Let’s take a closer look at why brand fame is such an important part of building brands

In this POV originally written for mSix & Partners, I explore brand fame; what it is, what it delivers and how to build it. We are assisted by insight from some of advertising’s leading thinkers; Paul Feldwick, Sir John Hegarty, Byron Sharp and Orlando Wood. Simon looks at how fame contributes to brand success and identifies the media channels that are best positioned to build it.

Think of a brand and write its name here…………………………………………………………

Chances are you wrote one of the following brand names: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Samsung, Toyota, Coca-Cola, Mercedes, Disney, Nike, McDonald’s, Tesla, or BMW.

These are some of the world’s most famous brands – let’s unpack the meaning of fame in a bit more detail. The word fame is rooted in the Latin ‘fama’ meaning fame, hearsay, kudos, renown, repute, and rumour. You will see ‘fama’ present in modern words like “familiar,” “familiarise” and “famous.” In short, having fame means being in ‘the state of being known or talked about by many people, especially on account of notable achievements [1].’ You will see that all the brands above, tick all the boxes in the Latin phrase book.

Within the market context, fame is slightly more nuanced. Brands are famous because they have intrinsic appeal, they communicate with mass audiences, they demonstrate distinctiveness, and benefit from wide social diffusion. These are, according to account planning’s elder statesman Paul Feldwick, the key components of brand fame [2].

The Marketing Society and ITV [3] described the main elements of brand fame as connection, standout, talkability, familiarity and universal meaning, with universal meaning and familiarity being the most important components of the set. Connected to these elements is consumers’ need to be seen to be making endorsed choices; both during and especially after purchase. Mass appeal equates to mass endorsement.

In this POV we will think more about brand fame;  why it’s important and how it is achieved, and how, over the last decade we may have lost sight of the best ways to build brand fame.

Why is fame important?

Fame is important for three reasons. First,  high fame means high mental availability and we know from the work of Byron Sharp [4] that high mental availability confers commercial benefits. Feldwick summarises this as being “thought of more often, by more people, and therefore chosen more often by more people.” Second, fame can disturb consumers’ economic rationality. This is one of the main, and sometimes overlooked, functions of ‘brand’ advertising. If consumers are prepared to pay a 10% price premium for a brand because, in Feldwick’s words, reasons of intrinsic appeal, mass audience communication, distinctiveness and social diffusion, then the brand will generate more scale and revenue. And thirdly, if the brand can use its fame to sell more volume through higher purchase frequency at that slight price premium, then the brand’s revenue will be even greater.

How do we build brand fame?

Now we know the value of fame, we can explore how it is built. Because the ‘whole’ of brand fame is composed of intrinsic appeal, mass audience usage, distinctiveness, and social diffusion ‘parts,’ it follows that our strategies to build brand fame should be strategies to build those component parts.

Whilst intrinsic appeal is driven by product utility, mass audience appeal and usage, distinctiveness and social diffusion can be assisted by marketing communications like advertising, media, and PR activity.

And here’s where the quest for fame becomes more challenging. If we want brand fame, we need to seek connections that are not necessarily logical but which appeal to right brain. These connections are not driven by rationality, but by emotional appeal. System 1’s Orlando Wood summarises this in his book “Lemon” he says the right brain is guided by implicit connections, empathy, novelty and metaphor. Contrast this with the left brain, dominated by explicit facts and logic, “cause and effect, literal, factual” [5].

How do we apply this to media strategy?

Rather ironically, we have media insight from one of the industry’s best known creative practitioners, As recently as March this year, Sir John Hegarty made an impassioned plea in the BBC’s CEO Secrets series, arguing for more use of broadcast advertising, “if you are constantly wanting to expand your brand, make it more famous and add value to it – only broadcast does that” [6] . In addition to Hegarty’s comments, we have strong clues from more of advertising’s most respected and prolific thinkers. Paul Feldwick talks about mass audiences whilst Byron Sharp extolls us to maximise mental availability.

Most importantly, Orlando Wood requires that we stimulate emotions – which points again towards the channels that can do that, TV, AV, VOD, Cinema, and online video. The fact that the moving image elicits an emotional response is long-proven by both academics and empirical experience. This response has been researched extensively by Uri Hasson and his team at NYU who have coined the phrase “Neurocinematics”. The NYU team found that film can elicit a powerful neuro response, provided that the film itself is structured in certain ways [7]. Although the work was originally based on movie responses, the learnings on how to tell a story to maximise emotional ‘System1 response’ are clear throughout the paper.

