Reports

Report : Planning for Synergy. Harnessing the Power of Multi-Platform Media

Together with CNBC the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has released a white paper on mult-platform media synergy.

Click here to read the synopsis

Report 59: Competing Brands Have Similar 'Personality' Profiles

My brand has a better 'personality' than your brand .... or does it?

Report 58: Make 'em laugh, make 'em cry: Understanding which emotions drive video sharing on Facebook

For practitioners the potential benefits of viral video campaigns may seem abundant; however success can be ‘hit and miss’.

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Report 57: A Guide to Continuous-Reach Advertising

The media schedule should minimise the gap in time between a category purchase and the last advertising exposure.

Report 56: Does On-line Reach the People TV Finds Hard to Reach?

The bottom line is that TV and internet usage are largely independent. Watching more or less of one has little affect on the viewing of the other.

Report 55: Light TV Viewers: young & desirable or just hard to reach?

Light TV viewers are similar to the rest of the population and it turns out that light TV viewers are not always light viewers.

Report 54: Do Your Heavy Buyers Stay Heavy, and What are They Worth?

Should you spend your time trying to target heavy buyers? Will your heavy buyers one year be your heavy buyers in the following year?

Report 53: Understanding How Brands Compete: A Guide to Duplication of Purchase Analysis

The follow up to Report 51: who do you really compete with? All marketers can use DoP analysis to profile the opportunities/threats in their market.

Report 52: Understanding, Identifying and Building Distinctive Brand Assets

What distinctive brand assets do you 'own'? What helps customers identify you above competitors? Important reading for anyone involved in brand building.

Report 51: Who do You Really Compete With?

What is the Duplication of Purchase Law and how can you use this law to discover who you really compete with? (Note: it's not always who you think).

Report 50: How to Stand Out in all the Clutter

The negative effect of clutter on your advertising performance looks to be less than first thought. In this report we look at the advertising outcomes in low and high clutter environments.

Report 49: TV: back to the future

Exensive research suggests TV will remain the major fast and vast advertising medium, if a more complex and expensive one. This report presents important implications for effective TV scheduling.

Report 48: In Praise of the 15-second Advertisement

How effective are short commercials relative to longer ones? 15 second spots are more than half the price of 30 second spots. The evidence we show here supports paying a premium.

Report 47: Cross-brand Cannibalization Kills the Profitability of Price Promotions

Many companies own more than one brand in a category. When one brand is discounted it steals full-profit sales from these other brands.

Report 46: Penetration vs Loyalty: a Clarification

Is "go for penetration" the most sensible growth strategy?

Report 45: Are Younger Consumers Easier to Win?

Younger consumers are slightly easier to 'win', but is it worth chasing the younger consumer or targeting your marketing towards the older customer?

Report 44: Where Knowledge of Your Brand Resides

Most shoppers know very little about the brands they buy. Proof that brands must gain the attention and refresh/build memory structures amongst the broad base of consumers.

Report 43: Price Promotions

Calculating the real cost of price promotions: how much margin are you giving away?

Report 42: There is a Pareto Law - but not as you know it

80:20 is a marketing myth: almost half of a brand's sales comes from the lightest 50% of the customer base. No one can afford to ingnore their light buyers. Includes guidelines for calculating Pareto share.

Report 41: Ten Simple facts about measuring brand perceptions

This 3 page report is a useful reference for evaluating and designing your brand tracking and for interpreting the results.

Report 40: The Uniqueness of Brands

Across 130 brands and 13 product & service categories we test the theory that brands should have unique image associations.

Report 39: How Brands Compete

This 2-page report draws together the strategic implications of many of our fundamental discoveries about how buyers buy.

Report 38: Addictive Discounting

3 simple marketing metrics can diagnose whether or not your brand is addicted to discounting, and can help you kick the habit.

Report 37: Repeat-Viewing in the USA and the UK

If you watched last week do you watch again this week? Repeat viewing of TV programs is generally quite low and follows a very predictable pattern.

Report 36: Individual-level Advertising Sales Effects

If aggregate sales don't change does that mean my advertising isn't working? This reports shows how sales effects can be measured and summarises empirical advertising sales effects knowledge.

Report 35: 100% Brand Loyals Exposed

100% brand loyals: How common are they? How valuable are they? And how does loyalty status change over time?

Report 34: Good News about Bad News: Talking about Word of Mouth

Is positive or negative word of mouth more common? Who is giving it, and are there differences between categories? This report presents practical implications for managing word of mouth.

Report 33: Brand Salience – Implications for brand management

Being noticed is often the main reason why our brand is (or is not) bought. Building brand salience is important for maintenance as well as growth.

Report 32: How Consumers Choose Prices Over Time

Customers do shop across price levels. Understanding how this occurs is a useful background for planning and evaluating price changes.

Report 31: How brands grow

Empirical evidence from 20 fmcg categories shows that increased brand sales tend to arise more from additional customers buying the brand than from increased purchases by existing customers.

Report 30: Expectations and Reality for marketing metrics

Pharmaceuticals, like most brands, will grow by persuading non-prescribers to start using the drug, than from increased use amongst existing customers.

Report 29: Is Coke Always Less Price Sensitive Than Pepsi ?

This report identifies factors – such as brand size, starting price and consumer characteristics – that did or did not consistently affect price elasticities.

Report 28: Impulse Purchasing Patterns

Chaotic' impulse purchase markets, demonstrate patterns of brand switching and loyalty remarkably similar to those in many other product categories.

Report 27: Analysing Brand Image Data

This report outlines Data Reduction as a simple alternative approach to Correspondence Analysis for analysing brand image data.

Report 26: Double Jeopardy Revisited Again

Small brands have less customers and slightly lower loyalty rates than bigger brands. We discuss the implications of and deviations to this Double Jeopardy pattern.

Report 25: Decision or Descriptive Models

Which research for which problem? This report compares the merits of two main types of marketing models.

Report 24: Marketing: Romantic or Realist ?

This report explicates five ‘romantic’ marketing goals – and their realistic alternatives.

Report 23: Statistical or Practical Significance

Statistically significant’ is often misused overused: a 'significant' result is not necessarily interesting, important, large, meaningful, causal, or predictable.

Report 22: Report Writing

Six simple rules can help translate complex subject-matter into a brief, clear and useful report.

Report 21: Making Data User-Friendly

Most of the data we are asked to look at are hard to understand. Five simple guidelines can work wonders in turning data into information.

Report 20: Polygamous Brand Loyalty

Customers are polygamous not monogomous. A two page report setting out some basic discoveries about buyers (repeat) buying behaviour - and implications for brand performance metrics.

Report 19: What car will they buy next ?

Predicting retention and defection for both car types, and car brands, turns out to be perfectly possible. We show there are reliable patterns of repeat-purchase behaviour. Essential knowledge for marketers of durables.

Report 18: Patterns of TV Viewing: Loyalty to program genres

Do viewers of a particular genre (say Soaps or Sport) in one week spend more time, than the average viewer, watching that genre in the subsequent week? Implications for both advertisers & media networks.

Report 17: Perceptions of Differentiation ? Do users see their brand as different?

Very little is known about the level of buyer perceived differentiation. Do buyers often need to believe the brand is different from competitors in order to buy it?

Report 16: Brand Salience? What it is and why it matters

Brand salience is the propensity of the brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations. It is a crucial part of brand availability.

Report 15: TV Channel Use Amongst Multi-Channel Viewers

The report documents patterns in channel reach and hours per viewer. Plus how channels share viewers, and the sort of audience they typically attract.

Report 14: Do Brands Lack Personality?

Human personality traits are often incorporated in advertising and branding literature. This report looks at how consumers do or do not associate human personality traits with brands.

Report 13: Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity

Advertising is creative publicity; it seldom seems to persuade. Advertising needs to maintain the brand's salience - improving the chance it will come to mind in a purchase situation.

Report 12: Personal Buying is Like 'Family' Shopping

We examine whether personal shopping for products like books, music, computer games, mobile phones, clothes and fashion follow similar patterns to 'familiy' or routine shopping.

Report 11: Loyalty to Product Attributes

Product variants have loyalty levels predictable by their popularity (i.e market share). This is a blow to the idea that specialist variants can attract a small but highly loyal following.

Report 10: The forms That TV Ads Take

People do not believe that ads differentiate brands or provide information. Thus there is no "simple" basis on which these ads could successfully persuade. This highlights the irrelevance of persuasion theory to advertising practice.

Report 9: New Brands: Near Instant Loyalty

An unexpected but striking finding: loyalty to new brands was near-instant in some 20 cases examined so far. The new brands' average purchase frequency at launch is already 'normal'.

Report 8: The Case Against Price Related Promotions

Do price promotions acquire new customers for the brand ? Or do they erode brand loyalty ? We analyse hundreds of promotions across countries and discover generalised findings.

Report 7: Brand User Profiles Seldom Differ

Brand segmentation generally does not exist: competing brands are largely substitutable. Your customers are the same types of people who buy from your competitors.

Report 6: Customer Retention & Switching in the Car Market

Is the car market different? Perhaps unexpectedly, the repeat-buying and switching patterns for cars are much the same as for packaged goods and for services.

Report 5: The South Bank Pricing Tests

A wide-scale research program illustrates that price elasticities vary consistently with the context such as competitors' prices, brand size, measurement procedures, and certain consumer characteristics.

Report 4: Advertising is Publicity not Persuasion

Traditionally advertising is considered persuasive: ads should convince people that brand is different or better than a competitor. There is little evidence that advertising operates like this.

Report 3: Advertising and Brand Attitudes

This report presents compelling evidence against the common belief that attitudes shape behaviour, and highlights the shortcomings of using attitudinal measures in advertising evaluation.

Report 2: What We Can and Can't Get from Graphs and Why

Graphs can be extremely good at showing up a simple qualitative pattern, such as a curve. But they usually fail in communicating numbers or quantities.

Report 1: Understanding Dirichlet-type Markets

This is a position paper about purchase incidence and brand-choice in competitive markets. The Dirichlet model largely predicts these purchase patterns.