Jenni Romaniuk on better brand health

The Ehrenberg-Bass professor explains the principles and pitfalls of brand health tracking.

When it came time for Jenni Romaniuk, international director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, to write a new book, she thought about Adam Grant.

Romaniuk had heard the popular science author say that before he decides to write about something he asks himself whether he’d be happy talking about it for the next two years, and she thought: ‘Okay, that’s a good criteria.’

That is not the only reason that Better Brand Health: Measures and Metrics for a How Brands Grow World exists, of course. For another thing, Romaniuk was eminently qualified to write the book. Maybe even uniquely so. She is one of the world’s foremost experts on brand growth and distinctive assets, and she has spent a decade both practising and studying brand health tracking.

With one foot in the private sector and the other in academia, Romaniuk could get to grips with the pointy end of brand health tracking – designing questionnaires for companies, analysing results, etc – and then direct research to fill in the gaps whenever she was unsatisfied with the level of knowledge.

Better Brand Health brings together Romaniuk’s practical insights and research findings and grounds them within the established framework of brand growth to create a comprehensive guide to measuring people’s attitudes and memories. 

We spoke to her about some of the core concepts in her book, and some of the ways that marketers get it wrong when they set out to measure brand health.

Let’s start off simple. What are brand health metrics?

Brand health metrics are where we try to capture what effect we've had on a category by memories. There’s a whole range of different metrics under that umbrella, but it’s all about getting a window into the category and how what’s been going on in the marketplace has changed how people think and feel about brands. So brand health metrics, in the broadest sense, are anything dealing with memory.

One of the things you set out early on in the book is the mantra, ‘design for the category, analyse for the buyer, report for the brand’. Can you explain what that means and why it's important?

Basically, it points to three of the things that people get wrong or misunderstand.

‘Design for the category’ means you should have a brand-health tracker that any brand in your category would be happy to use. It shouldn't be just about you. If another brand in the category, whether it's a bigger brand or a smaller brand, would not use it, then you’ve got biased measurement. You don’t want that because you don’t know where your brand is going to be in the future. You might be a big brand now, but imagine you launch another brand in the category – then you’ve got to look at it through a small lens, and you’re going to have to design a totally new tracker and that seems a bit counterproductive, particularly when we know how brands compete. Your biggest competitors are the bigger brands.

‘Analyse for the buyer’. It's amazing how often people will ask for cuts by gender, age, life cycle, economic state, and not realise that the differences between them are trivial. Most of those differences are actually driven by the number of buyers or non-buyers of the brand you have in that segment.

Read the full article in Contagious.

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Nils Andersson Wimby: Better Brand Health – reading candy for those already brand-savage

“People don't care about brands or advertising. That insight is proven in research. What I really like about this book is that it takes its starting point in that insight, and then applies it to the measurement of marketing," writes Nils Andersson Wimby.

In recent years, trends around how to measure the effect of marketing have been characterized by digital metrics and real-time data. But "what gets measured gets done", and the focus on tactical, digital and rapid optimization has led to a short-term focus and poorer effectiveness of marketing, as shown in studies by e.g. Binet & Field.

Because while the dashboard-driven, detailed and mobile measurement of tactical/digital communication has developed strongly, little focus has been placed on developing the long-term measurement methodology. Brand Tracking has continued to do well with measurements of awareness, consideration and a couple of casually selected brand attributes. Sluggish, expensive and boring and unfashionable, the uninitiated thought. But nothing could be further from the truth, this is the measurement that is clearly linked to long-term value creation, which looks beyond clicks and conversions and aims at market shares and reduced price elasticity .

When Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute now releases a book about how to fine-tune your measurement to match the research from "How Brands Grow", then brand geeks breathe a sigh of relief. Build Better Brands promises just this: A handbook on how to translate the knowledge of Mental and Physical Avaliability into measurement methodology.

Read the full article on Resume.

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Insight Rockstars

Better Brand Insights – by Jenni Romaniuk, March 2023

“I think a lot of brand trackers are not fit for purpose in that they were designed in an era where the loyal/ heavy buyer was the person we were most interest in”. Professor Jenni Romaniuk and Insight Rockstars host, Frank Buckler discuss brand trackers and why they are important.

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

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Increasing mental market share by using category entry points

Customer question

Our client, a global FMCG manufacturer in personal care, was looking for ways to further develop the brand and increase market share. In this  nominated  case study for a personal care brand, category entry points are examined to find brackets to increase mental market share. Byron Sharp's idea of ​​mental availability, which together with physical availability is responsible for brand growth, plays an important role in this.

