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

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.