53: Understanding How Brands Compete: A Guide to Duplication of Purchase Analysis
The follow up to Report 51: Who do You Really Compete With?


52: Understanding, Identifying and Building Distinctive Brand Assets
Here is some important reading for anyone involved in brand building.


51: Who do You Really Compete With?
What is the Duplication of Purchase Law and how can you use this law to discover who you really compete with?


50: How to Stand Out in all the Clutter
The negative effect of clutter on your advertising performance looks to be less than first thought. In this report we look at the under-researched topic of advertising clutter; comparing both low and high clutter environments.


49: TV: back to the future
Some serious R&D into how TV works. These empirical generalisations suggest that TV will remain the pre-eminent fast and vast advertising medium, if a more complex and expensive one. Knowledge of these empirical laws can be used to guide advertisers in buying the most effective TV schedules.


48: In Praise of the 15-second Advertisement
There are plenty of reasons to suspect the performance of shorter TV commercials, and 15 second spots are not half the price of 30 second spots.  However, the evidence we show here supports paying a premium.  


VIDEO: In Praise of the 15-second Advertisement


47: Cross-brand Cannibalization Kills the Profitability of Price Promotions
Many companies own more than one brand in a category.  So when one brand is discounted it steals full-profit sales from these other brands.


46: Penetration vs Loyalty: a Clarification
Is "go for penetration" the most sensible growth strategy ?  


45: Are Younger Consumers Easier to Win?
Younger consumers are slightly easier to 'win', but is it worth chasing the younger consumer or targeting your marketing towards the older customer?

44: Where Knowledge of Your Brand Resides
Further proof that brand management must gain the attention and refresh/build memory structures amongst the broad base of consumers - most of whom know very little at all about the brand.


43: Price Promotions
How much margin are you giving away?


42: There is a Pareto Law - but not as you know it
If 80%+ of your customers make only 20% of the purchases of your brand you could be forgiven for ignoring them. But what is the reality? And what are the implications for brand growth?In addition to revealing the true Pareto Law, this report also gives essential guidelines for calculating your own brand's Pareto share.


41: Ten Simple facts about measuring brand perceptions
This 3 page report is a useful reference for evaluating and designing your brand tracking and for interpreting the results.


40: The Uniqueness of Brands
Across 130 brands and 13 product & service categories we test the theory that brands should have unique image associations.


39: How Brands Compete
This 2-page report draws together the strategic implications of many of our fundamental discoveries about how buyers buy.


38: Addictive Discounting
3 simple marketing metrics can diagnose whether or not your brand is addicted to discounting, and can help you kick the habit.


37: Repeat-Viewing in the USA and the UK
Repeat viewing of TV programs is generally quite low, with much less than 50% of this week's audience having watched the program last week. These repeat-viewing levels turn out to be quite predictable, across markets and time.


36: Individual-level Advertising Sales Effects
Even when aggregate sales do not move advertising is still having sales effects, which can be seen in individual level data. This reports shows how, discuss the profound implications for how advertising works, and how its sales effects can be measured. It also reviews what has been learnt about advertising sales effects over the past 30 years.


35: 100% Brand Loyals Exposed
Common wisdom is that consumers who only buy one brand are the most desirable customers to have. In this report we examine three key areas regarding 100% brand loyals: How common are they? How valuable are they? And how does loyalty status change over time?


34: Good News about Bad News: Talking about Word of Mouth
Word of Mouth is an influential medium, yet it is not well understood. What is the relative incidence and impact of positive versus negative word of mouth? Who is giving it, and are there differences between categories? This report debunks some common myths and discusses practical implications for managing word of mouth.


33: BRAND SALIENCE – Implications for brand management
Being noticed/considered is often the main reason why our brand is (or is not) bought. Building brand salience, beyond simple awareness and a positive attitude, is important for maintenance as well as growth.


32: How Consumers Choose Prices Over Time
Knowledge of the specific and widespread way in which consumers buy across different price levels can be used as a background to the planning and evaluation of strategic and tactical price changes.


31: How brands grow
Increased sales for a brand tend to arise more as additional customers than as additional purchases by existing customers. New empirical evidence confirms this in 157 cases of annual brand share changes (gains and losses) in 20 fmcg product categories.


30: Expectations and Reality for marketing metrics
Most pharmaceutical marketing managers believe that the easiest way to increase sales of their drug is by getting existing users to prescribe it more often. However in reality, pharmaceuticals have to grow by persuading non-prescribers to start doing so.


