Data and research inform the work, which leads to more research and more data, which informs the work...
In the early days of advertising, until about a decade or so ago, the “art” of advertising was felt to be enough. An ad would win awards if it looked like a 60-second movie. That ad may have looked and felt amazing, but it didn’t always move the needle, and if it did, it was often by chance. Those days are over.
The single biggest shift in the use of research in our industry over the last decade is the sheer proliferation and use of data. All clients talk about today is data: the importance of data. The need for data. Data-infused insights. Data-informed solutions. The mantra “digital or die” has become “data or die.” If today’s planners and agencies are not data literate, they will not survive.
All this data can be incredibly overwhelming. When abused, it can hurt. When used properly, it is a beautiful thing.
The ability to form a complete data loop is a critical part of the success of any modern agency. At my company, pulling D&A into the core agency from its origins as a media-only function has been a very, very successful change for us. It demonstrated that the role of data extends well beyond media monitoring and optimization. Modern strategic planners, with their data analyst partners, need to help our clients understand the key role data can play in identifying business and consumer opportunities, through testing and learning and performance analytics. Planners need to navigate the whole data loop across the entire customer experience, without killing great ideas.
Why is this so important? Clients do not pay agencies a huge amount of money to think and approach problems in the same way that they do. They pay us to challenge them and think differently. They pay us for creative excellence. They want us to suggest new ideas and solutions by using the less analytical right side of our brains. But the stakes have never been higher (think of the average tenure of a CMO or CEO), and the tolerance for trial and error shrinks every quarter. The role of agencies today, and particularly strategic planners, is to strike the right balance of inspiring creative and reassuring data. Data is critical to support creative, but we can’t overcorrect and stifle new ideas. Data must provide insight and evidence that helps new ideas survive and thrive, so that the art and science of our craft are both represented throughout the process of creating advertising.
Creative is still king. And ad agencies still attract the best creative talent, despite the competition from in-house agencies; or consulting firms like Accenture, which provide rigor (and that have even gobbled up ad agencies); or big tech Alpha brands like Google, Apple, and Facebook. Why? Creative people want to work in a creative environment, with people who share a purpose, passion, and vision, which is to make amazing, effective work that they can be proud of. Also, brilliant creative people, who generally have short attention spans, do not want to spend all of their time working on one brand. And once they jump to the client or in-house or consultancy side, their portfolios will lack variety, so the longer their tenure, the harder it is to get back to the agency world. (Yes, consulting firms do work on multiple brands, but advertising is not their core expertise, so the culture of the company may be less desirable.) Most great creatives want to work at great agencies to keep themselves interested and engaged, and to keep their portfolios fresh.
Will that change in future? In all probability, it may, especially as marketing budgets continue to get squeezed, and the competition offers more attractive packages. But for the foreseeable future, I believe that ad agencies will continue to attract the best talent. However, no matter how great the talent and how great the creative, it will never be enough for today’s clients.
The work simply has to work.
If the work dazzles audiences, but doesn’t lead to measurable business results, CMOs will take the client’s business elsewhere (assuming they keep their job). Long gone are the legacy client agency relationships of 10 or 20 years or more. Clients today are nervous, and that makes them fickle, so agencies need to stay disciplined and ahead of the curve, looking out for every potential obstacle and opportunity.
When used well and selectively, data gives us a significantly greater chance of helping the work to work. It helps us understand our consumers better. It helps us determine what drives their emotions, behaviors, and decisions as they move through the path to purchase. It helps us to optimize positionings, ideas, and media channels and track the effectiveness of not only media choices, but also brand and business metrics. Data also gives us the ability to launch great, mold-breaking ideas, knowing that we have done everything in our power to help them, and our clients, be successful.
When any agency is pitching for a piece of new business or planning a new or evolved strategic and creative direction for an existing brand, the strategic planner is at the center of the process, using research and data to inform and inspire themselves and others on the team. There are many stages, all relying on research and data: analyzing business data to help define what success looks like; finding consumer insight; testing positioning territories; pretesting creative concepts; doing in-market testing, such as AB testing; tracking brand and creative success; analyzing media effectiveness; and, ultimately, establishing if the team has met the KPIs of success.
