Are you UNDERthinking your brand enough?
Good marketers overthink things.
How they segment the market. Their target. Their product or service offering. Their pricing. Their packaging and distribution strategy and partnerships and promotions. And they should. This stuff is hard.
But when it comes to connecting with buyers, great marketers UNDERthink it too.
What face should you make on your YouTube Thumbail?
Like, does changing your facial expression impact your viewcount?
Heck yeah it does.
Kapwing used an automated facial coding tool to see which facial expression (happy, afraid, surprised, disgusted, etc.) on the thumbnail got the highest view counts on YouTube. They checked hundreds of the most-viewed videos for the top 10 ‘Tubers in each of 10 categories (music, comedy, science, etc.).
How should you interpret your purchase funnel?
Like, should you worry if your consideration rate is lower than the industry average?
F’rinstance, if you look at outdoor apparel brands in the US, you find that The North Face’s funnel is big, Patagonia’s is medium, and Helly Hansen’s is tiny.
Are old people more brand loyal?
My friend Benjamin Cawthray at Kantar wondered about this. So he checked Kantar’s panel of ~30,000 UK households across ten category-leading grocery brands.
One measure of brand loyalty (lord I hate that term) is ‘share of wallet’ (SoW): f’rinstance, what percent of a household’s bottled water purchases go to a single brand, like Evian (the category leader)?
Does any car brand buck the Law of the Demand Curve?
Like, can you have a high-priced car that’s also a high-volume car?
It’s one of the oldest truisms in business: if you raise your prices, demand (and thus volume) should go down. It’s the ‘Demand Curve’. Augustin Cournot described it in 1838.
But in these ‘unprecedented times’, does it hold up? Why yes, it holds up remarkably well.
How hard is it to buck demand curves?
Like, can you have a high-priced product that’s also a high-volume product?
It’s one of the oldest truisms in business: if you raise your prices, demand (and thus volume) should go down. It’s the ‘Demand Curve’. Augustin Cournot described the relationship in 1838 (20 years before the invention of the oil well).
But now that we have zillabits of data, does it hold up? Why yes, it holds up remarkably well.
How crappy is digital targeting, really?
Like, one of the big promises of digital media is targeting. HYPERtargeting even.
But how accurate is the data these big ad platforms have on us?
Adlook decided to find out.
What Would an Applied Brand Science Podcast be Like?
Find out right meow.
“Hello world; is this thing on?”
It’s official: We’ve launched a podcast: COVER BRAND. We LOVE our alma mater, right?! We bleed gold & blue (or crimson & silver, or)
How “loyal” are people to their college or university?
We LOVE our alma mater, right?! We bleed gold & blue (or crimson & silver, or).
But what does “brand loyalty” look like for colleges & universities?
Can an ad be both emotional AND rational?
This is a debate we actually have. All the time.
Is this a product ad OR a brand ad?
Is this rational OR emotional?
Is this about features OR about lifestyle?
What’s the “point of no return” for distribution losses?
Like, how many points of distribution can a brand lose and still recover?
Michael Kruger & IRI crunched 6 years of scanner data to find out. It covered all food, drug & mass outlets (not Walmart) for 298 categories and 10,818 brands. They only looked at brands with >30% distribution in year 1.I mean, we’re all creatures of habit, right? And brand loyalty is what we’re all after, right?
Well, The Hartman Group asked 2,000 Americans where they bought their groceries in the past month. In particular, which channels they shopped. (Grocery, mass, dollar, club, natural, etc.)
Is anyone 100% loyal to their grocery store?
I mean, we’re all creatures of habit, right? And brand loyalty is what we’re all after, right?
Well, The Hartman Group asked 2,000 Americans where they bought their groceries in the past month. In particular, which channels they shopped. (Grocery, mass, dollar, club, natural, etc.)
What’s the Killer Performance Indicator for grocery product growth?
Well, one stat you should absolutely positively track is consecutive repeat purchase rate (CRPR).
It shows how often people pick your brand on back-to-back purchases of the category. E.g., how often you get bought twice in a row.
When’s the best time to kill your mascot?
In 2020, Planters killed off their 104-year-old mascot, Mr. Peanut.
10 days before the game, Planters dropped an ad online where Mr. Peanut sacrifices himself to save his buddies in a fiery crash.
How many brands can one person “love”?
In marketing, we talk about “brand love” all the time — well, some people do.
But what’s the State of Brand Love in America?
A couple years ago, Upland Localytics did a simple survey of 1,000 adults to find out. Turns out, there’s no time for love, Dr. Jones.
When do you know you launched a bullseye vs a brick?
Nielsen crunched a whole lot of data to see the pattern — at least in terms of distribution — for CPG (consumer packaged goods).
They found that for the first 6 months, all launches grow distribution equally well. (% ACV is a measure of how many stores a product is sold in out of all the possible stores. Roughly-ish.) Good sell-in and retailer excitement helps most brands ramp up quickly.
Do ads really ever “wear out”?
Analytic Partners has just put a heaping mound of data on this question. They looked at the effectiveness of over 50,000 ads in 2020 to see if their impact was wearing out.
They found that 14 of them — FOURTEEN — showed signs of wearing out.
That’s 1 in 3600. That’s 0.03%. In other words, 99.97% of ads were going strong, doing fine, and didn’t need to be replaced.
What were the best (& worst) posts from us this year?
Let’s start with the best. Here are the top 3 Most Interesting Posts as voted by you, The Public:
What’s better than the Net Promoter Score?
Like, is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) some kinda magic number for predicting sales growth and tracking your brand health and measuring customer loyalty?
Not really, no.
A team led by Sven Baehre at the University of Limerick has been doing lots of work on the NPS.
How big should you make the logo?
Like, does it hurt a brand’s likability if the logo is too big?
Turns out no. It doesn’t.
Clear Channel UK did a nifty study on an outdoor ad for Müller, a €4.6Bn yogurt & dairy maker in Europe.