As the reader is aware, topics for the forthcoming issues of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) through the end of 2006 were selected in early 2004. After joining the editorial team in late 2004 and seeing that I would be the editorial steward for an issue on “Drivers of Brand Growth,” I immediately asked myself, “Does this mean ‘the drivers of growth in sales and earnings for branded products and services’ or ‘drivers of growth in the health or equity of brands’”? Realizing just as quickly that the answer was, as a sophomoric logician might quip, “Yes,” I decided that this would be a rare opportunity to bring these two streams of research and thought together for our readers and enable them to envision what Gerry Tellis calls “a deep, comprehensive and insightful picture of how advertising really works”—a picture resulting from a careful interlacing of “the econometric paradigm” and “the behavioral paradigm.”

Advertising is a rich, multidimensional phenomenon that has been studied in several disciplines. This research has led to an emerging body of findings and some potential generalizations. Even then, misconceptions about advertising persist, and important aspects of the phenomenon have not been adequately researched. Despite advertising's apparent weakness it is essential for free markets.

The elusive notion of brand equity is operationalized in a “share tiering” framework with a combination of multiple constructs: (1) relative barrier or brand price, (2) brand quality perceptions, (3) brand purchase loyalty, and (4) self-report future brand purchase trend. This general measurement framework for “true” brand equity when applied longitudinally permits the evaluation of markerting ROI. Recommended measures for the “share tiering” approach to brand equity measurement are illustrated using the cola category as an example.

A measurable framework for brand equity is presented that links together financial performance, loyalty, and attitudinal dimensions and for understanding the impact of a corporate brand on sub-brands that share the same name. This study describes specific key performance indicator measures and, most importantly, how to intelligently set targets for each measure, so that marketers can track and manage the success of their brands. A case history for a large European telecommunications company is presented that shows how this framework produced a very different view of the health of the company's brands versus prior research, one that was ultimately accepted as correct. This study discusses organizational problems the CMO had to address as he tried to implement this new framework, and how to generalize this approach to other industries.

This article examines how societal shifts resulting in a better-informed consumer are changing the nature of the customer-brand relationship as well as the nature of branding building. As the importance of nonmarketing touchpoints such as customer service departments and the actual in-store experience continues to increase, marketing is challenged to step beyond its traditional role to prove its value in generating business growth. Toward achieving this end, marketing must respond to three key challenges: the ability to maintain superiority, the need for achieving returns with fewer resources, and finding ways to manage the expanding complexity of today's customer touchpoints.

The article highlights the importance of brand evolution as a necessary component of successful marketing strategy. In particular the article emphasizes the decision to revitalize the core brand. Three key constructs are used as a framework for analyzing rebranding decisions, namely brand vision, brand orientation, and brand strategy implementation. It is proposed that the key to successful rebranding is the need to build each of these three components as well as ensuring that they are tightly linked and coordinated. The normative framework was applied to a major Canadian retailer, Canadian Tire, and found to be helpful in analyzing their rebranding. Lessons have been drawn from the case study, including the important role of advertising.

In a study of the Double Jeopardy (DJ) phenomenon and the mediating effect of brand penetration between advertising and brand loyalty, we integrate a survey of 19,335 consumers on their buying behavior of 187 brands across two fast moving consumer goods categories, shampoo and detergent, and a database of advertising expenditures on these brands in four major cities in China. We find that (1) smaller brands are punished twice for being small, following the well-known DJ pattern, which says that brands with larger market penetration tend to enjoy higher repeated purchases and smaller brands attract fewer buyers who also buy less; (2) brand penetration plays a mediating role in the relationship between advertising and brand loyalty; and (3) there is an asymmetric effect of market penetration on brand loyalty for small and big brands.

Perceived brand parity is the belief in the consumers mind that major offerings in a product category are similar. The current article presents the results of a study indicating that high parity perceptions inhibit a company's ability to develop loyal customers. Whether that is good or bad depends on the type of competitive strategy a firm has chosen. With a differentiation strategy, advertising should be used to fight parity perceptions. However, with a low price strategy, parity perceptions should be fostered in an attempt to discourage brand loyalty. Thus, a starting point for many advertising campaigns should be a clear understanding of both the parity perceptions in the marketplace and the need to either develop or fight brand loyalty.