Category entry points as building blocks of mental availability

DVJ Insights developed an approach based on the academic work of Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. She provided an empirically proven model to measure mental market share. The building blocks of mental availability are the Category Entry Points (CEPs) – situations and moments when consumers think of certain products and brands. Consider, for example, the moment of using a body lotion: always after a shower or when the skin feels dry. If a consumer positively associates a specific CEP with the brand, this stimulates purchasing behaviour. So understanding CEPs offers concrete opportunities for brand growth by linking products to relevant situations and 'occasions'.

Approach and result

In order to detect as many growth opportunities as possible, the research was conducted in two phases. In phase 1, the current category entry points of various product categories of the brand and of the competition were mapped out with the aid of storytelling . This provides insight into when consumers use a product, why, in what context, for what purpose, et cetera. Using AI modeling, the most important CEPs per category were identified from all consumer stories. In phase 2, the frequency and mental market share of each CEP was then determined. This provides insight into where the customer's (or competitor's) brands are under- or over-performing and ultimately which CEPs are most promising for brand growth.  

Read the full article on Adformatie.

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown

Humans are hardwired to fear rejection.

To understand why, transport yourself to prehistoric times.

Imagine you are a caveman living in the year 10,000 BC and you commit a social faux pas against the caveman next door. Word gets out, and suddenly no one in the tribe wants to share their roasted sabretooth tiger with you. Without the support of the group, you can no longer feed yourself, and before you know it, you are starved out of the gene pool.

Modern Homo sapiens inherited this ancient fear of rejection, which is why we’re still alive.

Modern B2B companies struggle with something similar – fear of ‘brand rejection’.

Marketers fear we might say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and catastrophically harm the business. We often see this in advertising. Brands will pause media campaigns during turbulent times or dull down creative, trying to ensure we don’t insult any potential buyers and find ourselves starved out of a customer base.

But is the fear of brand rejection warranted?

Spoiler alert: not really.

Just like fear of rejection prevents too many people from reaching their full potential, fear of brand rejection prevents too many B2B businesses from reaching their full potential.

Have no fear, rejection is rare

Many B2B marketers worry about brand rejection. We track negative sentiment. We go dark during dark times. Sometimes we even run campaigns to address specific criticisms and try to win over our ‘detractors’ or win back our ‘churners’.

Almost all these decisions come from the gut.

We’d all be better off if these decisions came from the data instead.

And for the data, we turn to Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, the patron saint of marketing rationalism, who recently published a paper with The B2B Institute entitled – wait for it…’Brand Rejection in B2B’.

The B2B Brand Rejection paper quantifies the answer to a simple question: how serious is brand rejection in B2B? Please allow us to summarise the findings.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

How to avoid taking a knife to a gun fight! Tips to build a strong service brand identity

Think about the last time you bought a chocolate bar, that moment you saw it on the shelf. You can probably remember how that chocolate bar looked, the colours, patterns, images on the pack, its weight in your hand before you tore open the wrapper, and its smell and taste as you put it in your mouth. All of this engagement of the senses helps refresh existing brand memories, and on occasion, build new ones.

Now compare that experience to the last time you renewed your car insurance –what happened? You received an email, letter or even text informing you it was due, pressed a few buttons on your phone or computer and then? Perhaps a vague sense of security, the mild accomplishment of a task ticked off the to-do list…but really, nothing to engage the senses, no adding to the reservoir of experiences that creates a memorable brand. This is the challenge services brands face in the battle to build brand memories.

The service sector is growing and shows no sign of abating. While the sector includes traditional service industries such as insurance or telecommunications, growth in the digital world means new services have emerged in every realm from health and fitness, education, safety/privacy, and entertainment. With the world becoming more interconnected, offering a service that can be accessed at the press of a few buttons can allow a brand to reach many more buyers all over the world. For example, Peloton can reach many more people with its fitness app than it can with its bike. Setting up stores is expensive and sending products is difficult, these activities put us at the mercy of logistics, and increase our carbon footprint. So long live growth in the services sector!

However, this servicisation of the world does have its challenges, and one such challenge is to build a strong brand identity when the primary offering is a service. Unfortunately, being a service in branding is like taking a knife to an (attention) gun fight. You have a weakened toolkit because you don’t have a physical product to show, that buyers can see, hold, or even trip over. Yes, your competitors are similarly handicapped, but it’s not just competitor brands that you fight when building brand identity. Obstacles to overcome also include environmental and mental clutter, which can render your brand a wallflower unless you find some way to stand out.

