Marketing Architects

Bold challenger brands find ways to win, even against industry giants. These underdogs succeed by building real emotional connections with customers. But that takes teamwork across departments. And actually talking to the people who buy your stuff. Learn more about Chuck Hengel's challenger principles in our latest issue! #Marketing #Challenger #Strategy

Have you heard of "smashable branding"? If you smash a Coke bottle and hand someone a shard, they'll still recognize the brand. That's powerful distinctiveness. Marketing Architects founder Chuck Hengel explains that building an iconic brand means making everything distinct and unique. No shortcuts. The secret? True collaboration across every function. Customer service isn't separate from marketing. Neither is manufacturing. Or finance. When everyone contributes to the marketing process rather than staying siloed in their departments, magic happens. Check out Chuck's full interview on The Marketing Architects Podcast. #Marketing #Branding?

When Sean Haugen joined Marketing Architects, he was excited to put his advertising education to good use. And what could be more exciting than building TV campaigns? Seven years later, he's grown through four different titles to become a Media Operations Manager on a team that didn't even exist when he started. His role? Keeping the train on the tracks. Sean supports the media buying team through data management, creative trafficking, streaming ad serving, process automation, and much more. He collaborates with every department and network partner on work that impacts every client. With so much happening quickly, organization, communication, and resilience are Sean’s secret weapons. He knows how to pivot fast. Just like when Marketing Architects pivoted to remote work. Today, Sean loves having extra time with his family and pets (a dog and two cats) thanks to working from anywhere. And no commute means Sean logs off work to head straight to the golf course in the summer and the ski slopes in the winter. #Spotlight #RemoteWork

When your brain encounters a story, mirror neurons mean you react as if you're living it. This explains why narrative ads get shared twice as much as traditional messaging. This neurological connection makes brands more trustworthy and drives purchase decisions. Learn how strategic storytelling can transform your marketing results in the latest issue! #Marketing #Storytelling #Brand

Storytelling in marketing is powerful, but often misunderstood and misused. Just how effective is "story" in advertising? There's plenty of research to back it up: 1. Stories make ads more engaging and memorable. A study titled “Visual Storytelling in Advertising” by Doaa Eldesousky demonstrates how emotionally compelling visuals improve engagement and recall. 2. Stories drive engagement and word-of-mouth. “The Role of Storytelling in Advertising” by Jin-Ae Kang, PhD, Sookyeong Hong, and Glenn Hubbard found that ads using a clear narrative structure improve emotional response and increase consumers’ willingness to talk about the brand. 3. Stories improve purchase intent. “The Influence of Storytelling on the Consumer–Brand Relationship Experience” by Catia Fernandes Crespo, Alcina Gaspar, and Ricardo Moita test storytelling’s effects on 323 consumers. Storytelling improved brand identification and purchase intention. But storytelling in marketing goes wrong when brands think they're making movies instead of ads - blockbusters belong in Hollywood. The best brand stories create memory structures for your product or service at the moment your customer is in-market for them. Story can strengthen your message, or take it off track. We discuss storytelling in advertising on the podcast this week... Link in the comments to listen. ??

77% of marketing professionals now regularly use ChatGPT or similar AI tools. And one major use case for AI? Market research. Synthetic audiences delivers faster results, bigger savings, and often better accuracy than traditional methods. Learn how AI can complement traditional research in the latest issue! #Marketing #AI #Research

Can synthetic audiences substitute for real humans in market research? At Marketing Architects, we’ve spent the past two years testing LLMs to pretest TV creative and identify which commercial will win in-market BEFORE production. (Pretty important when TV creative is a major investment for any brand.) We validated our results against 20+ years of real TV performance data and our past human panel pretesting. For us, synthetic audiences have been MORE predictive of in-market TV creative performance than traditional methods. DISCLAIMER: Getting there wasn't easy. It took thousands of tests, 4 months, and our OWN custom data to get here. We aren't just plugging questions into ChatGPT. I’m not saying LLMs should replace all market research. At our agency, we still rely on traditional methods for most research and strategy. But for this use case (pretesting TV creative) it's faster, allows for more testing, and is more accurate than focus groups or surveys. Great marketers are skeptics. And any marketing solution claiming to be a “quick fix” deserves scrutiny. But after seeing this firsthand, I think ignoring synthetic audiences is a mistake. If you haven’t explored them yet, maybe it’s time. We break it all down on The Marketing Architects Podcast this week… link in the comments to listen.

At any given time, 95% of your B2B audience isn't actively in-market. But they are building mental shortcuts that determine which brands they'll choose later. These Category Entry Points (CEPs) are why you reach for Coke when you're thirsty. Or stop at Starbucks during your morning commute. The more moments you own, the more likely you are to be your audience's choice when they are ready to buy. Learn how to capture customer attention at the right time in the latest issue! #Marketing #Brand #Strategy

Are Category Entry Points (CEPs) the most underrated concept in marketing effectiveness? We (marketers) spend a lot of time thinking about differentiation, but what about making sure your brand is top-of-mind in as many buying situations as possible? A Category Entry Point (coined by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Jenni Romaniuk) is the mental cue that links a buying situation to a brand. The classic example of a brand that has mastered CEPS is Coca-Cola. Are you thirsty? Celebrating Christmas? Watching a game? Have a Coke! The more situations your brand is associated with - and the stronger those associations - the more likely you are to be chosen. And broad-reach media like TV is key to reinforce CEPs over time. We chat about CEPs on The Marketing Architects Podcast this week, including how to identify and prioritize them. (but the image below by The B2B Institute is a great place to start) And now I can't stop looking for CEPs in TV commercials and judging if they are strong or weak. ?? Link in the comments to listen to the episode!

TV's biggest event of the year was record-setting. And not just for the Chiefs-Eagles showdown. The game drew 127.7 million viewers, making it the most-watched Super Bowl in history. And those millions weren't just there for the football. When Kendrick Lamar took the stage, viewership hit 133.5 million—the largest halftime show audience ever. For the first time this year, viewers could stream the Super Bowl for free through Tubi. The FAST platform's accessibility led to record-breaking streaming numbers. But even so, many streaming viewers caught the nationally broadcast ads through live linear streaming. And the game's biggest gains? A 24% jump in viewership among women ages 18-24. #Data #SuperBowl