Hi, my name's Paul Baines, I'm a Professor of Political Marketing at Cranfield School of Management...
...co-author of "Marketing", Third Edition by Oxford University Press.
Today we're talking to Fiona Blades, the Chief Executive Officer of MESH Planning...
...an innovative marketing research agency based in Camden, in London, in the UK.
In the example that follows, we look at how real time experience tracking...
...can evaluate communication campaigns across all of those touch points.
I think some of the limitations in market research...
...have been around the more traditional ways of measuring brands and communication...
...because what you find is that you very often get a brand and communication tracker...
...and this will combine brand health metrics, which could be consideration or favourability...
...those kinds of things, brand image statements that you associate with different brands...
...and then you put some execution evaluation modules on the back of those...
...showing some TV ads, and there's automatically an assumption...
...that the TV ad must be the thing that's driven the brand metric.
In fact it could have been something completely different.
It could have been that there's been some new product launch that's gone in...
...that doesn't have anything to do with the advertising...
...it could be that there's been some great social media...
...it could be all kinds of other aspects that could have been making the impact on the brand.
So I think one of the limitations has been in the past...
...particularly for brand tracking...
...that you're asking people about advertising which isn't in the moment.
That relates then to recall, so there's an issue with recall because people...
...what they haven't seen and this means that...
...they'll very often, when asked, "what have you seen?"...
...they will over-claim on big brands and on something which is you know, on TV...
...and they'll under-claim things like "oh I happened to see something in the supermarket"...
...or a small touch point that might just have, have passed them by.
But it could have been a very influential one in their purchase decision...
...so there's an issue with recall as well.
We know that emotion is very important to...
...understanding how people interpret brands...
...but again we've done work with the psychologist and he's explained...
...that unless you capture emotion in the moment, it's gone forever...
...so there's no point in showing somebody an ad...
...and asking for their response because actually when they see it in real life...
...when they're sitting with all their mates, they may have a very different reaction to that in the context...
...so you need to understand how communication is working in context as well.
We found that real time experience tracking has worked very successfully for clients...
...over the six years that we've had MESH established.
So where the idea comes from is that we believe that experiences actually create brands...
...and Jeremy Bullmore has a wonderful quote that he uses...
...which says "people build brands like birds build nests...
...from scraps and straws they chance upon"...
...and we think that these scraps and straws are their experiences...
...so if you can capture all these experiences or touch points...
...you can understand why people think about brands as they do.
So this is what we do with real time experience tracking...
...we use people's mobile phones...
...they let us know when they come into contact with brands, so if it was a study on soft drinks...
...they might text us about Coca Cola, Pepsi, Lilt, Fanta...
...and they'll let us know which brand they saw, which occasion it was...
...was it TV or in-store or social network...
...how it made them feel - very negative to very positive - and how likely...
...it made them to choose that brand next time.
So we're getting thousands of these experiences in every day for the study...
...but before somebody actually tells us about the experiences...
...they give us their views as to their perceptions of brands.
So we know whether they normally buy Coca Cola or they normally buy Pepsi...
...and we can then see at the end of the week...
...whether they are now saying they buy PepsiCo or they buy Coca Cola...
...we can see how brand image statements have changed...
...and then we can start to do some more sophisticated analytics...
...to see which of these experiences have impacted on those touch points.
The benefit of this, is that you can get information very quickly...
...so if a client is starting a campaign...
...we only need to get participants to do the first questionnaire, then to do some tracking...
...maybe for a week or two weeks, then the post and we can immediately start to see...
...the clients can make changes.
We're also starting to see that the persuasiveness metric...
...so 蘇ow likely did it make you to choose this brand?'...
...can be predictive of later sales and churn and this is quite interesting because...
...for one of our clients, we're now seeing that if we monitor...
...their customers' reaction to the competitor...
...that we see they have three weeks before that competitor will churn.
So we, we know we're just at the start of investigating what this experience data really means...
...but we do see it as the constituent part of brands.
The role that our research plays within clients is...
...really addressing a couple of needs actually.
One is that we don't just look at TV, we can look at all the different touch points -
...and that could be somebody consuming a product, it could be looking online...
...searching for something, social media, in-store, TV -
...so we look at all of the different touch points in one way which I think is one thing.
That means that clients can get a much better understanding of which elements...
...are working within their marketing mix.
