Jenni Romaniuk is a lead researcher at the world-famous Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of “Better Brand Health”
Why do people make the buying choices they do?
That simple question has preoccupied marketing researchers for more than half a century now. They’ve sought to understand what goes on in people’s minds as they make purchase decisions. Using scientific methods of discovery, they’ve probed people’s attitudes, values, habits, beliefs, social mores, motivations, personality quirks, cultural influences and more, looking for common patterns of behaviour that will predict how customers can be expected to respond in given buying situations.
The first breakthrough behavioural model to emerge was published in 1969 by John Howard and Jagdish Sheth in a book called “The Theory of Buyer Behavior”. It was, according to the authors, “an attempt to explain the brand choice behavior of the buyer.” Their model assumed that people are rational decision makers who move deliberately through progressive stages of the purchase process, guided by their past propensities, brand perceptions, and preferences. Their groundbreaking work laid the foundation for the elevation of consumer research into a recognized field of marketing study.
Today consumer behaviour research is an applied social science, incorporating theories of behavioural economics, social psychology and cultural anthropology. It has expanded our understanding of the complex interplay of factors that underly consumer buying decisions. And yet most marketers are almost completely oblivious to this body of scholarly research. They might be vaguely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from their school days but that’s about the extent of their knowledge. Their world is tightly bound by the exigencies of campaign planning, product promotion and brand advertising. Research only ever enters their line of sight when they need a snapshot of brand health or some fresh insight into consumer trends.
So how is it that one of the most popular marketing books in recent history was penned by a market researcher? In 2010 Bryon Sharp, who heads up the Ehrenberg-Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, published a book called “How Brands Grow” which caught the attention of brand marketers everywhere. He introduced them in everyday lingo to a set of empirical generalizations (what he termed “Scientific Laws”) that completely upended many of their long-held assumptions about consumer behaviour. He urged marketers to focus on attracting light category buyers; showed them that greater loyalty amongst heavy users doesn’t necessarily translate into market success; claimed (controversially) that distinctiveness trumps differentiation – and, even more provocatively, that behaviour drives perception, not the other way around. In short he challenged much of conventional marketing wisdom.
The book succeeded in making a convincing, fact-based argument for applying these “scientific laws” to brand building in today’s world of “polygamist consumers”. And now one of his longtime research associates, Jenni Romaniuk has come up with a book of her own, called “Better Brand Health”, explaining how to apply the Laws of Growth to brand health tracking. Tracking studies have always been a standard research tool for marketers keen to know what consumers think about their brand. The problem, according to Jenni, is that a typical tracking study doesn’t tell marketers what they really need to know about their brand: Is their brand consistently top-of-mind for buyers in all relevant buying situations? Is it readily available? Does it appeal to the widest market possible? In her book she lays out a formula for making brand health studies more useful– or as she prefers to call them, “category buyer memory” tracking.
I began by asking Jenni to explain the difference between market research, marketing research and marketing science.
Jenni Romaniuk: Okay, that’s a good question. I actually am all of the above, I would say, at different points in time. So the way I would separate them out is a market researcher is someone who is solving a specific problem at a specific point in time for a company or, for whatever reason. So, for example, we do specific projects for companies measuring, say, their distinctive asset strength, or identifying category entry points for them that is feeding into their specific brand strategy and is a record of a point in time: This is what’s happening. So that’s where I’m acting as a market researcher in that I’m commissioned to do this for a specific company to solve, to answer, a specific question. The marketing researcher and marketing scientist are two of an ilk. So marketing researcher is what I would consider fundamentally researching the phenomena of marketing. So that’s the academic research, the fundamental R&D. Coincidentally enough, the difference between market research and marketing research was the question that I was asked during my interview to become a member of what was then the Marketing Science Center back in the early 90s, shall we say. So that was actually the audition question that you had to present on what is the difference between market research and marketing research?
Now, we use the term marketing scientist. We actually use that for, that’s our sort of entry level researcher position, to represent the fact that we believe marketing can be investigated through the scientific process of discovery, through empirical observation, understanding the world around you, then seeking to explain it and change it. So that’s a process by which you understand marketing. It’s not the only one. There are people who do it through other research paradigms, but the sort of classic science approach, and empirical approach to that, is how we investigate marketing science, and marketing, as a phenomenon. And so the marketing research and the marketing scientists sort of come together in what I explore at a deeper, fundamental level and how I would approach that. So my answer is D, All of the Above.
Stephen Shaw: Right. But marketing science is an evolving discipline, too, right? I mean, your institute has been around a long time, but still, it’s traditionally operated in the academic community and not infiltrated the practitioner world very much. And Ehrenberg-Bass, I think, is making its reputation based on the fact that it is carrying the flag for marketing science, is it not?