Building Distinctive Assets can help overcome service brand limitations. Here are some tips to help a service brand become a strong, distinctive brand in the minds of category buyers.

Read the full article on WARC.

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

"No one gives off*** about your brand"

I went to the Festival of Marketing, edition 2022. Good news: it was about marketing again. Bad news: we're fucked.

Last time I visited the Festival of Marketing in London (March 2022) I missed the marketing. It was the edge of the corona period and half of the presentations were about culture, team and mental health. All important, but it didn't have much to do with marketing. And if it was about marketing, then it was about the P for Promotion, so about tactics.

This year was different: back to basics

This edition (October 2022) was different. It was about marketing, entrepreneurship, market orientation, brand building and sales activation. It was about the long and short term, about effectiveness and efficiency and about the collaboration of marketing with other disciplines. Marketing in other words, and in fact the basis of marketing.

That can hardly be otherwise if you kick off with a presentation by marketing professor Mark Ritson. The essence of his speech was: 'No one gives a fuck about your brand'. More nuanced: Marketers think too little from the customer's perspective. A second theme in his speech was rising inflation and declining spending. In Ritson's words: 'We are fucked'.

Then add that the best way to deal with the current economic situation is to maintain budgets and marketing communication activities. A statement that he substantiated with an argument about the importance of share of voice and the creation of extra share of voice, resulting in a larger market share. If all brands follow his advice, then of course nothing will happen, but the practice is that many brands reduce their budgets and reduce advertising activities. Keep doing what you already planned, and your share of voice will grow.

Ritson ended his presentation with his marketing checklist:

  • Stay market-oriented (but actually: finally put yourself in your damn customer's shoes!)

  • Keep strategy simple (objectives, targeting, positioning)

  • Combine sales activation with brand building (the long & the short)

  • Pay attention to differentiation and distinctiveness. Be different, but above all striking and recognisably different

  • Keep your communication budget on track.

Plan B and C

Another interesting session was the conversation with the CMO and the CFO of On the beach, an online travel company (onthebeach.co.uk). The theme: How do I ensure an optimal relationship with the CFO? Crux of the whole story: talk to each other… That sounds a bit silly, but these two people had a healthy professional relationship. They had clear and shared strategic frameworks, spoke to each other regularly without an agenda and the CMO felt co-responsible for the P&L. The CMO left the nerdy marketing shizzle to the team and spoke to the CFO about goals (in terms of increasing average shopping cart sales and market share) and how she was going to achieve them. No, not all that complicated, but apparently (and that is also my own experience with the companies I see inside) a huge challenge. Organizations still work in silos. One of the take-aways from the conversation for me was the CFO's advice: Come up with a plan B and a plan C. If things go better than expected, what do we do? And if things go down, what's the plan? The first thing in particular, being prepared for success and being able to scale when needed, seems like a good idea to me.

Heinz

An engaging group discussion was about Heinz and was held with the marketer and the agency side team working on Heinz. The conversation itself wasn't all that interesting. It was about the heritage of the brand and how they are now building on it. So with respect for the past, but with a new impulse for the future.

What was interesting is that Heinz has an innovation team that does nothing but come up with new product ideas. Beanz burgers, Beanz meals, Beanz filled hash browns. So a lot with beans, because Beanz means Heinz. But that has now been supplemented with a new 'platform' (…) Beanz means more. Still less strong I think.

This only works from a holistic approach. You can come up with nice Saucysauce and Spaghetti Junction, but you still have to produce, sell and put them away through your distribution channels. This is only possible if the entire organization is willing to think in that direction and cooperate. That is not the case from a company with silos.

What I had some difficulty with was the role that Heinz appropriates from his new 'platform' in the problem of children who go to school without breakfast. A campaign is calling on people to donate £5 a month so that one child can have a decent breakfast. Heinz doubles every donation. To me that feels more like a clever advertising campaign than a company doing it right. Difficult to find the right balance.

Champagne

I was looking forward to the session with Jenni Romaniuk. Not because it was mainly about champagne, that too, but mainly because I think that the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is an important voice in the marketing landscape and that their theory about brand growth and the role of distinctive brand assets is important. is to take note of. For anyone who works for brands: Romaniuk outlined her 'laws for growth' system (see image).

