Three common mistakes in awards entries

Have you ever been thirsty and thought to yourself, I need a red drink? I suspect the answer is no. But I’m betting that while scanning the soft-drink shelves in a busy and cluttered store you have used the colour red to help you find a Coke. 

However, a common mistake seen in award submissions is the belief that Distinctive Assets are meant to convey a meaningful or enticing message that drives consumers to purchase.  This is not the case. 

Distinctive Assets are golden, not a golden goose

The role of Distinctive Assets is simply to make the brand recognisable in advertising and purchase situations and act as an anchor point back to the brand in consumer memory. Distinctive Assets require consistent reinforcement and should be timeless; other messages should be delivered through creative, which can evolve and adapt over time.

If Distinctive Assets really did convey meaning the way many designers believe, then some of the most famous brands might be in trouble.  The Nike Swoosh says little about sportwear; Aleksandr Orlov is a Russian Meerkat who compares insurance providers. Despite (and arguably, because of) their category irrelevance, these Distinctive Assets are very good at what they do – provide creative ways to embed branding within advertising.  The Nike Swoosh and Aleksandr ensure that ad exposures, no matter how fleeting, are linked back to the brand in consumer memory.

Emotions are the vehicle, not the destination 

Emotionally provocative advertising can deepen encoding in memory and improve recall. Where marketers go awry is assuming that this emotion needs to be deep and withstanding. On the contrary, we see these positive effects even from fleeting physiological responses, such as increased heart rate or the flicker of a smile.

At best, objectives to foster long-term emotional connections with consumers, such as brand love, are misguided.

Instead, our communications should spotlight messages that will be useful to the consumer the next time they are in a buying situation. Messages that relate to how, why, when, or with whom buying or consumption will occur. By better understanding the mental pathways that consumers take when they become a category buyer and linking our brand to those messages (Category Entry Points), we build and reinforce useful associations which increase the Mental Availability of our brand.

An emotional response is not the end goal of effective creative, it is a tool we can use to trigger faster processing of advertising.

There is no universal best practice spend ratio  

Many marketers have misinterpreted the work of Binet and Field, whose series of IPA reports have analysed the statistical correlation among case studies in the IPA Effectiveness Databank between inputs such as marketing budget splits and business outcomes, such as increased sales.

This has led to the misperception that there is a universal 60:40 spend ratio – i.e. that 60% of marketing spending should always be on ‘long-term brand building’ and 40% on ‘short-term activation’.

Brand maintenance and growth depend on two valuable market-based assets: Mental Availability (the propensity to be thought of/noticed of in buying situations) and Physical (or digital) Purchase Availability (the quality and the quantity of distribution points where a brand can be bought); all brands need both.  Most campaigns seeking growth will invest/innovate in both, though some campaigns might focus entirely on one or the other.  There is no best practice ratio that applies uniformly.

Changes in Physical Availability have immediate sales effects as they influence how many of today’s category buyers can access the brand.  Changes in sales data can therefore be used to judge Physical Availability in award submissions.

The effects of advertising on Mental Availability, however, cannot be judged by short-term sales changes. Mental Availability requires longer-term brand building in consumer memory, and so other measures such as Mental Availability Metrics or Category Entry Point benchmarks should be used. 

Further reading:

• Romaniuk J (2018) Building Distinctive Brand Assets. South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press.
• Sharp, B (2010) How Brands Grow South Melbourne, Victoria: Oxford University Press.
• Ward E, Yang S, Romaniuk J, et al. (2020) Building a unique brand identity: measuring the relative ownership potential of brand identity element types. Journal of Brand Management 27(4): 393-407.
• Williams, J., Hartnett, N., and Trinh, G. (2022) Finding Creative Drivers of Advertising Effectiveness with Modern Data Analysis. International Journal of Market Research.

Dr Ella Ward, Senior Marketing Scientist & Professor Byron Sharp, Director, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Dr. Ward was an Industry Judge of the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2024.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.