How a deeper understanding of consumers drives stronger brand engagement and loyalty
What do you as a brand want from me, as a customer? Simply, you want me to change the way I behave in such a way that my actions help drive your business success. But how best to do that?
The basic axiom of clinical psychology reads, “if you could see the world the way I see it, you’d understand why I behave the way I do.” And if you accept that axiom, then you must also accept that if you want to change the way I behave, then you need to change the way I see the world.
If you understand me, and by implication my world, then you’ll know what you can do to influence the way I experience the world. Simply put, if know me, you know what you can do to make me happy. And if you are successful in making me happy by becoming part of my world, you’ll change the way I see the world, one where you have become a happy part of it.
I love trail running. I love going to trail races. These events are always an exciting, happy and memorable experience. I love the vibe, the atmosphere. Races are always sponsored, there are food trucks, and pop-up sports apparel stores, and they help create the vibe but not always makes me remember them or miss them. To do that they need to add to the experience.
For a brand to create a deeper emotional connection, the marketer first needs to understand something about me and why trail running events make for an exciting, happy and memorable experience? For me it’s as much the sense of the personal achievement crossing the finish line as it is the vibe.
One brand was successful in contributing to my trail running experience and it is hardwired in my brain. Some years back I ran a rather challenging race and just about that time when you wonder why on earth you’ve put yourself through this, I passed the water point and was enthusiastically handed a bottle of BOS Ice Tea and cheered along. The encouragement and energy at that point in the race is something I still remember. Right there the brand entrenched itself in my memory. I generally don’t buy iced tea but if I do, just one stands out, and it’s BOS Ice Tea that finds its way into my shopping basket.
From a brand perspective, the understanding of my world is everything that happens before, during, and after my engagement with the brand, extending beyond the brand and the category. What motivates me? How I spend my time? What memories do I treasure? What do I value? What matters to me? What do I struggle with? What experiences add meaning to my life?
When you have a deep understanding of my world, then you’re able to identify the best opportunity to deliver a meaningful experience that adds significant value to my life.
Brands create signature experiences when they succeed in linking an experience laced with positive emotions to the brand. Such experiences play a significant role in brand building, creating differentiation, driving loyalty and preference, and ultimately brand value.
Full article can be found here.
How marketers can appeal to Millennials with low-level commitments (Mumbrella)
Indulgent, opinionated, short attention spans, frequent job-hoppers. These are a few labels that have characterised Millennials.
However, we’re all products of our own generations, and Millennials are no different. They’ve grown up in an era which has witnessed an unprecedented speed of change in technology and connectivity; drastically influencing consumer behaviour.
Effective marketing to Millennials, therefore, requires a deep understanding of their psyche, which can only be done if we look at their stereotypes as new types of demand. They’ve grown up in an age of disruption, and companies need to disrupt their own marketing strategies to appeal to them.
Making sense of the trillion-dollar goldmine
Millennials now form a quarter of the world’s 7.4 billion population and will comprise half of the total global workforce. On top of that, one in three purchases will be made by them in 2020 and they are set to grow their buying power to a whopping US$1 trillion.
Companies looking to thrive in this growing consumer market hence need to align their strategies with Millennial demands; however conventional methods won’t be enough as over 84% of Millennials don’t trust traditional advertising. To explain this, we need to look at how Millennials have been shaped by their environment.
The rapid evolutions in technology have shifted social connectivity from physical realms to digital ones – giving rise to online retail. This has led to an explosion of choices as brands can now offer a greater variety of goods without being constrained by physical limits of brick-and-mortar stores.
This abundance of choice, however, also comes with congestion, and therefore brands need to do more to cut through the noise to attract today’s consumers. It’s no longer enough for a company to sell something based on just the product’s merits. It needs to be packaged as part of a greater experience, which is what over 70% of Millennials are willing to put their money down on.
Buying into personal development – lessons from Lululemon
Experiences are only one part of the Millennial buying mindset; they value brands that resonate with their ideology and celebrates their unique identity. As Millennials have grown up with digital technology, they are savvier than previous generations and often disregard generalised marketing approaches which focus more on product features, rather than how they – as people – would truly benefit from them.
Millennials want the brand that they’re engaging with to treat them as human beings, which is especially important today where digital connections are superseding physical ones. They want brands to build a relationship with them and promote their personal development, rather than being viewed as just paying customers.