In a new purchasing environment (e.g., where a consumer moves to a new city), do consumers tend to keep buying the first brand that they try? If so, a behavioral primacy effect might be at work. Behavioral primacy exists when consumers tend to repeat-buy the first brand that they purchased more often than other brands that are bought in the same purchase environment. This report assumes the physical experience of buying and using the first brand is satisfactory, and that all competing brands are available in adjacent spaces (as in a supermarket or on a website). This article presents findings that demonstrate a behavioral primacy effect: purchasing a brand in the first week was found to have a significant impact on how often a brand was subsequently bought. Furthermore, initial experience in combination with marketing influence tactics (such as specific prices, coupons, and advertising) greatly increases the probability of purchase of a given brand. The findings support the focus by many marketers on attracting consumers to try their brand first. One rationale for this strategy is that in mundane product categories, if a brand experience is satisfactory, continuing to buy the first-brand bought helps to conserve cognitive effort for a consumer's more important concerns.Assistance in data analysis by Eric Goodwin, Boston College, is acknowledged with gratitude. Partial financial support from an ARC research grant is acknowledged (DP0344446).

This study examines the long-term effectiveness of multimedia advertising in a competitive setting and its implications for budget allocation decisions, using multivariate persistence methodology. Analysis of network TV, spot TV, and magazine advertising for the two major competitors in the U.S. SUV industry suggested that long-run advertising effectiveness differed considerably among media. These differences were attributed to the media lifespan, retrieval, and content of the message they convey. The authors propose that budget allocation decisions should consider the long-run effectiveness of the different media employed to increase the productivity of advertising campaigns. They also conduct a simulation experiment to further investigate long-run sales effects of alternative allocation strategy scenarios.

Online advertising has been with us for over 10 years. During that time two different paradigms have characterized the way the effectiveness of online advertising has been assessed: brand building or direct response. In general the direct response paradigm has become the yardstick of online advertising success due to the universal measurement of click-through. This article proposes that the two paradigms are not contradictory but are in fact complementary and that the applicability of either model depends on the mindset of the audience as much as the intent of the advertisement. The article outlines a conceptual framework that integrates an established brand equity model with different stages of the purchase process and then uses existing learning, new research data, and case studies to illustrate the various ways in which online advertising can help build brands and increase the probability of purchase. The article concludes that click-through is primarily a consequence of the brand building effect combined with a willingness to learn more about the specific brand as a result of an immediate need for a product or service of that type.

This article is about affective advertising, defined as that which works more on our emotions and feelings than on our knowledge and beliefs. This sort of advertising can be processed effectively at relatively low levels of attention and as a result does not always perform well on recall measures. We compare the most popular recall-based metric—claimed advertising awareness—against an approach that deduces effectiveness from recognition and find claimed advertising awareness seriously underestimates the effectiveness of the advertising tested.

How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding by Douglas B. Holt, Harvard Business School Press, September 2004, ISBN: 1578517745, $29.95, 263 pp.

Your reviewer is usually not a big fan of “academic” business books. But let's dispense with suspense here—your reviewer find's Dr. Holt's new book to be a must read—for practitioners as well as academics, for new-product marketers as well as advertising folks. Depending on your brand and product category, you very well may want to add a new section to your positioning statement and a new column to your creative brief—a cultural brief.

162 Advertising's Role in Capitalist Markets: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go from Here?

171 In Search of True Brand Equity Metrics: All Market Share Ain't Created Equal

187 Brand Key Performance Indicators as a Force for Brand Equity Management

198 Marketers Challenged to Respond to Changing Nature of Brand Building

201 Radical Brand Evolution: A Case-Based Framework

211 The Double Jeopardy Phenomenon and the Mediating Effect of Brand Penetration between Advertising and Brand Loyalty

222 The Role of Brand Parity in Developing Loyal Customers

229 How Behavioral Primacy Interacts with Short-Term Marketing Tactics to Influence Subsequent Long-Term Brand Choice

241 A Look at the Long-run Effectiveness of Multimedia Advertising and Its Implications for Budget Allocation Decisions

255 Ten Years of Learning on How Online Advertising Builds Brands

269 Measuring Affective Advertising: Implications of Low Attention Processing on Recall