New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms was recommended to me by a friend of mine who works with a number of campaigning organisations. It took four years after it was published for me to take it down from the shelf and get stuck in.
Since then, we have had the Hong Kong protests, January 6 disturbances in the US Capitol building where both of their legislative houses operate from. We’ve also had movements around cryptocurrency and the infamous OneCoin scam.
The book promises to reveal:
How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World – and How to Make It Work for You
Front cover of New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Jeremy Heimans
Heimans is an ex-McKinsey consultant who now runs a social impact agency called Purpose. So one could think that New Power is basically part of Heiman’s marketing strategy. Make of that what you will.
Henry Timms
Timms heads up the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and has been heavily involved in promoting philanthropic donations.
Old Power and New Power
Heimans and Timms provide a model for what they think old power is. A top down power structure, think everything from mainstream advertising, government responses to the COVID-19 epidemic, authoritarian regimes like China’s crushing of dissent or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
By comparison, new power is participatory in nature and more of a peer to peer relationship. Examples include memes, crypto bros, the leaderless movement that fuelled the 2019 Hong Kong protests, support for populism and ISIS. ISIS recruitment is actually used as an example in the book.
How power works in our hyperconnected world
Heimans and Timms provide an analysis on the general thinking behind how campaigning works in a way that would be most familiar to anyone who has run a social media marketing campaign. I would describe it as a primer for typical corporate management types.
How to make it work for you
I personally think that this is where the book falls down. New Power isn’t replicable in the same way that a business process rengineering exercise might be. Sometimes these things take off, sometimes they don’t. They talk about some of the factors in the book, but movements often need a catalysing event like the recent apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang that sparked anti-zero COVID lockdown protests in China.
You can try and create a catalysing event, but too often it’s astro-turfing that no one ever sees, particularly if you are relying on a dominant platform algorithm. Your new power is actually reliant on old power held by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. Instead these platforms have been successfully mastered by authoritarian regimes including the Chinese government who manage to demonetise and have content taken down on western platforms.
Secondly, the authors try to claim showing a bit of moxie is new power. The example they give is a junior employee speaking to a senior executive that they manage to meet by chance.
Finally, the book lacks the intellectual rigour and scientific method of Mark Ritson or Byron Sharp’s work, instead relying anecdotal evidence, similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s body of work or Paul Polman’s Net Positive.
So, should you buy this book?
If you like TED talks model of learning a little bit about a lot of things and are reading for your own personal interest or to get a high level understanding of campaigning organisations might work, buy New Power. If you are thinking about changing your business into a more purposeful organisation, read this first instead (and its free).
You you can find out more about New Powerhere, find the rest of my book reviews here, and the books that I find most useful here.
For senior marketers who came up with a Jack Welsh influenced shareholder value focus, brand purpose was a seductive concept for otherwise empty and meaningless careers that could even be considered ‘bullshit jobs‘. Brand purpose campaigns are not coming from the need of consumers mostly but from the desire of marketeers to do something good of their day, of achieving something more than just selling a humdrum product.
In essence it is the same drive that motivated the apochrical question from Steve Jobs to future Apple CEO John Sculley
Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?
John Sculley recalling Steve Jobs pitch on a documentary profile of Jobs that was part of the Bloomberg Game Changers series.
In recent years over 90 percent of Cannes Lions winners were found to focus on brand purpose. In 2016, the Singapore office of advertising agency Grey created a fake brand purpose campaign for Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) designed to dupe consumers and award judges. The I Sea app was supposed to crowdsource help to spot refugees, but it was built on fake data.
Brand promise
Historically the focus has been on the brand promise – the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service. An example of this would be First Direct – a branchless bank providing its services by telephone and internet instead. It is a retail bank division of HSBC that was founded back in 1989.
Brand purpose, goes way beyond brand promise and is is the brand’s reason for being beyond making money, sales or profit – it’s a framework that guides business decisions and thought processes. A brand purpose is supposed to connect with consumers at a more emotional level. It is why the brand exists and should guide the brand’s mission that differentiates it from others.
By 2014 you had marketing royalty like David Aaker endorsing brand purpose, or as he called it Higher Purpose. It was further popularised in management by the 2017 publication of The Guiding Purpose Strategy: A Navigational Code for Growth is a book by Markus Kramer and Tofig Huseynzade. Kramer and Huseynzade looked at purpose at an organisational level and how it should be brought to life through brand management.
