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B2B Communication: Heart & Head-Start

Our other posts on B2B have made the case for incorporating emotional connections into your B2B communications.  (A special thanks to Tami Williams of DAMOTH Consulting and to David Stolberg of Rule Of 3 Advertising for their contributions to our experience.) So now the question is: how do we learn which types of emotions and…

by CraginCube

B2B Communication: Clarity Escorted by Brevity

Buzz Word Fence Posts For many moons, B2B communication was confined to the purely rational side of decision-making.  Messages were about accessibility, capabilities and provider’s history of service to its clientele. This gave rise to buzzword messages with kitchen sink constructions. That is, the B2B communication would try to erect every buzzword deemed relevant into…

by CraginCube

B2B Communication: It’s Not About Your Emotion

When considering whether to use emotional connections in B2B marketing communication, it is wise to beware of sounding overblown or self-congratulatory.  It is not about your emotion. While far from the worst we’ve encountered, this recent communication skirts too close to those negatives, in our opinions. (BTW, this fine bank has never been our client.) The warning…

by CraginCube

B2B Communication: Strive for Specificity

In another post we praised this spot by JLL for its ability to use faces in a context to convey an emotional connection of rising to a challenge.  (BTW, JLL has never been our client.) There are other merits to this ad as well. What we wish to focus on here is that JLL is…

by CraginCube

3 Ways to Demean Your Ad Agency

An Ad Agency strives to achieve a partnership status with their Client, but clients too often display 3 ways to show the Ad Agency there’s no sense of partnership: 1. How the Agency is judged; 2. Insisting on a narrow view of how the consumer approaches a purchase; 3. Fitting creative output into rigid boxes.

by CraginCube

Brand Health Tracking: 9 NPS Superchargers

You may THINK your current Brand Health Tracking study isn’t providing these superchargers but often a good tracking study is capable of it. Put on your rubber gloves and get ready to supercharge.

by CraginCube

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B2B Communication: Heart & Head-Start

Our other posts on B2B have made the case for incorporating emotional connections into your B2B communications.  (A special thanks to Tami Williams of DAMOTH Consulting and to David Stolberg of Rule Of 3 Advertising for their contributions to our experience.) So now the question is: how do we learn which types of emotions and associated topics to display?

Your Options to Start

Here are the options, from least to most effort and, not coincidentally, least to most certainty about the value of the learning:

  • Rely on yourself, alone.  Hey, you were once on the client side, right?  Good luck with this approach.
  • Rely on yourself and your own internal folks who face clients and prospects. A good start, particularly if you learn which of your account/sales personnel have a feel for their client’s issues and feelings, and which don’t. Consider getting your Advertising/Marketing Agency personnel involved in these round-table discussions as well.
  • Explore qualitatively via 15 to 30 In-Depth Interviews among both clients and prospects. This is usually a sweet spot for B2B learning: less expensive than the option which follows yet provides most of the key learning for incorporating emotional connections into your communications.
  • Define quantitatively via a survey of clients and prospects totaling 80 to 300, depending on the breadth of your clientele. This option makes the most sense when you also require feedback on “hard” business issues, such as which possible new capabilities to develop or feature, along with insight into emotional connections.

Finding and Attracting Respondents

Your own client list should handle that side of the project.  When you hire an independent research firm (like us! Funny how that worked) we may find that clients will offer referrals to prospects strictly for research contact purposes. (By the way, a reputable research firm will not disclose which of your clients chose to respond, nor the contact information for responding prospects.  This anonymity reassures respondents that they can be candid in their answers to questions.)

There are a variety of sources that list business personnel by title and sometimes we find it effective and efficient to advertise in trade media for respondents.

The major part of the expense of conducting this research is in the cost of finding respondents (list expense, ad expense, time of recruiting personnel) and of compensating respondents with honorariums.  

Structuring the Interview

Our clients are sometimes surprised that we open the interview with very broad questions intended to elicit top-of-mind issues – some would say “pain points” – from respondents.  Why don’t we immediately dive into issues directly related to our client’s services?  Two reasons:

  • If the respondent’s hot topics are, in fact, directly related to client services, then that makes the path to crafting effective communication that much easier
  • Our goal is to tap into emotional connections. Diving into features and capabilities evokes the rational side of decision-making, which is the easy part of the interview.  We want to open as many pathways as possible for respondents to use the type of language that will allow us to visualize and empathize with their emotional connections to their work.