This is a trend that brands like Lululemon have successfully taken advantage of. The sports apparel brand – which primarily caters to yoga enthusiasts – has shied away from traditional marketing tactics, relying heavily instead on word of mouth recommendations and community building. This may seem slow and cumbersome, but Lululemon has attracted a global following due to what’s called a ‘holistic guerrilla marketing approach’, which positions the purchase of its products as being connected to a larger community. For example, the way their staff engage with customers is more akin to yoga buddies talking about setting goals, rather than the product pitches from salespeople.
On weekends, Lululemon stores turn into fitness and conversation hubs to raise community involvement. Closer to home in Singapore, the company converts open spaces to host yoga classes, as they have done outside of ION Orchard and in the Marina Barrage area.
Offering experiences with lower commitments
Brands such as Lululemon are showing how prioritising experiences can generate a massive Millennial cult following, however another side to this experience which today’s marketers need to be cognisant of is value extension. Millennials today are shaped by growing student debt and have grown up through a series of global recessions. As such, owning a product for an indefinite period of time is seen being committed to it.
Satisfaction towards a single product – for Millennials – is diminishing at a faster degree as compared to previous generations. Millennials have a greater desire to experience new things at a faster pace, and so they see sharing as a more attractive option over owning as it they perceive it to carry lower commitments.
This is the attraction of the subscription economy, and explains why modern consumers, are likelier to subscribe to a service instead of buying products that just clutter their home in the long-term. Point in case, Spotify and Netflix have effectively replaced the album purchases and movie rentals of yesterday with monthly subscription fees that give the customers a much wider array of choices. Essentially, these platforms offer that low-commitment proposition with affordable monthly fees. At the same time, these companies have benefited from the past decades’ rapid tech developments to make accessibility of their services more seamless for the digitally-savvy consumer.
It’s evident that subscription services gel well with the Millennial purchasing mindset and, over the next 2 years, the preference for these services is projected to grow even further. But subscription services are now moving beyond entertainment items; they’re now entering areas where ownership has been necessary yet burdensome – car ownership.
Today’s ride-hailing services have attempted to bridge the ownership-commitment gap, but they don’t offer the convenience of driving their own car. This is especially tough when you want to take your car out for a weekend excursion or go on that long-planned road trip with your friends. Instead, we’re now seeing a birth in car subscription-based services, which – for Millennials who struggle to finance a brand-new car – provides a low-commitment option for something that’s been typically flagged as high-commitment.
Just like streaming services, car subscriptions charge an all-in, monthly flat fees which not only include the use of a car, but also the insurance, maintenance, road-side assistance and road tax that come with owning a car. This is vastly different from rentals, as the consumer will effectively own the car for as long as they like, but have the added flexibility of changing their vehicles regularly, so long as they pay the all-in monthly fee.
This is a dream solution for enthusiasts who like the feeling of trying different cars and – for everyday drivers – a more practical one as they can trade in their cars for others based on their different needs. These services are providing today’s generation of drivers the unmatched experience of driving their own car without being tied down by the normal ownership burdens.
It’s by marketing these low commitment experiences, one that Millennials crave for, that car subscription services can shake-up traditional car ownership as we know it.
Full article here.
What do influencers want in brand relationships?
Any successful relationship is built on clear communication. It’s true in marriages. And it’s equally true in the relationship between brands and influencers.
In a study published by my firm, The Abbi Agency, our research finds that social media influencers commonly cite weak communication with brands as their biggest headache — and a reason that influencer-based initiatives fail to deliver on their full promise.
While our study, “Travel Influencers & Destination Marketing,” focused on the destination-marketing sector, it’s clear to us that the same issues faced by travel organizations and travel influencers are common across the entire landscape of influencer marketing. (The full study is available as a free e-book download at TheAbbiAgency.com.)
We’ve been reading a lot lately from marketing executives about their best practices in influencer marketing, but we couldn’t find much research focused on the influencers themselves.
So we conducted dozens of interviews with influencers, ranging in size from nanoinfluencers with fewer than 10,000 followers to macroinfluencers who command hefty fees in exchange for their ability to deliver audiences that can total 1 million followers. We supported these in-depth interviews with surveys of influencers.
What we found: Unclear expectations, unrealistic production budgets and excessive micromanagement vex influencers who are eager to deliver results for brands. “It’s hard to work with brands when they don’t outline exactly what they want,” one influencer told our researchers.
