The impact of brand familiarity on online and offline media synergy

Abstract

Rooted in the integrated marketing communication framework, this paper conceptualizes how brand familiarity affects online and cross-channel synergies. The empirical analysis uses Bayesian vector autoregressive models to estimate long-term elasticities for four brands. The authors distinguish customer-initiated communication (typically online) from firm-initiated communication (typically offline). Their results indicate that within-online synergy is higher than online–offline synergy for both familiar brands but not for both unfamiliar brands. Managers of unfamiliar brands may obtain substantial synergy from offline marketing spending, even though its direct elasticity pales in comparison with that of online media while managers of familiar brands can generate more synergy by investing in different online media.