As we continue the interview we tighten the focus of our questions to topics directly related to our client’s offerings.

Why We Listen

Of course we’ll gather information on topics such as the criteria decision-makers apply to choosing among providers; the processes for finding and vetting providers; the personnel involved in the search, vetting and decision processes. Also, among all this hard-nosed business talk, we’ll be listening for:

  • A touch of poetry.  When does a respondent turn to metaphor or colorful language to describe the situation or how they feel about it?
  • Personality characteristics of providers: Are they admired like heroes; reliable like side-kicks; brainy but aloof; amusing but flighty?  Such characterizations provide important clues as to what brand personality we should develop for ourselves, and what language we should use to describe ourselves.
  • Critiques of vendors once used, but no longer. We aren’t much interested in who these rejected vendors are but rather why they were rejected.  It has been interesting how often the rejection is not around capabilities and features, but customer service and personal interactions.
  • Outlook for the future. This is something that no amount of data mining of your own sales or of industry sales can assuredly foresee.  Will current trends continue or is the industry close to a pivot point? 

In Conclusion

By conducting this kind of research, you’ll not just start to create advertising and marketing campaigns that are effective; you’ll have a heart and head-start.

Want to work with us? You might start by filling out the Contact box in the sidebar on the right.

There’s More to Know

We have other posts on B2B communications and emotional connections.  Click the “B2B” link in the CATEGORIES box in the sidebar on the right.

B2B Communication: Clarity Escorted by Brevity

Buzz Word Fence Posts

For many moons, B2B communication was confined to the purely rational side of decision-making.  Messages were about accessibility, capabilities and provider’s history of service to its clientele.

This gave rise to buzzword messages with kitchen sink constructions. That is, the B2B communication would try to erect every buzzword deemed relevant into the body copy – and sometimes the headline.  Linguists have studied the language of professionals – lawyers, doctors, accountants – and came to the conclusion that many of the terms were simply multi-syllabic substitutes for clear, concise language.  Further, this was quite intentional, the equivalent of a “No Girlz Allowed” scrawled outside a tree house.  Buzzwords are fence posts meant to keep the uninformed out – and to validate the speaker as one of the in-crowd.

Examples still exist, as in this body copy.

“Our bankers bring a variety of innovative ideas and creative thinking to the table, which informs quality execution and positions our clients for continued success. With relationship-based solutions and a collaborative team-driven approach….“

Since only few would dare parse the distinction between offering “an innovative idea” and offering “creative thinking:’ and fewer still would tease out how a “collaborative” approach and a “team-driven” approach may differ, why is this fine bank spending precious ad space on this word salad?

Fear.  Or as the Web-involved may say, FOMO – Fear OF Missing Out.  Some decision-makers say “collaborative,” others say “team-driven” so to include them all we (wrongly) deduce we must say both.  Or we fear they’ll tune us out.

But clarity escorted by brevity opens doors; while repetitive buzz words rise up like fence posts in the reader’s mind, shutting the reader out.

We offer two findings that have been consistent over the decades in which we’ve conducted B2B research on marketing communication. Perhaps they’ll reduce your level of fear of missing out.

Assume Intelligence

Finding 1: feel free to assume intelligence on the part of your audience of decision-makers.  While they may not be steeped in your particular discipline, they didn’t become business leaders by being foolish.  Even if their preferred phrase is “creative thinking,” they’ll know what you mean by “innovative idea.” Further, our B2B interviews consistently surface this thought among decision-makers who are choosing among possible providers: “They know all the same buzzwords I do.  I cannot choose among them based on buzzwords, I have to look at other factors.”

And among these other factors are emotional connections.

Assume Your Desired Decision-Makers Embrace Emotional Connections

Finding 2: In both our qualitative in-depth interviews and our quantitative surveys, most business decision-makers have acknowledged – and sometimes even emphasized – the value of emotional connections to their choice of providers.  Phrases like “trustworthy,” “I need them by my side,” and “there when I need them” pop up over and over again.  

In one quantitative study on financial services (that you would be forgiven if you labeled it a “dry” topic), “trustworthy” was in the top 3 of over a dozen attributes, most of which cited capabilities and features.  Your desired decision-makers are not only intelligent, they’re self-aware.  They acknowledge that they incorporate emotional connection judgements into their decision-making.

