What's in a Name? Advertising and the Concept of Brands (2nd ed.)

Citation

Grassl, W. (2005), "What's in a Name? Advertising and the Concept of Brands (2nd ed.)", Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 14 No. 2, pp. 137-139. https://doi.org/10.1108/10610420510592644

The past decade has seen a true avalanche of studies on brands and branding, and this has indeed become one of the best‐researched areas of marketing. One of the central questions is of course the contribution of advertising to brand building. According to the traditional – and many would now say overly simplistic – view, advertising is a strong force that makes a rather direct and immediate contribution to sales by influencing the desires and choices of consumers. Brands are then but intervening variables that are assumed to exist for their predictive value in this causal chain. Many recent studies have challenged this position. They see advertising rather as a weak force that has a much more indirect and longer‐term impact on sales. In this model, brands have a crucial role to play, since advertising is assumed to influence purchase behavior not directly but primarily through its contribution to brand building. The development of strong brands is then a long‐term exercise for the success of which repetitive advertising exposure is more a necessary than by itself already a sufficient condition.

This book, which is a completely rewritten and updated version of Jones’ classic 1986 work What's in a Name?, deals with several issues in the interplay between advertising and branding. The authors are marketing academics who both combine longstanding research on advertising with significant industry experience. Overall, their view on advertising comes down squarely in the camp of defenders of the weak force model (p. 41), although their data do find evidence for short‐term impacts of advertising on sales. The authors expressly (albeit in a somewhat tongue‐in‐cheek manner) warn marketing academics that the book disputes several received views on brands, the product life cycle, and the power of advertising (p. 3).

Following an Introduction, in which they prepare the framework for the book by elaborating on eight characteristics of brands (Chapter 1), the authors sketch what brands are and why they have emerged (Chapter 2). The first of the “heresies” the book proposes is the (eminently plausible) proposition that, at least among fast‐moving consumer goods (FMCG), on which the book focuses, atomistic competition has historically never been more than a fiction. Oligopolistic competition among brands has always been the prevalent market condition. Advertising and brand building are then natural ingredients, rather than exploitative ploys, of competition. The book goes on to consider the factors that are most important during the conception and birth of a brand, namely functional performance (which clearly dominates in importance), positioning, name, price, and distribution (Chapter 3).

Similarly, the factors that shape a brand during its growth and maturity are analyzed. In these stages of the product life cycle, trade and consumer promotions often outweigh advertising. Also, the market share of large brands normally exceeds their advertising share while the opposite is true for small brands – a strong evidence for scale economies due to advertising (Chapter 4). Mature brands then benefit from these economies: Manufacturers should clearly nurture such brands through advertising. Patterns of buying in stable markets show a remarkable degree of uniformity and stability, which the authors find elaborated in Andrew Ehrenberg's repeat‐buying theory (Chapter 5).

At this point, the book makes a digression on the role of recall rates in advertising research. Not only have serious methodological problems plagued the significance of recall testing as an evaluator of campaigns, but also evidence exists that there is simple and direct correlation between factual recall and preference or buying behavior. Overall, the book counsels circumspection in using recall testing (Chapter 6).

Having debunked misconceptions, the authors then present their positive theory. They describe how advertising influences sales (Chapter 7) and builds brands (Chapter 8). Over the short term, the impact of advertising on sales depends more on the creative idea than on any other factors. Weak effects dominate strong ones. Short‐term effects act also as gatekeepers for longer‐term ones: If an advertsiement has no immediate effect on sales, it will not have one later, regardless of advertising budgets. Continuity planning (“pulsing” frequencies) should therefore manage effects on sales as a repetition of short‐term impacts, always under diminishing marginal productivity of advertising. The long‐term effects of advertis‐ments, on the other hand, are of no less importance, since brands are built over the long term by reinforcing the bond with their consumers. Brand loyalty drives sales, and advertising is a powerful driver of brand loyalty, as is the consumer's experience with the product itself. Developing a strategy that treats brands as collectible items has proved successful for mature brands such as Coca‐Cola and Hallmark. By extending brands as collectibles, and thus by multiplying contacts with consumers, brands become “trustmarks” (p. 228) instead of “only” trademarks – they become prized possessions and an integral part of consumers’ lives (Chapter 9). Finally, the book spells out its conclusions on the contribution of advertising strategy to brand building (Chapter 10) and shows how advertising strategy should be implemented in advertising campaigns (Chapter 11). As a coda, the authors show how their results can bolster the development of better advertising. They plead both for more market experimentation and for closing the gaps in our knowledge about advertising. Contrary to much of the specialized literature in the field, they humbly assert that much of what managers would like to know is simply not yet known (Chapter 12).