Issues commonly arise when brands and influencers fail to specifically agree on expectations about deliverables. How many posts are expected on the influencer’s social media? What messaging is the influencer promoting?
Then, too, problems often arise when influencers and brands fail to get on the same page about the metrics they will use to track the success of an initiative.
Influencers told us that they use a variety of tracking metrics — page views, swipes, likes and direct conversions of page view into sales. Commonly, brands and influencers will agree to track “engagement,” but the term is surprisingly murky. Most social media platforms measure engagement on the basis of likes, comments and shares. Twitter and Instagram also measure views, impressions and reach in their calculations of engagement. Upfront agreement on terms is critically important, influencers told us.
Potentially more troublesome are failures to establish clear parameters on issues such as content rights. For instance, who owns the photos that accompany the influencer’s post?
Influencers told us that they also need better communication with brand marketers who fail to account for the costs — both in time and money — of producing top-flight content.
“There is an incredible amount of work that goes into what we do, and many brands don’t understand the time spent behind the scenes or the amount of money it costs to acquire the equipment required to produce compelling content,” one influencer told us.
It’s helpful for brand marketers to think of influencers as mini-content agencies, ones in which the influencer is playing the roles of director, talent and writer without a lot of help. Fair budgets for production, influencers told us, create better relationships.
At the same time, influencers told us that they do their best work, and deliver their best results for brands when they’re given some breathing room.
“I believe brands will see the best results with influencer marketing if they allow campaigns to be approached creatively, while still meeting all deadlines and specifications,” one influencer said in an interview with researchers.
The challenge for brand marketers is ensuring that influencers understand the desired messaging while allowing influencers to tell the story in their own words, in their own way.
Influencer marketing, done right, marks the renaissance of word-of-mouth marketing. An established influencer now plays the role once played by the trusted friend of a consumer. The word-mouth-power of influencer marketing depends, however, on the ability of the influencer to deliver an authentic message free from the micromanagement of a brand marketer.
In the destination-marketing arena, like other sectors of the marketing profession, well-designed influencer campaigns have become a proven tool.
But influencer campaigns can blow up — failing to deliver results and embarrassing the brand marketers who put their reputations on the line — if both sides fail to pay close attention to communication, expectations and creative control.
The secrets to avoiding pitfalls: Taking time to explain. Taking time to listen. Building the trust that always delivers the results that exceed expectations.
Full article here
What to Do When You’re Losing Your Audience During a Presentation (HBR)
You can tell when an audience has stopped listening to you during a presentation. Phones come out, and attendees surreptitiously text underneath the table. Instead of leaning forward and nodding along with your points, they begin slouching or tapping their feet. The more brazen may even start whispering to one another.
As a speaker, it’s dispiriting when you feel you’re trying to convey important information and your audience has obviously lost interest. But your only chance at being heard is finding a way —somehow — to re-engage them.
As a professional speaker who has given more than 300 talks over the past half-decade, I’ve addressed plenty of audiences under adverse conditions, from the serious (employees smarting from news of an impending reorg) to the banal (fighting to be heard over the clank of silverware during a lunchtime speaking slot). Here are four strategies that have helped me regain control of the room.
First, one of my favorite techniques for reclaiming attention is to move to a different part of the stage. Many presenters — hemmed in by the standard stage setup — default to delivering their remarks from behind a podium. This often feels safer to novice speakers because they have a place to stash their notes and don’t feel as exposed. But it means missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage your physical presence.
If you’ve been planted in one spot, in front of one part of the audience, you can reengage the rest of the group by moving to the opposite side of the stage. (Whether out of surprise or politeness, your sudden proximity will force attendees to focus on you.) If you’re not on a stage, you can take this even further and walk around the room. You don’t want to overdo this maneuver, but used judiciously it keeps audience members guessing where you’ll go next, which means their eyes are trained on you.
Another strategy is to speed up — or slow down — the pace of your remarks. Everyone knows that speaking in a monotone voice is deadly. But a corollary mistake is that, even if your voice has plenty of range, speakers often use the same rate of speech all the time.
Fast speakers barrage their audiences, slow speakers keep drawling, and audience members — confident they know what to expect — starts to fidget. But when you deliberately change speed, they take note: What’s different here? Why does this part sound distinct? And they’ll once again focus on your content.
