Why do demographics matter?

Reading Time: 3 minutes A study by Catalina Marketing appears to cast significant doubt over a veritable pillar of media marketing. Demographic targeting, it seems, often falls wide of the mark. Catalina researchers looked at 10 brands targeted at households headed by women ages 25 to 54. They found that, on average, just 15 percent of the ads playing […]

The Rule of Three: why profitable brands are usually very big or very small

Reading Time: 3 minutes This article from some time back by Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia sheds fascinating light on the business case not just for expanding brands but also shrinking them as well. According to the authors’ “Rule of Three”, the quest for scale is quite literally a race first for dominance and then for survival. But if […]

Building a better business case for brand internally with CFOs

Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s an old bias but a telling one. Finance people accuse marketers of only spending money. Marketers accuse finance teams of only counting it. It’s another re-run of the analytical versus emotive debate yet it has the potential to carry deep bias into decision-making. As Brad VanAuken observed in this article, “I have found that […]

The different scales (and values) of talk

Reading Time: 5 minutes “Everybody’s talking at me. I don’t hear a word they’re saying,” observed Harry Nilsson in 1969. 45 years on, it seems a lot of people are still not listening – but brands should be. New findings from Gallup suggest marketers may be pinning the wrong hopes on social media.

Why brand management will replace marketing

Reading Time: 3 minutes P&G’s decision to formally end the era of “marketing” at the company and make the shift to brand management may accelerate what amounts to much more than a title change for marketers generally. To me, it could point to a fundamental re-examination of the role of the people responsible for brands.

8 ways to build a more valuable brand this year

Reading Time: 4 minutes We talk a lot about the pressures on brands to perform and about the difficulties of staying competitive in huge and rapidly changing markets. Nevertheless, global brands experienced a 12 percent increase in value in 2014 – and there are powerful lessons for all those responsible for brands in how they did that. If demand […]

The role of brand in assessing business health

Reading Time: 4 minutes Brand will tell you a lot if you let it. How you brand, what you brand, where you’re found, who buys you and how often … these and many more questions are all things that competitive businesses ask themselves on a regular basis. I see brand as a highly effective lens for assessing the relevance […]

How do you measure brand potential?

Reading Time: 5 minutes Whilst the measures for evaluating what a brand is worth are well established, those for quantifying a brand’s potential seem less so. In general, brands are valued on their residual equity (what they are associated with and the depth and competitiveness of that association), their competitive performance and how much they are assessed to be […]

How should your brand support your sales team?

Reading Time: 3 minutes While there has been plenty of discussion around how marketing and sales teams should play well together, the onus on brand owners to proactively support people in the field seems to have attracted less attention. Customers, of course, make no distinctions between which parts of the organisation they are dealing with at any one time. […]

Changing brand economics

Reading Time: 4 minutes Consciously or not, many brands are now running a freemium model. They are giving away a lot more than they used to, particularly across social media, just to keep up with the changing competitive landscape. And they are hoping to recoup on that significant content investment when consumers do buy. So has any of this […]