That system revolves around mental and physical availability and the specific interpretation thereof on various factors. In the session she discussed the meaning of category entry points, the entrances to the brand. Many brands assume inputs that are obvious, but what happens when those inputs change? And what do you do if this changes the competitive field? Is the way in which you present your product still adequate? With a different theme and in different terms, it was again about the customer's perspective. And once again it turned out that organizations and brands deal with this too easily.

Read the full article on Marketingfacts.


Posted on October 14, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Principles of Brand Growth: Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass – (English)

Markenkraft

My guest today is Professor Jenni Romaniuk. Jenni is Associate Director of the world famous Ehrenberg Bass Institute of the University of South Australia. She is a Research Professor and author of two very influential books “How Brands Grow Part 2” and “Building distinctive Brand Assets and one of the leading researchers on brand equity, advertising effectiveness, distinctive brand assets, word of mouth, loyalty and brand growth. She pioneered Mental Availability measurement and metrics. Jenni was the Executive Editor of the Journal of Advertising Research and now sits on the journal’s Senior Advisory Board.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Posted on August 26, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

‘Brain engine optimisation’ is the new search engine optimisation

Marketing Week

Brands – both B2B and B2C – should focus less on keywords and more on making themselves memorable at the point of the buying decision.


“The most important search engine is still the one in our minds.” 

That quote – from Jon Bradshaw, founder of the consultancy Brand Traction – is the most profoundly pithy idea we’ve heard in a long time.

What exactly does it mean?

Well, imagine you’re a tourist in Dublin.

You’re inside Mulligans, a fabled 168-year-old pub on Poolbeg Street.

A cheery Irish barman ambles over.

“What’ll you have to drink?” he asks.

So, how do you decide what to order? Do you whip out your iPhone and type ‘What drink should I get in a pub in Dublin?’ into the search box?

Of course not.

You don’t search Google – you search your brain.

And since humans are ‘cognitive misers’, you default to simple and fast searches like ‘drink, pub, Dublin’. Your brain retrieves a short-list of options from its memory banks. And then, to save yourself time and energy, your brain usually picks the most obvious choice.

Guinness.

Today, marketers invest billions of dollars in search engine optimisation. We want our brands to come to mind easily when buyers enter the market. We’ve got the right objective, but we’re optimising for the wrong search engine. The right search engine is the one in your head.

Which is why the real focus for marketers should be brain engine optimisation (BEO).

That’s right – BEO is the new SEO.

But how do you optimise for search results inside a buyer’s brain?

We’re not smart enough to answer that question, but we know someone who is: Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, one of the greatest marketing thinkers of our time.

Our team at the B2B Institute published new research from Romaniuk that we believe could revolutionise the way B2B marketing works. The paper explains how B2B marketers can grow their businesses through brain engine optimisation.

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

WARC x Cannes Lions: The Future of Strategy and Ehrenberg-Bass research

The WARC Podcast

All the latest from day four of Cannes Lions 2022. Host Alex Brownsell, Head of Content for WARC Media, is joined in the Palais des Festivals by WARC editors Lena Roland and Anna Hamill to talk about this morning’s Future of Strategy sessions, and recap yesterday’s presentation from Jenni Romaniuk, Research Professor at Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Posted on June 23, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

The crisis in creative effectiveness has new issues

AdNews

Advertising, in its current form, is still not driving the growth it should be, according to a WARC’s Anatomy of Effectiveness study released at Cannes Lions.

The update on the original 2019 study is designed to give brand marketers, advertising agencies and media owners a fresh perspective.

“In 2019 we noted a sense that advertising, in its current form, was not driving the growth it should be,” says David Tiltman, SVP content, WARC.

“This was backed up by researcher Peter Field declaring a 'crisis in creative effectiveness'.

“Today, there’s no sign that the crisis is over. In fact, there are a host of new questions and issues to resolve. 

Read the full article on AdNews.

Posted on June 22, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Ehrenberg-Bass: Linking brand messages to buying situations wins ‘the mind and the market’

Marketing Week

Based on the premise that “memories generate sales”, new research from Ehrenberg-Bass urges B2B marketers to build “wider, fresher networks” by tapping into the power of category entry points.

Linking brand messages to key buying situations can increase customer acquisition and retention, proving the “accountability” of B2B brand marketing, according to new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

Collaborating with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, the research suggests brand messaging can become fully customer-centric by focusing on category entry points, the cues customers use to access memories when faced with a buying situation. These cues are both internal, such as motives and emotions, and external, including location and time of day.