It’s a cyclical process that is informed by a data loop, which, sadly, is not approached with this degree of rigor nearly enough, partially because not all agencies have the ideal conditions. To complete a data loop, it is best if:
Let’s assume that you do have in-house media (or an unusually fantastic relationship with your sister media agency). Where do you start, and where does data play a role?
The following approach is what I have found to be most successful when planning a brand launch or campaign. You do not need to go through this entire process for each and every brief campaign, only for significant new brand or campaign changes that will last for several years. “America runs on Dunkin’,” for example, has been the brand’s tagline for over 14 years now, and I do not see it changing anytime soon—even if the context and campaigns around it evolve to remain relevant, as culture and consumer beliefs and behaviors progress over time.
Data and research inform the work, which leads to more research and more data, which informs the work...
If the process looks lengthy, let me reassure you, it is not, and it cannot be. Done well, with the right team, each stage happens simultaneously with teams sharing their findings almost in real time. This whole process should take at least several weeks ideally, but it can take as little as 5–10 days, including proprietary research, if expedited. Clients do not have the patience or budgets for things to drag, so the more skilled you become at this type of planning work, the faster it will move, without sacrificing quality. Your clients will be happy, and so will your creatives—they are not going to let you take half or more of a 6-week total timeline to do your strategy work, while they are left with a paltry week or so to do the actual creative work.
However, a word of caution: as tempting as it is to expedite, do not rush this if at all possible. A new brand house, tagline, or big brand campaign idea is a big deal. It will significantly affect the future of the brand, so unless it is an emergency, don’t shortchange your clients or your team. Give this the attention it deserves, and it will yield great dividends.
The account planner needs to lead the charge and make it all happen. Throughout the process, data plays a critical role, informing, giving insight, validating hypotheses (or not), providing analytical rigor, all while ensuring that ideas remain intact or are enhanced by data.
Advertising is not a magic bullet; one campaign rarely transforms a client’s business. But a good campaign should be able to create measurable change. The first part of the process is establishing how to measure that change, and what success will look like.
Do not skip this part, no matter how tempting to you and/or your clients. I know it’s exciting to get to the consumer insight work and write a juicy brief for the creatives, but if you skip this step it will be impossible to gauge your success. You will also ultimately waste time: endless hours will be spent spinning, debating strategy and creative, because you have no objectives against which to judge the work. It will come down to personal opinion. Or, should I say, opinions. Because there is never only one of them.
If the KPIs for success are not immediately available, do not give up. Even if clients are resisting because they want to get moving, you must insist on doing this work. Of course, herein lies the rub: there is a vulnerability in establishing KPIs, because they can establish failure as well as success. But isn’t it better to work with the benchmark or foundation of real metrics?
Frequently, agencies are given goals that are soft brand metrics, such as increasing brand awareness or consideration. While these are important, what you need to push for are specific business goals. Are online sales declining due to cheaper competition? If off-line sales are weak in a region, how can advertising reasonably help, and what level of investment would be needed to do so? What goal can advertising credibly help achieve? What other activations are happening in that region other than advertising? Is your KPI for success stealing a percentage of the share from a competitor? If so, what percentage share seems reasonable, based on past data and media spend?
Sometimes the marketing team says they cannot find the relevant data or they do not understand their data. I guarantee there is someone within the organization who can find it, and who does understand it. Find that person, pull in your account leads and analytics team, and work with them (and the marketing team if they will jump in) to figure out what needs to be done and how advertising can help.
If this person does not exist (it’s rare, but it happens), then ask your client if they are willing (and legally able) to share any data, so that you can crunch the numbers with the help of your decision science team. If they cannot share data, you may have to rely on what’s publicly available. There is plenty of it out there, and it brings at least some rigor to the process. And if you are part of a holding company and are lucky enough to have access to its data stack, then go at it. For the purpose of illustration, I will assume that this is not the case (the reality for most small to mid-sized agencies).
If your brand is seriously outspent by the competition, then your client’s expectations need to be fair. You cannot claim the number one slot if you are outspent 10:1. You will only have a rat’s chance in hell of doing so if the product and brand are updated or transformed in preparation for relaunch, and you create a radical, risky campaign that is polarizing but that gets talked about. That’s the adrenaline shot that can either cure you or kill you. Few clients today have the stomach for such a big risk unless the brand is a seriously Old Dog, in which case, it will probably be your last hope to avoid putting it to sleep for good.