Lowering your voice or pausing can have the same effect. When I want an audience to focus on a key point, I’ll deliberately lower my voice to a near-whisper, so they need to focus intently in order to understand what’s going on. I may even pause in silence for several beats, to the point where they’re itching to hear the conclusion. This is especially effective if you stop after a rhetorical question. “Winning 40% market share might sound unattainable,” you could say. “So how do we do it?” A well-timed pause adds just enough suspense that your listeners can’t help but anticipate your answer.
So far, we’ve discussed physical techniques for snapping the audience back to attention. But these will only have a limited effect if they’re zoning out because your material is too dry or technical. The same presentation that’s perfect for the engineering department may be way too detailed for the broader leadership team, for instance. Thus, a final technique is to reconnect with the crowd by introducing a story or analogy that illustrates your point.
Even if your audience isn’t versed in particular technical specifications, they can still understand the difference between, say, a regional Amtrak versus a high-speed train. Citing a real-world parallel will help you make your point in a way everyone grasps (if investing an additional $1 million in R&D will get you “high-speed” performance, that may well be a compelling proposition).
Effective speakers ensure that audiences are actually paying attention to their remarks. If you truly want to inform, educate, or inspire people, you must to learn how to capture their attention and re-engage it when necessary. By following these strategies, you can recover more quickly from interruptions or distractions and ensure your message is far more likely to be heard.
Full article here
See you soon, Malaysia
Another week, and another couple of flights. This time, visiting Kuala Lumpur to present the welcome keynote for our Digital Mum Insights Reveal, and to officially launch theAsianparent Malaysia app (download it here!)
I always enjoy the opportunity to be on stage and share the fruits of our hard work and the latest exciting updates on theAsianparent with the media and our clients, as well as chatting socially with our partners afterwards. This time, sharing insights on how mums browse the web in Malaysia was especially illuminating – particularly as 94% of mums are the key decision makers of household purchases!
PS: I was also lucky enough to visit ‘Meat the Porkers‘ with some of the team – it’s possibly some of the best pork dishes I’ve eaten!
See you soon, Malaysia 🙂
#tickledmedia #lifeasatickler #flight63in2019 #theasianparent
The marketer of the future must avoid analytics paralysis
The analytics era seems to finally have arrived in marketing.
The question is, “Are marketers actually ready?”
For example, three-quarters of brands say they are spending more on marketing technology this year, with 24% claiming to be spending significantly more, according to a recent Forrester report.
It looks like marketers are finally taking this seriously.
At the same time, just 10% of brands in that report say they have a clear picture of who their customers actually are. Not just the data, but who they are as people, and how that affects their consumption habits.
Something’s not right here. I suspect we know why.
We’ve heard more than a few stories like this. A major marketer is fixated on using advertising to drive acquisitions and wants to better manage its return on investment. So, it turns to one of the many technology partners in the market for help in building a multi-touch attribution (MTA) models.
The marketer is excited about the promise of better analytics, so they invest a significant amount of time and money along the way. Then they start getting insights back, and realize they have loads of questions they can’t answer, such as:
“Are these numbers good or bad?”
“What is success?”
“What should we do with this information?”
“How do we take this insights and move our budget to places that will drive more acquisitions?”
Faced with all these fundamental questions, instead of taking the bold action they dreamed about, the marketer freezes. Eventually the company abandons the MTA tool with little to show for their investment.
Like I said, we’ve seen and heard lots of stories like this. We can help make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
Making effective marketing decisions is complicated.
There are many considerations to determine which strategies are working and which ones aren’t, but that’s only the first piece of the puzzle. Once you figure this out, the next question is always “Why?” and then “What can we do about it?”
That’s why so many marketers are investing in advanced analytics tools like Multi Touch Attribution and Market Mix Modelling. These kinds of products theoretically answer those questions, helping you guide effective decision making and uncover optimization opportunities.
Currently, marketers spend 5% to 7% of their overall budgets on data analytics. According to the CMO Survey, that number is expected to jump to 11.3% in the next three years.
Which is great, but only if these brands get a return on their analytics investment.
This is easier said than done. I’ve seen many organizations adopt advanced analytics approaches but fail to use the insight gained in an effective way.
In almost every case, these brands want to improve ROMI (return on marketing investment). Yet as they proceed with their analysis, they often realize that different pockets of the organization have very different definitions of ROMI.
If everybody has a different measuring stick for success, as a marketer you will not be able to make many informed decisions. You probably suffer a perpetual state of indecision.
