The Gravity of Impact

a five-part empirical inquiry into marketing effectiveness

SEEING BEYOND SHINY OBJECTS

“The more things change, the more things stay the same.” — Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1849)

Five years ago, nobody knew what a Polar Vortex was.

Now look where we’re at today. We have “Superstorms” and “Snowmageddons” and “Snowpocalpses” and big red graphics flashing across every major news network at the first sight of a snowflake.

Winter storms are nothing new, but the way we dramatize them, is. Hype has become our dernier cri.

Marketing, much like meteorology, is one of the few industries in which you can be wrong more than you are right and still keep your job. Forecasting is a tough business.

April 2, 1993 was the day that brands were supposed to die. It was on this date when one of the world’s most iconic brands (and most lucrative advertisers), Phillip Morris, had slashed the price of its Marlboro cigarettes by 20 percent [1]. It was a desperate attempt to compete with the surging success of cheaper, generic bargain brands. The day became known as Marlboro Monday. Marketers panicked. Stock-prices plummeted — not just for Phillip Morris, but across nearly every major household brand, too. Analysts had suggested that the very idea of branding was going bankrupt.

A little perspective goes a long way.

In the mid-1990s, MIT Media Lab Director Nicholas Negroponte argued that the future of advertising will see a total inversion of traditional practice [2]. Just last year the Huffington Post declared that “advertising is dead” [3]. Print media is on life support, people say. Facebook won’t be here in 5 years. Everything we ever knew about marketing is changing.

You can make a fortune by selling survival gear to people who think the world is about to end.

Today we swoon over technological curiosities. We fetishize futurism. We are seduced by the Gartner Hype Cycle and all of its voluptuous curves. We philosophize, we prophesize and we theorize about the state of our industry. We oversimplify what advertising has always been and we overcomplicate what advertising will someday become.

We’ve coined catchphrases like the Collaborative Economy and the Experience Economy and the Attention Economy and the Circular Economy and the Relationship Economy, all the while losing sight of our clients’ actual business economies — the tactile, quantifiable, bottom-line brand growth that we, as marketers, are supposed to be driving.

This is the crisis facing marketers today. We’ve become so obsessed with what’s new that we often overlook what actually works.

Every day there’s something new. New platforms, new technologies, new theories, new metrics, new techniques, new research, new platforms, new frameworks, new insights, new channels and new strategies. It’s launched new markets for new books, new conferences, new studies, new websites, new TED talks, new experts, new industries and new start-ups. New is right now, and right now is all about new.

Which is why, lately, I’ve become more interested in the opposite.

No, this isn’t about rejecting change. It’s about reappraising the things that never do. It’s about underlining the importance of long-term planning in a world that seems to have completely forgotten the value of it. It’s about extolling empiricism in an industry marred by untested intuition. And it’s about going beyond just celebrating change and recognizing ways that we can actually go about creating it.

Contrary to common opinion, marketing science doesn’t inhibit creativity. It actually validates the importance of it. And now we can tap into this treasure trove of marketing science to understand the conditions with which creativity needs to truly flourish.

As the great Jon Kabat-Zinn once said, “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” It’s a useful little incantation for marketers today, but it requires us all to keep our heads up above the water.

PART I:

THE RORY EFFECT:

WHY YOUR MOST OVERLOOKED AUDIENCE MAY ACTUALLY BE YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT.

At the beginning of 2014, the game of golf had been in steady decline.

For the eighth straight year, more golf courses across the country had closed than opened [4]. The number of golfers in the U.S. had dropped by nearly a quarter since its peak in 2002 [5]. Leading brands like TaylorMade and Adidas continued to post quarterly loses and retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods had laid off more than 500 golf pros throughout its network of store [6]. In April, one of the game’s most esteemed events, the Masters at Augusta, drew the fewest television viewers since 1957 [5].

To make matters worse, the game’s once perennial powerhouse and, for better or for worse, the face of golf itself, Tiger Woods, had not won a major tournament in years. He was noticeably absent from golf’s major events. Mainstream interest in the sport was, too.