Corporate and social responsibility (CSR) is not brand purpose
It is distinct from earlier concepts like CSR or corporate responsibility as US organisations often prefer to say. The easiest way to demonstrate this is by example. One of my first clients was Verizon Wireless the US mobile carrier. They used to donate pre-used cellphones, together with free services to charitable organisations like women’s shelters in the New Jersey area where they were headquartered. While they meant well, this clearly wasn’t the key focus of their business, but did make use of edge effects brought about by customers upgrading their phones.
I helped them template this activity in markets were they had an international presence at the time:
Czech Republic
Greece
Indonesia
Italy
Mexico
Slovakia
The role of CSR can be for many reasons:
Being a good corporate citizen
Being closer to the community to better understand the environment
The act as a counterweight to negate negative effects of having the business in the area. A classic example of this would be education and health clinics for communities where there is oil drilling
Is brand purpose effective?
We know that purpose lead marketing is 30% less effective than non purpose campaigns according to Peter Field, so purpose shouldn’t be seen as a money making decision. In fact, being prepared to forgo money if necessary is a hygiene factor in a brad purpose. Ethical behaviour won’t necessarily generate revenue.
Brand purpose is most likely to demonstrate effectiveness internally, where it can get people to do more for a company they believe in and matches a set of internalised values. Internal altruism and work life are aligned – they aren’t working in a bullshit job.
Risk management
Business risk management has a number of challenges with brand purpose. The moral challenges and perceived required speed of reaction poses problems for brand purpose risk.
Glocal nature of purpose
There have been a procession of (foreign) multinational companies that have committed costly perceived slights in China. Western businesses such as Nike have generally erred on the side of a Chinese brand purpose for profit and a perceived lower risk of reaction from western customers. For example Nike Withdraws Products After Brand Partner Vexed China for Supporting HK | Jing Daily or how western brands responded to China’s Xinjiang boycotts including concealing past corporate statements or flip-flopping like Fila, H&M and Hugo Boss.
TL;DR – brands are most afraid of offending: Chinese consumers > western consumers > developing world consumers – though this may change with de-globalisation.
Bringing a knife to a gun flight
The Unilever board have been pummelled by shareholder reactions to its brand purpose driven approach
Unilever seems to be labouring under the weight of a management which is obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business. The most obvious manifestation of this is the public spat it has become embroiled in over the refusal to supply Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the West Bank. However, we think there are far more ludicrous examples which illustrate the problem. A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot. The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913 so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert — salads and sandwiches).
Fundsmith is one of the top ten largest shareholders in Unilever at the time. This then set the tone for activist investor Nelson Peltz to secure a seat on the company board
Having a position
Having a position is a risk in itself. Some brands notably Dunkin Donuts Refuses to Get Woke: ‘We Are Not Starbucks’ just focus on their brand promise. They keep consumer expectations realistically low. Contrast this with Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s who took a position on the Palestine question and the invasion of Ukraine. In the case of Israel, Ben & Jerry’s independent board has taken Unilever to court over an attempt to stop sales inside Israel.
Purposeful consumer behaviour
Consumers generally have good intentions. They mostly consider themselves charitable, an example of the Lake Wobegon effect named after the fictional town featured on the US radio show A Prairie Home Companion. In reality, only 20-25 percent of consumers donate to charity. Consumers green tendencies seem to vary with the state of economy according to longitudinal research conducted by Gallup, regardless of their generation. Price is still the key consideration for consumers, but brand purpose can increased the perceived benefit for a consumer when considering similarly priced products.
Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor
Purpose is perceived as being of key importance to consumers because of misinterpretation of of market research and poor research design such as making a false association between the correlation of successful brands and assuming purpose as the causality.
Consumers don’t think every issue have the same weight, they are likely to feel more personally connected to health, economic and societal issues. Political, business or legal issues of brand companies are considered to be ‘hygiene’ factors.
Purpose-washing
One of the key challenges with brand purpose is that many brands have approached in a superficial manner at best. Superficiality might be one of perspective, for instance, Nike supported Colin Kaepernick and other progressive causes, but also funded right-wing Republican Party politicians. Progressive leaning consumers may feel betrayed or gaslit.