The good news is, we’ve seen this play out before, and we can help you through it. Here are five ways you can avoid letting your analytics investment languish – and turn your insights into powerful, profitable action for your organization.
Determine clear KPIs for the business and have the entire company agree upon them. This can be done by having open honest conversations about what the drivers of your business are.
Hold everyone accountable to those KPIs. If there is no accountability, people will not take action upon results, leading to a lot of wasted resources. The Harvard Business Review has outlined five ways to hold people accountable:
- Clear expectations
- Clear capability
- Clear measurement
- Clear feedback
- Clear consequences
Train teams to accurately interpret the results. It’s crucial that your people must understand what the outputs are telling them in order to implement effective actions to drive business growth. For example, ROI is a simple metric that many marketers understand, but what they may not know is what is considered good/bad for an ROI.
Bring together additional considerations to tell the full story. There is more to performance than just what the model tells us. A marketer should ask themselves why something is performing well or badly. For example, who was the target audience? Is there an opportunity to invest more into those tactics? What additional media was in market? Were there additional factors at play that could have influenced results?
Partner closely with your analytics teams. Unfortunately, I’ve seen many organizations in which these two groups work in silos, which results in marketers not always being clear on what they need, and analytics teams providing less than actionable insights. On the flip side, when the two groups come together, I’ve seen them come up with those Ah-ha! moments marketers dream about when starting their analytics journeys.
Only when all these factors come together can marketers extract the true value out of their models, as they will be empowered to make smarter business decisions.
For example, a client of ours previously had a seasonal campaign running. Before it started, everyone, including the senior leadership team, came together to determine and agree upon the main KPIs.
We built a multi-attribution model to measure against the KPIs and trained the client and media agency on how to accurately interpret the results. Multiple stakeholders with different types of data and insights came together to discuss the results and it was determined that some creative messages weren’t resonating with their customers.
Therefore, the company adjusted their creative in their media during their campaign. This resulted in a multi-million dollar increase in revenue, which more than paid for the models.
In the example above, all the pieces of the puzzle came together to empower marketers to make smarter business decisions which drove more value for their organization.
It can be done – with the right help.
Full article here
The many challenges marketers face in an increasingly privacy conscious world
Data privacy is one of the most vexing issues for marketers in 2019. For many it is likely to have far-reaching consequences; that is, it will remove hitherto trusted sources of information and drivers of key insights.
That’s because ongoing privacy crackdowns are shifting the ground beneath our feet and rapidly changing the game.
Here’s where the problem lies: over the last decade, in particular, a large number of companies that serve up solutions to marketers have conducted their activities in the shadows.
For consumers, these companies are routinely the unseen middleman in the transaction between advertiser and publisher. They may not have trust issues with rank and file individuals, but that’s simply because their existence is obscure to them.
“Some companies have been amassing large volumes of user data across loads of domains for years, and users have no idea,” said an ad tech executive who spoke on condition of anonymity in a recently published article. “They’ve built multi-million dollar businesses off the back of that. But it’s not their data – it’s publisher data,” the source added.
But the party – if the last drinks weren’t already being served – is coming to an end. And for marketers, these developments around data security could have a silver lining – eliminating the potential for “rubbish” audience data collection that they might otherwise put too much stock in.
Google’s implementation of its Chrome browser privacy controls last month, for example, is one-way data privacy is being tightened, albeit in a manner that, without being cynical, also protects Google’s own interests rather well.
While these new controls won’t arbitrarily block all third-party cookies, it will give users a choice as to whether they are blocked, and that’s bad news in some parts.
Interestingly, it’s worth noting that it’s not just consumers whose online data can easily be appropriated. Businesses are often the same and don’t have the proper protections in place to protect their own data.
The regulations that are coming into place today have come about largely as a consequence of unchecked power and a lack of regulatory oversight around the acquisition and distribution of data.
Recent media and technology headlines have accordingly been dominated by stories of security breaches, unauthorised data sharing and covert meddling with elections.
A tipping point in terms of public opinion was clearly reached following last year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, which drew attention back to the unanticipated results of the US Presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum in 2016. Following this scandal, in particular, a growing chorus of calls has issued forth to tackle the issue of data privacy.
Coincidentally, it was also in 2016 that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws were formally adopted, before coming into force in May last year. These regulations have made surreptitious collecting and sharing of data punishable with fines into the millions of Euros, putting tech companies well and truly on notice.
