Better Brand Health - Jenni Romaniuk, Ehrenberg-Bass

26:58Yes, yes. I will say some people did say, why have you got this chapter at the beginning of your book? Why do you need this? But to me, it's really important because it sets the scene. And it does separate out trackers that maybe pay lip service to the law of growth rather than ones that really do actually really take it to heart. Because the three laws I chose to go through, and I mean, I could have thrown a few more in, but this isn't a laws of growth book. It is using the knowledge from it. There are other books you can go to for that. But yeah, so the first thing is the brand user profiles law.

27:32It's not the first law I talk about, but it's the first one in terms of the sort of mantra that I've put forward for how you do this. And that just simply says that the profile of your brand's customer base should and probably will reflect that of the category. And if you actually have anything that skews from the category by a base, you should ask yourself not so much why you're succeeding, but why are you failing in some particular segments? And sometimes brands do that as a deliberate choice. If you have an insurance company that only sells to people over the age of 50, yeah, they're going to have a shortfall in younger category buyers, but that's a business decision they've made.

28:07It will limit their growth because they can only maximum get 100 % of the over 50s market. So yeah, so first of all, understanding that. And so that affects your sample. Don't fool yourself with your target market and don't skew your sample. Well, actually, it's the second law that comes in, which is the duplication of purchase law. And that affects the sort of brands that you're comparing yourself against, because that tells us that brands compete with other brands in line with competitor share. So what that means is no matter where you are on the market, you share more customers with big brands and fewer customers with small brands.

28:40Yes, there are exceptions, but that's the general pattern. And so what that means is when you're talking about your brand list, don't go for lookalikes, go for the big brands, the medium brands and a representative selection of small brands, as well as your brands, of course. And so they all speak to design for the category, which is the first part of the mantra. And that's important. I put it this way. Imagine you've got your questionnaire and you go knock on the door of your competitors, a bigger competitor, a smaller competitor, and say, hey, here's a questionnaire. Would you like to use it?

29:09If they would look at it, review it and go, yeah, actually, this would be good. Thanks. Then you're on track. If they look at it and go, oh, no, I wouldn't ask that question, wouldn't know that, I'm not sure about that. Then maybe you should rethink what are those questions that you're asking and have you biased the survey in some way? And the reason you want to do that is because no matter where you are, if you're small, you want to get bigger. You don't want to have to change your tracker when you become a big brand. If you're big, it's the small brands that are usually nibbling against you.

29:37So you want to know how well they're doing or you might launch a new brand. So you want to put them in. And then double jeopardy, good old double jeopardy is that small brands are penalized twice they have many few users who are slightly less loyal and that just tells us that we need to make sure we calibrate our metrics for brand size it's not one size fits all because if we do that then as a big brand we get fat complacent and happy because we always look good but it's not a matter of whether you look good compared to other brands it's are you getting as you should or better for a brand of your size and if you're a small brand it's always miserable and you might end up cutting things that are working because they're not giving you the scores of a big brand but they're giving you the scores of a better brand than what you are it's so true because like you know having worked in marketing many years like you always think your brand is more unique than it actually is you always think your buyers are more you know more loyal or heavier than you think sort of thing so i love the fact you start there because you really kind of set up you know you really challenge i think a lot of biases that marketers have when they're when they're thinking about you know also the temptation to flatter yourself well we're just going to look at this subcategory or we're just going to look at buyers that fit this particular profile and then you're sort of cheating right because you're kind of flattering yourself with a better score that doesn't really tell you what you need to know to grow so love it really good i want to talk about brand awareness because this is another fun topic, right?

31:08And it seems like, I don't know, marketers pick the definition of brand awareness that makes them look good. Is it prompted, unprompted, spontaneous, top of mind or that sort of thing? What are the main types of brand awareness and what would you recommend the best way to measure brand awareness? Well, brand awareness was a really interesting one because one, I got, I'm going to say, bemused and a little bit worried. Some work that London Business School professor Tim Ambler did back in, I think it was about 2003, I read it where he did a survey of boards and brand health metrics were reaching boards and brand awareness was the most common metric that reached boards.