But later that summer, something amazing had happened to the game of golf. It came in the form of a pint-sized, 25-year-old Irish dynamo named Rory McIlroy. After a very publicized breakup with fiancé and tennis pro Caroline Wozniacki, McIlroy went on a winning tear, grabbing top prize at the British Open, the World Golf Championship and the PGA Championship in a matter of weeks. He posted twelve top-10 wins, netted $8.2 million in earnings and finished the year as the PGA’s #1 golfer in the world.

More importantly, people started to care about golf again.

McIlroy’s march through the PGA Championship in August led to CBS Sports’ highest spike in television ratings in half a decade. Even small tournaments suddenly became media spectacles. The game had finally galvanized public interest.

The difference was that Rory McIlroy, much like Tiger Woods had done a decade before him, had made the game of golf exciting and relevant to mainstream audiences. The PGA no longer had to pander to their concentrated core of golf purists. The sport was finally expanding, driving television viewership, increasing participation and merchandise sales and corporate partnerships.

As strange as this analogy may seem, it helps illustrate how marketing can effectively help brands grow. For the past few years, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has applied Dirichlet data modeling to hundreds of brands of different sizes across different categories to see where sales revenue growth most often comes from. Their research unequivocally shows that “most real world brand increases in sales will come mostly through growing the size of the customer base” and not through driving higher rates of buying frequency [7].

For perhaps obvious reasons, this is especially true of smaller brands. But even large brands skew this way more times than not. For example, data shows how even a large, category-dominate brand like Colgate could expect roughly 3 sales due to increasing the size of its customer base for every 1 new sale from increasing the buying rate [7]. Coca-Cola has a different ratio, but a similar result. Decades of market research shows that you can adjust the company or the category, but it does little to change the fact that “growth-oriented marketing should focus on… light, occasional buyers of the brand… converting these ‘non-customers’ into customers [7].

Oddly enough, many brands today aim for the opposite. They try to capitalize on niche media, niche segments and niche markets. They become enamored with the prospects of hyper-targeted audiences and intricate connection tactics. They fixate on existing customers and on extracting more value from heavy brand users, on increasing purchase frequency and reinforcing brand allegiance. It all feels very ownable for brands. And maybe it is. But it’s simply not very growth-oriented.

This counters many of marketing’s most popular platitudes today. Digital networks in particular have been very vocal over the years in pitching a new form of advertising — one that could harness the power of intelligent targeting, one that could efficiently hone in on a brand’s concentrated core customers in order to drive rich, authentic engagement with the brand, spurring on advocates to spread trusted word-of-mouth to their vast social networks. Sound familiar?

But this never quite materialized like we’d been promised. Over 92% Facebook’s revenue today comes from an ad mix of premium video, digital display and other units that, while they can potentially still be very successful, aren’t too far of a departure from the traditional digital ad units that we’ve known for years [8].

We keep coming back to reach and frequency.

Despite all of the developments in media and technology over the past decade, we’ve yet to find a more effective alternative than expanding reach and increasing frequency. The media mix may have changed but the importance of those two variables has remained constant. Marketing needs visibility. Yet all too often, marketing efforts are planned from inside a vacuum.

The PGA was reminded of this a few months ago. The khaki-clad golf fanatics congregating around the 18th green may roar with excitement every time a player sinks a putt, but it’s the millions of captivated viewers tuning in from the quiet of their couches that will ultimately help the game of golf make the noise it really needs.

PART II:

THE LUST FOR LOYALTY:

WHY FANDOM IS FOOL’S GOLD.

A recent national survey found that almost 15% of married women and 21% of married men have admitted to having extramarital affairs at some point throughout their marriages (and that only includes the ones willing to admit it) [9].

Let that sink in for a second.

Now, consider how most brands today believe that these same people are unwaveringly loyal to the brand name of shampoo in their shower, or the logo on their sneakers, or even the insignia on the back of their automobile. Our assumption of how loyalty works is often incongruent with the reality of what loyalty is.