The instituting of GDPR is, of course, a classic case of an umpire being appointed to redress the balance of a game in which the players lost control.
But the issue needs to come back to some of the ‘players’ themselves and, most importantly, a reassessment of the value of third-party data. At the heart of the problem many marketers face is that they have, for a long time, relied on data sets that aren’t particularly useful in the first place.
One clear outcome of GDPR – and other regulations that will no doubt follow in its wake in the year ahead – is that it has shone a light on dubious data collecting practices and, more significantly, that this data relies heavily on inference.
Marketers who have sought this data out historically in search of quick wins will need to recalibrate and do their due diligence more thoroughly in future.
The first and most important strategy is evaluating whether audience data is actually useful to your business. In the world of media there are many accurate but non-audience specific data points, such as context, which might be neglected in favour of more “persona accurate” segments like demographics. Marketers need to work out what is truly worth focusing on.
It’s also important to note that cookie-less and device-less decisioning is on the rise. Businesses today need to consistently question audience collection methodology to determine accuracy. There is a big difference between data that is scraped based on browsing (which can paint an inaccurate picture) when compared to declared data points as search history and form fills.
Businesses need to start valuing their first party data even more than they currently are. But the issue currently is that many businesses don’t have adequate systems in place to collect and manage their first-party data, let alone protect it.
By implementing platforms without properly understanding how they work, businesses could be unwittingly granting these platforms access to collect and utilise their first party data. Ironically, it’s a scenario just like a consumer blindly clicking accept without reading the terms and conditions around accepting cookies.
These are the issues that marketers grappling with a new era of data collection need to come to terms with. If your business is not equipped to deal with these challenges, then it’s time to assess your options to change the status quo.
Full article here
How digital behaviours relate to brand equity
Recently a client asked how various digital behaviours impact brand equity. Answering this question is challenging; not just because of the widely varying forms of digital behaviour, but because that behaviour can both influence equity and be influenced by it.
Let us consider how behaviour and equity are related across a few different interactions, starting with direct online experience of a brand. The interaction could be as simple as making a transaction on the brand’s web site, for instance paying a bill using a bank’s mobile app. If that interaction is simple, easy and intuitive for the user it is likely to add to the positive impressions and feelings that the user has about the brand and so make them more likely to continue using it.
The big problem is that brands need to mind the gap. If people’s expectations are out of line with experience, then the resulting discontent could undermine the likelihood that they will continue using that brand. But experience and expectations are not independent. People will focus things that they have been led to expect through marketing, e.g. the pizza really does taste homemade or the TV screen really does look sharp, even though the actual difference might be imperceptible in a direct comparison.
Another digital behaviour that worries many marketers is the dreaded skip.
Looking at a global database we find that YouTube videos are viewed for an average of 7.7 seconds before people skip. Does that imply a lack of interest in the content? Or a lack of brand relevance? It is tough to tell without the asking people why they skipped. If the skip simply implies, ‘I have better things to do right now’, it may not be a problem. But if it signals, ‘That’s so lame’ or ‘No way would I use that brand’ then it is a problem.
In the case of last response brand equity is influencing behaviour. Negative mental associations are leading people to reject the brand before they even try it. But positive equity might cause people to view an ad for a brand simply because it is one they already use. They might not even reflect on why they are watching but pre-existing positive ideas and feelings trigger an instinctive desire to hear what the brand has to say. This is why it pays to be cautious about accepting findings from attribution modelling at face value unless the modeller has done their best to take prior effects into account.
The last example used views instead of clicks, but I suspect we can assume the two are similar in terms of the interaction between equity and behaviour. In some cases, the ad will lead to a click (based on positive expectations) and subsequently consolidate that equity once the brand is bought. In other cases, equity will precede the behaviour; for instance, people click on an ad offering a deal because they already like the brand. This may explain why there is no correlation between click-through and changes in brand equity or sales. Advertisers might assume that exposure to the ad is driving behaviour but in many cases people’s pre-existing relationship with the brand may have far more influence on behaviour and the ad is simply a trigger for behaviour not the root cause.
We can cannot always identify causality what we can say is that marketers need to create a self-reinforcing network of positive expectations and experiences in order to promote sales and growth.
For more excellent insights please visit the Millward Brown blog.
With “Retargeted” Advertising, Sooner Is Better Than Later (Standford Business)
You know those ads that follow you around online? New research shows that they work, especially when deployed early.
