Archive for January, 2009
Does insight stifle creativity? It doesn’t have to.
Yesterday I mentioned that Sir Martin Sorrel had cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”. “Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
Nic Niewart responded to the Media Week article and Sir Martin’s comment with this: ‘If a creative worth anything finds this bad news, then you’re in the wrong business, baby. It is precisely the marrying of strategic insights- (the nodding of client heads in the early part of the pitch/presentation) COUPLED to a Brilliant Creative Interpretation of that sentence/finding/word that has been what great advertising is about. The client is happy, the agency is happy, AND you get combined great business results. Why has it taken so long for the bleeding obvious to be stated?’
This creative tension always intrigues me but having read a number of ‘death by powerpoint’ presentations of customer insight studies which pour forth data by the dozen but not much that is easily executionable, I can understand why creatives groan at the thought of yet more ‘insight’. It is interesting that an industry that is so focused on provising insight about customers should be so inept at providing its insight to its own customers in a form and language that is easy to read and interpret and is immediately actionable and executionable. How any brand manager can develop creative brief from 240 slides of data is beyond me, yet that is what they have to contend with.
I am going to unashamedly plug our work here - but only because it is directly relevant to giving creative teams insight that they can work easily with and which enhances their creative freedom rather than stifles it. The techniques that we use (Values Elicitation and Language and Behaviour Profiling) give brand managers and creative teams strategic customer insight, along with that illusive brand personality and distinct customer language bespoke to their brand which makes a clear brief easy, and enables the creative team to create their little hearts out.
To agree with Nic, it is the coupling of great customer wisdom and creative genius that leads to great advertising WITH business benefits.
Great insight, brilliant creative interpretation, fantastic business results - here’s one our insight made earlier (and we’re told had a sales uplift of 155%).
Dairy Milk - I’m thinking of defecting
I am somewhat bemused. Cadbury’s have released a new ad featuring children with dancing eyebrows. I freely admit to being a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk fan and consume far more of the stuff than is healthy, but I am seriously considering defecting to another brand because I just cannot see what their ads have to do with chocolate consumption. The brief apparently was to ‘Create a piece of content that gives people the same joyful feeling they have when they eat Cadbury Dairy Milk’. Hmmmmm, drumming gorillas and dancing eyebrows… I just don’t associate them with that ‘joyful feeling’ I get. Perhaps I am odd.
Last week Media Week reported that WPP, the global communication group, is set to significantly shift its competitive profile away from traditional media and advertising operations to become a more strategic, insight-led organisation, according to chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell. Speaking at an International Advertising Association luncheon Sir Martin noted that WPP revenues stand at about £15bn, £4bn of which is generated by consumer insight, and he announced that WPP would be focusing more of its business in that direction. He cited recent research from the IAB, which looked at why clients value agencies and found that 87% of the sample pointed to the agencies’ “strategic consumer insight”.
“Clients won’t move in the future unless they get quantitative justification for what they do,” said Sorrell. “We may not like it - creative departments of ad agencies certainly don’t - but that’s the way the world’s going.”
So I am fascinated to know what ’strategic consumer insight’ led to the Cadbury’s ads (created by Fallon), and what quantitative justification they are getting to support them. Reports are that Dairy Milk sales are not soaring and that it has lost market share to Galaxy (and am I the only customer who is actually considering defecting to Galaxy or maybe Lindt?). Perhaps it is doing more for the Cadbury brand as a whole, let’s hope so.
Now here’s a thought!
Browsing the blogs while nibbling on my Ryvita and Kipper pate this lunchtime, I came across Rory Sutherland’s missive More kittens: Or how Sir Martin Sorrell can end the recession overnight, in which he is bemused why the mighty power of media buyers isn’t twisting the arms of the newspapers to write at least more balanced, if not more positive news.
‘Because, at the moment, it doesn’t really matter whether you are paying £20,000 or £10,000 for a full page in a British newspaper. What matters is that 50% of your £10,000 is being spent on paying journalists to write doom-laden articles discouraging consumers from doing anything except to cower inside their homes waiting for redundancy and repossession.
In short we are currently using our clients’ money to pay newspapers to destroy our clients’ businesses.’