In his book How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, marketing scientist Byron Sharp builds on a wealth of empirical evidence to suggest that customer loyalty is largely a myth. Or rather that it is wildly overinflated and misrepresented. His findings underline the important and often overlooked Duplication of Purchase Law which states that all brands within a category share their customer base with other brands of similar size. This explains why 72% of Coke drinkers in the U.K. say they also drink Pepsi [10].

As Martin Weigel explained in his essay The Liberation of Magic:

“Loyalty is much more like an open marriage than one characterized by unwavering monogamy and devotion… Irrespective of the category we examine, we see that the vast majority of buyers are in fact not loyal to a single brand. Devoted loyalty — borne of the belief that other brands just aren’t as good, or just aren’t the same — does not exist. Instead, consumers are perfectly happy to buy from a repertoire of brands. [11]"

This may be sobering for many brands today, especially ones that focus their major marketing initiatives around “acquiring fans” and “inspiring ambassadors” and “building brand activists”. It’s become an indulgent mission for many brands today. In fact, the prevalence of loyalty strategies outnumber penetration strategies by about two to one, despite research showing that penetration campaigns are still 3 times more effective [12].

For the past 25 years, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) has been mining marketing effectiveness data from more than 1,000 brand case studies. Their research shows that loyalty campaigns underperform on almost every business metric. They also found that only 9% of loyalty campaigns had actually increased loyalty significantly, notably not much higher than non-loyalty-based campaigns [13].

As shocking as it may seem, this actually makes quite a bit of sense. Talking to existing customers is fundamentally less rewarding for two reasons:

First, there are usually fewer of them than non-customers. For example, Harley-Davidson is widely regarded as having one of the most devoted customer fan bases in the world, yet these fanatics account for only one-tenth of the brand’s customer base and just 3.5% of its revenue [14].

Secondly, existing customers tend to be influenced more by previous brand interactions than by brand communications alone. This may explain why a beloved brand like Apple can confidently ignore social media engagement in lieu of other customer experience elements (Genius Bar, anyone?).

In other words, loyalty has its limitations. It may be good for stroking a brand’s ego but it’s relatively ineffectual for driving a brand’s growth.

It’s bizarre considering that a lot of business strategy today heavily prioritizes brand loyalty as a key marketing objective. As marketing researcher Karen Nelson-Fields cautions, too many brands are “putting disproportionate amount of effort into engagement… when [they] should be spending more time getting more light buyers.” The most effective and efficient aim for marketing continues to be defending or building penetration [15].

And yet a big part of this also comes down to the unshakable truth that people just aren’t as passionate about brands as many marketers assume. A global consumer survey by Havas Media Lab found that people couldn’t care less if 3 out of 4 brands disappeared tomorrow. Moreover, it shows that consumers only perceive 1 in 5 brands as making a positive and noticeable contribution to their lives [32].

So while building brand loyalty has become one of the more popular marketing mantras of recent years, it may not be the panacea that all of these keynote speakers and best-selling authors lead us to believe it is — at least not when it comes to delivering against key quantifiable business objectives. It may be surprising but it’s actually quite simple: consumer love isn’t quite the consecration we had hoped it to be.

The legendary ad man David Ogilvy once famously said, “the consumer is not a moron, she’s your wife.” And for some, there may be an uncomfortable amount of truth to that now.

PART III:

MEDIA’S LAZARUS TAXON:

WHY THE CRUSADE AGAINST BROADCAST ADVERTISING IS ACTUALLY HURTING ADVERTISING.

In 2011 the enthusiasm around social media marketing had hit a fever pitch. Facebook was just months away from announcing a record-setting IPO. Social media companies like Beluga, Gowalla and Radian6 were being bought-out by billion-dollar acquisitions. Pope Benedict XVI would soon join Twitter.

It was around this time when Pepsi made the calculated decision to double-down on social media marketing. In 2011, Pepsi made industry headlines when they had cut their outbound, broadcast advertising in half (down to $20.1 million) in favor of reallocating its marketing efforts around social engagement tactics [16]. It was a bold move at the time, one that signaled the spoilage of traditional mass media advertising. At least, that’s what it would seem.

