked a digital expert to weigh in on how size matters - but so do other aspects of a campaign.

"The best advice for digital creatives is to use simple animation with large brand assets and a clear visual hierarchy. While Adelaide is focused on the quality of media, we're impressed by the research from System 1 on fluent devices and Jenni Romaniuk at the Ehrenberg Bass Institute on distinctive brand assets. As attention data becomes more integrated in to marketing decision systems, innovative marketers will use media quality as a guide for what type of creative they should use. For example, in low attention environments a simple logo might be best," said Guldimann.

Read the full article in Biz Report.

Want to be more effective? Here’s five ideas to consider

WARC

As the marketing industry descends on Cannes, David Tiltman says it’s time to raise the level of debate around effectiveness.

Today WARC launches a new white paper: Anatomy of Effectiveness. It’s a distillation of the current evidence, case studies and thinking around effective advertising.

Why do this at Cannes Lions, a celebration of creative excellence?

Well creativity, as the report shows, remains one of the most powerful tools for driving effective marketing – when it is properly applied.

But what sort of creativity? And what kind of framework should it sit in? With what budget behind it? In what channels?

Those are the kinds of question that broad-brush studies of the business impact of creativity tend to ignore. But they’re exactly the sort of questions WARC’s clients in both agencies and advertisers come to us with. They’re the questions we try to answer in the content we commission, the analysis we produce, and the sessions we run (including at Cannes). And they’re the questions we try to address with the new white paper.

Read the full article on WARC.

Anatomy of effectiveness: A white paper by WARC

WARC

Summarises current thinking about how to advertise effectively, given the current sense that advertising is not driving the growth it should be.

• Brands should invest in excess share of voice, but the biggest driver of results is brand and market size.

• The general optimum split of marketing investment is 60% for long-term brand building and 40% for short-term activation.

• Creative emotional campaigns drive long-term effectiveness but even short ads can drive certain emotions.

• Reach is still the foundation of media effectiveness, multi-channel integrated campaigns are more effective than single-channel campaigns, and the frequency capping techniques online are a growing trend.

• All researchers emphasise simplicity, distinctiveness and uniqueness to improve brand recognition; fluent devices and distinctive brand assets are examples of assets that help brands stand out.

Read the full article on WARC.

The Sydney suburb with a secret Woolworths hiding in plain sight

News.com.au

This Woolworths is so small and behind the times, it doesn’t even say Woolies on the store. It’s a mystery why it even exists.

On a tidy shopping strip in a quiet corner of Sydney sits something that, in retail terms, is now unique.

Locals pop in and out all day long, some oblivious that their local supermarket is something you’ll see nowhere else.

But it’s not some newfangled concept store — a glimpse into the way we’ll shop into the future. Or the first Australian opening for an international retail giant.

Rather it’s a look back into the past, a glance into the world of supermarkets’ past. The residents of Jannali, in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, are picking up their groceries from the last of its kind.

The name above the door may be unfamiliar, but the company behind it is one of Australia’s biggest — Woolworths.

Jannali is the suburb with a secret Woolies. And it’s one of the country’s strangest Woolworths at that.

Welcome to Australia’s last ever Flemings supermarket. There were once scores of stores; now this single branch remains.

Read the full article on News.com.au

Red C’s shortcuts to brand choice

Marketing and Media Matters

It is surprising how often we test ads for brands that simply do not make it that easy for consumers to know which brand it is being advertised. The ads bear little resemblance to the brand that consumers know and unfortunately it is true to say that the money spent is often wasted as the communication does little to help build easier shortcuts to brand choice.

Being able to stand out has been a cornerstone of advertising impact since the practice was first established.  But equally as important is the need to make it easy for consumers to link the message quickly with the brand. If it is not, then the money spent is wasted because even if it is commutating a strong message, it is not linking that message to the brand behind it.

The importance of brand recognition as a key mental shortcut or heuristic to brand choice has been explored in many books, articles and papers in recent years. Behavioural economist Gerd Gigerenzer found that people rarely make decisions following detailed consideration, but instead make “fast and frugal” decisions to arrive at “good enough” choices.

Recalling brands in context: The availability mental shortcut is discussed in Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow. Mental availability is something marketers must measure carefully. If a brand is easily recalled in context, it becomes a good choice for consumers.

How do we know which choices are good enough? Not by careful comparison. Instead we use heuristics, or mental shortcuts. In 2003, Daniel Kahneman identified “baseline” heuristics involved in nearly every human decision. Of these, three baseline heuristics are particularly useful in explaining brand growth and the three are availability, affect and processing.

Read the full article in Marketing and Media Matters

Is it time to reposition positioning?

The Drum

Quick! What’s the difference between a positioning statement and set of brand values?

Or a value proposition and a brand’s DNA?

What about a brand promise and a brand essence?

If you answered ‘er’ to any of the above, then you are not alone.

Week long workshops have been spent parsing out the distinctions between ‘DNA’ and ‘purpose’. Cut through the froth, however, and we are talking about positioning.

But whatever we call it, positioning is central to what marketers do. Yet, here’s a scary New Year’s thought: is it time to reposition positioning?

Positioning faces an even bigger challenge. Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has pointed out that the way we think about positioning is back to front.

Read the full article on The Drum.

Mastercard does some…. branding…!

