Keep your brand name in the ad

When you run an ad, you need people to remember your brand, not just the ad. If they enjoy it but can't say who it was for, your brand probably doesn't get into their long-term memory, and the ad is unlikely to help you the next time they buy. So how you show your brand in the ad matters. Some ads leave the name out and trust a logo, a character or a slogan to do the job. That depends on people knowing the logo, character or slogan is yours, and it's easy to assume more people know it than really do. A print ad experiment tested this, and the safer bet was to keep the name in. A slogan in its place did worse for all three brands they tested, and a logo or character was a gamble, even with readers who knew it.

Three researchers, Nicole Hartnett, Jenni Romaniuk and Rachel Kennedy, tested this with print ads for three big brands in Australia: Commonwealth Bank, Cadbury Dairy Milk and Dolmio pasta sauce. They made five versions of each ad. One showed just the brand name, one just the logo or character and one just the slogan. The other two showed the name together with the logo or character, or with the slogan. Women read an online magazine at home with the ads in it. Afterwards, anyone who remembered an ad was asked which brand it was for and how much they liked it. Even for these big brands, with logos and slogans they had used for at least two years, not every reader linked them to the brand. For one of them, about a quarter didn't. The researchers counted just the readers who did know each brand's logo and slogan, so the results show those cues at their best.

The slogan result was the clearest. When an ad carried only the slogan, fewer readers named the brand than when it carried the name, for all three brands, and for the chocolate brand the drop was large. A logo or character used instead of the name came out level with the name on average, but that hid three different results. The bank's logo did better than the bank's name and the chocolate logo did worse than its name, each by about ten points, though neither gap was big enough to rule out chance. The pasta sauce character did the same as its name. Comparing across the results, the logo or character on its own did better than the slogan on its own for every brand. The study didn't test why the two logos went different ways.

Adding a logo or character to the name helped a little, as the name with the logo or character was remembered for the right brand more often than the name alone, by a small margin. Adding the slogan to the name was a little higher than the name alone too, but not by enough to rule out chance. How the ad was branded made little or no difference to how much people liked it. For each brand, the versions with the name, without the name and with both were liked about the same.

It helps to know what the study covers. It was print. The branding sat small in the bottom right corner, with one logo, character or slogan at most, and the name was set in a plain typeface rather than the brand's own. Each ad made the category obvious, and the three brands were large ones in their categories. Brand recall was measured right after reading, and the study measured memory for the brand, not buying, so it can't tell you what any of this did to sales. And because it counted just the readers who knew each logo and slogan, the researchers themselves say most advertisers won't have cues this strong, and that with less well known ones, leaving the name out is likely to do even more harm.

So what can you do with it? Don't assume people know your logo, character or slogan is yours. Find out how well known each one is, because the less well known it is, the riskier it is to let it stand in for the name. An earlier essay here covers how to measure your brand cues instead of guessing. Until you know, it's safer to keep the name in. Even with a well known logo or character, treat it as something to add to the name rather than something to replace it, because the name with the logo or character was remembered more often than the name alone. A slogan on its own is a long shot for getting the brand remembered. And if the name is being left out to make the ad more likeable, this study gives no reason to expect that it will.

Charlie