Tuning out the noise to better hear the quiet consumer

It’s time to take a closer look at how we measure brand health, says Jenni Romaniuk, author of books such as Better Brand Health; Building Distinctive Brand Assets; and How Brands Grow Part 2 – revised. From the institute’s base at the University of South Australia, she and her colleagues are known worldwide for advancing marketing knowledge and busting pseudoscience and marketing myths. Among the top fallacies is an over-emphasis on heavy users – our most loyal customers.

“One of the reasons I wrote a book on brand health tracking was because I was concerned that we were kind of missing the point,” says Romaniuk. Too often the impetus is to “dive in”, trying to separate out heavy users to look at them, she explains. In fact, “You actually have to separate out the light and non-buyers because they’re the ones that are hard to hear.”

She likens it to a full room with 100 people, 10 of whom are yelling. It’s the others who should be of most interest to you but our focus on heavy users drowns them out.

“That’s one of the big problems of brand health tracking. It has been so heavily weighted, either implicitly or explicitly, to the heavy loyal buyer that we haven’t been able to see opportunities for growth,” she says.

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Be careful about categorising

Don’t make assumptions about buying behaviours either.

“What we think of as fast-moving consumer goods actually don’t move that fast. Yes, there are a few categories we buy really frequently, but if you look at something like window cleaner, the vast majority of people buy that once a year, and that’s it,” she points out.

Common assumptions about how much people know about a brand, or a category, and how often they shop, are often erroneous. We appreciate that people buy insurance once a year but miss that they buy window cleaner on the same basis.

“So maybe they’re not that different after all. But there are different behaviours with insurance, so the metrics change. With something like window cleaner, we might focus on purchase frequency as a loyalty metric. With insurance, we might focus on renewal as a loyalty metric or its reverse, defection, because not many people defect. So the laws of growth – the metrics – might change,” she says.

Don’t forget to remind

The pioneering Andrew Ehrenberg, the institute’s late founder, described advertising as “creative publicity” and said it existed to remind us of things we already know but may have forgotten. Occasionally its job is to build new mental structures when there is something new to say.

“Yet often what happens with persuasion is a focus on new news, because the assumption is that you already know the old stuff, and that hasn’t worked, so I have to give you something totally new,” she explains.

“But the natural state of memories is to decay. We often forget things we already know. Advertising is at its best when it’s reminding us of things we already know, but doing it in a fresh and exciting way that makes takes us pay attention and go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right’.”

Health matters

Be considered in the metrics you use to measure brand health. In fact, best not refer to brand health at all – a catchall phrase in which Romaniuk has little faith.

She prefers the “category buyer memory tracker”, or CBM, an approach that taps into the way consumers build brand memories, and then retrieve them with the help of certain cues.

Clients get worked up about such things as unprompted brand awareness, says Winterlich, but how important are such metrics really?

It depends on what you are measuring it for, says Romaniuk, pointing out that in Ireland avocado means something you put on toast. In the US it’s a brand of mattress. But all brands have to explain to people what they sell, which is what creates brand awareness.

“At the time this measure was developed, we hadn’t really integrated what we know about memory into our branding thinking,” she says. “So people also used it as a way to measure the ease of retrieval from memory, which is why we have prompted and unprompted measures.”

“So the prompted measures are all about category membership – do you know that Avocado is a mattress company? An unprompted measure is about how easily can that come to mind when you have the category cue of, in this case, mattresses. What has happened over time is that people are focused more on the ease of retrieval rather than the category membership, which means they’ve missed the whole point of why it started,” she adds.

Awareness raising

If your unprompted awareness is not changing, ask yourself what have you really done to achieve it.

“It might be because you haven’t got the category memory structure very well embedded. It’s surprising how many ads don’t even let you know what category they are for, they kind of forget to sell sometimes.”

The biggest impact on memory is direct experience.

“If you bought something, interacted with it physically and paid money for it, you’ve thought more about it than anyone else. That imprints into your memory. It varies across categories but we see this systematically – brand buyers are more likely to respond to pretty much any measure than non-buyers. If you have a measure that doesn’t do that, if for some reason non buyers score more than buyers, I would worry what it is actually measuring,” says Romaniuk.

Big brands tend to score more than small brands. “That’s normal and a reflection of your past, but that doesn’t mean it’s a reflection of your future.”

But if you don’t control for that the risk for big brands is to say, ‘Yay, we scored top, we are the best’ – until they’re not, she warns. “They don’t see threats coming.”

For their part, small brands end up abandoning things that probably were working, but whose marketers were going “‘aw, I didn’t get the response of a big brand’. But you were never going to, because users are more likely to notice advertising for brands they use than non-users. So even those things have to be calibrated for,” she says.

If you don’t control for size, you’re getting a misread. “You risk missing threats and abandoning good stuff because you’re not understanding what’s going on,” she says.

Your brand tracking might even be telling you lies, saying things are great, but the sales don’t reflect that. It may be too brand centric when it needs to focus more on people, given that the brand lives in their mind.

“When I reviewed brand trackers, I went, yeah, you’ve got lots of things that are about the brand – is it trustworthy, is it innovative, is it up to date – but where was the consumer and what was going on in their minds?” she recalls.

She likens it to a bore at a party who only talks about themselves. “You realise you’re redundant. You could walk away and they’d still have the exact same conversation,” she says.

“A lot of advertising is like that. It’s about the brand, not about the people that have the brand in their mind – the people you want to buy your brand.”

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