• 
  
  
  
  
• Exclusive in-house briefings for R&D Initiative members.
  
  These allow teams to workshop results and what they mean for their business.
  
  To book your next in-house seminar, or for further information, contact Daniela Cavuoto.

We present all our major findings on:

1. Customer loyalty - what individuals say and do
2. Brand loyalty - loyalty metrics are predictable!
3. The importance of 100% loyal customers
4. Defection and acquisition

These findings come together in some surprising implications for marketing targets & strategy.

This briefing provides a very basic introduction to the 'Double Jeopardy' law, and the Dirichlet model of choice behaviour that describes loyalty patterns in many different markets. Dirichlet provides practical benchmarks and helps us understand why these patterns occur.

This session takes 2 hours plus discussion time.



In this popular seminar we look seriously at some of the assumptions of modern marketing. The research results & their implications are surprising.

Do brands sell to segments ?
How much should we concentrate on our best customers ?
Retention vs Acquisition - which is really cheaper ?
Cross selling - how much is reasonable to expect ?
Myths of CRM & Database marketing
80/20



A special preview of the forthcoming report.

In an era of accountability & media fragmentation some targeting makes sense, but like adding salt to a dish, too much targeting can undo the good.

And it's easy to get targeting wrong. We show that counter to widespread belief the statement that "targeting is more effective than mass marketing" is not automatically true - in theory or in practice. Indeed in real-world practice it very often turns out to be false.

We reveal the little known traps of targeting - and provide guidelines for getting targeting right.



Real results documenting how brands grow & decline. The implications of a great practical value for those who plan for growth.

Landmark results that show:
What happens to loyalty (& other metrics) when brands grow or die ?
How does churn (defection & acquisition) affect growth ?
How fast do new brands build loyalty ?



A marketer not knowing about Double Jeopardy has been likened to an engineer not having heard of Newton's laws of motion – or gravity even ! Yet textbooks don't cover it, or get it wrong. This briefing addresses this gap.

Smaller market share brands are bought by far fewer buyers in any time period, and these buyers are a little less loyal (in both behaviours and attitudes). This near universal 'double jeopardy' pattern gives meaning to many marketing metrics.

This briefing explains why Double Jeopardy occurs, what it really means, and the practical marketing implications and applications. It is very important for understanding how to deliver growth.



What sort of customer buys our brand ?
And how are they different from the customers of other brands ?

This briefing covers award winning research, showing you what you customer base should be expected to look like. Essential knowledge for the correct interpretation of segmentation studies.

And important implications for marketing and advertising.



Do buyers attribute personality traits to brands?
How much do personality traits vary between brands?
Does brand personality matter?
How stable are personality traits over time ?

Brand personality is now a popular tool for creating brand identity.   Our R&D provides serious empirical research on this hot topic, with some exciting & useful findings.



While much has been written on differentiation but there has been little fundamental empirical research.

In this briefing we address this gap, and answer some important questions:

Do buyers see the brand they buy as differentiated?
Do more successful brands have unique qualities (ie qualities associated only with them not competitors)?
How does differentiation relate to brand performance?
Do markets vary in differention levels ?

The findings are provocative, refreshingly clear, and important – for advertising, brand strategy and how marketers should be appraised.



This seminar is for those involved in decisions about branding and communication content decisions.

It shows the extent to which brands are considered differentiated by their buyers
Explains what distinctiveness is, and why it is a desirable strategy... and how it differs from differentiation
Discusses, with case studies, how distinctiveness works



Competing brands vary considerably in market share (why ?), yet comparatively little in loyalty (why ?).

Do emotional bonds to brands matter ?
How do consumers use brands ?
What does good branding really look like?
And what does this mean for advertising and media strategy?

We show why branding matters - but not for the reasons taught at business school, nor for the reasons advertising agencies pronounce.



Making your brand distinctive, easily noticed is essential. The same applies to your advertising; it has to be well branded, distinctive, and unmistakably yours.

This special preview briefing gives our early findings on what makes good branding, and how to measure it - for advertising & packaging.

Includes empirical results on the ad likeability - correct branding relationship.



Contemporary marketing theory downplays the importance of awareness, and focuses on brand attitude/evaluation. We turn this thinking upside down, put simply as marketers we got awareness wrong for decades. This briefing presents a whole new world view and:

what we mean by 'salience' - not awareness, not 'top of mind', not attitude
we show why brand salience matters so much
and how it explains patterns in loyalty metrics & brand buying
and how it can be measured

This leads to practical guidelines for advertising, and advertising testing.



Who competes with whom ?
How do brands really compete in real world markets ?
Which brands will you gain or lose most customers to ?
Brand segmentation

This briefing shows how to predict which other brands your customers will buy. It provides benchmarks for 'cannibalisation' (eg for brand extension and new brand launches) and for sharing customers.



This briefing draws on discoveries about buyer behaviour and brand performance.

Why advertising is needed
Persuasion or Creative Publicity
What advertising tries to do - TV, print, and www

Implications for how to advertise, how much and when.



