Ehrenberg-Bass News

The Ehrenberg Bass Institute has shown that most online shoppers are also offline shoppers of the same retailer, but they are also more likely to shop at rival retailer’s e-commerce offerings – a practice that will only have grown as they experience shortages of items from toilet paper to pasta.

The Ehrenberg Bass Institute have repeatedly demonstrated that effective targeting is like salt - a little bit can improve things, but too much is bad for your health. TV and other broadcast media essentially have a salt ration built in, no matter how hard you try and target it will end up being fairly broad (addressable TV aside).

The stories of brands losing positions of power are most vivid after the fact. Brand management teams which examine data and analyze research for insights they can use to grow their brand, and compete more successfully in the future, are saddled with limitations.

At the University of South Australia Business School in Adelaide, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is the world’s largest center for marketing research. I recently asked the institute’s director, professor Byron Sharp, to share his perspectives on some of today’s brand management challenges.

In September 2016, Wells Fargo, America’s largest retail bank, announced it had fired 5,300 employees for fraudulently opening more than 2.5 million accounts. Wells Fargo will pay US$185 million in fines to regulators and $5 million will be returned to customers who paid fees on accounts they did not ask to have.

This disaster could have been avoided if management had been aware of marketing science.

This year Jeep and others again spent big on Super Bowl advertising.  Here marketing scientist Professor Rachel Kennedy takes a quick look at some of the publicly available numbers to critique the Super Bowl from a brand growth perspective.