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Nerd Alert: What 100 studies taught us about marketing
00:09:51
Nerd Alert: What 100 Studies Taught Us About Marketing Welcome to Nerd Alert, a series of special episodes bridging the gap between marketing academia and practitioners. We’re breaking down highly involved, complex research into plain language and...
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- [00:00]
A
Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?
- [00:03]
B
Yes, exactly. What a bunch of nerds.
- [00:05]
A
Nerd alert, Right?
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B
Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Elena Jasper on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host. Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
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A
Hello, Elena.
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B
We're back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?
- [00:36]
A
My browser has 87 tabs open and they're all academic white papers. Elena, tag me in.
- [00:43]
B
Love it. That is dedication to the Nerd alerts. Let's get into it. This week, instead of reviewing one academic paper, I reviewed all of them. Not really, but we still all of them.
- [00:55]
A
We saw them on the Internet.
- [00:58]
B
Definitely not. We synthesized the findings from the a hundred Nerd Alert episodes we've created as a podcast. This would be episode 101. We celebrated that a hundredth milestone last week. And so today we're going to do more of a summary. Like all the research we've learned, all the studies, all the debates, our goal was simple. What does the entire body of evidence of the Nerd Alerts say collectively about how marketing actually works? Of course, we're not really going to cover all of how marketing works in like a 10 minute nerd alert, but we're going to do our best to summarize some of the biggest findings across 100 episodes. But Rob, before we get into the research, if you had to guess, what do you think actually drives brand growth more than anything else?
- [01:37]
A
Growth comes from realizing that customers barely know you exist. I think once you can accept that, you stop trying to build that deep emotional relationship and you start focusing on your product or service being the easiest, most obvious, idiot proof choice to make when they actually need you.
- [01:56]
B
That reminds me of, I don't know who said it could have been Byron Sharp, but it's that phrase, marketing's a weak force. And I think that's important for all of us to internalize. You're right. Like, no one really cares so much as much about your brand as you do. No one's paying attention as much as you are. I would say that's pretty spot on for a lot of these marketing principles. So when we looked at all these different studies we covered, the research keeps pointing back to a couple of principles. The first is that marketing works through memory. So from brand salience research to emotional advertising to the Dirichlet model to attention studies, this pattern is pretty consistent. Marketing builds memory structures over time so your creative can build associations with your brand. Your reach build month availability, and then repetition reinforces those associations. So when a buying situation comes up, the brand that comes to mind is the brand that wins. Second, creative is a big multiplier. So that came across in some of these studies too. Just that creative has an outsized impact. Research shows that marketers were pretty bad at predicting which of our ads is going to work and drive sales. We do know that emotion predicts effectiveness better than rational messaging. Humor improves memorability and impact. Distinctive brand assets compound over time and dull advertising is very costly. So across different studies, econometric models award case analyses. Creative quality explains more variation results than small media optimizations. And yet creative decisions are still often treated as subjective. Rob, why do you think creative decisions are still treated that way?
- [03:27]
A
I think it's easy to dismiss creative as picking the color of the curtains in your bedroom. Creative should be treated like the plumbing in your house, not the curtains. It's really, you know, what leak are you trying to fix? Is the water flowing to the right place? These are like foundational things that you have to be having discussions around. And we need to stop treating creative like it's just interior design. For instance, I hate the color magenta, and I've mentioned that many times in this podcast. But if I'm T mobile, I'm never changing that color. So just because I may not like it, my goodness, if I were the brand manager and I used blue in my holiday campaign, I'd fire myself.
- [04:12]
B
What would happen to T Mobile if the next CMO walked in and said, you know what, I'm not feeling the pink anymore.
- [04:18]
A
I'm feeling yellow today.