31:46I went okay because we don't really know much about what moves brand that's what struck me as really scary that marketers were putting their board credibility to a measure that really wasn't fully understood and then that That led me to ask a couple of questions like, first of all, it's been around so long, why wasn't it fully understood? And secondly, how can we understand it more? So that's why we started doing some R &D. And I like and I love a good analogy. Have you ever read my books? I've read a lot of analogies. And, yeah, well, I love an analogy. Some of them are good is probably a better way to put it.

32:22When I first started working with brand health measures and thinking about this book, my original idea for how you sort of think about these brand health measures was a family. and brand awareness I liken to grandpa who's you know not hearing pretty well a little bit doddery but he's been around a long time and when he speaks people listen and no one dares question it because the idea of questioning brand awareness people like but but no you can't it's it's like sort of one of those solid bedrocks it's like it's like criticizing grandpa but sometimes we have to. And the reason is because we have turned brand awareness into something it wasn't originally meant to be.

33:04So there's two forms of brand awareness, two reasons for tracking it. One is to as a category identifier. So it says it checks that people know basically what you sell. And that's the original form of brand awareness. And that makes perfect sense. The second form is to use it as a proxy of an or as a measure of an ease of retrieval. That's when we get into trouble because the ideas of that for brand awareness were actually developed in a time before we'd really integrated in how memory works and how we retrieve from memory. When you understand that, you realise we don't just use one cue and we don't just use a category cue.

33:42And once you start looking at the data and realising how do people retrieve things and the range of cues they use, and that's where the category entry points comes into it. But then also that the retrieval is shaped by the queue. And so one queue can't represent all of the different category entry points because as a brand, you can scroll well on one category entry point and poorly on another. And that's the nature of how our memories work. So if you're going to track brand awareness, the best use of it is as a category identifier. And then if you look at in that, you have to ask yourself, okay, so I've got two groups of people out there broadly.

34:20So this is the middle part of the mantra and lies for the buyer. So I've got people who've bought me and people who haven't. Do I really need to test prompted brand awareness amongst people who've bought me? Probably not. Very good point. Because they've probably worked out what you sell by virtue of habit. Now, if you enter into a new category, you might need to. So if you're an insurance company and you start selling pet insurance, then them just knowing your insurance company might not be enough. You might want to check that they actually do know you sell pen insurance. So, you know, as you subcategories and things are important there, but yeah, it's the non-buyers that you really need to do that.

34:59So basically, if you think about it pragmatically, that takes something that looks simple, brand awareness, obvious, better to be people aware or not, turned into something complex when we have two measurement approaches and three metrics and people picking their own metric to something that's actually simple, which is one metric which is as a category identifier what proportion of non-buyers know that's what you sell very good i like it it's a theme actually runs through your book is is designed for the category and and the importance of non-buyers and like buyers right it's really really good to remember that so because i'm in court my attention in this particular chapter as well about the stability of individual the individual level of awareness i thought was fascinating one of the brands i used to manage actually was on your list which made me smile but top of mind awareness was I think it's 10 % of the people that were top of mind, if I've understood this correctly, were the same as the previous sample.

35:54And even the brand leader in the software category that we referred to, I think, was in maybe low 70s and a very, very well-established brand as well. That was quite surprising, you know, as an insight. Well, actually, it's not that surprising. George Day in 1970 actually reported this for appliances, that there was an instability in brand awareness. So, you know, and because people won't believe something in the 1970s unless they see it more recently, and we've done replications, one of our researchers, and she did a whole PhD looking at the stability of responses to various things. And at one level, I remember when I first discovered this, because this is a factor of all brand perceptions.