There’s More to Know

We have other posts on B2B communications and emotional connections.  Click the “B2B” link in the CATEGORIES box in the sidebar on the right.

B2B Communication: It’s Not About Your Emotion

When considering whether to use emotional connections in B2B marketing communication, it is wise to beware of sounding overblown or self-congratulatory.  It is not about your emotion. While far from the worst we’ve encountered, this recent communication skirts too close to those negatives, in our opinions. (BTW, this fine bank has never been our client.)

The warning signs are that the most emotionally impactful terms are about the bank, not about the bank’s prospective clients. “Revolutionized,” “monumental steps,” “reimagine,” “perpetual improvement” – none of that language is about connecting with the client. 

If we’re to rely on language and not visual image, then focusing the emotional impact on the prospect’s emotions will generally work better, as in this approach by Charles Schwab (paraphrased from memory as we couldn’t find the original online).

“The market keeping you up at night? That’s why we have 24/7 customer service.”

Charles Schwab (ad paraphrased)

Faces Convey Emotion

If your audience is comprised of humans, (hey, don’t laugh – AI is coming for our jobs), then most researchers agree the human face is one of the best ways to express an emotion.  

We think this spot by JLL nails it, because the faces are surrounded by the correct context, and express the feeling of meeting the challenge.  In a visual image, headline, subhead and link, the communication job is complete with clarity, brevity and call-to-action. (JLL has never been our client.)

But those researchers touting faces don’t work with all the constraints that we marketing types have.  We rarely want to express a negative emotion, for sure. Plus, matching a facial expression to a concept we want to convey can be tricky. For instance, what’s this lady’s emotion? “Vision” maybe?

What does her face convey to you?

Wells Fargo hopes you’ll allow their ad to link her face to “control.”  Her small-business context is clear enough, but the connection to the “control” concept seems tenuous to us. Still, we prefer this to a screenshot of the online banking tool.

If you’ll recall our first example from Texas Bank, their image was of blue-shaded cacti.  Artsy for sure, evocative of Texas quite probably, but not an icon of the “revolutionary,” nor “perpetual improvement” concepts to be conveyed.  We thought perhaps the cacti were a meme for the bank but no other cacti in any form appear later in the communication. With tongue in cheek, we suggest saving the cacti for the “we do more with less (water)” campaign.

Finally, the JLL spot on deferred maintenance points out one more merit in B2B communication.  See B2B Communication: Strive for Specificity.

B2B Communication: Strive for Specificity

In another post we praised this spot by JLL for its ability to use faces in a context to convey an emotional connection of rising to a challenge.  (BTW, JLL has never been our client.) There are other merits to this ad as well.

What we wish to focus on here is that JLL is not a maintenance firm; it is a real estate firm that probably earns most of its profit from connecting businesses to appropriate leased space.  Oh and JLL manages properties. Also they offer property-specific technologies.  So they offer an array of services. Yet here they are focused on one specific aspect of their business that is arguably several steps removed from their most-used service.  Why would they do that?

We can think of four reasons:

  • The challenge and solution are specific, but the feelings of a challenge well-met are universal.
  • Entry point to a new arena (i.e. greenfield, white space expansion)
  • Expanding the prospect’s mind-set of their capabilities
  • Establishing a unique positioning among a zillion leasing brokers

Folks speak of “the power of story.” Well, stories have a hero (or protagonist) and a specific challenge.  Overcoming the challenge is specific.  Yet we in the audience can apply that story to ourselves, even though it may have involved dragons that don’t exist and wicked stepmothers we’ve never encountered.  We say we are “inspired” by the story. The sociologist or professor of mythology says the specific becomes universal.

There’s something most of our B2B clients, no matter the industry, have had in common.  Many more of their prospects were entirely unaware of them than knew of them. Sure, Charles Schwab has advertising money to toss about, but most providers to other businesses have budgets that are far more constrained, if they’ve advertised at all beyond a web site. So the temptation when launching a first campaign is to try to quickly and cheaply convey all that we do for our clientele.  We want to give a tour of our mansion of services, and use a visual image of the vastness of our edifice.

Don’t do that. The winning combination is a communication that first and foremost advances the brand name, coupled to a message of clarity and brevity with a workable call-to-action.  Our goal is to portray one simple path to our garden gate – not  to convey the mansion of capabilities that we could display.  Get the first face-to-face contact, then consider when and how to display all your firm has to offer.