Just a few months later, Pepsi had officially lost its longstanding position to Diet Coke as the second-highest sales leader in the category. More notably, it was the first time that Pepsi had fallen behind two Coke brands in over twenty years. One industry analyst called it “a wake up call.” Ad Age declared, “Pepsi lost the cola war [17]."

Somewhere along the way, “broadcast” became a dirty word.

It was probably right around the time when “permission-based marketing” and “two-way conversations” and “one-to-one relationships” became staples of our marketing vernacular. As Seth Godin likes to say, “bullhorns are overrated.”

Nowhere has this sentiment stuck more than in the belief that television is dead. Experts point to things like the rise of digital video, the advent of DVR, even the popularity of platforms like Netflix, Hulu and HBOGo, to suggest that television is on a crash course with obsolescence. Even way back in 1994, Wired magazine predicted that “interactivity may mean the end of those obnoxious television spots that seem designed to irritate viewers into remembering the products [2]."

While we all may concede that most television spots are indeed obnoxious, the demise of television’s effectiveness, as a whole, is nowhere near as conclusive. Quite the contrary.

The IPA Datamine pulls from over two decades of effectiveness tracking to prove that “campaigns that included TV advertising outperformed those that did not… [and] more surprisingly, the effects of TV advertising seem to be getting bigger over time [13]." Turns out, today’s multi-screen, multi-device, multi-channel world is only amplifying television’s overall effectiveness.

The impact of television advertising is particularly powerful when measured against specific communication objectives. Television continues to drive the highest brand recall rates for audiences — nearly twice as much as the next highest channels, print magazine and print newspaper (not exactly the most modish mediums, in and of themselves)[18]. Television also has shown to have the greatest effect on price elasticity, one of the most telling metrics for measuring the long-term success of brands [19]. And, television tends to have the largest purchase influence on U.S. adults — more than social networks, mobile ads, online video and video game placements… combined [18].

Mark Pritchard of P&G explained, “when we take television off the air, our brands go down. When we put it back on the air, our brands go up. There’s such a tight correlation with TV advertising and growth.” Luke Dunkerly of Woolworth believes television “remains the place to make an announcement to the world, the place to make an emotional connection with customers.” Sir John Hegarty of BBH goes so far as to say that “this is actually television’s Golden Age [20]."

To be clear, television advertising is not foolproof. Exaggerating the infallibility of television advertising would be just as dangerous as exaggerating the death of it. And it would be ludicrous to assume that television advertising doesn’t need to evolve in order to meet the many ways that people consume video today. But it’s time to let the pendulum of our perception swing back to a saner state. Television advertising is, after all, just one victim of this impulsive, unfounded and pervasive aversion toward broadcast media today.

Traditional media channels may not seem very glamorous. They are, by definition, traditional. They may not satisfy our constant craving for being on the cutting edge of innovation. They may seem antiquated, uninspiring, perhaps even creatively confining. But the novelty of emergent interactive media doesn’t all of a sudden dissolve the effectiveness of broadcast media. It’s not to suggest that new media is null — it’s just to remind ourselves that traditional broadcast advertising isn’t, either. Not even close.

Paleontologists have popularized the term Lazarus Taxon — a classification used to describe animal species that were assumed to be extinct, only to later reappear and once again flourish. It’s fitting for the way many marketers perceive media today. Our industry becomes so enamored with the idea of extinction, yet much less so with the reality of it.

At the end of the day, advertising effectiveness has always been driven by ideas, not by channels. Yet we continue to let channels dictate strategies, rather than the other way around. This is our grand opportunity to finally restore some reason back into the equation.

PART IV:

THE LONG TAIL OF EFFECTIVENESS

WHY BRANDS MUST UNSHACKLE THEMSELVES FROM SHORT-TERMISM & HARNESS THE POWER OF EMOTION

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over a decade since the United States had invaded Iraq. It’s even harder to believe, more than a decade later, that we’ll ever get out of there completely.

