THE POWER OF BRAND EQUITY TRACKING & MODELING.

Equity and Attribution

Adding the Missing Dimension of “Why”

A major telecommunications brand was spending heavily on advertising and promotion; however, sales growth continued to be sluggish. Pricing was competitive and the brand had already optimized advertising spending both across and within advertising media. Nevertheless, sales were not responding.

A first clue to this mystery came from the brand’s BERA Equity measures. BERA Brand Management leverages a panel of 1 million respondents in over 200 categories to track and compare consumers’ attitudes about brands, using a concept of “Brand Love,” a composite of four key attitudinal measures, Familiarity, Regard, Meaningful and Unique. Meta-analyses have shown a direct relationship between BERA scores and financial performance.

(“Brand Value Drives Corporate Value” by Greg Milano, CEO Fortuna Advisors)

For our brand, “Brand Love”was roughly mid-pack for its category, which, unfortunately, put it solidly in the “Boredom” range.

While scores for Familiarity and Regard were strong vs competitors, the brand was falling down when consumers were asked whether this brand was Meaningful to them or Unique compared to competitive brands.

The marketing team needed answers to two key questions:

1. How does marketing affect Brand Love and its components?
2. How do changes in Brand Love impact sales for their brand?

What we found was both enlightening and disturbing:

• Marketing was indeed a major driver of Brand Love, especially the “meaningful” and “unique” measures, which together drive the “tomorrow” component of Brand Love.
• A drop in the Meaningful and Unique scores in mid-2017 had provided an opening for competitors, so that starting in mid-2018 the brand was receiving less than its fair share of category growth.
• The moves the brand had made to reallocate the media mix since that time were correct, i.e. funds were being reallocated to more efficient media and there was little indication of advertising saturation.
• The “Today” components of Brand Love, Familiarity and Regard, were making a significant contribution to sales.
• However, the “Tomorrow” measures were not contributing to sales, despite very high levels of marketing spending, optimized media mix and competitive pricing.

What was going on here? The Missing “Why” Dimension

The brand team had leveraged their Attribution models to get pricing in line and optimize ad spending both across and within ad media. However, none of this addressed the underlying cause of sales weakness. The BERA metrics and modeling explained why sales were soft:

• This brand had struggled to differentiate itself, as shown by the low and declining levels of Uniqueness and Meaning.
• While the modeling identified that Marketing investment had been able to drive key dimensions of brand equity and has been properly optimized against short term sales, marketing by itself cannot overcome a lack of differentiation in consumers’ eyes.
• The result was that the brand had not been able to achieve its fair share of category growth, despite high marketing spend.

Reviving sluggish sales will take more than twisting the dials: it will require identifying or creating something unique about the brand that would distinguish it from its competitors. This, not more or optimized spending, will allow the brand to garner its fair share (or more) of category growth.

Is this a success story?

Not yet. BERA tracking and modeling has identified the key to the brand’s sales weakness and pointed the way to its solution. The job of carving out a unique and compelling brand positioning in a Category that can easily become a commodity will require a combination of marketing inspiration from the Brand Team and (most likely) technical innovation and support from Engineering. As the Brand journeys down this road, BERA’s unique capabilities will be there to guide them, helping to turn brand boredom into Brand Love.

—Simon Dratfield

IS YOUR SPONSORSHIP PROGRAM PAYING OFF?

A Fortune 500 company was a major sponsor of the PGA, which included a tournament in Hawaii. Everyone assumed that the principal, and perhaps only, benefit of this program was to give company executives a chance to rub elbows with famous golf pros and meet with big customers. An opportunity to entertain customers is important, but is a Sponsorship worth diverting a major portion of a brand’s marketing budget from proven, revenue-producing channels? Put another way, can Sponsorships really compete with advertising in terms of generating new customers and revenue – especially in terms of return on investment? Are Sponsorships even measurable? As we will see, the answer to all these questions is an emphatic yes.

Here are some simple steps for ensuring that a Sponsorship program earns its keep:

UNDERSTAND THE KEY ELEMENTS OF SPONSORSHIP

• The basic sponsorship contract usually includes Intellectual Property rights (e.g. right to use the name and conditions for doing so), signage and/or hospitality at Sponsorship Property events and perhaps experiential programs associated with Property events.
• Activation activities may include on-site hospitality, player or performer appearances & endorsements or logos on apparel.
• Sponsorship-specific media and promotional support encompass brand ads with the Sponsorship theme, brand promotions centered around the Sponsorship property, Sponsorship Property ads that include the brand.

Relying solely on the basic contract without the supporting activation and media elements risks sub-optimizing the Sponsorship opportunity, since it usually involves a large portion of the program cost but can fail to build the connection with the brand and/or reach a wide enough audience.

CREATE INTEGRATED SPONSORSHIP PROGRAMS

In our experience, tight integration of activation and sponsorship-specific media & promotion into a Sponsorship program is the key to a successful (and profitable) program.