There’s More to Know

We have other posts on B2B communications and emotional connections.  Click the “B2B” link in the CATEGORIES box in the sidebar on the right.

Deliberately Evoking Negative Emotions in Your Ad

Don’t avoid taking risks that may pay big dividends. Guard against those risks.

The good folks at Sentient Insight recently Tweeted the link to a Forbes article by Professor Derek Drucker, another good guy. Prof Drucker’s article points out that ads may (but do not have to) play upon emotional leverage to deliver a call to action with more oomph. 

Furthermore, certain services or products might lend themselves to offering scenarios that deliberately evoke negative emotions, because the intent is that the purchase/use/enrollment in the brand will fix it. Prof Drucker then cautions that evoking negative emotions may work to a brand’s advantage – or detriment. The cautionary tale Prof Drucker cites is a Nationwide ad that depicted the aftermath of a “Dead Boy.” saying it caused a backlash widespread enough to push Nationwide to issue an apology. Our Prof notes “…too much negative emotion, especially when it is unclear how the brand can solve for it, will turn off consumers.”

Agreed and well-stated. But, but, but then the article’s wrap is this: “…my advice for brand managers is to think long and hard about not only the content, but also the emotions that might be evoked by their advertisements.”

That advice, I fear, stops short of being helpful. We’re asking the people who birthed this baby of an ad (creatives and the brand management who green-lit their efforts) to now critique it? And even if they have a devil’s advocate on their team who will be so bold, aren’t the key questions two-fold:

  1. How many are offended, put-off or confused as to what to do to alleviate the negative emotions the ad raises?
  2. Are these negativists the consumers the brand wants, or people who would never buy/enroll/act favorably towards the brand in the first place?

Let us build upon our good Prof’s advice (recognizing that we are not being humble when we do so, apologies). When considering launching an ad designed to evoke negative emotional reactions, consider these rules:

  • Pretesting ads is important; even more so, pretesting ads deliberately evoking negative emotions is vital.
  • Analysis of pretested ads should determine if the viewers/observers who subsequently indicated favorable purchase intent/enrollment/etc. are indeed viewers who registered the negative emotion and knew how to “fix it.”
  • Analysis should also gauge the size of those who express strongly negative emotions towards the ad and will not buy/enroll/etc. When we compare their numbers to the remainder who will not buy, are they a majority/substantial minority, or instead a small subset?

The reason for this is that launching an ad evoking negative emotions requires brand management to accept a degree of fall-out on social media. Criticism online is going to come with the territory. And once the ad is out, the creative dollars and initial media “splash” dollars have been spent and so any backlash to the brand already has been evoked. 

The true question is whether to stay the course because the ad works as intended for a net gain for the brand; or to shelve the ad before all media dollars are spent.

3 Ways to Demean Your Ad Agency

An Ad Agency strives to achieve a partnership status with their Client, but clients too often display 3 ways to show the Ad Agency there’s no sense of partnership:
1. How the Agency is judged;
2. Insisting on a narrow view of how the consumer approaches a purchase;
3. Fitting creative output into rigid boxes.

As an independent survey researcher, I’ve been an observer of many an interaction between an Ad Agency and their Client (who was also my Client).  I don’t mind a client who provides tough feedback to a vendor, Agency or Research. Yet there are some interactions with Ad Agencies that make me wince. I wince because the main communication is not “how do we find a path to attracting more consumers more often?” but rather “Even though we (client) called you (Agency) in to help us, we’re going to insist you fit your creative process, energies and output into our boxes, and you’re failing if you don’t.”

If you want to evoke an Ad Agency’s best work, here’s 3 things to avoid:

  1. Don’t judge your Agency on one number
  2. Don’t insist your consumer thinks just like you
  3. Don’t confuse understanding with persuasion

Let’s take a look at each of these.

Don’t judge your Agency on one number

There’s an approach reminiscent of the knight’s search for the Holy Grail: one thing that explains it all, provides the definitive proof. For awhile it was Overall Attitude towards the brand; then Purchase Intent; then Actual Sales Figures; and more recently Net Promoter Score (NPS).

This attitude seems to be most militant among brand Managements who would seem to have the most reason to be patient for results: managing a mature brand that has been slowly losing ground for five to ten years and a new Agency has been called in to revive it. Hey, it took all those years to sink this far, maybe it takes more than six months to turn it around.