Of course at one point, it not only seemed possible but actually very plausible that a full military surge would be both swift and successful. At least that was the attitude onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. President George W. Bush appeared in front of hundreds of American servicemen and servicewomen to announce the end of major combat operations in Iraq. Behind him, a massive ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner unfurled from the flight tower. It became one of the most enduring images of the decade.

It was also a miscalculation of epic proportions.

We all know now that the overwhelming majority of military and civilian casualties in Iraq would come after the ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech in 2003 [21]. It would take another 8 years for U.S. troops to finally withdraw. In the summer of 2014, they would return to Iraq yet again. Even by his own admission, President Bush would concede years later that, “I regret that that sign was there [22]."

To be clear, this isn’t an attack on a particular person or political policy. Rather it’s an indictment of poor planning. It demonstrates the shortcomings of short-sighted strategy, of placing a premium on immediate effects over effective long-term outcomes, of our desperate desire to quantify success before we truly understand how to define it. It’s becoming more and more symptomatic of strategic planning, both in war rooms and corporate boardrooms, and we need to at least be aware of it. Nearsightedness is a form of blindness.

In the seminal market research publication “The Long and Short of It,” Peter Field and Les Binet pulled from 32 years of marketing research to show that short-term metrics do not effectively predict long-term success. But more importantly, the research suggests that short-term strategy “actually steers you away from long-term profit [19].

Ironically, more and more brands today are focusing more and more on real-time measurement. They zero in on intermediate metrics such as clicks, likes, mentions, traffic, even quick-fire promotional sales returns. But Peter Field points to the data to explain how “real-time evaluation is inherently short-term… and can actually lead to brands being damaged and profits being reduced [23]."

This phenomenon plays out across a range of marketing activity. For instance, it’s pretty intuitive that price promotions can successfully drive positive, short-term bursts in sales throughout the year. Yet the data shows that these same price promotions can actually drive a substantial, negative effect on brand value and price sensitivity over time [23].

It’s the marketing equivalent of those miracle diet pills being sold on late night infomercials. You might lose a ton of weight in just a few weeks, but you’re probably not doing any favors for your overall health.

Fortunately, Binet and Fields propose a framework that can help restore balance for brands wanting to achieve both immediate short-term goals and sustainable long-term success. They outline two fundamental functions of brand communications, with two fundamentally different marketing implications: (1) rational activation communications and (2) emotion-based brand communications.

Rational activation is very useful for increasing short-term cost effectiveness and immediate sales responses. It tends to be particularly powerful in the form of search, direct marketing and point of sale channels, among others. On the other hand, emotion-based communications can be successful across brand channels such as press, television, radio, etc. and has been shown to drive long-term efficiency gains and to raise base sales. Both are valid, necessary and effective approaches for building brands today — it’s the balance between the two that’s been bastardized.

In examining over 700 brand case studies across 83 categories, Binet and Field found that the most successful brands and campaigns tend to cluster around a 39% to 61% ratio of rational activation communications to emotion-based brand communications, respectively [19].

Most brand marketers understand this distinction, intuitively. But what they often fail to understand is why emotion plays such a powerful role in communications or how they can harness it to its fullest effect.

For years behavioral economist Dan Ariely has led research on how organizations can actually get people to care. He and his colleagues have examined everything from charitable foundations to multinational corporations, even broader cultural trends and global news events. Ariely makes the important distinction that “the key to action is not thoughtful deliberation. It’s emotion. And in fact, when we get people to do thoughtful deliberation, the emotion can actively turn off [24]."

In other words, force-fitting rational messages into advertising may not only diminish people’s emotional connection to an ad, but it can actually prevent them from having one at all. For this reason, we ought to stop treating emotion simply as a way to deliver the key consumer takeaway. Effectiveness data shows us that emotion can actually be the key consumer takeaway.

Orlando Wood of market research firm BrainJuicer references years of creative-testing analysis to show that “success can be achieved with high levels of emotion and very low levels of key message take out [25]." Wood explains that an audience’s ability to extract the key message from an ad is in fact a very poor predictor of effectiveness. Shocking, right?

