The brand health backwater

Top-of-mind awareness gets short shrift in Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s new book about brand health metrics. 

It might feel good to be the first brand that comes to mind when you ask someone to think about a category, she told Contagious, but unless you are the only one that they recall, it makes no odds. 

It’s not just top-of-mind awareness, either. Unprompted measures in general are pretty useless indicators of brand health, says Romaniuk, because they were developed in the 1960s, decades before the associative network model of memory was integrated into marketing theory. 

And yet these antiquated metrics are still in widespread use among companies today, often alongside new ones that have nothing going for them beyond a faddish popularity. Which is nuts, when you think about how much time and energy brands spend trying to figure out what people think about them. 

In Better Brand Health, Romaniuk, who is the associate director (International) at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, proposes a new model for brand health tracking that combines her practical experience and research findings with up-to-date models of how brands grow. 

We spoke to Romaniuk about why marketers should design tracking surveys that could be used by any brand in their category, which metrics should set alarm bells ringing if they decline, and what she thinks about brand love. You can read the full interview here.

Want to know which campaigns will (or should) take home the Grands Prix at Cannes next month? 

Then join us for Contagious Live in London on 17 May. 

Over the course of an evening at Framestore’s Chancery Lane offices, our writers and strategists will present the campaigns they think will perform best at the Palais, in an epic and rapid-fire pitch battle. 

Tickets cost just £35, but we’d advise you to book now because space is limited.

 Contagious.

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