One great KPI that proves effectiveness robustly and quickly is a media test. In-market tests, such as those conducted by Google Ads (to optimize digital ad content), provide speedy results and are much simpler to conduct. However, for omnichannel campaigns, if all other variables are more or less equal (distribution, demographics, the level of spend on any other promotional activities), then comparing sales in a region where a campaign ran against sales in another region where the campaign did not run is the purest way to establish effectiveness (or if you are unlucky, ineffectiveness). You can also use this type of test to determine how the combination of brand and retail messages in one region compared to a similar region, with the same spend, where only retail messages ran. Trying to justify brand advertising in a tough economy is very, very hard. Soft metrics won’t cut it, so, where possible, opt for a media test. Nothing motivates a CEO more than seeing the effect of advertising on actual sales.
Another reason for rigor when it comes to business metrics is that often, and especially today, advertising spend is one of the first things to be cut when a CEO is trying to reduce costs. If the CMO cannot prove the effectiveness of the advertising, they cannot fight these cuts. Establishing and reaching the KPIs for success are the only ways to protect the budget. Media tests put the client in a strong position to justify the spend, but don’t wait until the budget is threatened to run the test. Be armed and ready with the data in advance. It’s a subtle but important difference. When asked to justify spend, don’t argue for retaining or finding more money to roll out a successfully tested campaign—instead, turn the message around and present the CEO with the numbers that represent the potential financial consequence of not rolling out the campaign. FOMO is often a key motivator.
Finally, and critically, in my experience, if the business goals and objectives of the campaign are generic or unclear as the campaign is being developed, no one, including the creatives, will understand what the work is supposed to be doing. Without KPIs, the client is making decisions about the work based on whether or not it appeals to them personally—and that makes no sense whatsoever. How is a client who is (typically) middle-aged and (frequently) conservative supposed to judge if a campaign for a Gen Z audience will succeed?
Asking a client to be more diligent about business metrics may be time consuming and there may be pushback, but if you do not do this, campaign after campaign will be rejected by the client based on personal judgments. Money and resources will be wasted, and it will steal weeks from the schedule.
Well done—you have established what success will look like. Next, immerse yourself in the category and in your clients’ business by reading reports from as many reliable and recent sources as you can find. Don’t just rely on the opinion of one person who wrote one article back in 2016. Dig into as much reputable secondary research as you can, and ask your clients to provide you with any research and other information that they are willing to share.
For public companies, a lot can be learned by listening to earnings calls and reading annual reports. The questions asked on earnings calls force the brand leadership to think on their feet, and the nature of the questions typically gives you a lot of clues about the kinds of weaknesses and opportunities the company may be facing. You can also check stock fluctuations over the last 1–10 years, being sure to pay particular attention to the highest and lowest points and asking what was happening at the time of these peaks and troughs. Overall, is the company growing? Does it have positive momentum or not?
Best of all, try to interview the C-Suite and other stakeholders. Ask the marketing team for a list of people within the organization who can give you a broad but clear picture of the company and its brand(s). Call or meet with these people and ask why and when their business began, who the founders were, what gap the company or brand filled at that time, how successful the company has been over time. Has the company grown through acquisitions and mergers or has it grown organically? Mergers and acquisitions can result in a culture clash, which can create an unclear or confusing brand purpose, mission, and positioning. If that’s the case, it will need to be addressed.
Find out who these stakeholders believe the competition is; this may have changed dramatically over the years. Note that the predominant competition isn’t necessarily another company or brand. It can be a much stronger human force, such as inertia or lack of relevance.
Speak to external industry experts. Find them via your LinkedIn contacts or network with your team to find out who their relevant connections are. (Just be sure not to speak to any competitors still working in the industry!) There are many recently retired CEOs and C-Suite (and other) executives who will talk to you for a reasonable fee.
Let’s assume you now have solid, client-approved business and campaign goals and you’ve done all of the groundwork. Pin that information on the wall of your online or real-world war room, so that everyone has access to it, and turn your attention to the next phase, which is radically different: cultural analysis.
Culture plays a huge role in brand success or lack of success, though its significance is often overlooked or dismissed as a “soft” metric. When it comes to brands, relevance is everything. If a company or brand is not culturally relevant, then it is not relevant to consumers and simply cannot succeed.
Examine the key cultural shifts or trends in the world and in your country. There are many resources for cultural trend analysis, including subscriptions with companies that specifically track trend data. However, because these are typically pricey, and because things are moving so fast, it’s important to track culture on a real-time basis, not quarterly. The latter is useful for big, broad, slow-moving cultural shifts that have taken over a year to develop, such as a downtrend in the housing market, but important trends can shift dramatically within a 24-hour period. Think of how the stock market reacts to the announcement of a corporate scandal or a new CEO of a public company. Or how COVID-19 changed everything, everywhere, in only a few days.
All cultural trends are connected, and the Internet has given us literally millions of data sources for trend analysis. Look at readily available economic data, stock market data, the housing market, customer sentiment reports, Google search trend data, fashion trends, the most popular movies and TV shows, the global news, the biggest trends in music and hobbies. Again, it is key to ensure that your sources are reliable. But the real skill is in finding the links between trends—they are always connected—and identifying in their earliest stages the trends that will endure.
These incipient trends are often the result of what is called a “cultural collision.” For example, I believe that the recent surge in popularity of historical dramas—see the massive popularity of shows like Downton Abbey, Outlander, The Last Kingdom, and Vikings—may be a reaction to a significant cultural collision. Stress is always present in our culture, but over the last decade it has been compounded due to economic instability, job insecurity and overwork, overexposure to excessive information, the obsession with social media, and the pressure to be perfect. As an antidote to this stress, what could be a better than the short-term escape of binging on a good English Edwardian romp or a heroic Scottish or Viking drama—all set in a time without Internet or cell phones or social media? These trends then cause cultural shifts. The adoption of the Viking trend, for example, leads to the uptick in tribal tattoos, partially shaved heads, or funky facial hair. And this trend, in turn, conveniently responds to the fear of homogenization experienced by second-wave Millennials (the younger end of the generation) and Gen Zers. When everyone has access to the same social platforms, fashion websites, and celebrities, younger people who hate the idea of looking like everyone else will pounce on a chance to be more individual.
Any brand that anticipated this collision by carefully watching cultural trends could prepare for the associated threats or opportunities well in advance of an upturn or downturn in sales. The fashion for shaved heads and facial hair, for example, could mean a reduction in the demand for standard razors, but an increase in the demand for clippers and beard-grooming products. This illustrates that cultural trends are not “soft” metrics at all. Anticipating them and responding to them early can make sound business sense.
To be relevant, brands need to sense and respond to cultural collisions.
As previously mentioned, all cultural trends are connected, and there are many more I could cite that could be added to the diagram on page 100, but this illustrates my point. Four shifts contribute to one collision, and a subsequent ripple effect of needs and solutions.
So, back to brands. If your brand can respond to an early collision or trend, it will forever be connected to that trend. This will position it as a progressive and relevant brand, and, with luck, will force other brands to recalibrate to its dominance. This kind of forward momentum is a key indicator of brand energy and, therefore, success, so it is not to be underestimated.
Look how quickly Airbnb changed the world of travel accommodation. It was founded in 2008 and within a decade surpassed Hilton in U.S. sales. How did this happen? There’s little doubt that Airbnb latched on to some significant early cultural shifts and trends that were emerging and that are still happening today:
These types of trends can be discovered or substantiated by secondary category data that is freely available. Travel and category sales data are available from sources such as statista.com or travel.trade.gov, and reliable psychology data can be found at psychology today.com. Resources are endless, so dig in. If you have a hunch about a trend, don’t act on it until you find data to substantiate it. If the data suggests that your hunch is a growing trend—even if it is in its infancy—use it and find other trends that may be connected to it. Remember: there are always connections! For example, a recession affects the housing market, which affects consumer security, which provokes consumer anxiety, which affects their spending. You get the gist.
It is important to act quickly. Don’t dawdle and wait until the trend is mainstream—by then it will be a category convention, useless to any brand looking to challenge the status quo. If this happens, start the process over again, and next time, act sooner.