36:34It's not even just unprompted awareness. I first went, oh my God, does that mean this whole thing is rubbish and we should just throw it away and start again. But actually, it's really just about the probabilistic nature of memory and understanding that any one question doesn't give us everything from memory. It gives us a subset. And then if we ask the question again, we get another subset and there's some overlap. So there are some responses repeated, but there are also some new. And when you understand that, you go, okay, so how I use this information, I don't use this information, for example, to segment the market.

37:11I don't segment people based on one survey perceptual responses, because that's really faulty. It's an unreliable measure. But it is useful because it tells these, and this is why I like a free choice pick any prompted approach to measuring brand perceptions is because it replicates that probabilistic process of memory. Even though on face value, there's no reason why it should. The fact that we give people all the brands and thing, People could go through and tick all of them or tick randomly and stuff, but they don't, actually. There's beautiful underlying patterns that come when people respond to that.

37:50And so that tells me people are giving me real associations when they do this. Yeah, really, really good point. Right, we're going to take a little detour here. So to talk about Donald Trump's hair. So bear with me on this one. So we did a study at System One a few years ago, looking at the presidential candidates of the election and which distinctive assets they're associated with, and also which campaign slogans came to mind associated with each individual. And there are a couple of really funny findings, actually, which won't be a surprise to you, I should say. But anyway, a funny way of illustrating some of the points.

38:21Donald Trump's hair was a more distinctive asset than any other identifiable feature of any of the candidates by a long way. The second thing, Donald Trump was associated with the other candidates' straplines more than any of the other candidates to their own. Because he was so dominant in the category, sorry, we're talking about the Republican nomination now. So it's not him versus Hillary, but it's him versus all the other candidates running for the Republican nomination. Because he was so well known that when people asked the question, so make America great, obviously, was the thing he was associated with.

38:53But even when we asked in the survey, you know, what do you associate Donald Trump with? The straplines of the other candidates came up more for him than came up for all the other candidates for themselves, which I think was the effect of kind of his, you know, his overall fame that he would pick up that as well. Yeah. So you're saying you measured it by the tagline? Well, which taglines, which of these taglines do you associate with which politician? And what we found is that actually for the other candidates' taglines, more people put Donald Trump for their taglines than put the politician for whom it was.

39:27And that was unprompted. Unprompted, yes. Okay, so yeah, so what you're getting there, so yeah, so, but I imagine overall it was pretty low. Yes, it was, yeah. That's the thing. So what you're just getting there is a little bit of wobble and confusion. Because whenever you ask surveys, you've got to remember that people who take surveys are nice people. They want to give you a right answer if they can. So you're always going to get a little bit of confusion in there, which is why when even when we with distinctive assets with uniqueness, while I'd love 100%, I'm realistic that if you get 90%, you're doing good because there's always going to be a few that, you know, will just give an answer in there.

40:00So that's what I think you're getting there. And to some extent, he does have a little bit of he will parody anything that becomes successful. So there might be a little bit of that factor in there. Yeah, it makes sense. When we're talking about brand attributes, there's quite a lot of different types of brand attributes, aren't there? So what are the different types of brand attributes and which ones would be more important than other ones to use in a survey? So there are a lot of typologies about brand attributes, but most of them are based on the attributes themselves. So they're about the wording of them, what they are.

40:33So, you know, there's things like hedonic versus utilitarian, which speak to the nature of the attributes and things like that. So we take a different approach and go, well, why don't we look at how they're used by buyers in order to classify attributes? So in there, there are three basic roles. The first is to think of options to buy, attacked as a retrieval queue. That's what I commonly call category entry points. The second are when you've got multiple options salient at the same time, which we commonly do have, because our brain can, you know, we have working memory that can have multiple concepts at a time, we might need some criteria to select between them.

