Should you change your ad messaging or execution? It depends on brand age

Koen Pauwels, Bharat Sud, Robert Fisher and Kersi Antia
Additional contact information
Koen Pauwels: Principal Research Scientist, Amazon Advertising, USA
Bharat Sud: Lecturer, DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Canada
Robert Fisher: Alberta School of Business Research Chair in Marketing, University of Alberta, Canada
Kersi Antia: George and Mary Turnbull Faculty Fellow and Professor of Marketing, Ivey Business School, Canada

Applied Marketing Analytics: The Peer-Reviewed Journal, 2022, vol. 8, issue 1, 43-54

Abstract: Should advertisers change their message (what is said), just as they do the execution (how it is said) to reflect changing consumer preferences? This paper is the first to quantify how these ad components and their interplay affect brand sales. The authors define the concepts of market consistency and changes in ad executions and show how they interact with each other and with the brand’s age in their sales outcome. The empirical analysis confirms the hypotheses in the US minivan market. As a brand matures, executional variations become increasingly beneficial, but changing advertising messaging to remain consistent with customer preferences becomes less effective. For older brands with little executional variation, changing the ad message even reduces sales. The authors thus uncover important boundary conditions for the opposing theories that brands should ‘stick with their message’ versus ‘change with the times’ and advise how to manage advertising as the brand matures.

Keywords: advertising; advertising messages and execution; brand management; brand maturity; Hausman-Taylor regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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