Nicole is an advertising and media researcher with a particular interest in how to design effective advertising content.

Her expertise spans advertising measurement, management and decision making, distinctive brand assets, brand performance metrics and consumer behaviour. She has published in international journals including the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and the European Journal of Marketing. Nicole also has extensive experience conducting research projects for the Institute’s sponsors across industries and markets, and regularly presents seminars and workshops on various marketing topics.

What we covered in this episode:

Why Marketers are not good judges of advertising
Marketing departments are not better than a coin toss
Intermediate campaign variables don’t often correlate to sales
Why experience doesn’t make you any better at spotting winners
The importance of distinctive assets
Why characters are a dying art form
Why we all need to be a little more Churchill
The case for not changing the creative
What happens when brands stop advertising
Alcohol, babies, pet food & Pandemics
Why scale matters when you go dark
How your trajectory determines how bad going dark will be
What to do when you manage a portfolio and have to cut spend
The long term consequence of going dark
Why you need a range of distinctive assets to aid memory
The power of blackcurrants as a Ribena distinctive asset
Why the high turnover of brand managers is bad for effectiveness
Why How Brands Grow is the one book every marketer should have
Quiet behind the scenes discipline is what matters when everything changes
The comfort of familiarity when it comes to memory
Building your business around what doesn’t change
Are you measuring what really matters
Organisations suffer from short term memory and short datasets
Learning from success and failures over a long time series
Why the insight department need to start letting go
Winning the Boardroom battle with data

When Brands Stop Advertising - Dr Nicole Hartnett, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

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