The other thing is because we capture the information in real time...
...so we're capturing people's experiences with brands and touch points as they have them...
...it means that we can actually get the information more quickly...
...and we can let them know what things are working and what aren't...
...and therefore benefit from the, the learnings.
In terms of the, the success that we've had working with clients...
...there are a couple of examples that I think might be useful to talk about.
One which is where we were working with Energiser...
...and they were launching the new razor called Hydro, Wilkinson Sword Hydro.
It was being launched globally but it was being launched first in Germany...
...and therefore there was an opportunity to have a look within that launch...
...at what we could learn that could be then utilised in other countries...
...but also because it was such a big launch...
...the client wanted to understand what they could change along the route.
And we were able to construct a research programme where we were capturing the real time information...
...so that we could feedback immediately to let them know 惣es, the posters were working'...
...we could also let them know that the press wasn't working as well as they hoped...
...and we should move press into online - it was a young male audience -
...this then really helped in terms of optimising their campaign.
We could see that that TV ad was performing very strongly...
...in terms of increasing consideration for the brand...
...and it didn't wear out as quickly as we thought...
...so we were able to suggest that they had a cut down version of that...
...with a tag on and that actually worked even more powerfully later on in the campaign.
So they were able to make these changes throughout the campaign's life...
...and this significantly impacted on the way that the actual brand performed.
The Energiser executives calculated that the changes that had made...
...had benefited three-fold in terms of the advertising effectiveness...
...and it helped them to increase their share by 10% of this marketplace within four months.
Well, a very interesting recent dilemma that Gatorade, one of our Pepsico client brands, had...
...was how to measure their campaign.
So Gatorade was looking to reposition from a sports drink...
...to becoming much more about sports nutrition...
...and this meant that certain metrics on their brand, they were looking to see if they could increase.
They believed that the best way of doing this was using experiential touch points such as gyms...
...fitness centres, parks, those kinds of things which were close to...
...when people might actually be consuming or needing the product...
...but they didn't know whether this was the right strategy.
So what they did was they went with traditional media, with TV, sponsorship...
...outdoor, in-store, all the normal things, as well as the experiential touch points...
...in order to see how the whole mix worked together.
We were able to pick up the experiential touch points through real time experience tracking...
...and we could see that if somebody had had one of those experiences...
...that spontaneously they said it was a very engaging experience...
...and much more likely to make them purchase this brand.
We also did more sophisticated analytics around that work...
...so we didn't just take their word for it that they were very persuasive touch points...
...we looked at the brand metrics and how people perceived the brand...
...before they started telling us about their experiences and afterwards.
And we could see, there were significant shifts in the brand image attributes that they were looking to move...
...if people had had the experiential touch point experiences.
So we were able to suggest to them...
...that they should increase their spend in those areas.
We also saw efficiencies that could be made in the traditional media...
...so this was working well.
It wasn't about cutting the traditional media all together...
...but we were able to make some efficiencies.
Well, I actually set up MESH, having been in advertising and marketing before that...
...so in fact, I'd never worked in a research agency before setting up MESH.
...I'd worked in advertising and then I moved into more kind of through-the-line agencies...
...so the last one I was at was Clayden Healey...
...and I was working on brands like Mercedes Benz, T-Mobile, those kind of brands...
...and I knew it wasn't just the TV ad that was impacting on the decision.
It could have been people going into car dealerships...
...or it could have been phoning the call centre or looking online...
...and all these different experiences were going to be contributing to the brand health.
And I just felt that there wasn't a research tool that was available...
...that we could really use to unpick, was it the direct marketing?
Was it going in, in the new point of sale we put into the dealership?
Was it something that we'd done online?
Or was it actually the TV ad which was really all that we seemed to be evaluating from a research perspective?
So I decided to set up an agency because there really wasn't anything else available...
...that would actually help me to understand which elements of the marketing mix that I'd been working on...
...were working best.
I didn't know how the work was happening in the dealership or was the online work...
...that was actually driving the changes in brand...
...and I thought you could probably do this using a mobile phone...
...and of course, coming from a promotional background and sales promotion...
...we were starting to use mobile within the industry at that point, and I thought well that...
...that's a way that we can collect data, in real time...
...as people are having the experiences...
...and we won't have them forgetting what they've seen.
So that was actually how we set about looking at setting up MESH.