Archive for November, 2008
Ad recall - has it any relevance?
Marketing magazine’s weekly Adwatch Bulletin has just landed in my inbox, listing recent ads with the highest recall http://www.brandrepublic.com/marketing/AdWatch/. As I read through the list, I couldn’t helping wondering…so what? So what if the Argos ad has the highest recall. What interests me is what happened next. What did the viewers feel compelled to do as a result of that ad? What action did they take? Did they feel compelled to get off their sofa and reach for the Argos catalogue - or better still go to their local store or onto the internet and starting buying stuff?
I sometimes wonder if we are asking sufficiently penetrating questions in these surveys. It’s very nice to know that your ad is remembered. But wouldn’t you like to know that your ad caused a storming of the checkouts? Recall is irrelevant if the ad didn’t trigger an action and a consequence.
We’re all in business to keep the money flowing between us. As we are seeing in this current economic crisis - if the money don’t flow, we all grind to a halt. So perhaps we should introduce a new measure of advertising effectiveness: ‘to what extent did the ad compel you to reach into your pocket and spend its contents on that product or brand?’ Being top of that list would really be something to celebrate!
What has John Sergeant and customer knowledge in common? Everything!
We’ve watched with growing interest and amazement this week as the storm in a teacup over John Sergeant’s less than twinkling toes, has become a maelstrom of media activity. While the BBC could not have planned a better PR campaign for getting Strictly Come Dancing splashed across the news (even Newsnight devoted a 10 minute piece to it on Wednesday - the day Sergeant announced his retirement from the show), does it hide an underlying issue? On the ‘other side’ ITV are having a similar but much less public conundrum on the X Factor, where the public vote is saving the underdog at the expense of the better performers.
Where the decisions over who stays and who goes are made by public vote, it is a very clear indicator of customers’ preference. But what is the real motivation? Do the TV companies truly understand what internal emotional levers are being pulled when their customers feel compelled to pick up that phone and vote? Since the BBC had to shut down the Strictly message boards last night because of the overwhelming number of people posting their comments on this week’s revelations, we rather suspect that they don’t!
Let’s get real……..
The Times reported today that official interest rates were slashed yesterday by one and a half points to 3 percent leaving base rates at their lowest level since 1954.
The International Monetary Fund are also warning that next year would be Britain’s toughest since 1991 and predicted that the economy would shrink by 1.3 per cent – the biggest fall in GDP since 1991. This would leave Britain by far the worst performer among the world’s leading industrial countries. It also factored in a global recession for the first time, saying that the world’s developed economies as a whole were headed for their first full-year contraction since the Second World War.
This has to be the most conclusive indication so far that that it is time to change the way that we think about marketing expenditure.
The smart companies will already be saying that this is exactly the time when we should be holding our nerve and continuining to spend at the same level, if not higher to protect market share. But what if we now start to take our thinking rather than our budgets to the next level?
As Einstein said we can’t solve problems at the same level of thinking at which they were created!
No longer can we afford to spend marketing budgets hoping that it will have the desired effect. Our thinking and language need to change so that we are focussing on getting the best possible return on investment and are really certain that that the investment is being made in the right place to give the best possible customer leverage.
Knowing how to get this customer leverage comes firstly from making sure that we have extracted all that we can from customer information that already exists, only gathering more customer information where there are clear gaps in our knowledge. Then by looking at all customer information sources from a key leverage points perspective, we can start building a map of what the customer is focussing on and identifying what they will be prepared to invest in.
This perspective shift has to be coupled with being brave enough to admit that some areas of past investment have not been working hard enough and that these investments need to be cut to enable more investment to be made in areas that will deliver better returns.
Given the choice, which will be the better levers for you to pull?
Do your customers want to be hugged or educated?
Do they want deals or directions?
Do they want freedom to choose or reassurance?
Do they want evolution or revolution?
Deciding which customer levers to pull requires not only the skill to be able look where others have looked and see what others have not seen but to also to know with certainty what effect pulling them will have!
The days of hopin’ and wishin’ and prayin’ are over. We now need customer insight that will deliver this level of certainty, because it is based on fact not hypotheses, behaviour not opinions, experience not projections and is intrinsically linked to the bottom line.
As marketers we need to get a clear perspective on the real world of the customer as they see it , hear it, feel it and spend money in it to make sure that their interest doesn’t fall to an all time low!
It is indeed a question of behaviour!
Hats off to Mark Ritson in this week’s Marketing magazine for banging the same drum that we have been banging since the mid 1990’s. He writes that ‘focusing on what consumers do, not what they say they do, is key to building effective strategies.’ Actually we go one stage further - focus on what the customer is focusing on and then seek to understand what is driving them to focus on that. Therein lies the key to their behaviour and the success of your strategies.
Ritson also says ‘I have umpteen war stories of focus group findings and opinion surveys that sent me and my client in the wrong direction from the consumer behaviour we were trying to predict’.
We also have plenty of experience of clients going down the wrong track and then asking us for help in getting back on the right one. The problem is, as Ritson points out, customers do not do what they say they will do. But they will repeat behaviours that they have done in the past - in fact they are programmed to do so! So the answer is to model what they have already done. That way you get a much better predictor of how they will behave in the future.
Truly impactful customer modelling and mapping that gets to the heart of the customer, their focus and their behaviour, is an art. It is not done to the customer, it is extracted from them. Rather like taking a blank canvas and enabling the customer to paint their real story upon it. It’s not about prediction based on opinions, attitudes or hypotheses. It is about future behaviour projection based on mapping actual behaviour in the past.
You see, there are certain drivers of behaviour and motivation that we all display in the different contexts of our lives. Knowing which ones are in play in a specific context is crucial to understanding how we are likely to behave when we are in that context again.
Let’s just look at an example. Marketing cites New Coke as famous failed prediction. ‘In 1985, Coca-Cola ran more than 200,000 blind taste tests on its new Coke formula. When results revealed that a majority preferred the new taste to traditional Coke and Pepsi, the company launched the new formula. The public hated it. Research had failed to account for the difference between blind product tests and real brand loyalty.’
The problem was not that the research got the wrong answer - the problem was that it did not ask the right question. It did not ask whether Coke customers were motivated by trying new and different products (even within the brand) or by sticking to the same old favourite they loved. Had they asked that question, they would have known that customers would not accept a ‘new’ replacement Coke, even if they preferred the taste. They might have accepted it though, if it was marketed as the same old Coke they knew and loved, just with a slightly improved taste. It might have been a whole different story - or maybe the same story with an improved ending - for Coca-Cola. Note how they have succeeded with brand extension (Diet Coke, Diet with Lemon etc) -but these are additions not replacements.
Discovering the point of greatest leverage to influence the customer to repeat their behaviour in your favour, is the intuitive art within the art of customer mapping. As the old story goes, the value is not in how hard you tap the pipe, it’s in knowing precisely where to tap. You can’t know where to tap, if you don’t know your customer’s map!