41:15So then the brands themselves can be evaluated on things. So some evaluation criteria. A lot of textbooks overplay this evaluation process. The reality is sometimes it doesn't happen because we can also use things like physical availability to choose. So I might think of three, you know, I might leave here, go, I'm going to have something to eat, think of three options and go, oh, there's the one right in front of me. I'm going there. And in that case, they were all equally fine options. It was just the most physically close. So not always is evaluation in there, but it can play a role. And also it can play a role in the discounting.

41:50So you might not buy the most trustworthy brand, but if you have some doubts about it, you might just cull that in favor of the ones you don't have any doubts about. And then the third are distinctive assets, things used to identify the brand and that's what we call distinctive assets so they have a specific role to play because they're just brand accused and they also evoke the brand but they have a different role than the category entry points and back to a point you made earlier again common theme design for the category how much should we pick category attributes as well as brand attributes if well i don't see a difference because a brand attribute so well if you're talking about distinctive assets so put them aside because I actually don't think they should be part of a tracker.

42:35I think they need their own measure because they have a specific measurement approach and timing of how you do that. I actually don't recommend them as part of a tracker. I understand for efficiency, some people might want to put them in, but then you have to do that with special considerations because the unprompted measurement, you can't do it before any other brands are provided. But of the others, in terms of brand attributes, I don't understand why you would pick something that would not be useful from a category perspective. The exception to that is I do appreciate there are some attributes you might track for other things.

43:12So you might track something on diversity or your corporate reputation type attributes, because that's a different triple bottom line reporting, those sorts of things. I do allow for that presence in there, but I think that's a different conversation of how you use those versus the things that are actually going to be influential to get your brand thought of and bought in buying situations. I was quite surprised at how many category entry points the average brand has as well. And I think this is another trap that brand managers get into is you might segment the market and you might go, yeah, that's the category entry point of my brand.

43:47And then you kind of go all in on one, don't you? Which is a bit of a trap because you're limiting potential for your brand. and um but talk to me about that because i was quite surprised at how many category entry points there are as well that's yeah so we well i mean we do research where we go out and find category entry points for categories and yeah i have to put a limit on 35 and frequently have more than that that we then take to so we do a stage one we identify category entry points and a stage two where we work out the priorities and at the end of the priorities i like to come up with what i call the long short list, which is usually five to eight category entry points that are suitable for a brand to have.

44:25In essence, we're always talking about wider, fresher networks. Now, in reality, there's a limit on how many you can build because you've only got so much budget, people only have so much attention, and to build them, you have to have prominent co-branded moments. And there are only so many of those that you can have in any execution. You can't have a 30 second ad with 20 prominent co-branded moments, our brains can't process that much information. So you're always going to be restricted. So the question then is which are the most valuable to do? And that's where you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot and sort of win the battle, but lose the war by investing your money in something that doesn't come up very often, or that's really highly competitive.

45:08And lots of other brands are in that space when you don't need to. So there are ways to be able to deal with that. But yeah, the average brand, I think it ends up with about six. But remember that it's context with size. So bigger brands tend to be known by more people for more category entry points than smaller brands. That's how they're in more evoked sets with more brands. They also have an extra advantage, which speaks to double jeopardy, is that they're often in evoked sets with fewer brands. And that speaks to one of the laws, I don't talk about the book, but the natural monopoly law. And that is that big brands tend to monopolize like category buyers who know very few other brands in the category and so they come in and they themselves don't buy very much as like category buyers but there's enough of them that as a group they contribute a fair bit to a big brand's bottom line.

46:02Come on to mental mobility you talk about how to measure mental market share I love the model here can you talk us through this because yeah it's it's really smart this but yeah talk us through how you might go about kind of measuring mental market share? Yeah, well, it's just, I read a paper quite a while ago that I, where I likened brand associations to distribution outlets in the mind. That was the title of it. And that was before I even thought about this idea of mental market share, but it's just me thinking about the fact that these are basically mental doorways that people are going in to access the brand.