At this point, no online shoppers should be surprised if they go sniffing around the internet for, say, a new handbag and find themselves, in the days and weeks following, besieged by handbag ads wherever they go on the internet.
In the world of online marketing, this is known as “retargeted” advertising, and it has become ubiquitous. It works like this: When you visit an online store, the vendor places on your browser a cookie that ad exchanges can detect and use to push related ads onto other websites you visit or social media apps you use. The ads can be from the original vendor or one of its competitors.
And they work — recent surveys have shown that some marketers are spending more than half of their digital ad budgets on retargeting.
But many questions remain about how to deploy such ads effectively. For instance, should a retailer use one retargeting strategy for visitors who merely look at a product on its website and a different strategy for those who add items to their digital “shopping carts” but stop short of making a purchase? And when should the retargeting campaign start — immediately after the visit or weeks later? And then how long should it last? One week? Four?
Retarget Early, Retarget Often
In a recent study, Stanford Graduate School of Business marketing professors Navdeep Sahni and Sridhar Narayanan set out to answer those questions and more. They designed an experiment to measure the effectiveness of various retargeting campaigns on more than 230,000 visitors to BuildDirect.com, a Canada-based retailer that sells home-improvement products, mostly to customers in the United States.
BuildDirect employs multiple platforms for its retargeting campaigns, but this study focused on its use of Google’s DoubleClick, which tracks users through a combination of cookies and Google user IDs.
The professors created different categories of “frequency caps,” or the maximum number of retargeted ads that each customer would see during the four-week experiment. The range was wide, with some customers seeing zero ads over the entire period and some seeing up to 15 per day, every day.
The first thing the researchers found was that retargeting works: Among users who exited the BuildDirect website after viewing a product page (as opposed to creating a shopping cart), the retargeted ad campaign increased their likelihood of returning to the site by nearly 15%.
“Retargeted ads do affect consumer behavior,” the researchers write. “A significant proportion of users, at both early and relatively advanced stages of purchase process, change their behavior because of the ads. This is consequential . . . because a returning consumer gives the marketplace another chance to sell its products and also gain revenues by showing relevant ads on its own website.”
Sahni and Narayanan also found that ads shown to users in the first week after their visit to the website were more effective than those shown in later weeks. In fact, about one-third of the effect of the first week’s advertising occurred on the first day, and half occurred in the first two days.
This finding runs counter to a current widespread assumption about retargeted ads, which is that they serve mainly as “reminders” to potential shoppers and thus are less effective when they’re served up in the immediate aftermath of a site visit.
“This is a relatively big deal since it goes against the canonical thinking,” says Narayanan.
The professors also found that such ads drive consumers back to the advertiser’s website even when they contain no additional information beyond what a consumer already learned in their initial site visit. This finding suggests that such ads can repeat known information and still be effective in increasing website engagement — especially for users who have created shopping carts, which is a sign that they have done significant research and thus already know a lot about the product.
Playing Defense
Another benefit of retargeted ads, the researchers found, was that they play a “defensive” role by making it harder for competitors’ ads to reach potential customers, especially in the days immediately following the site visit.
“In a setting like ours, in which competitors also engage in aggressive retargeting, a consumer who leaves BuildDirect’s website is likely to be a target of a competitor’s ad campaign,” the researchers write. “Therefore, even if the ad does not provide the consumer with any new information, or remind her of information she may have forgotten, its exposure increases the chances of the consumer coming back to BuildDirect.”
Perhaps the most significant takeaway from their study, Sahni and Narayanan say, is that it’s the first to quantify the benefits of immediacy in retargeting ads. “If a user is not advertised to in the first week,” they write, “advertising later might not be effective.”
Full article here
Google’s glimpse of a world without ad-tech (TheDrum)
The global programmatic industry is now worth $18.4bn and although it has matured dramatically over the last five years, it is still grappling with issues around inventory quality, transparency and the use of personal data.
It’s now also facing another serious challenge. The infrastructure that powers the ecosystem – the third-party cookie – is dying. The growth of walled gardens, blocking of cookies at the browser level (ITP) and a shift to mobile browsing in-app are creating cracks in the system. All this combined with the impact of GDPR/CCPA, a negative ICO POV on the industry and an increasingly privacy savvy consumer.
At Dmexco, vendors, tech suppliers, brands and industry bodies came together in various forums to highlight these issues and come up with the solutions to solve them. One presentation, from Google, predicted what the future of personalisation – and a world increasingly without third-party ad tech – looks like.