Also, on the other end of the spectrum, Management of an Emerging Brand few have yet heard of. As one newly famous singer said: “It took me years to become an overnight sensation.”

The truth of the matter is that the value to us of any of these overall measures is when we couple them to measurements of the processes that advertising is supposed to impact. The process is complex: an ad campaign must attract the attention of the right consumers, reach enough of the right consumers, and entertain enough to encourage repeat viewing often enough for the right consumers to incorporate the messages into their ratonal/emotional frameworks for the brand. 

So, are the people we can demonstrate have been exposed to the advertising ALSO the people who have the better perceptions of brand on the ad’s messages; and also the overall score? Do brand awareness, message perceptions and overall scores rise in time alignment with each other and with scheduled ad drops? 

One of the biggest dangers for Management is to lose patience, pulling the plug on a campaign (or an entire Agency relationship) when, in fact, the campaign is beginning to work. So the key question to ask in the earlier weeks of a campaign is not whether the overall score has risen dramatically, but whether the people who recall/recognize the advertising are impacted by it. Even if their early numbers are small, a favorable pattern of ad recognition -> ad message lift -> better overall score argues for staying the course. In fact, it may argue that the campaign is working but under-funded!

Don’t insist your consumer thinks just like you

At this point in America’s social history, as a liberated man I can say it proudly: a lot of love goes into creating or improving a brand. R&D creates new features, operations ensures better distribution, customer satisfaction works hard to ameliorate pain points and keep consumers satisfied. Yes, these efforts are “work” but they intertwine in the team’s emotions so that the feeling is deeper than “punched the time clock.”

So, it is quite natural that brand Management will expect an on-boarding Agency to learn the fine points and then, well, communicate them. Simple, right?

Except the role of advertising is not to communicate all that goes into crafting a successful brand. Instead it is to grab attention, portray the brand in a message that the consumer finds compelling (important + motivating + unique/superior + credible) and to entertain enough so that the consumer is willing to experience the ad again (and again and…)

An ad is not a book or even a brochure and usually not even a paragraph. This mission of the ad must be executed with tight efficiency and ruthless effectiveness, which means that message optimization is a critical process.

And the message “winner” to emerge from message optimization may not reflect the specifics of the love the brand’s teams put into the brand. That is okay. Their efforts come to fruition in retaining consumers. An ad campaign mission is largely about filling the funnel at the top with new or reclaimed consumers.

Don’t confuse understanding with persuasion

Okay, honesty time. We researchers share the guilt on this one, because we often justify the expense of qualitative research or of lengthening a questionnaire to include more attributes by saying “we have to understand the language of consumers.” 

That is true, but consumer language is a far cry from persuasive language. Consumer activity with the brand can be a far cry from the visual imagery that best communicates for the brand. (Really now, users of that medication don’t take walks in the park that often. Users of that new-fangled mop don’t dress that well when they house-clean.)

So just because we can hand an on-boarding Agency video files of respondents chatting about the brand; and a Usage & Attitude study showing the most important attributes for the brand or category, doesn’t mean the Agency has “the answer.” 

Rather, the Agency has a starting point. Messages and visual imagery must be crafted, internally honed, pass inspection with you, and then be optimized in consumer research before being delicately balanced into an ad that evokes what we want “just so.” There’s “art” throughout this process, no matter how much we who have scientific measures can hope to help with consumer input.

In Closing

We’ve described the “don’ts,” so let’s focus on what to do:

  1. Use multiple criteria to judge the effectiveness and efficiency of an ad campaign (and make sure your Ad Effectiveness Tracking study can provide those measurements)
  2. Allow the Agency to explore which messages might best work for the brand, including emotive messages that may not directly mirror the nuts and bolts of what makes the brand work for the consumer in practical use. Agree on a process to optimize messages.
  3. Anticipate that a compelling set of messages will weave art and science; poetry and hard fact; persuasion and eye-catching explosion. Recognize that each phrase and each visual image plays a role in the communication and judge on how well that contribution leads to wholly integrated communication that is compelling (important + motivating + unique/superior + credible).

Happy crafting!

Think you might want to work with us? Start by filling in the contact form on the right-hand column.

Brand Health Tracking: 9 NPS Superchargers

You may THINK your current Brand Health Tracking study isn’t providing these superchargers but often a good tracking study is capable of it. Put on your rubber gloves and get ready to supercharge.

