A New Narrative for Print: Interview Ehrenberg Bass Institute’s Professor Jenni Romaniuk

When you think of advertising, marketing and brands, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and their work is most likely part of the conversation, with their extensive works relied on to help answer some of modern marketing’s greatest conundrums. Based in Australia, Professor Jenni Romaniuk is in high demand as a marketing thought leader; author of How Brands Grow 2 with colleague Professor Byron Sharp and best sellers Building Distinctive Brand Assets.

With the opportunity to speak and find out her views on print in the marketing mix, the IPIA jumped at the chance for a very early start to speak to Professor Romaniuk as part of our New Narrative for Print advocacy programme.

Marketing was a happy accident

This renowned professor didn’t set out to become a marketing guru. She started studying occupational health and realised this wasn’t for her. Rather than opting to be ‘really, really good or really, really bad’ at it, Jenni opted for a change and landed on a business course and liking economics this seemed like a good choice. At the University of South Australia, it just happened the marketing teaching was considered particularly good and with a crossroads to choose a major, she chose to study marketing. Recalling her passion for Mental Availability, she knows now the background knowledge that the University of South Australia had a great reputation for marketing helped prompt that choice. Lucky for Jenni and very lucky for global marketing as her career has gone from strength to strength.

Acknowledging her work has changed much over the last 20 years, those happy accidents which led Jenni to marketing have changed the way we consider marketing today.

Whilst well known in marketing circles and seen as the rising star in marketing theorem, Jenni’s work informs how impacts are measured and brand health tracking; her work may be less known in the print industry. It was Les Binet who initially suggested the IPIA speak to Jenni and seek her views on what we were searching for in the outcomes of New Narrative.

Diving into three specific areas to make the most of the time with Professor Romaniuk, the IPIA addressed the perception of print in the marketing industry, what it brings to the party and the benchmarks the industry needs to consider.

Benchmarking and brand assets

Focused on Mental Availability, Romaniuk spends much of her time discussing the Distinctive Brand Assets – those brand tools that truly build your brand presence, recognition to drive all important action in the environment your brand lives in. We asked Jenni if she felt there was a good benchmark of brand assets marketers should consider for optimum mental availability.

Romaniuk responded ‘I don’t think there’s an optimum number. I think it’s about horses for courses, it’s about understanding the environment in which you’re trying to brand and making sure you’ve got the tools to do it well. I don’t think Distinctive Assets are magical, amazing things. They’re just tools. They’re like a hammer, a spanner, a wrench.

So if I was saying to you, I’ve got to put this nail into this wall, here’s my wrench, you’d be like “I don’t think you got the right tool for that. I think you should change”. You’d say, “Get a hammer, because that’s the right tool”. And so, depending on how many different sorts of chores you need to do with your Distinctive Assets, that’s what should define how many Distinctive Assets that you use. So just like you don’t need 10 hammers, you only need one – a good one!’

She went on to detail the role of Distinctive Assets are to have a variety to suit the environment, but you must consider the job they need to do for you. These Distinctive Assets include everything from packaging to media to advertising.

Discussing further the assets marketers have at their disposal and just how marketers might use what is available to them, we delved deep into what marketers could and should be using to drive action, particularly between the online and offline worlds. Citing the sheer number of messages a consumer might see on any given day, the IPIA wanted to know what Romaniuk herself would consider if she were to launch a consumer brand today. Asking about the digital and physical relationship with a brand, we asked her views on growing techniques such as programmatic direct mail and whether we might see this evolve into personalised packaging.