But it actually makes quite a bit of sense when we think about emotion less like marketers and more like human beings. In our own lives, we become captivated by certain films and certain songs and certain books and certain shows and certain experiences for the way they make us feel, not because we can identify, extract and articulate the one single-most salient message behind it all. It’s often difficult, if not impossible, to fully explain our connection to these specific medias. Emotion is effective precisely because of its deep, human complexity.

But perhaps the most important implication of all comes from the mounting wealth of marketing research that links emotion-based communications as the single-most effective communications strategy for building the long-term success of brands [19]. Emotion embeds itself into audiences in a way that information simply cannot. That’s why emotional messages continue to be twice as efficient as rational messages and deliver twice the profit for brands over the long-term [26].

Our challenge today is to recalibrate the balance between rational activation messaging and emotion-based brand communications, to better use both approaches to their best advantages, in the best conditions. We need to start reframing emotion as a strategic objective, not just as a creative tone. And we must begin to reassess the way we value momentous, long-term success over narrower, short-term results.

PART V:

OCCUPY INTRIGUE

WHY BRANDS SHOULD, IF NOTHING ELSE, AIM FOR FAME

Just days after the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election, the New York Times ran a feature story on statistician Nate Silver. They called him a “math whiz”. Perhaps deservedly so. After all, Silver had correctly predicted the popular vote within one percentage point in 49 of the 50 states. The pundits were astounded. The public was captivated. Silver made appearances on CNN and MSNBC, even Comedy Central. His book The Signal and the Noise went on to become Amazon’s #1 nonfiction book the following year. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world. Our mainstream infatuation with Big Data and analytics had hit a cultural tipping point.

You’d be hard-pressed to find any organization more committed Big Data and analytics over the last decade than Tesco. The global grocery retailer became the gold standard for Big Data and the industry’s darling of countless data-centric case studies for years. In 2001, one retail analyst in Bloomberg Businessweek went so far as to say that Tesco is “the only company in the world to really get it [27]."

Yet the talk around Tesco has a much different tone today. The company’s market value has more than halved to an 11-year low [28]. Competitors continue to cut into market share. The Harvard Business Review eulogized, “even data-rich loyalty programs and analytics capabilities can’t stave off the competitive advantage of slightly lower prices and a simpler shopping experience.” Turns out, Tesco could track, chart and measure just about everything, except the stuff that actually mattered most.

This is no knock on Tesco. It’s a universal challenge for organizations today. We have more data at our disposal than ever before, yet less clarity on what it all means. The challenge is no longer how to better capture information — it’s how to better contextualize it all. That’s why when it comes to measuring what truly matters, brands need to better understand what to actually look for.

In The Conflict Between Accountability & Effectiveness, DDB makes the distinction between two primary types of marketing metrics: (1) leading and (2) lagging. Leading metrics are intermediate consumer measures of brand health — things like brand awareness, brand image, the type of metrics that are often deployed immediately after an advertising campaign in order to track lifts in consumer perception. On the other hand, lagging metrics are hard measures that directly impact business performance or measures of consumer behavior — things like market share, profitability, price sensitivity, penetration, etc.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that many brands still evaluate campaigns mostly (if not exclusively) through leading metrics. It’s somewhat understandable, too. Leading metrics tend to respond quickly and can be easily linked to marketing activity. It makes advertising feel accountable. Yet the mass of market research shows that brands focusing solely on leading metrics enjoy less than one-fifth the success of brands that also account for lagging metrics [15].

The IPA Effectiveness dataBANK has been studying the connection between specific marketing objectives and successful marketing outcomes. The findings are somewhat seismic, especially considering the fact that some of the most common marketing objectives today turn out to be so relatively ineffective. Only 27% of brand image campaigns actually report very large shifts in brand image [13]. In fact, brand image and brand awareness turn out to be the two poorest predictors of marketing effectiveness [13]. After all, even Kodak still has stupendous brand awareness.

Our understanding of lagging metrics tends to be a bit misguided as well. Contrary to conventional thought, the ultimate aim of advertising isn’t necessarily just to increase sales. Only 1 in 5 campaigns that focus on increasing sales actually yield a decent return [12]. Instead, marketing effectiveness tends to be greatest when campaigns focus on growing share and reducing price sensitivity. Advertising aimed at firming up price is nearly twice as profitable as advertising aimed at increasing sales, despite the fact that only 4% of campaigns are ever aimed to do so [12]. This is the true benefit of brand building. It’s also what all of those doomsayers from Marlboro Monday never quite understood.

But of all the marketing objectives that the IPA dataBANK had examined, there tends to be one more primed for marketing success than any other. The IPA’s recommendation is both conclusive and surprisingly straightforward: aim for fame.

The way in which the IPA defines fame is much more methodical than the way, say, TMZ or pop culture critics define it. Thankfully. Brand fame is not simply a measurement of awareness or familiarity. Fame is the ability to incite people to think and, crucially, to actively talk about a brand [12]. Brand fame begins to build an aura of authority around a brand within their category, but it also begins to construct a web of symbols and create salience within culture at large.

Quinn Kilbury, the U.S. Brand Director for Newcastle, sums it up pretty succinctly: “we want to be in the news. And from the news comes the views.” It’s a philosophy that has clearly helped catapult his brand. Despite the fact that a single 30-second Super Bowl spot was nearly double the price of the Newcastle’s entire annual media budget, the brand was able to generate in advance of one billion impressions for a Super Bowl commercial that never even aired during the Super Bowl [30]. The spot quickly spread and became an audience favorite. AdWeek would later name “If We Made It” the campaign of the year [31].

Not only does brand fame lead to more creative marketing and more creative advertising awards, it’s also been empirically proven to be the single-greatest measure of marketing effectiveness. Campaigns targeting brand fame outperform others on almost every business metric (sales, market share, profit, penetration, loyalty and price sensitivity) and brand fame is an especially effective objective for smaller brands and brand launches [13].

Quite simply, brand fame makes brands worth paying more for. As Peter Field explains in The Dangers of Common Sense:

“Fame campaigns are almost twice as profitable as other forms of advertising. And one reason for that is that they’re particularly good at reducing price sensitivity. It seems we’re willing to pay much more for the brands that everyone’s talking about [12]."

The importance of creating brand fame has only been underscored by the changing media landscape of recent years — the emergence of new media channels, the fragmentation of networks, the rise of digital interaction. The list goes on. Just look at the elusive social media stream as a case in point. Brands are no longer just vying for attention against other brands or competitive products. They are contending for precious real estate against the things that our family and friends are sharing, the major news stories of the day, even the moronic memes that utterly entertain our reptilian brains. Brands must be able to seamlessly augment culture if they intend to actually impact it.

The researchers at Brainjuicer remind us that the problem with most marketing is that, “word-of-mouth is usually seen as a side effect of good advertising, not the point of it.” It’s a powerful distinction, but one that many marketers still fail to recognize today.

THE GRAVITY OF IMPACT

In the opening scene of the 1972 documentary Future Shock, a suave, cigar-smoking Orson Welles rides in the backseat of a taxicab, admonishing the world outside his window as he describes the cultural phenomenon known as “Future Shock”:

“Future shock is a sickness that comes from too much change in too short of time, the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore. It’s the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we can’t solve them. It’s the premature arrival of the future…

Everyday we’re bombarded by choices. We need to make instant decisions. We’re in endless combat with our own environment with all its space and variety. It’s choice over choice.”

The sentiments of Future Shock haven’t changed much since the 1970s. Some would argue that it’s only intensified. And they’re probably right. It’s the Moore’s Law of everything. But in the wake of all this rapid change, all of this revolution and radical reinvention, there emerges an even greater obligation to understand the implications behind it all.

This is the defining role of marketing strategists today: to recognize not only what’s happening but, more importantly, what matters — what matters to our creative teams, what matters to our clients, what matters to the real people in the real world that we’re really trying to reach. It’s not easy. In fact, it’s really difficult. But by leveraging years, rather decades, of exhaustive marketing research and real-world case studies we can begin to do the one thing we have always set out to do: make a real impact.

