Why you won’t find Ehrenberg-Bass talking about mass awareness
The popularity of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s work means its complex ideas are often reduced to sound bites. Associate Professor Rachel Kennedy explains how the institute’s messages can be misinterpreted.
Yesterday, John Douglas wrote an opinion piece entitled: The problem with blindly jumping on the Ehrenberg-Bass bandwagon. I would like to thank him for taking the time to highlight issues and to praise our work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.
Associate Professor Rachel Kennedy knows a thing or two about the work of the Ehrenburg-Bass Institute
As one of those women John says control 85% of purchases (and I do control most purchases for my household), let me say I’m all for ads that give me an emotional response.
However, as with John’s article, some of our messages can be misinterpreted. So, I want to clarify our position on some issues raised:
Thank you for clarifying, Rachel.
A very elegant pin in my balloon.
Thank you for starting the conversation. Always happy to engage
Just one question:
Often I feel EBI contradicts itself. For example, we hear Bruce McColl saying his target is all 7bn people on this planet.
But not everyone on this planet will be a category buyer for sweets and chocolate. How does that work with your law to ‘target category buyers’?
I am equally surprised about your tampon example above. Men are certainly not the category buyer either?
Sometimes I think you guys need to be more coherent and careful with your messages.
We are often trying to summarise decades of research and many studies in simple to understand ways. We do appreciate there is enormous complexity to much of what we research and we invest enormously in documenting and describing what we find. We would love it if more marketers read more of the detail that we write rather than reading too much into the likes of PR responses that have to be written quickly and can never cover the depth of knowledge we are trying to share.
I am a man, and I have bought tampons for my wife, just as Rachel suggests some men do.
I do have one question.
While you haven’t seen evidence that gender targeting leads to a better total uplift, have you seen evidence that gender targeting hinders uplift?
Have there been any studies at all into the effectiveness, or not, of gender targeting?
(Sorry, two questions.)
I appreciate your time Rachel. Thanks for keeping the conversation going.
John I have not. I’ve also not specifically looked for them. Controlled in-market experiments could be fun … but based on what we have seen I’d suggest there are other priorities for brands that want to grow
Hi Rachel, it’s an interesting comment you make about single source data. I get it in certain international markets, but is that a suggestion in Australia?
My understanding is single source data here is either;
a) Fused data. The robustness of this is questionable at best, and I was involved in constructing one of the largest- on what basis is a respondent that “saw” the ad the same as the respondent from another panel that purchased the product. The error margins are massive.
b) Based off STV data or MCN- which means we’re looking at the 20% rather than the 80%.
Or am I missing another source?
I’m a huge fan of your work, and bringing science and rigor to marketing decisions, but just concerned that if that rigor is based on junk data, doesn’t garbage in = garbage out?
Was not specifically a suggestion for Australia (what we write tends to get shared around the world). Agree with you that fused data is not the same as single source. In some categories there is some single source but it is not widely available here. Totally agree with you that we need quality data to under pin evidence-based decisions.
Hi Rachel,
I find this article fascinating. Especially what you say about the need for strong advertising copy (that has the ability to nudge the whole audience) that can trigger an emotional response.
We’re in the business of dynamic audio which strikes a chord on both of those notes. Would it be worth an intro?