Why the research matters
Brands are tools that become assets: they distinguish you from the competitors and communicate to new buyers long before they’re even thinking about buying your category. Their ingredients are many, but it often boils down to the elements of your identity: logos, colours, taglines - your distinctive assets.
What matters most is that they are famous and unique.
Which is where marketers’ intuition can be so problematic, new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute finds. Critical decisions about brands often come down to marketers’ intuition – but this research finds that their judgements are often deeply inaccurate. Real consumer research (or failing that, a non-marketing opinion) is necessary for marketers to assess their brand’s activity because research suggests they are extremely bad at it.
This is according to a study published in the Journal of Brand Management earlier this summer by Ruby Brus, Nicole Hartnett, Margaret Fulkner, and Carl Driesener, all of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia.
How it worked
The research compared marketers’ intuitive judgements with consumers’ brand associations measured on two dimensions (fame and uniqueness) for 405 brand elements used by 50 brands in five categories across a diverse range of markets in Africa, Europe, and Oceania.
Consumer scores for brand element fame and uniqueness were calculated from survey data collected with 7,505 respondents. Complementing this data, 1,453 intuitive predictions were gathered from 157 marketing professionals for the same 405 brand elements. This allowed the researchers to map the results into the strategic quadrants of the Distinctive Asset Grid.
What they found
- Just 2% of marketers’ predictions were in a ±5% range of consumer scores, while just 44% of marketers placed the results in the same strategic quadrant as consumers (see chart).
- The significant blind spot appears to be that marketers tend to overestimate the fame of their brand elements while underestimating uniqueness.
- “These results suggest intuitive judgements by marketers of brand element strength, as determined by consumers’ knowledge, are quite inaccurate, reflecting poorly on managerial intuition,” the researchers write.
- However, there is a remedy here: group judgements are three to four times more accurate than individual predictions.
Key quote
“This research demonstrates that marketers’ estimation of brand element strength is not often aligned with consumer memories and, therefore, making decisions on this basis alone risks poor performance and/or wasted resources,”
the researchers concluded.
“For example, in overestimating the fame of brand elements, marketers may have higher expectations for what these cues can achieve when included in marketing touchpoints and experience disappointment in performance results (e.g. lower brand recall for communications). And in underestimating uniqueness, brand elements with potential may be unnecessarily or prematurely abandoned, when longevity is a tenet for building strong brand elements.”
Source: warc. com, Ehrenberg-Bass Insitute via Springer Nature