29: Is Coke Always Less Price Sensitive Than Pepsi ?
Textbooks often imply that each brand will have its own characteristic price elasticity. However many experts now believe price elasticities depend on the wider context. This report identifies factors – such as brand size, starting price and consumer characteristics – that did or did not consistently affect price elasticities within an experimental setting.


28: Impulse Purchasing Patterns
Remarkably, there are many regularities in impulse purchasing. These ‘chaotic’ markets, in which buying is largely immediate and for personal consumption, demonstrate predictable patterns of brand switching and loyalty similar to those in many other product categories, and similar to household purchasing.


27: Analysing Brand Image Data
This report outlines Data Reduction as a simple alternative approach to Correspondence Analysis for analysing brand image data.


26: Double Jeopardy Revisited Again
Compared to a large competitive brand, a small brand typically has fewer buyers. But in addition, fewer of its buyers like the small brand, and they buy it less often. The marketing implications of this Double Jeopardy pattern are discussed, along with its causal mechanism and deviations.


25: Decision or Descriptive Models
This report compares the merits of two main kinds of marketing models. Decision models are for solving problems, and include explicit marketing-mix decision variables. Descriptive models seek to uncover marketing phenomena, and represent them, without incorporating marketing decision variables.


24: Marketing: Romantic or Realist ?
This report explicates five ‘romantic’ marketing goals – and their realistic alternatives.


23: Statistical or Practical Significance
The term ‘statistically significant’ is widely misused and vastly overused: the 'significant' result is not necessarily interesting, important, large, meaningful, causal, or predictable in the future. So what does statistical significance really amount to?


22: Report Writing
Six simple rules can help translate complex subject-matter into a brief, clear and useful report.

21: Making Data User-Friendly
Most of the data we are asked to look at are hard to understand. Five simple guidelines can work wonders in turning data into information.


20. Polygamous Brand Loyalty
A two page report setting out some basic discoveries about buyers (repeat) buying behaviour - and implications for brand performance metrics.


19: What car will they buy next ?
Predicting retention and defection for both car types, and car brands, turns out to be perfectly possible. We show there are reliable patterns of repeat-purchase behaviour. Essential knowledge for marketers of durables.


18: Patterns of TV Viewing: Loyalty to program genres
How do TV viewers allocate their viewing time, on average, across genres. Do viewers of a particular genre (say Soaps or Sport) in one week spend more time, than the average viewer, watching that genre in the subsequent week ? Implications for advertisers seeking to reach target audiences, and for TV promos.


17: Perceptions of Differentiation ? Do users see their brand as different?
Brand differentiation is essential for brand success – or so says conventional wisdom and much of the branding literature (eg, Trout, 1999; Aaker, 2001). This belief affects marketing strategies, advertising briefs, tracking studies and more. Marketers are judged on their success in differentiating their brand. However, very little is known about the level of buyer perceived differentiation. Do buyers often need to believe the brand is different from competitors in order to buy it?


16: Brand Salience? What it is and why it matters
Brand salience is the propensity of the brand to be noticed or thought of in buying situations. It reflects the quality & quantity of buyers' memory structures devoted to the brand. Brand salience is a crucial part of brand availability, and as such it is an important part of the explanation of the fundamental patterns we see in both buyer behaviour and brand performance (see report 1)


15: TV Channel Use Amongst Multi-Channel Viewers
We describe and model viewing patterns for households that have access to more than the few terrestrial channels. In spite of the dramatic changes in the number and types of channels it is good to know that predictable viewer behaviour patterns still hold. This result makes the complex marketing world just that little bit more simple/clearer.

The report documents patterns in channel reach and hours per viewer. Plus how channels share viewers, and the sort of audience they typically attract.


14: Do Brands Lack Personality?
The concept of brand's having human personalities often features in the practice and the literature of advertising and branding.

This report looks at how consumers do or do not associate human personality traits with brands.


13: Brand Advertising as Creative Publicity
Our view of brand advertising is that it mostly serves to publicise the advertised brand. Advertising seldom seems to persuade. Advertising in a competitive market needs to maintain the brand's broad salience - being a brand the consumer buys or considers buying. Publicity can also help to develop such salience.

This publicity view of advertising should affect both the briefs that are given to agencies (e.g. that cut-through is more important than having a persuasive selling proposition), and how we then evaluate the results.