Having identified all of these trends, Airbnb positioned itself right in the center of their collision point. It created a community where each member—renter or owner—feels a sense of place and belonging. From this, they created their (abbreviated) brand purpose and tagline, “Belong anywhere.” (This was inspired by Douglas Atkin, the ultimate OG planner, who was their global head of community at the time—and, more recently, the author of the Foreword to this book.)
When Airbnb claimed this cultural space, competitors such as vrbo.com, which had been around for decades already, reacted by changing their visual identity, positioning, and advertising in order to compete. But they were too slow. Airbnb recognized these significant and relevant trends early, acted on them, and owned them. Airbnb is now the world’s largest online marketplace for lodgings, with listings growing more than 100 percent each year (prepandemic). Again, these are not soft metrics. That’s the power of purpose and cultural relevance.
Once cultural shifts have been analyzed to give you a strong sense of the cultural territory your brand may occupy and own, the rest is fairly straightforward. The cultural context becomes the foundation of the brand campaign for everything that follows.
Healthy Alpha brands, Youth brands, and even Newborn brands cannot succeed if they rely on looking for good old-fashioned “white space.” Instead, it’s important for these brands to lead by rising up and out of the category and look for a higher order purpose and positioning, which can only be done if they attach themselves to relevant cultural shifts or collisions.
Understanding a brand’s place in the world also helps avoid stepping into another brand’s territory. When that happens, differentiation is impossible, and misattribution of advertising impact to the category leader is probable.
However, analysis of the competition is necessary to understand category dynamics, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; the leaders, challengers, followers, and losers; as well as the strategic and creative areas to avoid—the spaces that have already been filled. The strategic planner will work with their team to immerse themselves in the category in order to:
This type of competitive breakdown will also help you understand the conventions within a category, an unfortunate fact of modern advertising. The skittish client and agency will try to follow convention in order to avoid making ripples—positive or negative ones. Better to keep your head below the water and allow others to take risks, according to this “do no harm” mentality—which, ironically, is a sure-fire path to mediocrity. I’ll avoid the usual clichés of “sea of sameness” or “zig when others zag” (well, it seems I didn’t avoid them after all), but the point I am making is that you need to fight to elevate your client above the aforementioned mediocrity. If the planner puts rigor behind the process and uses data throughout, to help protect and evolve great ideas, the work has an excellent chance of succeeding and achieving its goals after launch.
An important tool that I use for both competitive and brand analysis (later in this chapter) is perception mapping. These are not brand maps, where the axis and position of brands are based on subjective opinions, which results in team arguments about where exactly brands should be placed. These are data-informed maps, developed through quantitative research: consumers are offered a list of brands and a list of attributes and asked to pair them. The lists can include just about anything, including car brands, hotel brands, beer brands, animals, and even types of relationships.
As an example, the perception map on page 105 pairs technology brands with adjectives. It shows that Xerox is not associated with any specific attribute today, other than a distant connection to “powerful,” which is probably a residual from the past. On the other hand, Hewlett Packard (HP) is considered “visionary,” and Canon, “straightforward,” which all make sense. The map also highlights the neutrality of the Canon brand (not a terrible thing), highlighting the need to link it to a positive attribute, which will help it stay competitive.
This may sound like an eccentric technique, but I have used these survey-based maps for many years, and similar patterns always emerge, which is reassuring. This isn’t pure science, but it is a useful way to prompt consumers, in a method akin to free association, to react without thinking, which reveals brand associations, honestly.
Perception maps are informed by quantitative research—consumers are shown a list of brands and asked to match them to a list of attributes, or animals, or types of relationships.
These maps can include multibrand clusters from a variety of categories, to see how they fare alongside your brand. For example, in many perception maps, I have seen Walmart be linked to Ford, Courtyard by Marriott, and Budweiser. For perception maps about relationships, I have seen it fall under “marriage of convenience” on many occasions—when the most desirable relationship status for most brands would be either “married for life” or “forbidden affair.’’