Not the most exciting headline I suppose, but I am a bit bemused by the furor about the decision to remove the brand name from the logo. This decision been called ‘smart’, ‘masterful (nice pun)’ ‘bold’. I call it business as usual. This is what any brand with a strong Distinctive Asset can do - use the Distinctive Asset to replace the brand name. It’s not brave, bold or brilliant, it’s just good branding - assuming you have a couple of foundations in place.

1. It is really a strong asset with (close to) 100% Fame and 100% Uniqueness

Marketers often over-estimate the strength of their Distinctive Assets because they have a skewed view of the impact of their own asset building activities versus competitors. Mastercard are reported in the Forbes article as saying 80% of consumers recognised the logo without the words accompanying it (I assume they linked it to Mastercard, not just had seen it before!). This does, of course, mean 20% or 1 in 5 consumers don’t think Mastercard when they see this logo. Perhaps these people don’t need credit cards?

Some forms of measurement can also give misleading results. For example our research, published in the Journal of Advertising Research, shows that prompting people with the brand name when measuring the strength of Distinctive assets can inflate Fame scores by up to 20 percentage points.

2. There is a new buyer education process in place

Even if you have a strong asset now, new buyers are constantly coming into the category. Distinctive Assets are not innate knowlege, we learn them through the (successful) activites of marketers. New category buyers need to be taught that this Distinctive Asset is synonymous with Mastercard or over time, even the strongest Distinctive Asset will erode in Fame.

3. There is a competitor monitoring system in place

While you might have some control about your brand’s asset building activities, you have limited control over competitor activities. For a global brand like Mastercard, its important to monitor the Uniqueness of their asset, and check no competitors are encroaching into its mental territory. Lack of Uniqueness is when competitor brands are also linked to your brand’s asset. And once lost, Uniqueness, is very difficult to regain - as you can’t tell category buyers not to think something!. So picking up encroachment is early is really important for keeping a Distinctive Asset strong.

4. You have a full Distinctive Asset palette and not just rely on one asset

A visual asset will not work in all environments. Any brand needs a set of diverse assets to draw on to use in different media and retail environments. Putting all your eggs in one basket with one asset is a risky strategy.

Mastercard’s choice is not something to be applauded, celebrated or even criticised in itself. Thousands of brands make this same decision for branding moments in an advertisement, on a social social media post and other places where category buyers experience brands. It’s just often, unfortunately, a decision made without the right foundations in place. Hopefully this is not the case for Mastercard.

Kraft peanut butter is back in Australia, but Bega says only its spread is the original

The Advertiser

After more than a year’s absence, Kraft peanut butter is back on supermarket shelves. Or is it?

That’s the question facing shoppers with archrival Bega insisting that only it now owns and produces the “never oily, never dry” spread Australians grew up with. Whatever is in the new — and almost identical — Kraft jars, it’s not the real thing, the Aussie firm has said.

It’s the latest chapter in an increasingly bitter breakfast time battle between US giant Kraft, now owned by Heinz, and NSW dairy Bega which bought most of Kraft’s Australian operations for $460 million last year.

The two are due to face each other in court this week over allegations of trademark infringement.

The victor will likely go on to dominate the $110 million Australian peanut butter spread market.

Jenni Romaniuk, a research professor at Uni SA’s Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of Building Distinctive Brand Assets told news.com.au the spread stoush was “a bit of a mess” and it could ultimately be “bad news for Bega” if shoppers flocked back to the familiar Kraft name.

Read the full article on The Advertiser.

Brands need distinctive assets

WARC

Brands relying on the quality of their content to get noticed may be neglecting the significant marketing opportunities offered by having a set of distinctive assets, according to Jenni Romaniuk.

Writing in the current issue of Admap, the associate director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science likens the strategy of getting attention first then branding second to using darts to tackle a swarm of wasps: “you might hit a few, but you will miss the majority.”

Further, “The more attention-grabbing the creative, the harder the branding has to work to succeed,” she notes.

One way of creating branding that cuts through the environmental distractions external to the advertisement, including mental clutter, is to deploy “distinctive assets”.

Read the full article on WARC.

The Four Commandments: future proofing a brand’s identity

UniSA News

Think of M&M’s and you get an instant visual image of the characters Red and Yellow; a flash of bright green in the haircare aisle can draw you to Fructis; and when I write the words ‘Aussie kids are….’ a good number of you would have finished that sentence in your mind without prompting (probably also with the music to accompany it!).

Each of these factors are Distinctive Brand Assets. They’re the non-brand-name aspects of a brand that form its identity. Built up over time and embedded in your memory, Distinctive Assets trigger the brand in the minds of buyers and help them identify the brand with ease – online, in-store, in the street or on your phone.

Distinctive Assets are created by the brand’s marketing activities, and when done well—like M&M’s, Fructis and Weet-Bix—they can activate a rich vein of thoughts. Yet there are also risks. The appeal of Distinctive Assets can lead marketers to make poor choices about assets for their brand, particularly when they’re considering (or have been told) it’s time for a change.

The following four commandments help you focus on the important, and avoid some common traps that damage the brand.

Read the full article here.

Q&A with Jenni Romaniuk of The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Research World Connect

Interview: With her latest book, Building Distinctive Brand Assets, now available, Jack Miles from Research World Connect recently spoke with Professor Jenni Romaniuk about the book’s background and contents.

Read the full Q&A on RW Connect. 

Distinctiveness: the practical and the theory

The Writer 

Rachel Eyre from Sainsbury's and Professor Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute talk about that mysterious beast: distinctiveness. And how you could make sure your brand stands out. Listen to the full interview on The Writer's podcast.