24th of September 2018
Does a second brand aid advertising impact?
Marketers constantly seek new attention-grabbing advertising tactics. And for good reason, because each time an ad fails to capture the attention of potential buyers, precious advertising dollars are wasted.
One tactic is featuring two different brands in the same ad – the idea being that as buyers tend to notice their brand’s advertising, adding a second brand will increase the total number of brand users and therefore grab attention from more ad viewers. This article explores this assumption and suggests good practice for co-branding in advertising.
The natural physiological tendencies of our brains can both help and hinder marketers’ efforts. For example, the brain’s reticular activating system encourages us to pay attention to stimuli that are perceived as important and relevant to our lives. Say you adopt a puppy. Suddenly, you will start to notice all the other dogs around you. No, there hasn’t been a sudden influx of four-legged residents in your neighbourhood; you’re just a typical human ‘programmed’ to screen out the irrelevant and screen in the relevant. Transferring this to the marketing world, we see that people who have used a brand have a higher chance of tuning into that brand’s advertising than non-brand users. This is because the brains of shoppers who buy a brand perceive these ads as ‘relevant’, allowing them to filter through their brain’s screening mechanisms. In the marketing literature, this phenomenon is known as the ‘usage-bias effect’ and has been documented in many markets, categories and advertising memorability measures. The ubiquity of this known bias makes it a prime weapon in the fight for audience attention. If one brand gets more attention from its users, then surely pairing two brands together should attract attention from an even greater brand user pool, right?
In order to capitalise on the usage-bias effect, some marketers choose to feature a second brand in their advertising (e.g. through sponsorships, cause-related marketing or co-branding), often with the intent of both brands cutting through. For example, one of this year’s most talked about Super Bowl commercials was a 60-second ad depicting a friendly rivalry between Dorito’s Blaze and Mountain Dew Ice. The two brands (different categories but both owned by PepsiCo) joined forces in a rap battle featuring Missy Elliott and Morgan Freeman (Team Blaze) versus Game of Thrones’Peter Dinklage and Busta Rhymes (Team Ice).
With two brands in the same ad, the pool of naturally attentive viewers should increase, laying the foundations for other merits of a co-branding strategy. One of such benefits is being able to ‘borrow’ the mental associations of the second brand (e.g. youthful or contemporary). There are also economic benefits in promoting two brands for the price of one ad spot. But these benefits are only realised if, first, featuring two brands does increase attention to the advertisement, and, second, people do remember the two brands advertised. These two outcomes are often assumed, but rarely tested.
In the context of online banner advertisements, a team of marketing scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute explored whether consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands benefit from co-branding with a charity or a retailer. Dual-branded ads were compared with equivalent single-branded ads on two measures of attention, namely ad recognition and brand recall. We conducted experiments in three separate countries, with over 3,000 points of data in each country: the US (n = 3,015), the UK (n = 3,465) and Australia (n = 3,805).
Thirty-three individual brands (18 CPG brands, six charities and nine retailers) were matched up to create 54 brand pairs. The brands represented a range of product categories (e.g. Colgate, Kleenex, Special K, Pantene, Yoplait), cause types (e.g. RSPCA, Red Cross, Salvation Army, Cancer Council) and retail chains (e.g. Walgreens, Walmart, Sainsbury’s) operating in each respective market. The findings from the study led to five key insights:
The addition of a second brand does not increase attention to advertising
In this case, two was not better than one. Compared to single-brand advertising, co-branded advertising did not score higher on ad memorability. Rather, the presence of the second brand always had a neutral or negative effect. For example, oral care brand Aquafresh achieved 20% ad recognition shown alone, but when paired with charity brand Cancer Research UK or retailer brand Tesco, ad recognition dropped by four to six percentage points. These results are contrary to the assumed usage-bias effect, where reaching more collective brand users should lead to greater noticeability.
Users of both brands give greater attention, but users of one brand suffer
Delving deeper into the results for different usage groups helped us to understand why there was no lift in overall ad memorability. We found that there was actually a lift, but it was confined to the (typically small) subgroup of people that used both brands.
Compared with single-brand executions, the addition of a second brand had a negative effect on ad memorability for those who used only the primary brand (but not the secondary brand). This led to an overall ‘cancelling out’ effect, where the lower ad memorability of those who use only one brand mitigates the higher recall. Therefore, we see that the addition of a second brand has no positive effect on ad memorability at the aggregate level.
The addition of a second brand leads to lower brand memorability
In almost two-thirds of cases, brand recall was lower when two brands were present as opposed to one. In the remaining cases, the addition of the second brand had little to no effect on brand recall figures.
However, we also saw that when a second brand is added, fewer people retrieved either brand, and more people retrieved no brands. While it’s plausible to assume that one brand’s loss will be another brand’s gain, it is not the case here. Instead, the addition of a second brand resulted in more people stating ‘don’t know’ when asked which brands were shown in the ad. These results suggest an interference effect on memory, whereby when the cue (e.g. the ad) is linked to more than one item in memory (e.g. multiple brands), all items compete for retrieval, and all become harder to remember. In this case, neither brand benefits.
Only one brand (of the two) wins
When asked to recall which brand is featured in a given advertisement, retrieval of more than one brand was extremely low (<10%), even when the two present brands were given equal visual prominence within the ad. This challenges the assumption that individuals will register both brands, which is a necessary condition to form mental associations between the co-advertised brands.
While co-branded advertising is often used to publicise an alliance between two brands, these findings question the feasibility of achieving this in a single advertisement. Over time, this might be possible, but it would require that any alliances are communicated for a long time. Achieving the link with a single, once-off campaign appears unrealistic.
Own the context, own the brand retrieval
If only one brand wins, what can you do to make sure it’s your brand? We found that when a brand owns the creative context, it is also more likely to own the memories (e.g. promoting M&M’s in environments related to eating chocolate, as opposed to showing the brand alongside rescue animals). Aligning the context of the ad with a given product category creates a contextual priming effect and facilitates subsequent memory retrieval. It is of questionable value to the brand to pay for co-branded advertising where the other brand controls the context.
Implications for advertisers: Size and context matter
These findings tell us that the relative size of the brand and partner brand’s user base are important determinants in choosing who to advertise with (or whether to partner with any brand at all). In particular, the benefits are most accrued when two large brands with many dual-brand users pair together (top right quadrant of Figure 1). It is of questionable value for a large brand with lots of users to partner with a small brand with few users (top left quadrant). Similarly, there is little benefit in pairing two small brands, with few collective brand users (bottom left quadrant). While it’s possible to simulate the various scenarios when choosing a suitable partner, identifying a win-win outcome (especially for small brands) appears to be difficult, unless the small brand can own the ad context (bottom right quadrant).
Figure 1: Co-branded advertising effects between different-sized brands
Note: PB = primary brand that owns context; SB = secondary brand that does not own context
Should marketers choose to undertake co-branding in advertising, having ownership of the ad’s creative context (i.e. being the primary brand in the ad) should temper the ill effects. Unfortunately, this also suggests that secondary (non-focal) brands have little to gain from advertising with a partner. Marketers should certainly avoid parting with their advertising dollars if the ad context is to be dominated by their partner’s category. Or, perhaps the answer to achieving an optimal outcome for both partners is to divide the budget in a way that allows both brands a stand-alone ad, each with their own day in the sun.
In closing, our results cast doubt on the assumed value of co-branded advertising. Advertisers should question the value of ‘sharing the limelight’ with a second brand and carefully consider the partners chosen, especially if small brands with few customers are involved.
Read the original article on WARC.