46:36And so when you take that analogy then further and that, and I had a parallel thought and that is that I was seeing all these beautiful patterns in buying behavior and yet I was working in a branding space where there was all these papers saying oh it's you can do anything that sort of stuff and I went it doesn't really make sense to me why would there be chaos but yet beautiful patterns maybe we just haven't been looking at memories properly and so when we start to look at memories from a pattern perspective that's when we start to see the things that were the underpinning for this idea of mental market share to say well if we treat brands and category entry points as distribution points in the mind we can create a mental market share by we imagine this universe of brands and category entry points and you can know what share of these associations you have, just like you can know what share of sales you have by collecting all of the sales from all the distribution outlets and saying, well, we got X percent, this other brand got this and this.

47:42And then you take that down to then what are the underpinnings of that? And then you have mental penetration, which is the proportion of people who link your brand to at least one category entry point. So that's analogous to two things. One is penetration as a brand. So those who are familiar with that, it's that, but in memory form. But it's also a more sophisticated awareness measure because I'm taking it from just the category queue to I'm giving you, say, 20 opportunities to link my brand to a category entry point, I'm giving you the brand, I'm giving you the category entry point, if after 20 opportunities, I'm not still registering, I think the chance of you thinking of me next time you're in a buying situation is really, really low.

48:30It's not impossible, because something might happen in store or online that suddenly brings your brand to my attention. But that's physical availability working, not mental availability. then we have network size which speaks to that so that speaks to that how many people can think of my brand then we want to know how often and that's network size which is of those with mental penetration how many category entry points they have linked to it and then the third metric is share of mind which is of the people who have me in their brains how much space am I taking up and share of mind is particularly important if you're a big brand because usually when you're declining that's where we see it first that it's not that you're fallen off the wagon and people don't think of you at all because it's really hard to remove a brand totally from memory but what happens is just nibbling away slowly competitors are just getting in there and you're just fewer people slightly less often you're actually present and over time that just then erodes sales it's really fascinating as you describe it because it really you know we're very familiar with taking that approach to physical availability right what's my share within cafes or supermarkets and and you know that sort of thing and it really does translate neatly quite cleverly doesn't it over to mental availability so yeah really neat another good analogy yeah i know you do you do and it plays out i found that that chapter fascinating actually i hadn't thought about mental availability in quite the same way before like physical availability as you break it down it makes sense you know share of you know minds and so on can we talk about brand love it made me smile this chapter i have to say but you know going back to analogies i'm the proud owner of a new puppy 16 weeks old teddy and uh obviously you know the family have fallen in love with him and it does seem sometimes that brands want to have a relationship a bit like i have with teddy don't they but it's not necessarily the case is it well i mean i put it out i mean i have i have a dash and with attachment issues when i read that list i reckon because i know that he has attachment issues but he would sell me for food in a second because he also has food issues so i'm like god even alf wouldn't fit this criteria i mean yeah you've just got to get real just make any sense it's one of those things where you go really you really want to go there think about it so when i did my a to z of brand health tracking i got to l and it was around valentine's day and i was kind of like i should have this as brand love but what can i possibly say about brand love i hadn't said before so that's why i composed a song instead brilliant now i really enjoyed that series that was that was a great way to bring it to life absolutely brilliant let's talk about category purchase frequency as well i mean this is kind of going back to what i was talking about earlier actually in that most people's categories are bought a lot less frequently aren't they than people think they are i mean it was a real shock actually i know i know um when i did the did the sums on the leading energy drink as well i mean i suppose if you just serve it how many times you think people drink this energy drink a year they'd probably go 10 20 30 you know because people in their heads think well probably once a week every other week and then you realize it's two and you just go really sort of thing it's always going back to the kind of what surprises the audience that's one i found in you know in my career always shocks people you did a poll you know and what you you know, okay, put your hands up.