Les Binet of Adam and Eve outlined a good test of brand purpose
Purpose bullshit detector. Ok, you have a brilliant new purpose drive marketing initiative.
1) Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
2) Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.
Purpose-washing isn’t new and can see its roots in the ‘greenwashing’ of the mid-1980s where companies claimed ‘green behaviours’ that were designed to cut costs, or create the illusion of caring for the environment.
Brand purpose examples
Brand purpose examples become difficult. Patagonia would be amongst the first brands that would be used as an example. It’s an unusual company that inspired other brands like Warby Parker and Toms. Things start to fall down when you look at large corporates.
PepsiCo tried to pivot towards nutrition as a brand strategy and purpose focus in the early 2010s under then CEO Indra Nooyi, yet still relies on sugar filled drinks for its business.
I worked at Unilever on Family Brands, what people in the UK would know as Flora margarine, when the company mandated that every brand had to ‘find its brand purpose’. Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ success sparked a change over at Unilever.
Dove’s brand vision / purpose is interesting because it came out of a consumer insight. After surveying 3,000 women across 10 countries the brand team found only 4% considered themselves beautiful. Further research found that a majority of girls had anxiety about how they looked.
We believe beauty should be a source of confidence, and not anxiety. That’s why we are here to help women everywhere develop a positive relationship with the way they look, helping them raise their self-esteem and realise their full potential.
Note that while Dove has a successful men’s range of products, men and boys self esteem or confidence isn’t a concern of Dove’s brand purpose despite academic research suggesting similar issues.
Then CEO Paul Polman focused Unilever on its Sustainable Living Plan and brand purpose was at the centre of it.
Those that didn’t have one were to be sold off. We focused the flora relaunch around being ‘Powered by Plants’. The reality is that I was working on a product known by different brands in much of the 23 or so countries that it was sold in. In the UK, there was the health aspects of Flora versus butter and the vegan credentials. In Kenya and other parts of Africa it was about nutrition for children in the family and the superior shelf life compared to butter. Despite its brand purpose, yellow fats were perceived to be a lower growth sector and the business spun off to Upfield. Money trumped purpose, although Polman has continued to advocate for a change in business practices with his book Net Positive.
Unilever has stumbled with its brand purpose focus, being too focused on it for active investors and insufficiently focused on it in the eyes of other stakeholders, including company insiders.
The pharmaceutical industry is beset with conflicting views regarding brand purpose. The companies will view their products has having a live changing or life saving brand purpose, where as external views will be more concerned about predatory pricing and the non-inclusive access that is a side effect. For instance, one in five people with diabetes in the US have rationed their insulin usage due to high costs.
Secondly you had lifestyle medicines, notably Pfizer’s Viagra, but still no breakthrough AIDS vaccine. Finally there was the exploitative nature of Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson providing opioids for pain relief that drove a crisis in addiction.
Many commentators would cite Nike but the examples are problematic:
Their FlyEase design approach that enables disabled people to participate in sports, is a great example of accessible design. But disabled customers have found them hard to obtain as they flew off the shelf. Accessible design benefits able-bodied consumers too
Plus size activewear could be just about capitalising on the obesity epidemic, rather than truly inclusive sports participation
Supporting Colin Kaepernick and taking the knee for racial justice is at odds with other Nike behaviours including the nature of their supply chain. While anti-sweatshop campaign dented Nike’s reputation in the 1990s, it still has appalling labour conditions today.
Brand purpose thinking from academia and the advertising industry
Articles like this one in AdAge have helped to drive the brand purpose movement: Gen Z doesn’t want to buy your brand, they want to join it | AdAge – This group isn’t waiting for brands to lead on issues. Instead, they’re leading. Since movements rarely come with a business case or cost-benefit analysis, marketers must consider how they can partner with Gen Z to become more involved and deliver on the promise of purpose (paywall)
Brands take note: The purpose of purpose is purpose – Most of the data used to support the case for brand purpose is verbal, spoken data which lays itself open to the ‘intention-action gap’ that exists between what people say they will do and what actually transpires. That gap is particularly large with topics like brand purpose because social desirability bias leads respondents to, knowingly or unknowingly, overclaim the importance of purpose in their purchase decisions in order to look less like a wanker. But there is a bigger, more pressing question now being asked of brand purpose. As we enter a recession, we know – from bitter past experience – that customers will change their behaviour in the tricky months ahead. In May, Kantar was already showing a significant proportion of the market (albeit, again, with spoken rather than derived data) switching to lower priced options. Such moves are not a uniform downgrade of every brand for a cheaper alternative. In order to justify the continued purchase of some premium brands that are deemed different and meaningful enough to retain their place, customers trade down on weaker, less essential fare – Mark Ritson takes a pragmatic view on brand purpose in this Marketing Week op-ed. Meanwhile Byron Sharp over at the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science has even greater concern about brand purpose: Purpose could be ‘the death of brands’, warns Byron Sharp
The Future of Purpose – TrendWatching – Trendwatching’s take fits in with Richard Shotton’s view …in 2020, consumers will embrace businesses that BREAK the CODE of the brand DNA or their entire industry in the name of a more ethical or sustainable consumerism.
