“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”, said John Wanamaker, a department store merchant, back in the early twentieth century. If Wanamaker had been alive today, he would have been forced to eat his words. It’s never been easier to measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign in today’s ultra-connected world.
Television and radio audiences can be broken down by demographic to the nearest 100 listeners or so, whilst YouTube and Facebook are turning targeted video advertising into a science, which takes into account time of day, viewer profile, even the mood the watcher might be in and the weather outside.
Brand building, on the other hand, is a far harder activity to quantify. A product’s popularity cannot be measured in terms of the number of people who are aware of it, only in terms of how many people are buying it and consuming it. Think, for example, of the disastrous results when Coca Cola decided to introduce “new coke” in the 1980’s (they switched the recipe back after 3 months), Bic’s attempt to move into the underwear market, or Colgate’s push into ready meals. The consumer simply refused to allow the brand to get away with changing its identity…….