Romaniuk confessed to being a bit of a sceptic when it comes to programmatic elements as she felt it over promised and underdelivered most of the time. Noting the digital environment is quite different from the physical environment in terms of how we encounter it, Jenni referenced research that she and other scholars had just published where they looked at, for example, whether faces on packs in a digital environment and if this distinctive type of feature drove attention. Explaining the approach, Romaniuk explained  ‘We know a lot of work from advertising that having a face naturally grabs people’s attention because it harks back to our sociological upbringings whereby we just naturally notice faces. This is because we want to understand is that a friend or a foe and [we] wanted to see whether or not if you put a face on a pack, given the challenge in online is, when you’ve got lots of brands in front of you does this grab your attention? Does having a face on the pack make a difference to that? The answer was no it didn’t in this study and simply because we suspect a digital image is too small to activate that part of our brain that sees a face as something to be concerned about. If I was designing a pack that’s what I’d be thinking of: what is the purpose of the pack in the different environments and how do I make sure it has the best opportunity to do that’.

The discussion then went to areas like online grocery shopping and the challenge to stand out in the line up. Romaniuk reminded us that important characteristics like variant codes and a strong brand identity really support you in the online world or suffer a sea of sameness – and therefore the tools we have ready to go and are kept relevant to the environment where we need to work.

Calling on the messages bouncing around the marketing community this year which shout about the lack of creativity, being more creative, less boring and the role print can play in delivering, the IPIA focused their next question those brands who achieve legendary status of an Effie Award through long term, consistent campaigns with very Distinctive Brand Assets. Citing stand out work  from Guinness, Specsavers, Lidl, McCain, Yorkshire Tea, (who had recently dropped a big campaign in Australia where they’ve had to change the strap line a little to align with colloquial language) those long-term brand stories include a big mix of media – and it’s hard to imagine any of these brands without a printed element. Whether it’s distinctive packaging, door drops, direct mail or simply outstanding out of home posters, building brands that become household names need access to all the tools marketers can get their hands on.

But in recent interviews asking top ad agencies about where they see the use of static elements alongside their digital counterparts, some creative teams point to the printed elephant in the room; the fact they’re having to endlessly prove the effectiveness before a client will commit. Putting this balance we need to achieve of creativity and effectiveness to Romaniuk, asking if marketers these days have got a big job on their hands about all the options to prove that value before they commit? A big question to unpack, she started with the idea of creativity that is not effective is useless. She gave some stark examples to show how trying to separate the two is foolhardy.

‘I’ve had people talk to me and ask, “I want to do a brand campaign that’s not linked to sales. I’m trying to convince my board”. My response is this; I’m sorry, if I was your board, I wouldn’t approve that. Why are you advertising and it’s not linked to sales? Doesn’t mean it has to have sales tomorrow, but it’s got to have sales in the agenda of it’.

‘Now the question is how and when you do that. And I sense the creatives are more pushing back at the process of effectiveness rather than the goal of effectiveness. Well, at least I hope so anyway, because otherwise they won’t be in a job for very long! Something’s got to pay the bills and it’s the sales that does that’.

She felt very uncomfortable about the idea that other things have to be sacrificed for creative. ‘Particularly about branding quality… that’s a conversation I’ve had a lot. If you cannot get the brand in the creative, I don’t care how good your creative is, you’ve wasted your client’s money.’

Measuring effectiveness the right way

Considering the number studies that have measured creative effectiveness, Romaniuk explained that many have bundled branding as part of the creative, but it’s actually a different element. In the things that do the branding, the branding devices have to be consistent; they form part of your Distinctive Assets or your brand name as are the things that drive creativity, when the purpose of creative elements is usually to get people’s attention and or to facilitate processing through emotional responses.

Romaniuk noted these can change campaign to campaign quite easily. This is because what draws our attention, what sort of emotions we evoke comes from a big palette; the creative devices can be from a wide range of things. It’s clear there is an art of how you pull this together to craft something that makes people laugh, enjoy, cry… whatever emotion you’re trying to create.

Jenni was keen to state that this is the beauty of creativity but that is different from the art of branding or the science of branding, which is about making sure that your brand stands out, is processed, is noticed and actually is an integral part of the advertising in there. She concluded ‘I think sometimes when people use the word creative, they’re not being very specific about what they’re talking about. So, if you’re just talking about the attention and emotion getting devices, then I believe that’s an important part. But branding needs to be at least equal, if not ahead of that. But if you’re talking about it all as one amorphous blob, it’s then very hard to operationalise and actually work out what effectiveness is, and what drives effectiveness’.