51:51What do you think? It's always a shock, isn't it? Well, you used to have this term, fast-moving consumer goods. Ironically. Which gave that impression. But you go, actually, the vast majority of people buy toilet cleaner once a year. And so you go, it's not really fast-moving. And so, but this speaks to, so when people talk about different categories and they go, well, it holds for packaged goods, how do you know it's going to hold for durable? They go, well, because there's a lot of packaged goods that if you look at how often people bought them, they look like durable buying patterns because they bought so infrequently.

52:28So it's actually these categories are not that different from each other. Yeah, no, it's a real surprise. Yeah. How often do you buy a toaster or something? I don't know. How often do you go on holiday? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people go on holidays quite frequently, probably more often than they buy toilet cleaner. There you go. We touched on it a bit before. um what because again you know put myself in the brand manager's shoes you're desperate to find out how did my ad campaign do and presumably like my campaign has transformed all my brand metrics overnight you know which is a classic one i think we're all overexposed to our own marketing aren't we and assume that everyone's going to wake up and go wow now i've seen the ad i'm going to you know how would you what would your advice be about measuring the impact of marketing on a brand so again i'll separate out the the the measurement to make sure you're giving the marketing activity the best chance of success that it has those ingredients it can get attention it's it's it's well branded it has a clear message and it's you know able to to do stuff and then you've got to distribute it so you've got the media plan in place to make sure that this attention-grabbing, well-branded, clear message thing is out there.

53:39So once you've got those ingredients in place, then it's a distribution issue and the level of distribution is going to affect how much you're going to see the impact in your tracker and people's brains. And this was actually one of the ironic things that used to define media spend. We discovered because people would go, oh no, no, I have to spend a minimum amount to get any impact from advertising. And for a while there, we're kind of like, huh? Think about it. That makes no sense. If I show you an ad and only you, you can act on it. You don't wait for a couple of hundred thousand other people to see it before you go, okay, now I'll add.

54:15Now they're spending$5 million? I'm going to pop in the shop. Yeah. No, and when we realized what was happening linked back to brand tracking is it was a minimum spend to see the result in their tracking. so the irony was the tracking was driving the media rather than the other way around and we kind of like you know have a think about it you know if i only show an ad to this room i'd say to groups of people i can affect everyone in this room i can't affect anyone outside of this room but that doesn't mean you will wait for that so yeah so that was one of the the ironies of of actually doing that so your your sense of how much effect you're going to have on memories is going to be determined by how much reach you've had and how effective that reach has been.

54:59So that's why I do advocate having for the bigger things that you're doing, having some way of assessing just what has been the actual reach of them. Not because I think that's a definitive, this is how effective it is, but it allows you to calibrate your expectations for it. And if you have some big competitor activities, you can also see the relativities there. And it also is a way of if it isn't working so if you have the reach but not the branding you can pick that up and you can go okay well we didn't pick that up earlier because we really should have we need to fix that going forward so yeah so i don't see it as like this is only the only thing you would do for communications effectiveness for me it's a calibration of your expectations of what sort of change you should see i think it's okay because as a media buy you get presented with this campaign's reached 90 % of the audience with 15 opportunities to see, and you get lulled into false sense of security as a brand manager, you go, flipping heck, right?

55:59Everyone's going to be talking about my campaign. Then you look in your tracker and go, we've shifted it by 0.1%, you know, whatever. I just had this conversation with a client because, yes, their media company had told them that they had reached 80 % of the market and our results came back and said it was more like 10%. Yeah. and they're like well it's actually no in fairness it was about 20 but branding was only about 30 so it cut down to eight in terms of branded reach yeah and so they're like oh we don't know what to do here how you know how accurate is your approach and i'm like well granted some people could have seen it earlier and forgotten it and it's no longer affecting them i'm willing to accept that But do you really think 80 % was right?