Think a superband that doesn’t tour, a fashion magazine with no photoshoots, or an airline that tells passengers to fly less (see innovation examples below).
Yes, this is a highly actionable trend, and a tactical chance to prove to consumers that you really get the scale of the challenge ahead. But it’s being driven by deep shifts in the nature of status, innovation and transparency…
Unconsumed Status. Status has always been a key driver of consumption behaviors. But via rising awareness of social and environmental damages, the nature of consumer status is changing radically. That means rising numbers fulfilling their status quest by seeking out new brands and new modes of consumption that reimagine, or even invert, old attitudes and priorities.
Clean Slate Mindset. Today, purpose-driven insurgents can become mega-brands that shake the mainstream faster than ever. Tesla is rewriting the rules of automotive; Impossible Burger those of meat. That’s driving expectations across all industries that legacy codes can and must be rewritten in the name of a better consumerism.
I worked peripherally on And1 early on in my career, but it didn’t catch fire in Europe than it did in the US. I hadn’t known the full extent of the buzz marketing campaign that backed up the brand in the US. Here’s the early versions of their ‘mix tapes’, which did for street football what skate videos did for skateboarding in the 1980s. They blew up street basketball in the US, in a similar way to the X Games blowing up extreme sports. ESPN got on board with a sports related reality TV show with players competing for an And1 team contract.
But all the buzz marketing didn’t get the cut through that Wieden + Kennedy’s Freestyle TV advert did, effectively depositioning And1 from its street ball territory. Then there was a tie-up show on MTV2 that was similar to the And1 | ESPN show of the previous year. The lesson I took away from And1 was that product and reach both matter. Nike could buy reach and And1 didn’t have any product of note after the Tai Chi.
Opinion: Intel’s ‘smart capital’ is a warning from the past | eeNews Europe – the author considers the rise of private equity to fund new silicon fabs as a warning of peak semiconductors. Similar things happened in the 1980s and 1990s when large businesses like Coca-Cola helped fund manufacturing facilities. The key difference this time is how globalisation has been thrown into reverse by ‘Made in China 2025’ and hostile moves against Taiwan
Loss of Chinese tourists forces Europe’s luxury retailers to rethink | Financial Times – A recent surge in Middle Eastern tourists, as well as US visitors buoyed by the strong dollar, has helped fill stores. Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, said the lack of Chinese tourists left the many luxury retailers that relied heavily on them with “a huge feeling of loss”, but had spurred “a huge effort to diversify”. Retailers have personalised their services. During Europe’s Covid lockdowns, shop assistants contacted customers via WhatsApp with tailor-made recommendations. Berg sees a “possible return to the old idea of service and store management from the 1990s, the little black book with all the customers’ addresses and preferences in it”. “You have to do much more to attract local customers,” Berg said. “They can come back, they have more time to spend, versus an international customer that was determined and straightforward.” – A few thoughts on this: The article asserts that Chinese tourists are straightforward and not picky. I think Chinese tourists are very picky by comparison, although the diagou’s supplying lower tier cities or buying to order might appear to be ‘luxury hoovers’. Secondly, luxury brands have treated non-Chinese customers abysmally (in particular the watch makers like Rolex and their retail partners like the Watches of Switzerland group) and they deserve all the problems that they get. Only focusing on the Chinese market has allowed the Chinese customers to blow up the secondary market. A straw poll of people that I know who have a Rolex from the past 10 years or so:
All of them had to buy their watch on the secondary market
About 80 percent of them had original warranty cards with Chinese family names, which is far higher than the 30 to 40 percent share that Chinese consumers make of the global luxury market
Finally, I don’t see the market coming back in the same way given Xi Jingping’s focus on common prosperity which will make luxury consumption increasingly problematic.
