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 the
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
favorability, 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 also 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 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 don't remember what they've seen and 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 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 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 a 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
brand like birds build nests from scraps and stores 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 then let us know which brand they saw, which occasion it was, was
it TV or instore 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 by 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 which of the touch points
are impacting most and as a result the clients can make
changes. We're also starting to see that the
persuasiveness metrics, so "how 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 know we're just at the start of investigating what
this experience data really means but we do see it as the constituent parts 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, which is meaning that they can then optimize their activity very
quickly and therefore benefit from the learnings.
In terms of 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 utilized 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 program where we were capturing the real-time information so
that we could feedback immediately to let them know "yes 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 optimizing their campaign. We could see
that the 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 threefold
in terms of the advertising effectiveness and it helped them to
increase their share by ten percent of this market place 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 centers, 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 work 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 was 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've never worked in a research agency before setting up MESH.
But what I found particularly when I was working, 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 Claydon 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 center 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 the new
point of sale we put into the dealership? Was it something that we've 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've 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.