The discussion continued into the missed opportunities where media buyers, brands or their creative agencies may not have considered some channels like posters to connect between online and offline worlds. Using an example such as a simple proximity poster to illustrate potentially missed sales by not directing consumers in the real world a brand they had encountered on social channels, Jenni noted the success of very basic messaging that McDonalds use.

‘They have some great ads where they have like, you know, one ad billboard outside next to it, like, you know, McDonald’s 200 metres and then next McDonald’s 190 metres. you know, just something that A makes the point, but B just makes you smile when you see it…you’re pointing out that you’re now 10 metres closer, which you didn’t need pointing out, but you’re nearly there. It simply makes the point more succinctly with two messages than just one.

Calling out the role of print to register messaging, Romaniuk felt one of the advantages of print, particularly when in those sorts of static forms such as poster, is you have time to register a message. And with time register a message, means you can be clever with your creative – and that bit of extra time can mean a big difference on how that message registers. When compared to formats like video whereby things are moving so quickly, if you don’t ‘get it’ quickly, you’ve just lost that moment. Discussing other notable campaigns from the last eighteen months, the IPIA noted the divisive campaign from Burger King, showing new mums devouring a burger in the delivery room. The creative director behind this campaign used a mix of poster and digital to leverage fame. Keen to know Romaniuk’s view, we asked what her opinion was of this, at least locally, famous campaign. She wasn’t a big fan of this one and felt the vast majority of people out there just wouldn’t pay attention. She questioned whether this campaign missed an opportunity to have something that speaks to everybody.

Jenni asked ‘Why do you need to divide? A colleague of mine, John Dawes, has just written a piece this and talks about whether you need to polarise people to be successful in arguing against it? Because I think the more you polarise people, I don’t know that that’s conducive of a big brand.’ She highlighted other brands such as Oatly and explained the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute used their campaigns as great examples such as when Oatly landed in LA, their billboards reflected this, localising the brand to the area and having fun with the creative message.

How we should be driving recognition and action with direct

Fun was a topic the IPIA wanted to come back to after recommendations from creative behemoth Dave Trott on how campaigns should have the opportunity to have fun with posters particularly having the ability to make you ‘stop and stare’, driving disruption, conversation and action. Coming on to the last interview questions, the IPIA’s recent debate in the House of Commons looked at the use of print in campaigns to make them more effective. As part of the debate topics discussed, areas such as promotions and direct mail were used as great examples for brands that only live in the online space, using print to connect differently with their ideal audiences with example from large retail brands like Ocado relying on door drops and direct mail as a core ingredient for their response led drives.

As an industry seeing a distinctive uptick in spend in these areas, the IPIA asked Romaniuk her views on direct mail and its role in delivering distinctive brand assets directly into the home.

She felt there were pros and cons. She said ‘I’ve done a bit of research in direct mail in the B2B sector, definitely that ‘stickiness’ of something branded being delivered. But it depends on what you’re doing. For example, if you’re doing direct mail, you want it to work regardless of if someone opens it or not. A lot of people just look at it (direct mail) and say I know what that is. I’m not going to open it. If you’re going to use your brand assets on it, have them on the outside… so people don’t have to open it. As soon as they have to open it up, as soon as they have to work to get to what you want, you’ve lost. Or you’ve massively narrowed your potential opportunity’.

She went on to explain how we must think more about how you get your message to the person as easily as possible. ‘Any time that you require your audience to work to get to you, you usually do one of two things or both. You narrow the audience because most people won’t do the work. But you also skew the audience as well, because the people who do the work are usually those, for example, who have already bought from Specsavers. They are thinking ‘so what have Specsavers sent me’? But they’re not the people that you need to grow your brand. What you want to grow is the person who’s never used Specsavers asking themselves ‘what’s in the envelope?’. Romaniuk went on to explain making these new customers work too hard to figure out the offer was not a good idea. She urged us to consider the Distinctive Assets we could and should be using on direct mail or door drops.