These findings about using film to build emotional connections are also corroborated when we build models to analyse marketing and media effectiveness. When we analyse different forms of media activity, we find that these moving image channels are often delivering some of the strongest results.

In conclusion:

Fame builds brands and emotional connection builds fame, and the moving image builds emotional connection. So, if you want to generate powerful emotional engagement with your brand, use moving image media channels. If you want to read more about the connections between emotional engagement, cinema, brand development and the impact on short-term performance, in an applied media planning context, then the DCM Cinema Effectiveness Roadmap [8] is a good place to start.

References

1. Oxford Languages  / Dictionary definition of Fame
2. Why does the pedlar sing? Paul Feldwick, 2021
3. How much is fame worth to the bottom line? Market Leader, 2005
4. How Brands Grow Byron Sharp, 2010#
5. Lemon, Orlando Wood, System1, 2019
6. Has Social Media killed the famous ad?” BBC News 14 March 2023
7. Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film Uri Hasson, Ohad Landesman, Barbara Knappmeyer, Ignacio Vallines, Nava Rubin, and David J. Heeger, NYU, 2008
8. Cinema Effectiveness Roadmap, Digital Cinema Media, 2023

The post Brand fame; what it is, what it delivers and how to build it. first appeared on Marketing IQ.

SIX pioneers of marketing effectiveness past and present

1. Claude Hopkins, the copywriter who earned $2.7m per year selling Bissell vacuum cleaners

We all talk about market effectiveness and marketing science, but these topics are not new. In fact, one of the first proponents of marketing effectiveness was a copywriter called Claude Hopkins. Hopkins was paid by his agency Lord & Thomas to write copy to sell Bissell vacuum cleaners in the US. Here’s the remarkable bit; Hopkins was paid on results and he was paid more than $200k in the 1920’s. That’s the same as being paid $2.7m in today’s money.  How many copywriters today are paid on payment by results? And I wonder how many could earn $2.7m if they were?  Hopkins was so obsessed with trying to understand how advertising worked that he wrote a book called “Scientific Advertising” to share his knowledge – published after his retirement.  Many effectiveness practitioners will tell you this is the first book on the subject of increasing marketing effectiveness.

You can read about Claude Hopkins here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_C._Hopkins

You can also buy Hopkins’ book ‘Scientific Advertising’ here

2. Simon Broadbent, quantifying the memory effects of advertising

Around the time that Hopkins retired, another pioneer of marketing effectiveness was born. Simon Broadbent was born in 1928. As a Cambridge mathematician he was the first person to quantify how advertising diffuses through populations (interestingly his original work was on pandemics of disease in orchards). Within this broad framework, Broadbent identified that the memory effects of advertising can be quantified. This idea morphed into the concept of AdStock.  AdStock now sits at the heart of the current debate around short- and long-term advertising effectiveness.

You can read Broadbent’s books about optimising media budget setting here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Advertise-Simon-Broadbent/dp/1841160482

3. Andrew Ehrenberg, explaining consumer behaviour with statistics

At about the same time as Broadbent was born, another pioneer of effectiveness might have been taking his first steps to marketing greatness.  Andrew Ehrenberg was born in 1926 and initially trained in statistics and psychiatry. He moved into market research in 1955 and his mission shifted to identifying scientific laws that might underpin consumer behaviour. The most famous of these was his application of the ‘Double Jeopardy’ law to marketing. Ehrenberg found that larger brands have more buyers and better frequency characteristics so if you want to grow sales you must grow market penetration. Ehrenberg proved this theory many times over, across multiple categories, and observed the pattern to be so reliable that it could be called a marketing law.

Ehrenberg died in 2010 and you can read his obituary here: https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/obit—andrew-ehrenberg-marketing-pioneer/27183

4. Judie Lannon, one of the pioneers of identifying the emotional sell, and the first woman to sit on the board of JWT.

Judie Lannon was the first woman to be appointed to the board of ad agency J Walter Thompson (now Wunderman Thompson) in 1976. After graduating in psychology at the University of Michigan, Lannon began her career working in research at Leo Burnet in Chicago but moved to JWT and stayed there for the majority of her career. She was one of the first researchers to identify that emotional arguments were as important as rational arguments in selling consumer products.

