A few weeks ago, I felt compelled to write a post setting the record straight on Millward Brown’s view on the book, How Brands Grow. There are many points on which Professor Byron Sharp’s and our learning is aligned and there is one thing on which we can vehemently agree: marketers must ensure that their brand is remembered from any marketing communication.
For many years, some in the advertising industry have espoused the idea that brands should not be featured too prominently in any form of ad – particularly ones designed to elicit emotions or which aim to ‘go viral’. The brand was seen as potentially off-putting, or a hindrance to engagement. Even without any data to back me up it seems a bizarre idea. People pay little enough attention to ads, so if you hide your brand away, how on earth do you expect people to connect the ideas and feelings evoked by the ad to the brand, let alone have them influence behavior at a later date?
Apparently, it was news to some that Millward Brown measures how well advertising creates “brand-linked memory structures” as described in How Brands Grow. Maybe that is because over the years Millward Brown terminology has morphed from describing our Awareness Index as a measure of brand-linked memorability, to less accurate but simpler terms like “branded impact.” Either way, what the Awareness Index measures is how well advertising creates memories that are linked to the brand in peoples’ minds.
The connection between the Awareness Index and sales has been proven repeatedly, whether measured in tracking or pre-testing. When tracked, the Awareness Index is a measure of how easily advertising memories come to mind when accessed via the brand name. In 1982 Stephen Colman, Cadbury Ltd, and Gordon Brown, Millward Brown, published Advertising Tracking Studies and Sales Effects which documented the relationship between this measure of ad awareness and sales effects, and since then that early work has been replicated not just for tracking (you might like to check out my 1994 contribution on WARC) but pre-testing as well.
And, before anyone asks, yes, the same relationship is apparent for digital advertising. In our Normative Insights database we find that unless there is a shift in brand-linked ad awareness there is little chance that other measures like brand favorability or purchase intent will change.
So marketers don’t hide your brand, celebrate it. If you want your brand to be salient – come to mind easily in relation to specific needs and contexts – then your marketing communication must link the brand and the impressions left by the advertising in people’s minds, and you cannot do that if no one notices your brand in the ad.
Witten by Nigel Hollis,Executive Vice President and Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown