Does Samso Research Media House Method Work? Testing Against the Research
- Noel Ong
- 2 days ago
- 13 min read
Depth, repetition and a recognised name are not marketing slogans. They are some of the most heavily evidenced ideas in marketing science and behavioural finance. Here is what the published research supports Samso Research and where it pushes back.
By Noel Ong · Founder, CEO & Lead Researcher · Samso
A NOTE ON THE PIECE — DISCLOSURE OF ORIGIN This is a Samso editorial piece about Samso's own method. In line with our Editorial Charter, we make it clear that we have an obvious interest in the conclusion. So we have made sure that our thoughts in the blog below is sourced to independent, published research, peer-reviewed finance journals, marketing-science institutes and large-scale industry studies. We have included the places where that research qualifies or contradicts the approach. Read the sources. If the evidence does not hold up, the method does not deserve your attention either. |
The Samso Research Method makes the following claim; That depth beats hype. That a story builds recognition through three principles we call the three Rs — recency, relevancy and repetition. That an owned audience matters more than mass reach. That a name, covered consistently and seriously over time, becomes a name investors recognise without prompting.
Those are pleasant things for a research house to say about itself. The fair question is whether they are true or just the in-house language every media business uses to justify what it sells.
Our aim is for Samso to stand out from the crowd and offer a different form of engagement to allow balance in the research and "Make News Simple". The reason we have taken this approach to write this piece is to showcase out evidence for our strategy.
Today, we want to allow public domain literature to show that the strategy of the Samso Research Media House is not the reinvention of the wheel. The marketing science on repetition and frequency, the behavioural-finance research on how investors actually choose, and the large industry studies on what decision-makers trust is our backbone. Where the evidence backs the method, we say so and cite it. Where it sets limits, we say that too.
THE MECHANISM — PART ONE
Recognition is built by repetition - Samso Research Media House
The third R — repetition — is the one that sounds most like a sales pitch and is, in fact, the best documented. In 1968 the social psychologist Robert Zajonc described the mere-exposure effect: repeated, unreinforced exposure to a stimulus is enough, on its own, to make people regard it more favourably. Familiarity, in his words, breeds liking. The relationship he measured took the shape of a positive but decelerating curve — the first exposures do the most work, later ones less. Fittingly for a research house whose mark is a Chinese pictogram, one of Zajonc's original experiments used Chinese-style characters; people came to prefer the ones they had simply seen more often. [2]
This is not a one-study curiosity. By Bornstein's 1989 meta-analysis the effect had been replicated across more than two hundred studies, on words, faces, sounds and objects. [3] In advertising the same intuition was formalised by Herbert Krugman, who argued that exposures move a person through three psychological stages — curiosity ("what is it?"), recognition ("what of it?"), and finally a reminder that primes a decision. [1]
![Figure 1: The Recognition Curve - The first exposures move a name furthest; the curve flattens as familiarity is established, and can decline if the same weak message is simply repeated. The Samso method does not rely on a magic number of touches — it relies on the underlying mechanism this curve describes.
Sources: Zajonc (1968); Bornstein (1989) meta-analysis; Krugman three-exposure framework. See refs [1]–[3].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8d6c37_950217a717a04970b112e21b13cc25e6~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_477,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/8d6c37_950217a717a04970b112e21b13cc25e6~mv2.jpg)
Figure 1: The Recognition Curve - The first exposures move a name furthest; the curve flattens as familiarity is established, and can decline if the same weak message is simply repeated. The Samso method does not rely on a magic number of touches — it relies on the underlying mechanism this curve describes.
Sources: Zajonc (1968); Bornstein (1989) meta-analysis; Krugman three-exposure framework. See refs [1]–[3].
THE HONEST LIMIT The popular "rule of seven" or "rule of three" is the part of this story to be sceptical of. Krugman himself resisted the literal reading that three advertisements equal a result; he was describing psychological stages, not media-buying maths. [4] Modern audiences are also far noisier than the 1970s ones the early studies measured. And Zajonc's curve has a ceiling: past a point, exposure satiates and can even erode liking. The takeaway is not "repeat anything often enough." It is that repetition is necessary but not sufficient — which is precisely why for the Samso Research Media House, the other two Rs exist. |
THE MECHANISM — PART TWO
Most investors aren't ready today
If recognition is built slowly, the obvious objection is: why bother, when most people aren't buying anyway? The answer comes from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. In 2021 Professor John Dawes set out what is now called the 95:5 rule: at any single moment, roughly 95% of potential buyers in a category are not in the market, and only about 5% are actively choosing. [5]
Dawes is explicit that the figures are illustrative, not literal. [6] But the structural point is hard to argue with, and it maps almost exactly onto how investors behave. A given investor is not deciding whether to add your company to their portfolio this week. They will be ready months, sometimes years, from now — at a placement, a re-rate, a capital raise, a sector rotation.
The job in the meantime is what Ehrenberg-Bass call building mental availability: being the name already in their head when their own moment arrives. A campaign run entirely at the 5% who are deciding today reaches a tiny slice of the people who will eventually matter.
![Figure 2: The 95:5 Reality - Only a sliver of any investor audience is "deciding" at a given moment. Consistent, depth-led coverage is how a company stays mentally available to the far larger group who will decide later — the logic behind treating coverage as a campaign rather than a one-off event.
Source: Dawes (2021), the 95:5 Rule, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute / LinkedIn B2B Institute. See refs [5]–[6].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8d6c37_1ba07cfa22ab48ad973a78c8135d979e~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_348,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/8d6c37_1ba07cfa22ab48ad973a78c8135d979e~mv2.jpg)
Figure 2: The 95:5 Reality - Only a sliver of any investor audience is "deciding" at a given moment. Consistent, depth-led coverage is how a company stays mentally available to the far larger group who will decide later — the logic behind treating coverage as a campaign rather than a one-off event.
Source: Dawes (2021), the 95:5 Rule, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute / LinkedIn B2B Institute. See refs [5]–[6].
THE MECHANISM — PART THREE
In investing, familiarity is the motivation
Most marketing evidence is about products. Investing has its own, and it is blunt. In a 2001 paper in The Review of Financial Studies, one of the most cited journals in finance, Gur Huberman titled his findings "Familiarity Breeds Investment." [7] After the AT&T break-up, he showed, shareholders disproportionately held the regional phone company that served their own region. The same pattern runs through the data: investors over-weight their home country, employees pile into their employer's stock, and people in a company's home town own more of it than chance allows.
Huberman's conclusion is that people invest in the familiar, frequently in preference to what diversification theory would tell them to do. [8] For an ASX small- or mid-cap, that is the entire commercial case for recognition stated in the language of finance, not marketing. A name an investor recognises and feels they understand has a measurable edge over an equally good name they have never heard of.
"People invest in the familiar while often ignoring the principles of portfolio theory." — the finding, in plain terms, from Huberman's study.
THE HONEST LIMIT Read carefully, this is a warning as much as a tailwind. Familiarity bias is a documented error: it leads investors to under-diversify and to back what they recognise over what they have examined. A research model that simply manufactured familiarity would be exploiting that error. This is the exact line the Samso method is built to stay on the right side of. Recognition earned through genuine understanding geology, strategy, numbers, and the risks named out loud, is recognition an investor can defend. Recognition manufactured by noise is the bias Huberman is warning about. The first is what depth-led coverage produces; the second is what a press-release mill produces. The mechanism is the same; the responsibility is not. |
THE MATERIAL — PART ONE
Depth is what decision-makers actually trust
The second R, relevancy, or depth, is where the claim is least like conventional promotion, and the evidence here is recent and large. The annual Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveys around 3,500 management-level professionals across seven countries. The 2024 edition found that 73% of decision-makers consider an organisation's thought-leadership content a more trustworthy basis for judging its capability than its own marketing materials and product sheets. [9]
The same study found that 90% of decision-makers and C-suite executives (e.g., CEO, CFO, COO) become more receptive to a company that consistently produces high-quality thought leadership, and that 70% said a single substantive piece had, at least occasionally, made them question whether to stay with an existing supplier. [10] Roughly half of these senior people spend an hour or more every week reading this kind of material. The appetite for substance among the people who actually move capital is not a hope. It is measured.
![Figure 3: What Decision-Making Do with Depth - Substantive, expertise-led content does not merely raise awareness — it shifts trust and consideration among the senior people making decisions. Depth is the lever; the volume of selling is not.
Source: 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (~3,500 respondents, 7 countries). See refs [9]–[10].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8d6c37_65e1956e3fbd48879a67297d4d768fdf~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_371,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/8d6c37_65e1956e3fbd48879a67297d4d768fdf~mv2.jpg)
Figure 3: What Decision-Making Do with Depth - Substantive, expertise-led content does not merely raise awareness — it shifts trust and consideration among the senior people making decisions. Depth is the lever; the volume of selling is not.
Source: 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (~3,500 respondents, 7 countries). See refs [9]–[10].
THE MATERIAL — PART TWO
Long-form is how the work travels
Depth tends to mean length, and there is large-scale evidence that long-form work is also what spreads and endures. A joint study by BuzzSumo and Backlinko analysed over 900 million articles.
It found that long-form content earned roughly 56% more social shares than pieces under a thousand words, and that articles beyond 3,000 words attracted about 77% more referring domains — the links from other sites that signal a piece is worth citing. [11][12]
56% | 77% | 912M |
More Social Shares For Long-Form vs. Short Content | More Referring Domains For 3000+ Word Pieces | Articles Analysed In The Study |
THE HONEST LIMIT Length is not the lever — thoroughness is. Google's own engineers have said word count is not a direct ranking factor; comprehensive content simply tends to be longer as a by-product of covering a subject properly. [13] The same study found that the rewards concentrate heavily: a small fraction of "power posts" earn the great majority of shares and links. Padding a thin story to 3,000 words does nothing. A genuinely deep one, that happens to be long, is what travels. That is a standard, not a word target. |
THE DISTRIBUTION
Owned audience is the multiplier - So Says The Samso Research Media House
The work at the Samso Research Media House argues that an owned audience matters more than borrowed reach. The marketing literature broadly agrees, for reasons that have nothing to do with vanity.
Owned media which means your own site, podcast, email list, channels you control earns credibility over time as the work proves consistent, remains live and keeps returning value long after publication, and is the largest single contributor to organic, non-paid discovery. [14]
Marketers consider owned formats like email newsletters among the most effective channels for establishing genuine authority, ranking them significantly higher than paid placements.[15] A collection of substantial coverage is not a cost centre with an expiration date; instead, it is an asset that grows over time, which is precisely the argument made in the prospectus for the back catalogue.
This is not a thought, the monopoly of media in 20206, Google, has always valued owned media at a much higher status that its own paid content. The organic nature or content has always been the most valued source of content as it carries weight of independency.
![Figure 4: The Trust Spectrum, and Where Samso Site - Owned media's weakness is that audiences know the brand controls it. Independent, third-party coverage carries the highest inherent trust precisely because it doesn't. Samso's editorial charter — disclosure of origin, both sides required, editorial control retained, every piece labelled — is the mechanism that lets even paid membership coverage retain credibility closer to the independent end.
Framing draws on the paid / owned / earned media literature. See refs [14]–[16].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8d6c37_a66c0d234e3b45249d46299a44855540~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_389,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/8d6c37_a66c0d234e3b45249d46299a44855540~mv2.jpg)
Figure 4: The Trust Spectrum, and Where Samso Site - Owned media's weakness is that audiences know the brand controls it. Independent, third-party coverage carries the highest inherent trust precisely because it doesn't. Samso's editorial charter — disclosure of origin, both sides required, editorial control retained, every piece labelled — is the mechanism that lets even paid membership coverage retain credibility closer to the independent end.
Framing draws on the paid / owned / earned media literature. See refs [14]–[16].
THE HONEST LIMIT Owned media has a real weakness that should never gloss over: because the brand controls it, it carries less inherent trust than genuinely independent, third-party coverage. [16] A research house that takes membership fees is, structurally, closer to owned media than to journalism. There is only one credible answer to that, and it is not to pretend the tension away. It is the Editorial Charter: disclose the origin of every piece, require both the upside and the risks, keep editorial control out of the member's hands, and label the work so readers always know which path they are reading. That is what allows the paid work to be worth reading — and what lets the independent coverage keep its full weight. |
THE SYNTHESIS
Why the three Rs compound
If we put the evidence together and the three Rs stop being a slogan and become a description of three separate, well-documented mechanisms working on the same audience.
![Figure 5: Three Mechanisms - One Compound Effect - Each R answers to a different body of evidence — mental availability (recency), trust through depth (relevancy), and the mere-exposure effect (repetition). None is powerful alone. Sustained together, they produce the slow build the prospectus calls recognition.
Synthesis of refs [1]–[16].](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/8d6c37_9f0ef8cc33a64748822149b65681afae~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_485,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/8d6c37_9f0ef8cc33a64748822149b65681afae~mv2.jpg)
Figure 5: Three Mechanisms - One Compound Effect - Each R answers to a different body of evidence — mental availability (recency), trust through depth (relevancy), and the mere-exposure effect (repetition). None is powerful alone. Sustained together, they produce the slow build the prospectus calls recognition.
Synthesis of refs [1]–[16].
Recency keeps a company mentally available, so it is in the room when an investor finally enters the market — the 95:5 lesson. Relevancy supplies the depth that the Edelman data shows decision-makers actually trust and act on. Repetition does the patient work of the mere-exposure effect, turning a name into a familiar one.
And familiarity, Huberman's finance research tells us, is not a vanity metric in this industry — it is something that demonstrably affects where capital goes. No one of these closes the loop. Run consistently, over time, through owned channels that keep the archive working, they compound.
SAMSO CONCLUDING COMMENTS
What the evidence does and does not say
When all is said and done, the Samso method is not magical, and an honest review of the literature prevents us from claiming it is. There is no silver bullet that will ensure that our methods will work. There is no rule of seven that ensures success. Experience clearly show us that Repetition without substance becomes mere satisfaction that leads to a sugar hit at the very most.
Length without depth is just noise and at most times encourages boredom. Unchecked familiarity of topics and real experience in the industry can lead investors astray instead of aiding them. It is a well known fact that Owned Media alone is less trustworthy than independent journalism.
What the evidence does indicate is that the individual mechanisms on which the Samso method relies — creating mental availability before the purchase moment, gaining trust through depth rather than quantity, the gradual accumulation of recognition through consistent exposure, and the documented influence of familiarity on investment decisions — are among the most well-supported concepts in their fields.
The Samso method is not a new invention. It is the undervalued application of these mechanisms to ASX-listed companies, that is lost in the midst of constant hype. Hype will give companies the instant glorification but as we all know, any credible story will always be a long term proposition. Hype will garnish instant valuation re-rating but when the profit taking takes place, the majority of credible stories never recovers.
The Samso approach is to allow our form of research to create a balanced argument that will be valid even after the profit taking. It allows investors to gain confidence on the company story as there are real facts to digest creating evidence of credibility.
What The Samso Research Media House Do Not Do is create the "Sugar Hit Experience". There is no hype and there is no discussion of "Moving The Price". The ASX market investing market is constantly looking for the short term manifestation of value creation but real companies with real projects always refer the slow appreciation of value as it is something that can be sustained. As a former practitioner of being a ASX company director, I can vouch for that thought.
The ultimate aim of this blog is to highlight the science on why depth, repetition, and a credible source of information are effective. The charter is what makes our independence defensible. Remove either, and the argument collapses. Together, they are why we believe research conducted in this manner is the path worth supporting — and the sources are right below, allowing you to make your own decision.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Krugman, H. E., "Why Three Exposures May Be Enough" — summarised in the effective-frequency literature. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing (Springer). link.springer.com/article/10.1057/jt.2012.1
Zajonc, R. B. (1968), "Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9(2, Pt.2), 1–27 — overview via The Decision Lab. thedecisionlab.com/biases/mere-exposure-effect
Bornstein, R. F. (1989), meta-analysis of mere-exposure research (200+ studies), Psychological Bulletin, 106(2), 265–289 — cited in The Decision Lab (ref 2).
Julius, L., "The Three Frequency Myth" — on Krugman's own caution against the literal three-exposure rule. linkedin.com/pulse/three-frequency-myth-larry-julius
Dawes, J. (2021), "The 95:5 Rule," Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. marketingscience.info
Dawes, J., "The 95:5 Rule" (author note on illustrative figures). johndawes.info/the-955-rule
Huberman, G. (2001), "Familiarity Breeds Investment," The Review of Financial Studies, 14(3), 659–680. academic.oup.com/rfs/article-abstract/14/3/659
Huberman, G., "Familiarity Breeds Investment" (working paper, full text, Columbia Business School). columbia.edu (PDF)
Edelman & LinkedIn (2024), B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (full report PDF). edelman.com (PDF)
LinkedIn Business, "Reach Beyond the Ready: 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Research." linkedin.com/business
Backlinko & BuzzSumo (2019), "We Analyzed 912 Million Blog Posts." backlinko.com/content-study
BuzzSumo / Backlinko study, press release. prnewswire.com
Content Length Statistics 2025 (on word count vs. thoroughness; Google guidance). ranktracker.com
Adobe, "Paid, Earned & Owned Media" — owned media and organic discovery. business.adobe.com
Content Marketing Institute data, via DesignRush, "Content Marketing Statistics." designrush.com
TVEyes, "Owned vs. Earned Media" — relative trust of media types. tveyes.com/owned-vs-earned-media
Disclaimer: This is a Samso Insights editorial piece concerning Samso's own research methodology, and Samso therefore has a direct interest in its conclusions. It is published in keeping with the Samso Editorial Charter, which requires disclosure of origin and the weighing of both sides; the limitations of each argument have been included accordingly. All empirical claims are attributed to the independent third-party sources listed above. Nothing here is financial advice, and no specific security is recommended. Readers should consult the primary sources and form their own view. |
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