Research Digest Why some brands should be consistent and common in their advertising strategy, and others shouldn't

In “Consistency and commonality in advertising content: Helping or Hurting?”, published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, Maren Becker and Maarten J. Gijsenberg analyse how the consistency of a brand's advertising content over time and its similarity with competitor brands' advertising affect sales.

Why study this

Strong, successful brands are built on unique, consistent positioning. Or so popular marketing theory says. Yet little empirical evidence supports this belief, although it guides advertising choices worth millions of euros every year. Even marketing practitioners disagree over the effects of consistency – similarity in the firm's advertising over time – and commonality – similarity with competitors' advertising. So the authors studied the dynamic impact on brands' sales of their advertising content consistency and commonality, exploring the moderating effects of two main factors: brand size and time horizon. To do so, they analysed the content of 247 television ads of 33 brands of German consumer packaged goods over a 4-year period, examining four content dimensions: informativeness, high- and low-arousal emotionality, and creativity. 

Findings

  • Overall, the results show that consistency and commonality matter, although only in the long run.
  • Smaller, younger brands that have yet to build a clear image in the minds of consumers benefit from consistent advertising, especially when it comes to emotionality. 
  • For large brands with an established image, the positive effect of consistency is reduced, possibly because consumers might perceive it as boring. 
  • Small brands benefit from commonality with competitors’ advertising content. The similar advertising content may help consumers correctly identify the product category of small brands. 
  • Large brands neither suffer nor benefit from commonality with competitors’ advertising content. For large brands, the positive long-term effects of commonality are strongly mitigated if not cancelled out.
    or.

Ads air in a highly cluttered environment awash with competitive advertising. A possibly effective way to rise above the clutter thus appears to lie in being dissimilar to competitors’ advertising content, but we find that this is not the case.

Key insight

Whether consistency and commonality in advertising content will help or hurt depends on the size of the brand. 

Impact

For small brands, advertising content may be a stronger (and cheaper) driver of sales than advertising spending, as increases of 1% in low- and high-arousal emotionality will have positive cumulative sales impacts of 3.82% and 2.26%, respectively. In contrast, large brands should be dynamic over time, since consistency of informativeness, low-arousal emotionality, and creativity will have negative cumulative sales impacts of 0.6%, 1.82%, and 0.7% respectively.  

Final takeaway

While the best strategy for small, less-known brands is to mimic their competitors and remain consistent over time so as to create and preserve brand essence, larger brands will be most successful when they differ and surprise in their advertising content over time.

Authors

Maren Becker Maren Becker Assistant Professor of Marketing and Research Methods at ESCP Business School (Berlin campus)
Maarten J. Gijsenberg Maarten J. Gijsenberg Professor of Marketing Dynamics at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands)

Campuses

Berlin