Effective advertising and user privacy go hand in hand
Google’s “Making the web work for everyone in a privacy-first world” keynote, given by Matt Brittin (president of EMEA) and Emily Henderson (head of media EMEA,) outlined Google’s vision for a world that’s moving from the ‘individual’ web to – or rather, back to – a ‘contextual’ web.
Google claims that this is a new world which benefits the user, the publisher and the advertiser, and allows for the personalization of advertising (which is more contextual than individualised) while respecting user privacy.
Within the keynote, a case study from The Guardian showed how its first-party publisher data can be combined with machine learning to scale. The case showed how an ad for the Google Home Mini was ‘personalized’, pulling in ingredients from the recipe shown to be used as a demonstration of voice commands for the device.
Although results from this specific test weren’t shared, Google reported a 220% uplift in its return on ad spend from activity run from new ‘privacy first’ way of working – an impressive number that underlines the importance of context in advertising and the benefits of data-enhanced execution.
There were uplifts for publishers, too. Increased performance means buyers are more likely to place a higher value against the placements and pay more for the impression. The removal of the third-party tech chain means they – and Google – will also likely make more revenue.
But while this is a smart workaround, what these ‘personalized’ ads do not fix are the issues around digital walled gardens – the ability to move data in and out of the Google system and obtain a full view of the customer.
What’s more, while this approach might help larger publishers, Google won’t be able to directly partner with every small publisher in the world, nor will every publisher have The Guardian’s strong development team.
In my opinion, this reflects not just a power shift to Google in the post-GDPR ad-tech world but a white flag to privacy advocates and a step back in terms of digital capability. It misses out on a wider, privacy-friendly data opportunity.
A people-first web isn’t just contextual
Smart planners are already moving beyond retrospective, and often ineffective, audience-based targeting towards other data points that can better indicate what mindset or lifestyle stage a consumer is in at any given time.
Importantly, few of these opportunities use personal data, so are not impacted by the changes being made in the ad-tech ecosystem. Examples of these data points include:
Behaviors and past actions – Behavioral-based targeting comes from the era of contextual targeting and is still highly effective. Recently, we have been using media signals to better map the consumer and re-direct to the right destination/purchase. For example, for Bose we used search behavior to map audiences from price-sensitive to premium-benefit-oriented and tailor messaging directionality, resulting in a 56% increase in in-store revenue driven by search.
Emotions and moods – The emotional state of a consumer can greatly affect their purchase decisions, particularly those made on impulse. We have been working with a large CPG brand to target consumers in heightened mood states known to drive purchase (using messenger apps), which led to a 3.2% increase in the likelihood of purchase, with a 55% reduction in media cost.
Moments and leading indicators – A person looking at buying a house, or indeed a recent home purchase, can be a leading indicator for a variety of product sells, from cars to cable packages to pet care. This is not simply a case of finding new data points, rather it’s an evolution in how we both identify and communicate with growth audiences
While the death of the third-party cookie will impact advertisers’ ability to execute, the damage is minimized by evolving from a one to one targeting at scale mindset. These ‘humanized’ opportunities, like Google’s, can come from first-party publisher data, but more often come from smarter planning and execution – and they produce solid sales uplift.
Going beyond a band-aid solution
Google’s vision is a tangible solution for a cookie-less world, but there are several other options that brands can take now to continue to make the ad-funded web work in a privacy-first world.
For example, they could build more first-party relationships (sponsorships, data partnerships and exchanges) with publishers, app developers and SSPs – or indeed drive first-party data collection if that provides a tangible business benefit within cost.
Or they could support ID consortiums – independent IDs seeded during the bid process that sits across exchanges for a richer view of consumers and more accurate targeting.
They could even work with programmatic ad networks to reach audiences at scale across multiple sites (often at a greater scale than the duopoly). These are valid, scalable solutions that respect privacy (although their impact is often limited to the 20-30% of inventory that sits beyond the walled gardens).
The Dmexco conversation is often tech talking to tech – tech-based problems are met with tech-based solutions. Solutions are often replications of what has been done in the past, rather than re-inventions which can truly move the industry forward.
By going beyond programmatic band-aids and targeting consumers based on behaviors, emotions and moments, as well as looking at the context, brands can continue to market to people at scale well beyond the Google ecosystem.
Full article here