He suggests: ‘Group M and the other large media buying houses should simply withhold all advertising money from British media until they learn to cheer the f*** up. And, correspondingly, we should lavish advertising money on feel-good media.
Imagine the phone calls. “Hello, Daily Telegraph, we were going to give you £100K to run a series of ads for IBM, but unfortunately you ran an article on repossessions yesterday. So instead we’re going to put all the money towards sponsoring “Dogs do the Funniest Things on ITV3 and a gatefold pull-out in Hello! Now, don’t do it again, right.” ‘
I think Rory has a point. We might be heading into the biggest downturn anyone under 65 will have seen in their lifetime, but there are still good news stories to be broadcast. There are companies who are still growing and doing well, brands that bucking the apparent downward trend, small businesses that have never been so busy, not to mention millions of people doing interesting things worth talking about. And if the papers run out of good news stories, they can always resort to fluffy kittens, but I suspect by the time they do we’ll be out the other side of this and denationalising all the banks we now suddenly own.
There is a more sinister side to the media’s obsession with bad news, which is of concern, and that is the psychological effect the gloomy news has on us all. This recession hasn’t suddenly come upon us in the last year, it has been creeping up on us for several years and yet a year ago we were still thinking we were a booming economy and spending as such. The only difference in what was really going on in the economy then to now is that no-one told us we weren’t booming anymore.
Perhaps we would all be better off if the media just balanced their news-telling, so for every doom and gloom story they hunt down, they also sniffed out a good news one. Then perhaps we could all feel a little more balanced and our media spend would be supporting our thriving client’s businesses instead of contributing to killing them.
In the meantime, perhaps we really should put our money where our clients’ mouths would like to be - in media that attempts to support and reverse an ailing economy rather than media that just adds to it.
It all comes down to one thing: what is valuable to your customers?
I was browsing through McKinsey Quarterly this evening and came across this report on Maintaining Customer Experience from December 2008.
I quote… ‘How can consumer businesses make necessary investments in service while facing the pressure on revenues and costs? Our review of the companies with the best customer service records in ten industries suggests that one key is to minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of satisfaction. Specifically, companies should challenge their beliefs about service and test those beliefs analytically. Many will discover that long-held, but seldom-reviewed, assertions about what customers really want are wrong.
Sophisticated companies that figure out what matters most to customers, eliminate the investments that don’t matter, and finance the ones that do, will thrive—and may find themselves, when the economy returns to normal, with fewer competitors.’
I have a moment of deja vu here. Isn’t that what I posted on here yesterday?
The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those [customer] values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not.
One of the most rewarding things about the work we do at The Best Organisation is the ability to show clients where they can save money and get a better return on their ROI, by understanding what is important to their customers, i.e. those ‘drivers of satisfaction’. It’s also rewarding to know that the authors of that McKinsey report (Adam Braff and John C DeVine) are singing from our hymn sheet too.
Welcome Barack Obama. A new age has begun.
Today was the historic inauguration of Barack Obama as the new US president. I watched it on TV along with millions around the world. I am sure I am not the only one that felt a new energy and a new hope emanate around the man, even though his inaugral speech was tough and realistic. We do face huge challenges in our individual and collective economies at a personal and global level, and these challenges are necessary to sweep away an unsustainable way of living. But as Obama said in his speech, ‘Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished.’
And we still have values, needs and desires to be fulfilled. Our values may change but nevertheless we will still seek to fulfil them. The role now of all purveyors of goods and services is to find out what those values are and to adjust to provision of them accordingly. Those companies that cannot fulfil the values of its customers will fall by the wayside. Those that can and do, will thrive. Whether in nature or in business, the fittest survive and the weakest do not. We might like to think we can buck that trend, but we have yet to prove that we can.
Obama was elected because he fulfilled the values of the nation: for change, for freedom, for ’hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord….(And) an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.’
As businesses, if we want that kind of success, and that kind of loyalty (and we can have it, companies can still grow in recession), then we have to become very certain of the customer values that we are aiming to fulfil.
Why is it so hard to talk to women?
Men may still be the higher wage earners in most households, but women are the main holders of the purse strings, deciding what to cut back on, how much to save, and what to spend the hard-earned cash on. From techno-gadgets to the weekly shop, home decor to utility bills, women are the decision-makers (even when they let the men think that they are).
