Information for persuasion
Editor's note: Jody Moxham is chief innovation officer and co-founder of PhaseOne. Terry Villines is vice president, director of analysis at PhaseOne. Both Moxham and Villines are based in the firm’s Los Angeles office.
The winds of change have been raging through the market research world for the better part of a decade now. Everywhere we go, marketers are struggling with too much data, not enough data or having data they don’t know how to use.
Analytics has been emerging as the way to make sense of the data, so much so that the world of big data has declared this the decade of the analyst. We would argue that the need for analytics extends deep into the market research realm, particularly into marketing communications.
In view of today’s far more complex and data-rich environment, analytics is a welcome addition to the valuable uses of qualitative and quantitative research. Each of these traditional research methods engages customers directly and elicits useful responses. The current situation, however, requires more nuanced and richer insights than can be gotten by talking with consumers. That is where analytics comes into play.
It used to be that advertising was the single-most important tool marketers had in leveraging sales or market share. The evolution during the last decade has resulted in a changing role for advertising and an increasing role for other forms of marketing communications. Analytics accommodates all aspects of a marketer’s arsenal and provides actionable insights.
Analytics has considerable advantage over directly asking consumers what they think about an ad, a campaign or even the appropriateness of a channel. Once fully developed, analytics lets you look in the headlights and reliably forecast how communications and strategies will perform, allowing you to make adjustments before costly production of any kind. Analytics also provides the ability to look in the rearview mirror and diagnose why communications and strategies performed as they did. And analytics can do so with an n of zero – in other words, without the need to speak directly with consumers.
Codify the patterns
That should not be a surprise. As a community we have been tracking advertising performance for more than 60 years. One of the great advances of analytics is the ability to matrix marketing situations and codify the patterns that historically have high correlation with success and failure for each set of variables within the situation. Equally as important as identifying the patterns is understanding the role each variable plays in leading to success or disappointment.
Research analysts at our firm, PhaseOne, identified more than 290 variables that can influence the success of marketing communications. Our research has shown that 44 percent of these variables have a positive effect and drive performance; 30 percent have a negative effect that will limit performance; and the remaining 26 percent have a neutral effect but may be necessary to hold the story together.
The goal is to reduce the presence of variables that have a negative impact on communication – to accentuate the positive, so to speak. We use analytics to determine the strength with which a communication engages the audience and is able to compete within the competitive frame. In order to arrive at those conclusions, we diagnose the role that each element plays in engagement, building interest in the brand, persuading on behalf of the brand and driving memory of the message. Because analytics is a desktop exercise, we can create a mosaic that illustrates how each communication performs individually as well as how it fits with all the other marketing elements. Even more importantly, analytics allow us to explain why, which allows changes that maximize investment and return.
Strong marketing messages are built upon powerful communications strategies. Analytics can also be harnessed in the development of winning strategies. In fact, when it comes to the variables that influence the success of a communication strategy, our analytics has identified 120 marketing situation variables, including product category, competition, product life cycle, target audience, societal influences, economic indicators and others.
The ability to do real-world testing of hypotheses that are formed in academia allows us to prove the situations in which a hypothesis is valid and when it isn’t. Also, our partnerships with organizations and their creative agencies have resulted in a constant sharing of real-world marketplace data. This, along with staying abreast of academic developments, allows analytics to be tailored to fit unique needs. And yes, each marketer’s situation contains something that makes it unique. That is why we have not found one-size-fits-all solutions.
Consider the challenge a global packaged goods company faced when it had a finite budget to cover marketing throughout Europe. In one country the brand was the market leader; in another a distant third; in yet another country a new entry, and so on. The client’s budget allowed for one mass-media campaign that would be translated into multiple languages. The application of our analytics helped the brand team and their ad agency develop a campaign around a single idea that would be appropriate to each of the diverse marketing situations. This required a comprehensive analysis of the target audiences’ attitudes and behaviors, the competitors’ claims, the brand’s equity, along with other societal influences and conditions. It was by matrixing these various inputs that we were able to help illuminate a path forward. In spite of heavy and growing competition, our client has maintained market share in all countries and has grown share in several.
What is essential
We’ve talked a lot about the benefits of analytics and feel we must take a moment here to discuss what is essential in any analytic methodology. Yes, methodology. Analytics is not just the opinion of a smart person with a lot of experience. Such a person can be useful but even the best individuals are right at most 55-60 percent of the time. Like Wanamaker said a century ago when he found that half the money he spent on advertising is wasted, “the problem is that I don’t know which half.” By contrast, an evidence-based methodology, like ours, has typically been validated by tough marketers at the 75-80 percent range and on occasion as high as 87 percent. This reliability is inherent in the methodology being based on evidence, not opinion.
When we set out to develop a methodology for explaining the effect advertising would have on consumers, we started on a quest to acquire all the knowledge about communication that resided in the social sciences, advertising tracking and sales studies, marketing principles, the entertainment world (storytelling) and education principles. It takes a multidisciplined approach to provide insights as rich and varied as our consumers are today. In order to produce those insights, our analysts follow a deconstruction/reconstruction methodology. We begin by coding the communication content, style, structure and nuances, including objectively determining the energy with which each incremental idea is expressed. During the reconstruction stage, we map all that codified data onto frameworks that have been proven to aid accurate determination of persuasiveness, memorability, engagement, relationship to other communications in the marketing arsenal and ability to compete successfully with competitors’ claims.
We will share an example of how multidisciplined, methodological analytics in the right hands can lead to behavior-inducing communications. A global marketer had developed a new product that incorporated technological breakthroughs and offered vastly superior benefits. The breakthroughs were essential to success in an already-crowded category. We analyzed several options for an introductory campaign based on the futuristic technology. Our semiotic analysis identified the brand’s image would be ultramodern, sophisticated and high-tech, while our motivational analysis identified a high level of persuasiveness. As a result, the agency dramatically changed the nonverbal elements, which we identified as the source of the image. The agency replaced them with semiotic cues that were homey, comforting and imbued the brand with a sense of familiarity and tradition. The persuasive value proposition remained the same. The introductory campaign quickly met, then exceeded, the penetration goals the marketer had set. This semiotic analysis was part of our multi-disciplined approach that examined the campaign from multiple directions including persuasiveness, motivational triggers, mnemonics, self-identification likelihood and other key elements. A multidisciplined analytic and evidence-based approach provides powerful benefits when in the hands of a knowledgeable user.
Quest to explain why
Analytics is a never-ending quest to explain why. Validity and reliability of an analytics methodology relies on a commitment to stay abreast of new perspectives and test new hypotheses. The explosion of knowledge coming out of neuroscience and big data today is dramatically enhancing understanding of how people process information, what motivates their behavior, what turns them on, what turns them off, what people say vs. what they do and so much more.
We are on the cusp of a new era in market research. Analytics will be at the center of it. Analytics offers powerful insights that can be harnessed by professionals like you to improve performance, make better-informed decisions, think about solutions in new ways and move you more quickly toward the future.