- [04:19]
B
Yeah, not good strategy. Probably not. How should you be making your creative decisions? All right, our next principle. Probably not a surprise here to people that listen to this show. Brand growth comes from reach, not loyalty. So this pattern is all about growth. We've covered things like buyer group potential double jeopardy, loyalty versus repeat purchasing on the show, and the conclusion is consistent. Your brand grows by increasing penetration, not by extracting more from heavy buyers. Most customers are light buyers, and even your loyal customers buy your competitor. So growth, it comes from getting more people to buy you, even if it's just occasionally. The optimal strategy isn't increasing your depth, it's increasing breadth. And that requires scale, which can be uncomfortable because you Got to pay for that. It requires an investment that you just can't get around. Um, another principle, promotions create spikes, not growth. So this shows up in some of the studies we've covered about pricing, loyalty research, long term performance and promotions. They do some things well. They can help move timing, they create short term volume, they shift purchases forward, but they rarely build that long term preference that you want. In some cases that you get into this sort of discount doom loop and you train your customers to wait to buy. Or they could signal weakness in your category. So they can be maybe used tactically but they are not growth engines. Next, measurement often misleads strategy. We've covered a lot of different measurement topics. Some I still don't understand fully, but we've talked about things like last touch attribution that can over credit things like paid search. That's typically not a good view of what's happening with your marketing. A B tests can be distorted by platform delivery bias. Do you remember that study where we. That was a crazy one. Do you remember that AB testing thing we did where.
- [05:58]
A
Yes.
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B
Oh man, I've been trained like all these marketers are trained to AB test on digital platforms, but it doesn't really work because the digital platforms they're changing the audiences for you. Oh man, how much time have I wasted? AP test attribution can inflate some channels by nearly 200%. We've had other studies about that got third party data. Man, the measurement topics on this show are kind of scary. But overall, when we focus too much on the short term to drive our marketing decisions, we're going to have a decrease in the effectiveness of our long term marketing. Rob, after reading all these studies and learning all this stuff about how measurement can be skewed, how many decisions are driven more by what's easy to measure than what's actually working for your business?
- [06:40]
A
I'm sure it's way too much. We focus too much on immediate click through rates and not conversion or too much on conversion and not lifetime value. But what a dangerous question when you say that out loud because that would mean what you're measuring isn't actually a proxy for what's working. And so it really comes back to defining what does success look like and making sure you're actually measuring that correctly.
- [07:07]
B
Another consistent theme across the research that we've covered on nerd alerts is that broad reach media still matters. So we've covered attention studies, ESOV research, profitability data, and we've consistently seen that TV captures high attention, it has an Emotional impact, a long term payback and ability to scale. Linear and streaming, they work well together. And some digital channels they do look very efficient at small spend levels but they can saturate quickly. So scale and efficiency are not the same thing. TV is great at that. I'm asked sometimes how do you guys do this podcast and keep it going because people like it. But also these principles, they directly translate to what we do as an agency. So we try not to make the podcast too promotional about marketing architects. But this kind of stuff, it's exactly what our clients care about leads to tv. It just marketing effectiveness happens to just line up really well with what we do. That's why we've done a hundred episodes of this. All right. So overall what do these a hundred episodes? What have they told us marketers need to do differently? Treat your creative as a strategic asset. Invest in testing, iteration and strong brand linkage. Reach comes first. Growth comes from broad mental availability. User promotions carefully. They're powerful short term profit lovers, but limited long term growth drivers demand multiple models of measurement. Rely on incrementality testing, econometrics and controlled experiments to understand the true impact of your marketing balance. Brand and performance. Talked about that a lot on the show. Brand investment makes performance marketing more efficient. And think long term memory builds slowly. Over time it compounds. It takes investment and patience. And maybe the most important insight from this show. There is really no silver bullet tactic. There's not always a very clear answer. Welcome to marketing. But we're doing our best. All right, time for around GPT. Marketing works like building muscle. You don't get stronger from one rep, you get stronger from consistent repeated stress applied over time. Creative is the exercise reaches the repetition. Measurement is the form check and time is what turns effort into strength. I thought that was a pretty good Rob GPT.
- [09:09]
A
I love the idea of doing a best of mashing up all these wonderful case studies over the past hundred episodes. Great idea.
- [09:18]
B
Yeah, pretty fun. You should still go back and listen to the other episodes though. People still have to learn there. But yeah, I thought it did a nice job of kind of summarizing what we've learned. So cool. That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing marketing architects.