Getting the Most from Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The creator of NPS often points out that to get all the insight from NPS, one should ask an open-ended question after the rating question, asking “Why?” that rating was given.

I’ve had several decades of reading responses on open-end questions. They have occasionally given me a thunderstruck insight. But mostly, respondents avoid giving us much just as they avoided essay questions in school. Open-ended questions just feel like too much work.

Which means we need other measurements to supercharge the insights from NPS. But first, some history.

Brand Health Tracking with Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score was created by Fred Reichheld, a Liberal Arts Major who evidently had some disdain for the communication capability of classic statistics, because the NPS is a calculation that essentially delivers the same information as an average would. But getting marketers to take action when an 8.3 average rating drops to 7.9 can be tough, because it doesn’t seem as significant as it might well be. So, innovating on an aversion to statistics?  I like it. 

An NPS question sequence, consists of a rating on how much or little the consumer would recommend the product/service/organization on a rating scale of 10 down to 0; and an open-ended “why” follow-up. These questions are often incorporated into a Brand Health Tracking study, for good reasons: a) a recommendation rating has long been used* to assess the degree of customer loyalty and enthusiasm and b) since 2003 Mr. Reichheld and Bain & Co. have successfully promoted widespread use of NPS, this allows some comparability “apples to apples” across a wide array of industries, services, not-for-profit activities, etc. (*I’ve been asking about recommendation levels since the 1970s and I’m hardly alone.)

However, NPS is only asked among customers, users or beneficiaries of the product/service/organization, because they have the experience to form a “recommendation” rating.  So NPS alone is insufficient as the one key measure for Brand Health Tracking, as BHT seeks to learn the brand’s reputation among prospects as well. Further, if one sets up NPS to only ask of current customers, one never learns what the Trier-Rejectors of one’s brand would rate, ’cause they’ve already left the database. All of that is easy enough to fix, so let’s supercharge NPS.

List of 9 Questions & Analyses to Supercharge NPS

The techniques listed here apply to NPS and any other “overall” rating about brand reputation. In brief:

  1. Defining Value perceptions
  2. Distinguishing Loyalty from Frequency of Purchase/Use
  3. Distinguishing Convertible Prospects from Uninterested Prospects
  4. Discovering which brands have a Leaky Bucket
  5. Utilizing Ad Triggers to assess ad reach and effectiveness 
  6. Assessing a wide array of brand imagery attributes, benefits, claims, messages
  7. Determining whether and when competitors experience message wear-out 
  8. Accounting for seasonality and/or competitors’ ad drop calendars 
  9. Defining Message Clusters and their impact

Here’s a brief description of each, with a link to a more extensive article on most. BUT HERE’S SOMETHING YOU NEED TO KNOW: You may THINK your current Brand Health Tracking study isn’t providing these superchargers but often a good tracking study is capable of it.  Let’s talk about whether our analyses can cost-effectively tap the latent power in your current tracking study.

Defining Value Perceptions

A rating of “good value for the money” alone will not cut it.  You need to know what proportions of your customers and prospects view your brand as a Solid Value (think Walmart pricing) versus a Premium Value (think L’Oreal or TaylorMade golf clubs).  And how many are in the downsides of Beneath Consideration or Beyond Consideration?  Customers with a strong NPS rating who view your brand as a Premium Value might slip into Beyond Consideration in a era of recession, inflation or stagflation. Learn more about our ValuEdgeSM system here.

Distinguishing Loyalty from Frequency of Purchase/Use

Some proportion of your users will provide strong recommendation ratings on NPS and yet use a competitor more frequently, or simply not use your brand very often.  If its a big proportion, learn why.  Your brand may be in a niche use based on: the characteristics of an occasion; or the feature set you’ve been messaging; or your price.  Any of these are addressable once you know the root cause.  Ask Jameson Irish Whiskey about how often “Irish coffee” is served at a home with their bottle in the cabinet. (Hmm, there’s the Advent season and New Year’s and, ummm, not many other times.) Ask Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, who used to have one box in every home – for months and months and even years.  One box. But then they sure fixed that starting in the 1980s, eh? Now nearly everyone knows there are all kinds of uses of A&H. Learn more about LIONCUTSM here.

