The aim is to give the ad industry an holistic view of the measures that determine how a brand grows across time, and the importance of each piece of the media mix in a brand’s success. It will try to answer the long-standing question about whether to target existing brand buyers to increase loyalty and maintain share or to grow the brand’s base by targeting light and non-brand buyers.

Partnering with CPG advertisers such as Anheuser-Busch, The Hershey Company and Kellogg, media companies including CBS and Facebook, and industry organisations, NCS and The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute are analysing more than six billion rows of data from 50 brands across three and half years to understand the best strategies for building brands in today’s media environment.

The research will look at who the most likely potential buyers of a product are, and determine how to best influence future purchases using five pillars of advertising: creative, reach, targeting, recency and context.

Leslie Wood, chief research officer, Nielsen Catalina Solutions said: “In the advertising industry, there’s more data available today than there’s ever been before. Brands have greater ability to deliver messages to more specific audiences, but we haven’t had the tools to understand the implications of targeting decisions.

“This study will put the pieces together and deliver insights on how media and creative decisions contribute to a brand’s growth over time.”

Professor Byron Sharp, director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and author of How Brands Grow added: “One of the decisions that marketers continue to grapple with is how to target their marketing dollars. Choices range from targeting existing buyers of the brand, e.g. loyalists, to targeting future category buyers to grow penetration.

“Of course, many brands do both with different campaigns. We are seeking to find out the right balance for brands that really want to achieve substantial growth.”

The initial findings of the research will be released in spring of 2018.