56:44You know, it's probably somewhere in the middle, but I'd suggest it's more on my end of the middle than their end of the middle. The word that's doing a lot of heavy lifting is opportunity. Yeah. Right? I mean, how many messages do you get every day? And, you know, you're amongst 2 ,000 opportunities and you remember two, right? Particularly if you're talking digital. Yes, definitely. Yeah, because you just scroll through, don't you? Oh, absolutely. Well, there's been all the studies on viewability, how accurate those figures are, sorts of things. So I would be extra sceptical in a digital sense.

57:18Now, the cunning brand manager at this point goes, ah, yes, but we drove word of mouth. And you got some advice on word of mouth as well, haven't you, in this chapter? Yes, one of my hobbies. Yes. Yeah, no, I became fascinated by it because it's a really interesting research area. But I do leverage off very heavily from Professor Robert East, who's a real guru in this area. actually having dinner with him tonight. So first of all, don't measure will somebody, could somebody, might somebody, you know, give word of mouth. Actually measure word of mouth, what people have done, because that's the thing that will have an effect.

57:52But also often we think of word of mouth as one big thing, but depending on what you're doing depends on, it's a tale of two stories where you've got the giver and the receiver that are both players here. And depending on what you're trying to assess, either of those side is going to be more important. So there's no point in trying to measure the impact of word of mouth by asking the giver because they've got nothing to do with that. Similarly, there's no point in measuring the motives for giving word of mouth by asking the receiver because they're not going to know what's going through people's heads.

58:31So we really need to get a bit more sophisticated about this. Now, word and mouth measurement is not for every category. There are some categories that don't get a lot of conversation. So my advice always is benchmark it, see where you are, see where you're normal, and then based on the incidence of it, decide whether it's an important part of your tracker. It might not be, but at least you've got sort of in technical terms, that programmed so that then if you do need to dial it up for whatever reason, say something happens. So say you decide, oh, we're going to do a buzz generation campaign and you do want to have word of mouth.

59:07You've got the benchmark and you can easily measure the assessment. If something goes wrong, which is another time you might want to measure, say, negative word of mouth. So say you have a product recall or you have a celebrity gone bad, that sort of thing. Then, yes, you can look to your word of mouth figures, but that's actually where online probably conversation is your first protocol to see, well, are people at least talking about it online? in more normal conversations. So not like your, you know, very, very, very specific chat groups and things where you've got really involved people, industry people, things like that, in just normal conversations.

59:44If it is, then you might want to again, turn on your word of mouth measurement to see, well, who's actually receiving or giving this word of mouth? Does it look like it's going to affect us in the long term? And so it's a more of a as needs type of measure rather than something you need to report on continuously. And that's what I like about it because it's so easy, again, to kind of go, look, there's 100 million impressions of our brand being talked about around the world. And you go, well, is that a lot? Is that a little? Has it impacted the brand? Is it good? Is it bad? You know, it's easy to kind of get, you know, drawn into, you know, the social listening and put too much emphasis on that.

1:00:21The big problem with that, though, is you can't tell who the giver is or who the receiver is. and you really need that context to understand what it's about. And if you're in a brand that's in multiple categories, sometimes you can't even tell what category it's talking about. And so that really makes it hard for it to be usable. So, yeah, it's a whole chapter because that was one of the things that the publisher actually said. I thought there'd be more on online stuff in here. And I thought, well, it's not very good, but how do I put that in there in a way? So that's why, and my co-author, we wrote about the use of online when it doesn't work.

1:00:58And it doesn't work for most brand health tracking, but there are some situations where it does work. So we try to highlight those. So if you understand, no data source is perfect, but if you understand its limitations, you can understand where sometimes those limitations can be a superpower. Yeah, that's good advice. Let's end on physical availability, as you do in the book, by the way. I remember years ago launching new products and doubling distribution, and it also doubled penetration and awareness, of course. So, you know, obviously the two things kind of link together. And, you know, as you talk about the job of physical availability is to be easy to find and easy to buy.

