July 2003   

Trying To Do More May Be Too Much

Andrew Latzman

In an effort to be more efficient and to leverage the equity of other brands, some advertisers have recently begun to use a single advertisement to promote multiple brands.

Diving into Dynamic Logic's MarketNorms (Q1/03), we isolated 27 campaigns that prominently featured multiple brands in the advertising. The data shows that these campaigns on average under-performed and were generally scoring below MarketNorms for most of the metrics. Below is a comparison of data from ads with a single brand and ads with more than one brand (co-branded ads):

As indicated in the chart above, co-branded campaigns in blue perform below the single brand MarketNorms average in orange. We see this in all brand metrics with the exception of Brand Awareness, where it is about equal. On average, the co-branded campaign executions are:

1. Not Making the brands featured more top-of-mind
2. Not Making the message more aligned with the brand
3. Not Making audiences more favorable towards the brand
4. Not Making respondents more likely to purchase the brand advertised, in fact, it hurts it

There is a limited amount of time in which a person has the opportunity to be influenced by an advertisement. Advertisers should make the most of each impression and not try to combine two brands in one ad. If you are considering co-branded ads, be sure that:

1. The message works across both brands
2. Each brand has its own moment of clarity
3. The message is simple and easy to absorb
4. At least one brand is ALREADY well established with the target audience