Belinda Parmar of Lady Geeks reckons the tech brands could be missing out on £0.5 billion in revenue by not marketing to women. ‘Ask any family who was in charge of buying the Christmas gifts, and you’ll find out its women not men. Women are not only buying technology for themselves, but as the Chief Household Officer, are buying for kids, husband, gran and friends. Women are in charge of the house, but more importantly are in charge of the living room (see battle for the living room) where much of the technology lives: PVR, console, HD TV…. ‘
Yet marketers seem to find it so difficult to talk to women? Is it because there are more male marketers? Is it because women are so complex? Is it that the marketing world just hasn’t learned women-speak? Or is it something else?
Perhaps the gender dynamics model developed by Pauline Crawford and Alana Mitchell can throw some light on the matter. ‘Not all women are the same, yet they are all ‘female’. Likewise with men; they do not all behave the same yet they are ‘male’. We all have within us mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics, preferences, and behaviours.
While having a female body means women have unique body parts and cycles, some women may be more ‘male’ in their thinking, decision making and in their logical responses, while many females portray the classic all female traits of nurturing, sensitivity and intuitive reasoning. Likewise within men, some may be more ‘female’ in their thinking preferences, emotional reactions, and actions and still be male through and through!’
A mere conversation about cars and handbags with Pauline and my colleague Di, bore this out. Pauline (the more masculine thinker of the three of us) wants great performance in her car and pure practicality in her handbag. Di (more feminine thinking) wants comfort and reliability in her car and a soft, squishy handbag. I (sitting in the middle ground) went for beauty and quirkiness in both, with scant regard for practicality, performance, comfort or reliability!
What is particularly interesting from the viewpoint of how to talk to women is that the language you use will vary depending on where on the masculine/feminine scale your female audience sits. So you’d need to have that knowledge as a fundamental pillar to your marketing strategy. Pointless trying sell a performance car to the Di’s of this world or a squishy handbag to the Pauline’s. But get the targetting and the language right and you are onto a winner!
In addition, your female buyers will have placed your product or brand in a specific context in their lives, they will have certain criteria relating to that context and they will have a whole other set of unconscious thought processes that drive their actual buying behaviours at the point of purchase.
It would be pretty good to know all these things before you start lavishing spending this year’s severely cut budgets. It would definitely make a difference to your ROI.
Our predictions for 2009
We’ve been walking our talk recently and checking in with our customers to be sure we understand what is of real value to them. It has been quite illuminating and very, very useful. It is helping us shape our business direction, our marketing and sales activity and the way in which we communicate. It has helped us define the language of our customers and enabled us to speak it more fluently.
And this is what we have given our customers that is so valuable to them:
A much deeper understanding of what is really important to their customers (what really makes them buy that brand) - creating a brand personality that they struggle to develop in any other way
A lexicon of their customers’ language which they can apply across all media (from TV ads to pack design and merchandising to shop layouts) and from which they can write much better creative briefs
The training to make sure they can speak their bespoke customers’ language fluently and that there is common understanding within the whole team
Additional rich, new and illuminating insights that are both strategic and action oriented
Customer-driven business knowledge that can be executed immediately
Presentations/debriefs/workshops they actually enjoy and stay awake throughout
For a long time we have been banging this drum that the key to successful sales and marketing is speaking the customers’ language and developing dialogue with customers in their language not yours. The companies that do that have seen phenomenal results - e.g 155% sales uplift from one TV ad, a store refurbishment that cost one tenth of the usual spend, a way above target increase in transaction value, redirection of a training budget giving a significantly better ROI, a product saved from bombing by a subtle shift in pack ingredients.
So our prediction for 2009 is this. Those companies that actively seek to learn and fluently speak their customers’ language and to understand their unique brand personality, will thrive and flourish even in this gloomy economic climate. Those companies that insist on shouting louder and more slowly at their customers in the company’s language will at best survive and at worst go down the pan.
Every business regardless of size lives or dies on cashflow. The key to good cashflow is customers putting their hands in their pockets. They are much more willing to do that for brands that they value and that speak their language.
Here’s to a very prosperous 2009.