This New Study Reveals How Brand Loyalty is On the Decline / Digital Information World – I see this as more indicative of economic recession rather than any major change. Gallup showed that traits such as preference for green products decline in a recessionary environment, it would make sense if brand loyalty took a similar battering in favour of private label brands and substitute products
Spanx commits to all-female board after Blackstone investment — Quartz – More than a quarter of board seats in the Russell 3000 Index belonged to women during the last quarter, compared to 15.1% just five years ago, according the corporate leadership research firm Equilar. Still, just 84 of these boards had achieved gender parity, meaning that they were represented by 50% women. And companies still struggle to achieve adequate racial and LGBTQ representation on their boards as well. Justine Smyth, chair of the New Zealand telecommunications company Spark, has suggested that while the first “diverse” appointees on company boards may feel like tokenism, those members can help advocate for change once they are given decision-making power – Spanx is an American underwear company that does foundation garments to make the wearer appear thinner. Spanx innovated around testing with real people, having multiple sizes and packaging colours that increased brand salience. The back story of Spanx is similar to the ‘founder in a garage’ story that was the starting point of many Silicon Valley firms. Spanx is a private company. It is interesting that Spanx are taking private equity money from Blackstone rather than going public. Will we get to a situation in the future where all-women boards like Spanx come under the kind of pressure that all-men boards come under now? If we got to that stage, then we’d have equality. I think that will be a while.
Microsoft Executives Told Bill Gates to Stop Emailing a Female Staffer Years Ago – WSJ – interesting that we haven’t seen this kind of expose about Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs. Secondly, there is the timing with Mr Gates’ divorce. Finally, all of the money and hard work to reinvent Mr Gates as a philanthropist looks as if its becoming undone. While Mr Gates
The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy
Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong – I suspect that this is designed to do a few things over time.
Allows Chinese citizens on the mainland access to more ways to do investments, whilst still being in full view of the Chinese government.
It allows the Chinese government to expand ‘capture’ of western financial institutions
It will allow China to put pressure on VIEs ran out of the likes of the British Virgin Island and similar territories out of scrutiny
How Hong Kong’s Elite Turned on Democracy – The Atlantic – there is something performative about the face and patriotism on display that I suspect may be driven less by a drive to get on and more by the fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones if they didn’t
Apple’s privacy changes create windfall for its own advertising business | Financial Times – “Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.” Apple said its privacy features were designed to protect users. “The technologies are part of one comprehensive system designed to help developers implement safe advertising practices and protect users — not to advantage Apple.” – this has my spidey sense tingling right now
What blockbuster? China spurns Hollywood’s advances | Financial Times – “If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators,” said Aynne Kokas, the author of Hollywood Made in China and a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that’s possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective.”
Alibaba Faces New Threat: an Evolving Chinese Shopper – WSJ – consumers have started to embrace new ways of shopping that favor browsing and interaction over targeted product searches. That trend has left Alibaba playing catch-up in some areas, and competitors have used the shift to gain a foothold in the world’s largest online retail market. Alibaba remains the leading platform in online shopping, but its share of China’s retail e-commerce market has fallen to a projected 51% in 2021 from 78% in 2015, according to research firm eMarketer. Interesting that WeChat, BilliBilli, Pinduoduo and Douyin are claiming part of the e-commerce pie. What this article doesn’t cover is the relative importance by comparison of O2O (offline to online) (paywall)
Fear of finding out was how Paul Holmes characterised marketing as a discipline and its approach to return on investment. This was an article that was originally published in 2019, but was going around in circles that I keep an eye on online recently.
The article characterised marketing in this way:
Marketing and public relations continue to focus on reach and awareness. Is that because they’re afraid of finding out whether they really make a difference?
The PR Industry’s FOFO Problem | Provoke Media
What do marketers actually focus on?
According to Nielsen:
Please rank each of the following marketing objectives for your business from most important to least important. Chart shows the percentage of respondents who picked that objective as their No. 1 priority. Source: 2021 Nielsen Marketing Report: Era of Adaptation.
Looking at those marketing objectives ROI and business impact are a key consideration embodied in both customer acquisition and brand awareness.
