While Consumers Expect This Year’s Football Championship Ads to Address Social Issues, Costly Mistakes Could Seriously Damage Brand Equity and Erode Market Share
RINGWOOD, N.J. (PRWEB) January 30, 2018 -- Leflein Associates, a trailblazer in the emerging field of brand receptivity research, is offering its latest insights on social issues and diversity inclusion sensitivities that should be considered during any ad campaign to avoid costly mistakes and improve marketing effectiveness.
“Today, more than ever, companies need to become culturally aware and informed when making advertising decisions about how they portray women and multicultural audiences. By basing creative decisions on data-driven evidence CMO’s can preempt social media disasters and sleep better at night,” said Barbara Leflein, President and CEO of Leflein Associates.
“Recently we’ve seen far too many high-profile mistakes advertisers have made that have cost them dearly through social media backlash. Those are the things we can help our clients avoid by simply taking the time up-front to utilize our methodology and apply it,” she added.
Whether it is racial inequality, immigration or women’s rights, it’s important to explore whether consumers give the brand permission to genuinely support a particular cause. According to a recent study conducted by Leflein and GenForward national survey of 1,816 adults 18-34, 88 percent of millennials cited a social issue they would like brands to bring attention to in their advertising efforts. Yet, despite millennials’ well documented passion for social causes, two out of five are skeptical, believing that companies only pretend to care or that brands and social issues don’t mix. Brands that do take on a social cause have to tread very lightly, as the study found that 80 percent of millennials said they would take action against the brand whose advertising mishandled a social issue they care most about.
This Sunday, advertisers will pay an average $3.8 Million for a commercial in The Big Game, which are big investments with big potential payoffs. These ads, according to a recent article appearing in Advertising Age, will face scrutiny amid the #metoo movement, for how women are portrayed, if included at all. Brands that want to align themselves with women’s empowerment should note that younger millennial women 18-24 are 21% more likely than men in this age group (58% vs. 48% respectively) to say they would stop purchasing or spread the word to boycott a brand if it mishandled a social issue they were passionate about. “Advertisers are always at risk of making tone deaf mistakes, but a fumble at the football championship can get you benched indefinitely,” Leflein cautioned.
Leflein Associates has developed a measurement technique called a Brand Receptivity Index™ (BRI), a proprietary methodology used for studying how a brand is received by the audience they are looking to reach with their message. When determining if any social cause is appropriate to the brand and whether brand messages are on point, it’s paramount to be sensitive to the perceptions of diverse audiences.
Addressing today’s pressing advertising needs, Leflein Associates is introducing its BRI Workshops for B2C and B2B companies. The Workshops are designed in two to three hour sessions for advertisers interested in connecting with the passions of diverse millennial audiences. These workshops can be tailored to a particular event or need based on the requirements of the client. For more information on arranging a BRI Workshop, go to: http://www.leflein.com.
About Leflein Associates
Headquartered in Ringwood, New Jersey, Leflein Associates specializes in custom market research, innovation techniques, and advanced analytics. The firm is a 100 percent woman-owned, full-service market research company specializing in branding, PR surveys, global A&U tracking, employee surveys, ad testing and new product ideation in the B2B and B2C sectors.
An award winning research provider, Leflein is on the cutting edge of advertising, business messaging, branding and culture mining. Leflein is located within an hour’s drive from the heart of Manhattan, the media capital of the world. At Leflein, research empowers creativity. For more information, see http://www.leflein.com and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
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The GenForward Survey of Millennials is led by Dr. Cathy Cohen from the University of Chicago. It is the first of its kind—a nationally representative survey of over 1,750 young adults ages 18-34 conducted bimonthly that pays special attention to how race and ethnicity shape how respondents experience and think about the world. The sample from which this data comes includes 1,816 respondents with oversamples of African American, Latino/as and Asian American Millennials. Data was collected from August 31 through September 16, 2017. Contact: Cathy J. Cohen, Founder and Director. GenForward, University of Chicago,
Robin Carley, Carley Communications Group, +1 9735133352, [email protected]
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