Net audiences: a comparison of the Sainsbury Normal Method and the Sainsbury Weighted Method

ABSTRACT

For almost nine decades, advertisers have relied on the Sainsbury Normal Method (SNM) to estimate net-reach where single-source data are either too expensive or unavailable. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no SNM validation studies have included catalogues, smartphone applications, websites, social media, or cinema. While few studies have applied the SNM across media, no study has addressed the limitation of the SNM, that is, the implied assumption of audience homogeneity. Given that audiences do differ by age within any medium, and across media, there is a need to incorporate audience heterogeneity into the method. The authors introduce the Sainsbury Weighted Method (SWM) which provides more accurate within medium net-reach estimations in 82% of the 9,680 cases analysed, with an average accuracy improvement for within medium net-reach estimations of 0.6 percentage points (or 13%). For across media net-reach, the SWM estimations are more accurate in 77% of the 968 cases analysed, improving the average accuracy by 0.5 percentage points (or 49%).

KEYWORDS:

• Sainsbury Normal Method
• Sainsbury Weighted Method
• media
• segmentation
• reach

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zachary William Anesbury

Zachary William Anesbury is the Inaugural Gerald Goodhardt Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and a Senior Marketing Scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at UniSA Business. Zachary’s area of expertise is consumer buying and media consumption behaviour. Zachary’s research has been published in the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, Marketing Letters and the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services. Zachary is on the Editorial Review Boards of the International Journal of Market Research, and the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.

Carl Barrie Driesener

Carl Barrie Driesener is Senior Lecturer at the Business School of the University of South Australia and a Senior Marketing Scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. His research interests include consumer behaviour and advertising. He is particularly interested in how advertising in a broad sense affects consumer behaviour, particularly loyalty. He has published in Journal of Advertising Research, International Journal of Market Research and Australasian Marketing Journal.

Bill Page

Bill Page is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. The Institute is sponsored by many leading corporations including Procter & Gamble, Mondelez, Unilever, Kantar, and Colgate-Palmolive. His research interests are in shopper marketing and retailing, including store layouts and shopper flow. His research focuses on understanding habitual behaviour.

Steven Bellman

Steven Bellman is a research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia. His research on media and advertising responses is funded by the Beyond:30 project, whose sponsors include television networks and advertisers worldwide. His research has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Management Science. He is on the editorial boards of five journals.

Byron Sharp

Byron Sharp is the Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. Byron’s first book How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know was voted marketing book of the year by AdAge readers in 2013. He has co-hosted, with Professor Jerry Wind, two conferences at the Wharton Business School on the laws of advertising, and is on the editorial board of five journals.