You can read more about Judie Lannon here: https://www.marketingsociety.com/news/rip-founding-editor-market-leader-judie-lannon

5. Gerard Tellis, 29,000 citations on Google scholar and an expert on advertising in recessions.

Speaking of measurement, imagine having 29,000 citations on Google Scholar. Gerard Tellis is Director of the Institute for Outlier Research in Business & Professor of Marketing at USCMarshall. With 29,000 citations, it’s clear that Tellis has covered many marketing topics, but one of these is a must read for every marketing specialist and that’s his work on how advertising effectiveness changes during a recession. Tellis undertook extensive work into the fortunes of brands that either cut or grew advertising spend during recessions.  I wonder how many global marketers were aware of his finding that, “When the economy expands, all firms tend to increase advertising. At that point, no single firm gains much by that increase. The gains of the firms that maintained or increased advertising during a recession, however, persist.”

You can read more about Gerard Tellis’ 29,000 citations here https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=MhV-CrYAAAAJ&hl=en

6. Byron Sharp, picking up the baton of marketing science from Andrew Ehrenberg.

Some readers might connect the name ‘Ehrenberg’ with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute in Australia, the academic base for one of marketing’s current high-profile pioneers. Byron Sharp became Professor of Marketing at the Ehrenberg-Bass at the University of South Australia in 1995 picking up the baton from Andrew Ehrenberg. Sharps work is widely publicised and he works to maintain the same standard of understanding marketing and media effectiveness as Ehrenberg-Bass’ founder.  He now leads a team of sixty specialists – all working to put science at the heart of marketing understanding. Sharp’s insistence on brand maximising reach is directly linked to Ehrenberg’s view that brands can only grow by increasing penetration i.e. reaching new customers.

You can read more about Byron Sharp here https://www.marketingscience.info/staff/byronsharp/

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How TVRs build campaign reach

Let’s assume you buy 100 TVRs in a given region. We know from our last post on TVRs that 100 TVRs is an amount of audience that is the equivalent of 100% of our target audience base.  But here’s the first important lesson in how TVRs build reach and frequency. 100 TVRs will not deliver 100% reach of that base.  In fact 100 TVRs will probably build around 50-60% reach depending on how those TVRs are distributed in the plan. So what is delivered by the TVRs that don’t deliver reach? Well, they deliver frequency.

How TVRs build campaign frequency

In the early stages of campaign, most people will see the ad only once. But some will see it twice and some may see it three times. Let’s say, for example, that 50% see it once, 20% see it twice and 15% see it three times 10% four times and 5% five times. These percentage total 100 and this is effectively how your 100 TVRs are distributed. This is called frequency distribution.

How to estimate frequency from TVRs and reach

There is a simple formula for estimating how TVRs deliver both reach and frequency.  Let’s continue to assume you have 100 TVRs. Frequency (sometimes called average opportunity to see or OTS) is calculated by dividing your campaign reach into your campaign TVRs. So, if you have 100 TVRs and your campaign delivers 50% reach then your average OTS is 100/50 = 2.

How many TVRs does my campaign need to be effective?

This depends upon whether or not you adopt the view that reach is more important than frequency.  Modern “recency” planning advocates (John Philip Jones, Erwin Ephron, Byron Sharp) argue that each point of reach will deliver more sales response than additional points of frequency (i.e. the percentage of people seeing the ad twice, three times etc). So they advocate building maximum reach on a weekly or a monthly level, but not building frequency. To achieve this objective media planners will seek between 100 and 150 TVRs per week and often plan the delivery of these TVRs in a week on, week off “drip” pattern. This type of campaign plan tends to suit campaigns that are designed to regularly remind consumers about a product they are already aware of.

More traditional media planning approaches (Krugman for example) suggest a minimum frequency of 5 OTS before a message begins to resonate with a prospect.  Our calculation tells us that if we want to achieve 80% reach at 5 OTS we will need 80×5 = 400 TVRs. Targeting an average of 7 OTS would require 560 TVRs. You can see why a launch campaign would typically be around 600 TVRs.

More advanced forms of planning use statistical modelling to estimate the sales response curve to advertising. These models show how budget and TVRs drive sales response (could be retail or online sales) on a weekly basis and forecast when spend levels will hit diminishing returns. For more on this please see these pages

Thanks to Ivan Clark for comments.

The post How do TVRs build media reach and frequency? first appeared on Marketing IQ.