Mind-set metrics in market response models: an integrative approach

Demonstrations of marketing effectiveness currently proceed along two parallel tracks: Quantitative researchers model the direct sales effects of the marketing mix, and advertising and branding experts trace customer mind-set metrics (e.g., awareness, affect). The authors merge the two tracks and analyze the added explanatory value of including customer mind-set metrics in a sales response model that already accounts for short- and long-term effects of advertising, price, distribution, and promotion. Vector autoregressive modeling of the metrics for more than 60 brands of four consumer goods shows that advertising awareness, brand consideration, and brand liking account for almost one-third of explained sales variance. Competitive and own mind-set metrics make a similar contribution. Wear-in times reveal that mind-set metrics can be used as advance warning signals that allow enough time for managerial action before market performance itself is affected. Specific marketing actions affect specific mind-set metrics, with the strongest overall impact for distribution. The findings suggest that modelers should include mind-set metrics in sales response models and branding experts should include competition in their tracking research.Marketing Science Institutepre-prin

Probability models for duration: the data don't tell the whole story

Probability models for duration have been applied to a wide range of individual-level and organizational phenomena. Interestingly, seemingly similar models may produce different results. Using divorce as an illustration, we discuss a hierarchy of duration models of different complexity and show how an analysis of the results across models helps explain why different studies may have come to different conclusions. This analysis also leads to substantive insights that even the most complete model by itself does not provide. © 1995 Academic Press, Inc.nrpages: 54status: publishe

Advertising’s sequence of effects on consumer mindset and sales: A comparison across brands and product categories

Advertising has the power to influence how consumers experience, think, and feel about brands, but the sequence of these mindset effects may differ by brand and category. This paper analyzes how the mindset factors of cognition, affect, and experience mediate advertising effects on sales, using data from 178 fast-moving consumer good brands in 18 categories over seven years. The authors compare the models proposed in the literature and conclude that the concept of sequentiality in advertising effects holds up well. Importantly, the sequence varies across brands, with the affect → cognition → experience (ACE) sequence being the most common. Brand differentiation and the hedonic versus utilitarian nature of the product category moderate the incidence of the ACE sequence: this sequence is even more likely for utilitarian products and less differentiated brands. For managers, the results show that the last mindset factor in the sequence is the most important in driving sales, with cognition being most responsive to advertising among the mindset factors. Moreover, in utilitarian categories, highly differentiated brands can expect about seven times higher advertising responsiveness of affect than less differentiated brands

Consumer attitude metrics for guiding marketing mix decisions

Marketing managers often use consumer attitude metrics such as awareness, consideration, and preference as performance indicators because they represent their brand’s health and are readily connected to marketing activity. However, this does not mean that financially focused executives know how such metrics translate into sales performance, which would allow them to make beneficial marketing mix decisions. We propose four criteria – potential, responsiveness, stickiness and sales conversion – that determine the connection between marketing actions, attitudinal metrics, and sales outcomes. We test our approach with a rich dataset of four-weekly marketing actions, attitude metrics, and sales for several consumer brands in four categories over a seven-year period. The results quantify how marketing actions affect sales performance through their differential impact on attitudinal metrics, as captured by our proposed criteria. We find that marketing-attitude and attitude-sales relationships are predominantly stable over time, but differ substantially across brands and across product categories. We also establish that combining marketing and attitudinal metrics criteria improves the prediction of brand sales performance, often substantially so. Based on these insights, we provide specific recommendations on improving the marketing mix for different brands, and we validate them in a hold-out sample. For managers and researchers alike, our criteria offer a verifiable explanation for differences in marketing elasticities and an actionable connection between marketing and financial performance metrics