My favourite research exposes the gap between actual consumer data and what marketers think. Brilliant new findings.

By Andrew Tindall

My favourite research exposes the gap between actual consumer data and what marketers think. Brilliant new findings…

My favourite book is Jenni Romaniuk’s ‘How To Build Distinctive Brand Assets’. It’s a brilliant example of how useful proper research can be, and how to blend data with real-world practice to improve effectiveness.

Mark Ritson called this new research out when we launched ‘The Creative Dividend’ with Effie Worldwide at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this year.

Ruby, Nicole, Margaret, and Carl from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute revealed the huge gap between how famous and unique brand assets really are vs what marketers thought of them.

This is the false consensus effect, where marketers are far more knowledgeable about brands and project this onto consumers, leading to:

• Fame is overestimated by 40%, which will make advertising deliver far below expected results.
• Only 1/3rd of marketers came within 20% of the actual data, massively underestimating uniqueness, which will lead to some assets being culled. A waste!

As Jon Evans always says on his podcast (Uncensored CMO), “You are not the customer”. I found in ‘The Creative Dividend’ research two additional findings that agree with this.

• Marketers overestimate the power of targeting and underestimate the power of creativity.
• The more research tools a campaign uses, the more business results it achieves. Bringing in more customer data is rarely a bad thing.

I’ve linked this new research and The Creative Dividend below. Congrats to EBI for another great piece.