• Activation activities help tie the brand and Property more closely together in the minds of consumers.
• Media support allows a brand to tell its story, leveraging the attributes of the Sponsorship Property to boost and complement brand imagery. Using the Sponsorship in ad copy also allows the brand to develop fresh creative and “new news.”
• High interest promotional efforts, such as chances to win back-stage passes to concerts, VIP boxes at sporting events or trips to attend sponsored events can become key parts of an integrated Sponsorship program, maintaining interest in both the sponsorship and the brand over extended periods of time.

The audience for a Sponsorship must be broader than just those attending the event.

Another key insight we’ve gained through multiple engagements is that, while in-venue activities such as hospitality may provide a very rich interaction with consumers, it is the mass audience of media that provides the scale needed to make of Sponsorships profitable. More recently, we’ve seen social media, with its ability to deliver customized messages to specific target audiences, used as a highly effective complement to mass media in a Sponsorship context.

PICK THE RIGHT SPONSORSHIP FOR YOUR BRAND

Choosing a sponsorship property that complements and reinforces your brand imagery is not as difficult as it might seem. We have seen a very wide range of  Sponsorships work for all sorts of brands: properties ranging from individual sports teams and entire leagues (e.g. MLB, NFL, Champions League, NHL), tournaments (individual golf matches, the PGA tour, World Cup), to special events, major musical events and award shows (e.g. Academy Awards, Grammys, Brits Award). The key is to use media and promotional support to link the imagery of the Sponsorship property to that of the brand.

• Caveat: if your competitor already has a well-established relationship with a particular property, it may be difficult for your brand to establish a beachhead, as one of our clients found out when they tried to sponsor selected teams in a sports league long associated with its rival.

Keep in mind that Sponsorships need not be high dollar, national properties in order to be successful, as evidenced by a major bank’s sponsorship of local soccer leagues for kids, including signage at games and branding on jerseys. The program (supported by media) garnered considerable community support as well as having a strong impact in gaining new customers and increasing revenues.

KNOW WHAT TO PAY … AND WHAT YOU REALLY VALUE

In one of our earliest engagements measuring Sponsorships, we found that the high participation fees charged by the league made that property a losing proposition. Armed with this information, the client was able to negotiate a significantly lower participation fee.

However, pure ROI may not be the only criterion for maintaining a relationship with a Sponsorship Property. Another client, when faced with a Sponsorship property that was too expensive to pay back, kept it anyway: the prospect of a competitor picking up that property would have been a major loss of prestige, something they did not want to have to explain to their Board.

ALLIGN BRAND AND SPONSORSHIP PROPERTY OBJECTIVES BY COORDINATING SPONSORSHIP PROGRAM ELEMENTS

The successful, long lasting Sponsorship programs we have seen are built on synergies: synergies of brand imagery and synergies in program execution. The goal is not only to create short term opportunities to drive sales and/or attendance for both parties, but also to create a linkage in consumers’ mind between the brand and the Sponsored property that transcends the specific executional elements. A wonderful example of this is the longtime partnership of Barclays and the Champions League (arguably the most important soccer league in the world): mention one to someone in the UK and the other invariably comes to mind. This powerful reinforcement doesn’t happen by accident, but is the result of careful planning and coordination over an extended period.

PLAN, EXECUTE, MEASURE, COURSE-CORRECT.

This is the classic cycle for improving any sort of marketing program. But are Sponsorships measurable?

Measuring a Sponsorship is not a cookie-cutter procedure. Unlike advertising, which has standardized, easy-to-obtain measurements such as impressions or clicks, Sponsorship elements can involve signage and mentions in-venue, branding on player jerseys, vehicles, or other paraphernalia , player/performer endorsements, inclusion of the brand in the sponsorship property’s own advertising, website or joint promotional events, and Sponsorship-specific ads run by the brand,  not to mention a host of in-venue activities such as hospitality.

The key to our success in measuring Sponsorships has been to understand how the sponsorship program and the brand’s consumers interact. The first step is usually an in-depth discussion with the client about the key elements and objectives of the program, which consumers are being targeted, and what messaging they are receiving. We also find that reading the actual Sponsorship contracts is often key to developing a useful modeling dataset.

Just as Sponsorship data is not cookie-cutter, neither is the model. There is a natural tension between the desire of data scientists to standardize modeling methodology and the creative impulses of marketers working on Sponsorship programs to create innovative programs that will attract and excite consumers.  Our experience has been that a model must be flexible enough to handle new marketing elements if it is going to reflect the true impact of a Sponsorship program. This is especially true when trying to evaluate the individual program components, to know which are doing the “heavy lifting” and which are simply wasting money.

Summary

Does my sponsorship program pay off? Measure it! As the Fortune 500 company sponsoring the PGA tournament in Hawaii found out, Sponsorship can actually be a highly cost-effective way of driving the business, and a consistent program of innovation and measurement can build a long-lasting bond with your brand.

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—Simon Dratfield