Distinguishing Convertible Prospects from Uninterested Prospects

I’ve heard pundits say “Everyone who isn’t a customer is a prospect.” Yeah, but not every prospect is worth pursuing.  Some prospects have heard or seen something about your brand that has them interested in a future trial.  Learn what that teaser is for your Convertible Prospects. Learn more about LIONCUTSM here.

Discovering which brands have a Leaky Bucket

In your category, there may be a brand or two with Leaky Buckets: they have almost as many Trier-Rejectors as they do Loyal-Frequent users.  Learn why.  Consider using your learning to pitch your Management for more resource money for your plan to grab the lion’s cut of the customers the Leaky Bucket brand is shedding. Learn more about LIONCUTSM here.

Utilizing Ad Triggers to assess ad reach and effectiveness 

When we obtain a decent measurement of advertising impact within a Brand Health Tracking study, the useful power in the study is greatly enhanced.  Ad Triggers tend to align better with media spending and social media mention levels than other kinds of “ad awareness” measures. Learn more about Ad Triggers here.

Assessing a Wide Array of brand imagery attributes, benefits, claims, messages

Measuring more attributes, benefits and claims is better. You are more likely to be able to include your marketing messages on the list AND messages of your competitors for comparison. You get closer to a 3600 view, which means you’re less likely to be unhappily surprised. So think of that as more “width.” 

Unfortunately, asking a respondent to carefully consider their “depth” of feeling about each message on a rating scale is one of the slower processes in a questionnaire.  That works against a broad width of messages, as interview time is money and longer length works against respondent participation and their concentration on your questions.

Many researchers will say you have two choices, but you have at least two more.  They’ll say you can measure the attributes, benefits and claims that your brand’s category messages to consumers with either a) a rating scale of 5 or 10 points for each item OR b) select “as many as apply” (or “on/off”) for each item.  The first option narrows how many messages you can list per respondent (Boo!).  The second allows more messages for width (Yay!) but has a hard time distinguishing among brands that compete closely (less depth, Boo!). Speedy rating times enables more messages rated, so there’s our twin goals.

Let us give you two options we’ve found work out better: 

a) Use a 3-point scale of Superior, Competitive, Not Competitive that is almost as fast as the on/off for the respondent but gives you a bit more “depth” or, 

b) Even better to get both depth and width, use our Imagery SliceSM system that’s faster than a multi-point system and provides a “share” output for each respondent for each message.  Width and depth delivered, so more insights delivered.  

Determining whether and when competitors experience message wear-out 

You’ve heard the complaints from consumers and the advice from marketing pundits and of course they conflict with one another.  The consumer complaint is “Ugh!  If I hear that commercial one more time I’m going to throw up.”  The pundit advice is that without substantial repeat of your message, you can be sure that most of your audience hasn’t truly heard it.

For the marketer’s planning purposes, the pundit advice is more relevant than the consumer complaint.  It is very difficult to get a linkage between brand and message to “stick” in the consumer mind.  So we repeat messages as often as possible.

Yet this leaves the brand open to the problem of message wear-out.  There’s a point where the message has done all it can and now has ceased to motivate more trial nor more loyalty.  A wear-out analysis can detect this point.

Wear-out for a major competitor can signal a major opportunity for your brand.  When the competitor is shouting a message that’s no longer working, even if their share of voice as measured by spending is greater than your brand’s, their message effectiveness is poor.  That’s a good time to ramp up your messaging frequency.  (You’ve used our Message Optimization system so you know you have a more effective message, right? No? {sigh} Let’s talk.)

Learn more about how detecting wear-out helps Emerging Brands here.

Accounting for seasonality, competitors’ ad drop calendars 

Reading some advice on a website lately: “Conduct your Brand Health Tracking study at least once a year.”  Well, the “at least” phrasing saves them but let’s get real.  If your brand’s category experiences any kind of seasonal shifts OR if competitors drop their major ad spending OR promotional events at times of year somewhat different than yours, what you’d measure in January could be quite different from what you measure in July.

Patience is a virtue.  I know its tempting to spend all your budget the moment you have approval so you can get your answers right now.  But over time you’ll be better served by respecting seasonality. 

Figure out the maximum number of interviews you can afford in the year, and then spread them out.  So rather than 1,300 interviews in January, conduct 100 every four weeks and aggregate into quarterly and annual read-outs. 

