Retail media, brand awareness and advertising performance?

Is brand awareness a valid measure of advertising performance?

And should anyone involved with retail media care?

As can be seen from the post on the Reeves Fallacy and the comments it generated, the validity of measuring brand awareness as an evaluation of advertising effectiveness is a hot topic. (Well if two comments make something ‘hot.’)

But you only need to read most issues of Admap to see that indeed it is a hot topic. As Roderick White writes in the Feb 2008 issue, ‘advertising agencies, in particular, have always tended to shy away from trying to tie their contribution to a business to the ultimate bottom line, which is where CEOs would like to focus: with a certain amount of justification, they have argued that there are too many outside factors that can affect a brand’s performance to attempt to look beyond what are recognisably advertising effects: awareness, brand reputation, intention to purchase, for example.

The importance of brand awareness is rooted in the ‘hierarchy of effects’ theory (a theory that’s been formalised for decades and has taken a number of reiterations but all along the same lines):

Daniel Starch, 1923: 'To be effective, an advertisement must be . . .seen - read - believed - remembered - acted upon'

E.K. Strong , 1925: 'AIDA': attention - interest - desire - action

Robert C. Lavidge and G.A. Steiner, 1961: 'Hierarchy of Effects': awareness - knowledge - liking - preference - conviction - action.

Russell H. COLLEY, 1961: 'DAGMAR': unawareness - awareness - comprehension - conviction - action.

(Source: http://www.westburnpublishers.com/marketing-dictionary/h/hierarchy-of-effects.aspx)

There seems to be some irrefutable logic here. After all, if a consumer is unaware of a brand how on earth can it be considered and then bought. ‘If you don’t know what you don’t know….’ well perhaps we won’t get diverted down there but…?

Academics such as Palda (Journal of Marketing Research, Feb 1966) and more recently Ehrenberg have criticised the model on such grounds that there is no such linear progression; that consumers may jump or miss out steps or, for example, that changes in attitude and awareness may follow rather than precede purchase (impulse purchase being a cited case.) Neither has been able to correlate the model to sales (and that after all is the end result of the model). Conversely, MacDonald and Sharp in 2000 concluded: brand awareness differentials seem to be a powerful influence on brand choice in a repeat purchase consumer product context. ‘Consumers,’ they say, ‘show a strong tendency to use awareness as a heuristic and show a degree of inertia in changing from the habit of using this heuristic.’

In fairness: it would best be said that the case isn’t proven either way.

Why those in retail media should care is that one reason why retail media is often not considered as part of the media plan (yes excuse the pun) is because there is scepticism among media planners that indeed retail media can contribute to the hierarchy of effects that most planners still rigidly adhere to. How can it help build my brand’s awareness they will argue?

But there is an interesting insight from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (Brand Salience. What it is and why it matters. Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp. March 2004). Here, it is argued that brand saliency does have an important part to play in the purchase decisions but that this is radically different from brand awareness. (Different because it is an infinitely more complex memory process than mere recall of a brand name.) One of their conclusions is that advertising should not be used primarily for persuasion but instead for publicity in order that to ‘put the spotlight on the brand and refresh the part of memory devoted to the brand.’

Would you be surprised therefore that this leads me to the inexorable conclusion that retail media can play a critical role in this process of refreshment, reminding the customer at precisely the right time that a brand exists.