Marketing science today enables marketers to formalize some of the foundational principles of growth-oriented marketing and to actually create that impact. This paper highlights just a few of these basic principles: broad reach enables expanded opportunities that tight targeting cannot; customer loyalty has a relatively low ceiling; traditional broadcast advertising is still extremely effective; the biggest brand payoffs come from long-term emotional priming, not intermediate short-term spikes; and, the ability to generate brand fame is a powerful predictor of sustainable brand success.

Of course there’s still an abundance of research yet to be conducted, to be evaluated and, critically, to be questioned. After all, marketing research should be directive, not prescriptive. But it can, and should, be leveraged by marketers today to show that creativity is a key ingredient of brand success, not an encroachment of it.

This is the golden opportunity that marketing science has afforded us today — to rely less on unsubstantiated, speculative soothsaying and more on actionable, evidence-based approaches that we know can make marketing efforts more impactful. It may not always make for the most riveting Op/Ed piece in the industry’s trendiest trade journals. But it should. Because without understanding the fundamentals of what makes marketing more effective and more impactful, we’re all just indulging in our own insignificance.

So before we begin another new year with a flood of trends, predictions, warnings and opinions, let us revisit and reexamine some of the foundational principles of growth-oriented marketing from a more empirically-grounded perspective. Let us be objective, thoughtful and thorough. And let’s not allow the hype of marketing faddishness to sweep over the underlying gravity of marketing effectiveness.

1 Naomi Klein, No Logo, 2002

2 Wired, Is Advertising Dead?, 1994

3 Huffington Post, Advertising Is Dead, 2013

4 Bloomberg Businessweek, U.S. Golf Courses Exceed Openings for Eighth Year, 2014

5 The Bleacher Report, Has Rory McIlroy Saved the Game of Golf?, 2014

6 Bloomberg Businessweek, How Golf Got Stuck in the Rough, 2014

7 Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, Where do sales come from?, 2002

8 TechCrunch, Facebook Beats In Q3 With $3.2B Revenue, User Growth Up A Slower 2.27% QOQ To 1.35B, 2014

9 National Opinions Research Center, 2013

10 Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know, 2010

11 Martin Weigel, The Liberation of Magic, 2013

12 Peter Field, The Dangers of Common Sense, 2009

13 Les Binet & Peter Field, Marketing In the Era of Accountability, 2007

14 The Economist, What Are Brands For?, 2014

15 DDB, The Conflict Between Accountability & Effectiveness, 2006

16 ThoughtGadgets.com, The False Dichotomy of Engagement Vs. Broadcast, 2012

17 Ad Age, How Pepsi Blinked, Fell Behind Coke, 2011

18 MarketingCharts, Advertising Channels With the Largest Purchase Influence on Consumers, 2014

19 Les Binet and Peter Field, The Long & The Short of It, 2013

20 Think TV, Next Generation Marketing: Episode 2, 2013

21 GlobalSecurity.org, 2014

22 CNN, The Situation Room, 2008

23 Advertising Week, IPA Thought Leadership, 2013

24 Dan Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality: Chapter 9, 2001

25 Orlando Wood, Using An Emotional Model To Improve The Measurement of Advertising Effectiveness, 2010

26 ARF case study for Guinness Basketball, 2014

27 Bloomberg Businessweek, Tesco Bets Small and Wins Big, 2001

28 Harvard Business Review, Tesco’s Downfall Is A Warning to Data-Driven Retailers, 2014

29 Wall Street Journal, How The Ice Bucket Challenge Got Its Start, 2014

30 WARC, Newcastle Brown Targets the News, 2014

31 Adweek, The Best Ad of 2014 Was Brilliant and Subversive and It Wasn’t Even Real, 2014

32 Havas Media Labs, Meaningful Brands For A Sustainable Future, 2011

Photo creds: Huffington Post, UltimateGolfAdvantage, Time, The Atlantic, FastCompany, The Nation, Fotolia