In the case of Fandango showing an interstitial ad when attempting to check out, I can't imagine that wouldn't hurt conversion, and I can't imagine that conversion wouldn't be one the key metrics they would test with. I would guess it's more just a lack of care. Someone said "we need our website to make more money" and someone else said "okay, I hear that ads are for making more money."
Well, presumably they're reselling these tickets on behalf of the theaters which get the bulk of the revenue. It's possible Fandango takes no margin on the tickets sales and just makes money on the ads.
They take a fixed fee per ticket. It's a good model.
Like most ticketing operations, they've built a niche monopoly. If you want to buy tickets online, they are usually the only game in town. If the obnoxious ads annoy you, their attitude is basically "fuck you, drive to the mall and miss your movie".
This is called a "moat". Build it for your company, it's a good thing for an entrepreneur.
To be significantly successful, you need to stop thinking this way. Start thinking about what benefits you & your company.
It may seem like contempt for the consumer, and perhaps it is. But it's also possible the consumer is irrational and you can benefit in the short and long term.
I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand". It's mostly branding people making an argument that comic sans devalues our brand, whereas the data clearly shows it doesn't.
The "long term harm" argument is indistinguishable from "i know better than you and I want it this way." It may be true, but it's unprovable.
> I work in marketing, and have seen scant evidence for the value of a "brand"
To what do you attribute the success of, say Coca Cola, rather than generic cola? Price and a good distribution network? Surely brand must contribute a little.
I don't know much about how branding works at that scale. But I don't think it's very effective for small/medium companies, and can be quite a money sink.
In nearly every SMB branding exercise/project I've participated in, the need for a brand, and the benefits it provides, are entirely limited to the egos of the employees.
I have seen this "we can't measure branding but we can measure conversion rates so let's optimize optimize optimize" approach borne out to create some of the worst websites. High converting, surely, but spammy, ugly, constantly trying to jam you into the funnel, full of dark patterns etc. Usually utterly forgettable, but often memorable for how crappy the experience is.
In my experience companies that do this are thinking very short term: how many people can we get through our funnel this month and how much money can we make from them? Yes it's hard to measure 'long term harm', but to assume it doesn't exist because it can't be directly measured makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
To me it is worth aspiring to be respected as a business. Obviously not to the point of letting your business fail because you obsessed over branding while nobody actually bought your product, but as a larger goal. A business that tries to squeeze customers for all it can and achieves grudging acceptance isn't something I aspire to be a part of.
The problem with a brand is that you don't know if it's the most effective use of the resources that go into it.
Coca Cola has nearly infinite resources, compared to the jobs I've worked (<$75mm annual revenue).
Even then, can they prove the value of their brand is an effective use of their marketing dollars? What I've read has a lot of correlations that could be explained by other causes.
It's difficult to measure the value of a brand, and most companies don't bother. It's expensive, because you have to pay actual people to talk to other people in a systematic way, over a long period of time.
Brand awareness is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers know that your product or service is an option when they are ready to make a purchase. You can't measure it from your marketing interactions alone, because the data set of your interactions is biased toward potential customers who are already aware of you. You can only measure it by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. The business purpose of measuring awareness is to help you find customers who have never interacted with your brand.
Brand affinity is the measurement of the degree to which potential customers have an emotional attachment to your product or service. A good shorthand is the degree to which a potential customer thinks of themselves as a "________ person." Think of a dude in a pickup truck saying "I'm a Ford guy, they've never let me down," or a person who won't even look at a phone that is not an iPhone. Again--the only way to measure this is by performing statistically valid sampling of potential customers. Measuring your marketing interactions alone will give you an artificially high measure of your affinity.
Design standards are important to both awareness and affinity.
A standard look helps the customer make mental connections between all the various times they've been exposed to your brand--this raises awareness. Comic Sans is not necessarily bad for awareness as long as you use it consistently in an intentional way. Randomly varying your fonts is bad, though, because it makes you "look" like several different brands, which means you will need to deliver more interactions to raise awareness.
Comic sans also might harm certain affinities, for example along the lines of being "sophisticated" or "beautiful." If a customer wants to think of themselves as sophisticated, they will seek brands that also present themselves that way. You're not going to see Mercedes Benz, which depends heavily on affinities of sophistication and elegance, using Comic Sans. You might see Scion, which depends on affinities of quirkiness and irony, use it. But again, the point is to be intentional.
Companies that are good at branding tend to be good either because they measure it compulsively (example: Proctor and Gamble), or because they are good at making internal opinionated decisions that stick (example: Apple).
Either way, the day to day operation of a strong brand does indeed look like a few people within a company telling everyone else what they can and cannot do with design.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. Honestly, it makes a lot of sense.
I don't have any experience with billion dollar companies. Have you worked in the industry and seen how they measure their campaign efficacies in huge companies? I bet it's really different than what I've seen.
Based on what I've seen, it's a lot of story telling that "branding" works. The question is, does it work better than if the company had put those resources into other avenues? Improve the product. Decrease the cost to consumer. Better customer service.
Here's a good cro vs. branding article, check out the Intel Inside section. [0].
There's a lot of money being made by people working in branding. If their field actually wasn't very effective, I wonder if it would be possible for them to accept it. I generally wouldn't want to find out that my career has essentially been a waste, and I created no value. (insert sinclair quote here)
It's probable that there is no grand strategy, but it might make sense if their model finds you unlikely to convert and the conversion price is very low. It's not necessarily flat per movie, they may be losing money on that one as part of a package deal.