1:01:31So what impact would physical availability have on your brand tracking measures as well? Because I presume there's a link between the two. OK, so, well, so one thing I'll say is that often in brand health tracking, you see some physical availability attributes sneak in. They're a waste of time. Don't do them. Just as much as word of mouth attributes. So, you know, measuring which brands have you heard people talking about? It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. Don't do it. There are some really useful physical availability metrics to have. They're best sourced outside of the tracker. The exception is only from a memory measurement perspective, not so much for use in a tracker, is prominence of shopping distinctive assets.

1:02:13Those are things you have to get from memory you can't get from the environment. now in terms of physical availability's impact on mental availability if you double physical availability what happens to mental availability the challenge you have is that a lot of stuff happens in physical availability that people don't notice so the vast majority of new brands that get launched you don't notice the vast majority of pack changes the vast majority of you know brands being on a supermarket shelf or not you haven't noticed so then that's the challenges how do we get things to cut through and why you can't just rely on physical availability you know some people have gone well why don't we just worry about in-store and not worry about advertising out of store you've got to get the brain ready such that when they're in an environment where there's lots of things going on you have that advantage you're something that they screen in.

1:03:09And that's what a lot of our marketing activity out of store is for. Because if you're waiting to install, that's a highly cluttered environment, really hard for anything to cut through. So that's why distinctive assets and stuff have to be built outside, not just on pack in shelf. And why there can be things on pack, and I'm talking about packaged goods here, but it can be logos and things as well that have been there for ages and no one's noticed. Even buyers someone noticed them because they haven't stood out, haven't been necessary. I mean, to me, mental and physical availability are equally important and go hand in hand, but they both rely on each other in that mental availability at its best allows physical availability to convert into sales and physical availability at its best allows your mental availability to convert into sales.

1:03:59Because if you have the best ad campaign in the world and you have crap physical availability, you're not going to see it in your bottom line. And that's a disappointment because it means that your creative work might not be recognised because people might have been a good campaign, but no one could find the brand in store or no one could work out how to navigate the website to buy that insurance product. And so you lost out for it and it's not recognising each. So to me, they're equally important. They do fit into each other. But when we're measuring things going on in people's brains, the feedback from physical availability is post hoc.

1:04:37So you get the distribution after buyers have gone in, noticed it, bought it, then you survey them. It's not because of the distribution, it's because they have become buyers that it changes their memory. The idea that the passive observation in shelf will have a big impact on people's memories doesn't make sense simply because we also know price promotions don't have a legacy, a memory legacy. So why would another facing or another skew on a shelf have a deep memory legacy? And circle back to the beginning of our conversation as well. Presumably that's also why distinctive assets are so important because they're connecting the two things together, right?

1:05:26So they're enabling you to remember the mental availability that was established out of the store when you walk into store and see the parrot or whatever it is well that's you know it's triggering the the mental availability isn't it well that's why we talk about shopping distinctive assets because the beauty of shopping distinctive assets is that you can and should use them in your advertising and they also help in store so if you're a brand starting out you don't have any distinctive assets and you're going where should i start shopping distinctive assets are the ones i would start with i would start with one of those and then i would pick something that was very different to that so you have immediate diversity yeah so you might pick a pack style and a tagline or you might pick a logo and well a tagline trying to think of something that's very different from a visual but basically tapping in i was gonna say an audio asset but they tend to come later down the line yeah great well that's top advice to end on i think there you go thank you very much jenny that's a pleasure thank you ladies and gentlemen for listening to the uncensored cmo it's a real pleasure having you with me.

1:06:26I hope you enjoyed that episode. And if you'd like to never miss an episode again, please do go and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts. I also have a YouTube channel as well, Uncensored CMO. Go and check me out over there and you can see all the episodes in full glorious Technovision as well. If you want to leave me a review, I would love it. It's great to get reviews. Obviously, five star being the best. And if you want to follow me, I'm over on LinkedIn at John Evans or find me on Twitter at Uncensored CMO. Thanks for joining me and see you next time.