12: Personal Buying is Like 'Family' Shopping
We examine the purchasing of products that are intended for the individual buyer, often unplanned, often for immediate consumption, and often not part of a pre-planned routine. They occur in many markets apart from the food products discussed here: reading books, music on earphones, computer games, mobile phones, clothes and fashion.


11: Loyalty to Product Attributes
Most brands (products or services) sport variants - eg, large and small pack sizes, regular and unscented formulas, a mortgage with or without redraw facilities. A first study of one product category has found that these variants attract different degrees of loyalty entirely in line with their market-share. Some variants are much more popular than others and they gain slightly more loyalty. If this finding generalises it will be a blow to the idea that specialist variants (eg, a non-allergenic formula) are able to attract a small but highly loyal following. And has significant implications for the launch positioning of such variants.


10: The forms That TV Ads Take
A series of exploratory studies of the Forms that Advertisements Take ("FAT") have shown that people often do not see ads as differentiating the brands; or as giving information about them.  There is then no "simple" basis on which these ads could successfully persuade. Much advertising practice therefore seems out of step with theories that advertising persuades.

The results of this paper do not imply that current commercials do not work.  But many do not work in persuasive ways that seem to be widely expected.


9: New Brands: Near Instant Loyalty
It is widely thought that loyalty to successful new brands or line-extensions evolves slowly.

An unexpected but striking finding therefore is that loyalty to the new brand was near-instant in some 20 cases examined so far: the new brands' average purchase frequency at launch is already normal, i.e. at the same level as a year or two later and also as for competitive established brands.

The finding was unexpected but makes much sense with hindsight.


8: The Case Against Price Related Promotions
Do price promotions acquire new customers for the brand ? Or do they erode brand loyalty ? We analyse hundreds of promotions across countries and discover generalised findings.


7: Brand User Profiles Seldom Differ
It is widely thought that different brands appeal to different types of users, or should do so.  Advertising and other marketing activities are often based on this presumption, and countless segmentation studies are therefore carried out. We have long doubted this supposition.  To test it we have compared the user-profiles of the ten or so leading brands in each of some 40 industries by their user' attitudes, lifestyles, demographics and media exposures.

The award winning results confirm our expectation that users of directly competing brands seldom differ in their profiles.  That is, brand segmentation generally does not exist, substitutable brands usually compete in what for them is a single unsegmented mass market, whatever it's overall size and structure may be.

The analysis procedure used here is simple - comparing each brand's profile with category profile.  It is outlined in some detail so that the same approach can be readily applied to other data.


6: Customer Retention & Switching in the Car Market
This report is about the competitive structure of the car market. Perhaps unexpectedly, the repeat-buying and switching patterns for cars are much the same as for packaged goods and for services.


5: The South Bank Pricing Tests
An extended program of laboratory pricing tests has led to a range of generalisable findings across different brands and products, including durables and services.  Price elasticities vary consistently with the context such as competitors' prices, the size of the brand, measurement procedures, and certain consumer characteristics.


4: Advertising is Publicity not Persuasion
The traditional view is that advertising works by persuading people that the brand is different or better than a similar competitor.  Or that it has special emotional "values", and that hence they should buy it.  But there seems to be little systematic evidence that advertising operates like this. Nor does the persuasive view explain why so much advertising is used and needed.


3: Advertising and Brand Attitudes
Here we report on three findings which point away from such a causal role of attitudes.  First, that the content of many advertisements does not appear to be of an overtly persuasive or indeed differentiating kind.  Second, that brand users' expressed attitudes to competitive brands tend not to differ greatly but are generally similar.  Thirdly, that when attitudes to a brand do change, this does not precede behaviour change but follows it.


2: What We Can and Can't Get from Graphs and Why
A graph seldom conveys any tangible information unless it has an explicit storyline.  Such a storyline will be much more memorable if it is also stated in words, eg.  'A is bigger than B', rather then just showing it graphically.  Yet few graphical presentations do that.

Graphs can be extremely good at showing up a simple qualitative pattern, such as a curve.  But they usually fail in communicating numbers or quantities.


1: Understanding Dirichlet-type Markets
This is a position paper about purchase incidence and brand-choice in competitive markets. It brings together a range of empirical patterns, the theoretical Dirichlet model which largely predicts these patterns, and deviations or departures from the model.

The findings have had numerous practical applications, for example to new brands, market partitioning, brand audits, and price promotions. There are also broader implications for our understanding of consumers, brands and marketing management.