Defining Message Clusters and their Impact

There’s a purpose to aggregating across two or three years’ worth of Brand Health Tracking also.  By creating a mega-database of 3,000 or so respondents, it makes sophisticated analyses of patterns in message ratings possible.  We may learn that the number one and two brands have been hammering at the same message theme.  Meanwhile, there are two other major themes.  Could be time for you to move forcefully to “own” one or both of those untapped themes.

Unlock Your Study’s Potential

We think this bears repeating.  Most of the questions we need for these superchargers ARE asked in most well-designed Brand Health Tracking studies.  Yet the data is not always analyzed to tap that potential. Talk to us about this.  We play nice with other researchers. We’re interested in adding value, not stealing business.

Yes, there are a few measurement/analysis structures unique to us:  our ValuEdgeSM, LIONCUTSM and Imagery SliceSM systems for example.  But even these are variants of good survey research practice, not mind-blowingly different “probes in the brain” measurements from what other good survey researchers do.  So we often find ways to approximate our desired results using questions your tracking study has been asking. 

Reach out to us and let’s see what we can accomplish together. (Hint: Fill out the contact form in the column to the right as a first step 😉

Ditch Ad Awareness, Measure Ad Triggers Instead

When properly asked and analyzed, playing clips (triggers) of your key ads to respondents will better demonstrate the degree of advertising reach and effectiveness in your Brand Health Tracking study.

Objective and Failed Solutions

When we get a measurement of ad reach within each respondent, we can then deduce the ad effectiveness for that same respondent in a Tracking or Monitor study. We can deduce the influence by observing higher scores in measured brand imagery (attributes, benefits and claims); and ultimately in overall measurements like purchase intent or Net Promoter Score, comparing consumers “reached” by the ad campaign versus those not reached..

The trouble is, the classic measures of Ad Awareness or Proven Ad Recall don’t work very well to identify ad reach.

The Bad Old Days

Back in the days when Brand Health Tracking or Ad Effectiveness Tracking was simply Brand Tracking, we asked Ad Awareness, for one very good reason. We had nothing better to ask on the telephone.

Continue reading “Ditch Ad Awareness, Measure Ad Triggers Instead”

Why Your Ad Agency Wants to Ignore Your Most Important Message

Why Marketers need a message pre-testing system that measures Importance, Motivation, Uniqueness and possibly Credibility.

The Counter-example

Why being Important isn’t always important.

SNAP!

grabs attention

CRACKLE!

persuades, motivates, proves your point

POP!

you alone saying it, unique, superior

Kellogg’s Rice Krispies traces Snap! Crackle! Pop! all the way back to 1933. That’s a very long time to be effective messaging. So we now consider: which of those words conveys “Importance.” You know, when your market research study pre-tests your messages for which ones are most Important. Hmmm. Nothing about the health benefits of rice. Nothing about being a better Mom or Dad for serving Rice Krispies.

Would Snap! Crackle! Pop! rise to the top of a discriminant function analysis (DFA) of your 30 or so potential messages? No, huh. Okay, so we’ve now hit upon one reason your Ad Agency hates your Market Research team. (Also researchers don’t pick up the lunch tab, just sayin’.)

Effective Message Pre-Testing Applies Multiple Criteria

Let’s consider the role of Importance, and augment it with an understanding of Motivation, Uniqueness/Superiority and Credibility.

Continue reading “Why Your Ad Agency Wants to Ignore Your Most Important Message”

If You’ve Got Something to Say…

Marketing communication, such as writing ad copy, involves the art of honing a communication down to the essential messages. Ad space and time are expensive commodities, no matter the media. Effective brevity enables affordability which empowers the reach and longevity of a campaign. When we respect the different roles that our messages play in our ad or other communication, the criteria we apply to learn which messages to elevate become clear. Consider the mind maps herein.

Respect the Role of Each Message

The novelist faces the problem of the blank page. What to invent to say? Whereas the marketer and her ad copy writer typically face the problem of too much to say:

  • R&D has a 32 page deck of all they went through to create the product, including two new patented aspects of it.
  • The Impact Team has pointers on consumer health and, oh! don’t forget –
  • Also the environment.
  • The packaging team has sourced a variation on the color red never before seen on a consumer packaged good, so they think you should highlight it.
  • The Boss says the single most important feature of any food product, including your new one, is that it “tastes great.” (Is he really suggesting that’s the headline?)

How to hone down to the essential messages, and how to use each?

Continue reading “If You’ve Got Something to Say…”