From a methodological point of view, the work by Jones and Slater has much to be commended. First, it is empirically oriented and aims at generalizations about brands (at least in the FMCG category) that are supported by sound data. Second, it largely dispenses with the avalanche of ever‐new theoretical constructs that have become popular in branding research – from “brand personality”, “brand essence” and “brand meaning” to “brand haiku”. By eschewing constructs of little heuristic value and even less psychological reality, the authors take more of a realist rather than an instrumentalist stance on research. It also shows a certain distance from the “consumer‐based” view on brands (as exemplified by the works of David Aaker and Kevin Keller) that is still the dominant research paradigm. Third, the authors draw a realistic (in the everyday as in the philosophical sense of the term) picture of advertising and brands. Brands are clearly distinct from products, and no tool of marketing management can create a “deep” brand if the functional performance of the product does not warrant it. However, in their definition of brands (“A brand is a product that provides functional benefits plus added values that some consumers value enough to buy” (p. 32)), Jones and Slater still make brands dependent on subjective valuation. Such valuation is by all accounts a necessary though by some accounts not a sufficient condition for brands to exist – unless one wants to take the empirically untenable (and in the philosophical sense highly idealist) position that anything can become a strong brand given a sufficiently large advertising budget.

From a practitioner's point of view, the most interesting part of the book may arguable be that on brands as collectible entities. It is here that the authors trod on little‐charted terrain. Also, their humble assessment of how much knowledge on advertising may really be considered as settled should counsel practitioners to reduce expectations while at the same time exhorting researchers to increase their efforts.

Like many good works that develop a common‐sense theory rather than just stringing together individual research results, this book occasionally succumbs to the temptation of flogging a dead horse. Few post‐Chamberlin economists would, for example, deny that oligopolistic competition among brands has been and is the prevalent market condition (although some may still use atomistic competition and homogeneous products as convenient fictions in their mathematical models). More importantly, the arguments of the book are expressly limited to the category of FMCG. Whether they would easily apply to services, for which the emphasis on functional performance can hardly hold, must be called in doubt. With its limitation of focus to repeat‐purchase and packaged consumer goods, could this book be regarded as developing a general theory of advertising and branding? Admittedly, it does not make such a claim.

This book also distinguishes itself by placing issues into the tradition of research on the economics of imperfect competition and on advertising. References to the works of Marshall, Hayek, Kaldor, Robinson, Chamberlin and Knight, but also to classics in the literature on advertising such as Young, Reeves and Ogilvy, show that many of the really important insights on brands do not originate in the latest edition of the Journal of Marketing. In particular, through many examples it makes it abundantly clear that the way advertising works on market demand is a highly complex process. Of course, already Chamberlin has argued that the net effect of advertising on prices cannot be determined by theory alone, since it is influenced by the extent to which advertising is informative or persuasive, and since scale economies in production and advertising exist. However, it takes excellent empirical studies like this book to remind us of such truths and guard us from all temptations at easy theorizing.

This book, then, is a most welcome addition to the literature that will undoubtedly find its place on reading lists. It also belongs in advertising agencies and boardrooms, where it could be both an eye‐opener and a valuable source of competent advice.