LONDON: The context of a customer’s decision is fundamental to the effectiveness of marketing communications, new research by Les Binet and Peter Field shows, though findings from the pair’s landmark studies remain true.

During IPA Effectiveness Week, Binet and Field revealed updated findings from the IPA databank. Emotions make advertising work much harder, Binet reported. (For more, subscribers can read WARC’s report: New lessons from Binet and Field - Media in Focus: Marketing effectiveness in the digital era).

“What we find is the more emotional the decision, the more the advertising media tend to be efficient,” he said. “Where you have a highly rational decision, you tend to get more of your growth from non-advertising factors.”

The implication is that when splitting the budget, it is important to understand the impact of both sides. In more rational categories, then, it is advisable to increase brand media. The opposite is true in more emotional categories, where it is worth decreasing brand building.

The importance of decision-making fed into the pair’s new focus on high- and low-research categories.  Short-term effects are much stronger in high-research categories, Peter Field reported. In part, this is due to their tendency to be high-interest categories with strong share-of-voice efficiency.

As a result, Field argued, given the efficiency of activation in a high-research category, the brand-building side becomes “significantly more important”. The takeaway from this finding, he added, was to not assume that brands should prioritise rational advertising in high-research categories, when brand building may work to drive research.

However, other elements of their prior work remain. For instance, they report “no change in the relationship between market share and share of voice, over the last 30 or even 40 years”. Remarkable, said Binet, “given all the changes in the media landscape."

Sourced from WARC