“Category entry points are not about the brand, they’re about the buyer,” the report’s author Professor Jenni Romaniuk, associate director (international) at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, tells Marketing Week.

“That’s what makes them important to understand separately from your brand. You can’t look at your brand and see category entry points, you have to go outside of it.”

The research urges marketers to identify and prioritise the category entry points that matter in their sector, and which their product can serve, linking their brand to category entry points through clear messaging.

“We are aiming for wider, fresher networks and I can’t say that enough. It is contrary to how we’re brought up to believe branding works. It’s contrary to this idea of positioning, finding that one thing you can own to be different from everybody,” Romaniuk explains.

“It’s about saying: ‘There’s lots of different ways people come into a category, we want to be behind as many of those doors as possible.’ That’s the probability game that comes in with this that’s different from everything.”

Read the full article on Marketing Week.

Posted on June 22, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

WARC releases 2022 update of its Anatomy of Effectiveness report

Media Week

WARC has released the 2022 updated edition of its highly successful Anatomy of Effectiveness report at Cannes Lions.

Three years on from the initial launch, the updated WARC paper aims to give brand marketers, advertising agencies and media owners a fresh perspective on the five key building blocks of effective marketing

David Tiltman, SVP Content, WARC, said: “In 2019 we noted a sense that advertising, in its current form, was not driving the growth it should be. This was backed up by researcher Peter Field declaring a “crisis in creative effectiveness”.

“Today, there’s no sign that the crisis is over. In fact, there are a host of new questions and issues to resolve. We’ve had a pandemic that saw budgets switch out of brand investment into performance marketing; we’ve seen the rise of ‘retail media’ platforms that are reshaping the media landscape; and with the impending death of the cookie we see a growing lack of confidence in advertising and media measurement.  

“This updated edition of our white paper draws on new thinking and the latest evidence to present the key building blocks required to deliver commercial impact today,” Tiltman added.

The ‘Anatomy of Effectiveness: 2022 Updated Edition’ report by WARC highlights the following five priorities for brands wanting to improve the impact of their advertising:

Read the full article on Media Week.

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

Mental availability, brand rejection, Binet & Field, ESOV and Ehrenberg-Bass: New B2B data shows marketers should flip the funnel sideways for business growth, B2C strategy also on the hook

Mi3

From flipping the marketing funnel sideways to scotching “delusions” that retention and loyalty trump acquisition – and a new performance-enhancing twist on Binet & Field’s 60:40 brand to performance rule (it should be 95:5 in B2B) – the science unpacked in How B2B Brands Grow also applies in large part to B2C marketing, says its Ehrenberg-Bass co-author, Jenni Romaniuk. Jon Lombardo, Global Research Lead at The B2B Institute hopes the science emboldens brands to stop making “drab and dull” performance ads and stop worrying about offending customers. The truth, he says, is few people care about brands at all: “It’s all upside. The job is always to build mental availability.” LinkedIn’s ANZ and SEA Enterprise boss Prue Cox says the likes of Westpac and DocuSign are nailing it.

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.

In 2022, should B2B content marketers focus more on advertising?

The Drum

Many B2B marketers focus on ‘content’ rather than advertising, but is that the best thing to do in 2022? For the answer, columnist Samuel Scott interviewed the person who created the term ‘mental availability’, professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

In 2005, Rand Fishkin – then the chief executive of SEO software platform Moz – published the first edition of their beginner’s guide to search engine optimization. To this day, the material remains one of the best examples of what has become known as ‘content marketing’.

For years (and even still today), I would refer people to the e-book whenever they would ask how to learn about ranking in organic search results. The guide has remained extremely popular over the years – it even ranks higher than Google’s own resources for many related search terms – and has undoubtedly gained many customers for Moz.

In advertising terms, Moz was ‘top of mind’ for me and others whenever people would ask about learning SEO. Moz’s senior executives and the company blog have been known throughout the industry for having some of the best ‘thought leadership’.

But in 2022, producing such content – a popular substitute for doing traditional brand advertising – might not be enough to build real ‘mental availability’ in B2B categories.

Based on the increasing B2B interest in brand that I saw in 2021, I foresee that more teams will ask themselves the following question this year: Is constantly publishing informational material and trying to become a thought leader actually a good way to get remembered in future buying situations?

Read the full article on The Drum.

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Jenni Romaniuk.