Long and short term goals
In order to understand marketing one has to understand that marketing provides short term benefits and long term benefits. Certain techniques skew towards a short term delivery and others deliver over the long term. The approach mentioned in Fear of Finding Out was very skewed to short term techniques.
That means that the return on investment timeframes could be very different. The longer the time frame that you are measuring the full return on investment, the harder it is prove it.
But surely you want things to work fast? True. But what if there are marketing techniques that keep on giving? Think about advertising jingles that stick in your head. They have mental availability decades after you’ve heard them.
In How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp, he distills down the findings from decades of empirical research into marketing. Two of the most important factors are mental availability and brand salience.
Mental availability is the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations. It depends on the quality and quantity of memory structures related to the brand.
It is different from brand awareness or brand recall because it is situational in nature and thus hard to measure, a notable exception would be through observational research in retail environments. Brand awareness and consideration are two relatively indicative proxy measures for mental availability.
Here’s what research firm Nielsen had to say about those proxy measures:
Nielsen research shows that a 1-point gain in brand metrics (e.g., awareness and consideration) drives a 1% increase in sales. Importantly, upper-funnel efforts also generate an array of ancillary benefits that can drive more effective sales activations—and not just for consumables. For example, Nielsen recently measured how effective a financial services company’s marketing efforts were at driving sales across approximately 20 markets and found that the correlation between the upper funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency was exceptionally strong (0.73).
Long-Term Business Vitality Should Outweigh Short-Term Sales Gains by By Cara Kantrowitz, Vice President of Solutions Consulting, Nielsen Research
A second aspect is brand salience which is how distinctive a brand is. This again helps with the memory structures that relate to a brand.
You might remember TikTok memes for a few months?
Go News India
What is the mental availability created by all but the most persistent Facebook ads? What’s the mental availability of a Google ad?
How are you measuring and driving brand salience for your company? Because that will affect sales further down the funnel.
For business to business audiences, which are covered in Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk’s How Brands Grow part two – the results are very similar.
The now bias
The now bias can be seen in the finding of the research cited by Holmes. The responses (and probably the question design that elicited them) are very focused on the bottom part of the marketing funnel / sales support.
Among the other troubling findings of Proof’s research, which included more than 400 senior business leaders in 160 key Fortune 1000 C-suites:
94% reported that they had little or no reliable understanding of the quantifiable business value actually delivered by marketing;
97% said they had little or no idea how much money they should be investing in marketing and PR;
72% said that they expected that 2019 marketing budgets would be cut by 10% or more.
Says Mark Stouse, Proof founder and a veteran of marketing and communications roles at BMC Software, Honeywell, and HP: “Many of the C-suite respondents went out of their way to say that their frustration did not stem from a lack of belief in marketing’s impact, but rather the failure of their marketing teams to embrace full accountability for ROI and business value.”
This doesn’t ring true based on research I have seen from Nielsen:
Please rate the importance of each of the following metrics / measurement capabilities to your organization. Chart shows to p-2 (very important and extremely important) on a 5-point scale. Source: 2021 Nielsen Marketing Report: Era of Adaptation
Research by Ebquity suggests the marketers are focused on ROI. You can get the full research here.
Marketers also have a now bias, that’s due to astonishing levels of CMO turnover in many organisations that’s only increasing over time.
The now bias creates revenue opportunities for agencies, with a temptation to do what’s right for them rather than their clients. ‘The quantifiable business value’ are likely to be getting worse. While client budgets are stagnant, media buying agencies are taking more of the money on online advertising (7 – 10 per cent commission, compared to 3 per cent on other media channels).
So there is a natural business incentive for them to lean into ‘business transformation’ / ‘digital disruption’ narratives popular in board rooms. Digital has its place, but it might not be the panacea that you’re looking for. I say that not as a digital cynic, but as a seasoned digital focused strategist, which means doing the research and recommending the right media for the right job.
Depending how you look at media channels some are better than others.
So how is the now bias exhibited by the C-suite? In business value they don’t think about brand building. Yet businesses are quite happy to factor in brand value when thinking about the value of goodwill on the balance sheet of their accounts.
The PR Industry’s FOFO Problem – Marketing and public relations continue to focus on reach and awareness. Is that because they’re afraid of finding out whether they really make a difference?