Much advertising produces little in the way of sales uplifts - even when it is producing sales. We explain why, and show how the 'single source method' can reveal which ads are having sales effects and which are not.

A special preview of the our report documenting the tremendous promise of single-source analysis. And what has been learnt from single source over the past 3 decades.



This briefing covers a variety of pricing issues that the R&D Initiative has investigated.

We show predictable patterns concerning the impact of price changes on sales. Price elasticity, the usual measure of how much a brand's sales change with a change in price, is not fixed for a brand, but varies with circumstances. Our large-scale experimental work identifies factors that lead consistently to bigger and smaller elasticities.

We look at both "real" price changes and price promotions.

Academic research on pricing has shown a wide range of confusing results. But recent R&D has discovered patterns in the sales reactions to both price promotions and price changes in general.

How important is price when buyers buy ?
What do price promotions do ?
Who buys on special ?
How to predict price elasticities
The (now known) conditions which affect reactions to price



What can we expect from a loyalty program ?
Do loyalty programs enhance loyalty ?
Do price promotions attract new customers ?
Do price promotions erode loyalty ?

We give answers to the above questions and show how loyalty programs and price promotions affect buying behaviour.



Firms typically spend considerable funds, and management time tracking customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality. But how should this information be interpreted ? What targets are reasonable to aim for ? This research provides grounded benchmarks that give context and meaning to satisfaction data.

We answer questions like:

Is my satisfaction score high, low, or normal ?
Should I benchmark against competitors or firms in other industries ?
Does the data collection method affect results ? Is this predictable ?
How is satisfaction linked to loyalty ?

This briefing is demolishes many of the myths surrounding this area.



What attitudes really reveal
What is our brand tracking really telling us ?
How to predict future behaviour
What is image tracking and perceptual mapping good for ?

We show some very surprising, and little known, facts about attitudes. And discuss the implications for market research, advertising, and marketing objectives in general.



This briefing looks at the increasing concentration of retail, particularly in the grocery trade. Building on our R&D concerning buyer behaviour and media consumption we examine the degree of power retailers have, and whether media fragmentation has reduced the power of national brands.

In short, we offer a realistic picture of how to live with and protect your brand against retailer power.



Who buys private labels ?
Is there loyalty to private labels...and national brands ?
Which brands do they compete with ?
How do they compete ?
How are premium private labels changing things ?

This briefing presents our R&D on private label buying, along with managerial implications.



- what to measure
- marketing metrics for products and services
- how to give metrics context and meaning
- Double Jeopardy, Duplication of Purchase law, the Dirichlet model

We explain how to get real value and meaning out of your data.
And how to avoid the traps of modern statistical modelling.

We introduce simple techniques, using tables and graphs, to help you see for yourself and communicate to senior management.



Cable and Digital TV has dramatically changed the number of channels many households have access to. Also the nature of TV channels has changed qualitatively.

Our R&D looks at patterns of viewing amongst households that have access to many channels. We examine channel loyalty and whether fragmentation has led to segmentation.



Typically consumer brand companies spend on media an amount equivalent to their entire annual profits. Excitingly, there is tremendous opportunity for efficiency & effectiveness gains.

This special preview briefing is based on a foundation study interviewing advertisers, and advertising & media agencies on how they actually buy & plan media strategy.

This briefing goes on to covers our top priority media questions, with preliminary findings & insights.

Topics include reach vs frequency, clutter effects, how people consume multiple media, measuring direct advertising sales effects, predicting TV ratings.



Do consumers produce more positive or negative word of mouth (WOM)?
Does this vary by category?
Is there a segment prone to give WOM? Are they older? younger? brand 'loyals' or 'switchers' ?
Which really has more impact - positive or negative WOM ?

This briefing provides startling new research, as well as practical suggestions for managing WOM.



Being able to predict if your ad campaign is likely to be successful is a useful skill to have. In this seminar we look at:

What is pre-testing? Is it predictive? Diagnostic? Both?
How is it done - what are your options?
What is known about pre-testing effectiveness?

Given the empirical results suggesting Ad Likeability is an effective predictor of sales we specifically examine:
What is likeability? What makes an ad likeable?
How do you measure likeability?
What should you expect in terms of likeability levels? Will this vary for brand users versus non-users?
Pre-v Post test effectiveness measure.

The results will broaden your perspective on what makes an ad likeable (it doesn't have to be humour). And maybe change the way you pre-test or use benchmarks to judge ad effectiveness.



This presentation draws out many of the implications (the do's and don'ts) of the R&D Initiative findings to date.

Normally we talk about a finding and then its implication. This briefing turns things right around and focuses on immediately on practical strategic directions.

It covers things like what we think people should measure and worry about in brand (health, equity etc) tracking. What directions to give to the ad agency. How to evaluate marketing communications. Who to target. etc etc.

It's designed to be practical, upbeat and positive.

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© 2005 Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia