When Brands Stop Advertising - Dr Nicole Hartnett, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
On this episode of the podcast, I'm joined by Dr. Nicole Hartnett from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Dr Nicole has just published some really interesting new findings on what happens when brands go dark. In this episode we find out more about this research and understand what advice she would give to advertisers out there who have either gone dark or considering customer advertising and the advantages of those brands that decide to continue invest though recessions.
Nicole is an advertising and media researcher with a particular interest in how to design effective advertising content.
Her expertise spans advertising measurement, management and decision making, distinctive brand assets, brand performance metrics and consumer behaviour. She has published in international journals including the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and the European Journal of Marketing. Nicole also has extensive experience conducting research projects for the Institute’s sponsors across industries and markets, and regularly presents seminars and workshops on various marketing topics.
What we covered in this episode:
- Why Marketers are not good judges of advertising
- Marketing departments are not better than a coin toss
- Intermediate campaign variables don’t often correlate to sales
- Why experience doesn’t make you any better at spotting winners
- The importance of distinctive assets
- Why characters are a dying art form
- Why we all need to be a little more Churchill
- The case for not changing the creative
- What happens when brands stop advertising
- Alcohol, babies, pet food & Pandemics
- Why scale matters when you go dark
- How your trajectory determines how bad going dark will be
- What to do when you manage a portfolio and have to cut spend
- The long term consequence of going dark
- Why you need a range of distinctive assets to aid memory
- The power of blackcurrants as a Ribena distinctive asset
- Why the high turnover of brand managers is bad for effectiveness
- Why How Brands Grow is the one book every marketer should have
- Quiet behind the scenes discipline is what matters when everything changes
- The comfort of familiarity when it comes to memory
- Building your business around what doesn’t change
- Are you measuring what really matters
- Organisations suffer from short term memory and short datasets
- Learning from success and failures over a long time series
- Why the insight department need to start letting go
- Winning the Boardroom battle with data