Let’s be honest: another huge benefit of perception maps is that they are fun to present and discuss, making them good pitch or meeting theater. I once presented a famous luxury-car brand team with an animal perception map, where Chevrolet was represented by an eagle, and Mini, the upstart challenger, was represented by a rabbit (this happens a lot with small challengers). The team was horrified to see their aggressive brand represented by a shark.
To me, the shark space is the most fascinating of all, particularly for a car brand: while it is aggressive and terrifying, it is also powerful, sleek, the most perfectly evolved animal in the ocean—and, most importantly, it cannot swim backwards. Now, does the consumer pick the shark because they are aware of its associations with powerful, forward momentum? Of course not. But the subconscious is a very interesting thing—it can immediately access all the knowledge and associations we have stored since birth and it is incapable of rational thought—so, who are we to judge it?
Much like the brand family maps, perception mapping can give you not only a sense of the space the brand occupies on the consumer’s mind today, but also where they need to move to, to stand up and stand out.
Okay, so we understand the KPIs of success, we know our business challenges and goals, and we have a good sense of the general area that we want to inhabit in the culture, and the brand associations that we already own and need to own. We know a lot at this point, but we need to learn more. We need to know as much as we can about the most important part of the whole equation—the consumer.
Again—the most significant role any strategic planner plays is to represent the consumer (or customer, if you are working with B2B audiences) in the brand development or communications campaign.
Why does the consumer need to be represented in the first place? Because clients and agencies are immersed in their brands and businesses, and they spend an unhealthy amount of energy and time on both. That is their job and their livelihood. But the consumer is the most important stakeholder. Is the consumer wandering around thinking about packaged cheese or insurance plans all day long? It’s highly unlikely, unless they are seriously quirky, so it is our job to ensure they are present throughout the process, so that the work is relevant, meaningful, and motivating. You may not be your target’s generation, gender, or ethnicity, but you can step into their shoes for a while. Learn about their lives and their worlds. Their hopes and aspirations. Their struggles and fears. Learn what drives them.
Most importantly, learn to like them. I was once told by a very famous ECD that my brief left him disliking the affluent, middle-aged male audience whom we were trying to target. This was particularly uncomfortable since he himself was an affluent, middle-aged male. He told me that he couldn’t write a campaign for someone whom he disliked, so, irritated and scratching my head, I revisited the brief, wondering how my 28-year-old self could even begin to climb into the brain of someone with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.
I had to admit to myself that I had come to the original briefing ill prepared. I hadn’t done my homework and I didn’t really know this audience—I had just blindly accepted our client’s request to target them. I realized it was time to do what I should have done in the first place: the work. I read a lot of secondary research and psychology white papers and interviewed as many men from within this demographic as I could in the time given.
Sure enough, some themes started to emerge. At the time, the UK was going through a small recession. This was quite a while ago, when we were not as enlightened as we are today, so most family structures we focused on were fairly stereotypical, with a primary male breadwinner, female secondary breadwinner, or stay-at-home mom, with 2.5 kids. I learned that this generation of white-collar boomer men had been raised by parents who had grown up during the war. Their folks had to make every penny stretch and in their frugality had “deprived” them of many of the things their children had wanted. Two decades later, their middle-aged sons, in particular, wanted to compensate their families for the “sins” of the parents, by providing them with a nice home, nice cars, a good school, and all the right clothes, gadgets, and toys. But this stuff costs a lot of money, and they had frequently overstretched themselves, living beyond their means by relying on credit cards and the hopes of a raise.
They lived with constant worry about money. I learned that many had hidden this from their partners and spouses, shouldering the burden alone. Unlike women of a similar age, these men did not talk to their friends or families about their woes. Anyway, most of their friends were, they told us, in exactly the same situation. I also had to remember that these people had been young once. In this case, during the 1970s, when the sexual revolution was in full swing. The white-collar lives of feigned privilege that they were living now, where material possessions seemed to be important, was in direct contrast to the truly meaningful lives they had once assumed and hoped they would have.
While I had little sympathy for them regarding their financial irresponsibility, there was a loneliness and vulnerability about them that I found sad but endearing. There was also something kind of cool about them and their hippie youths that I hadn’t noticed before. I learned that I actually did like them—and was then able to empathize enough to write a much better, more inspiring brief. My ECD agreed.
If you don’t know your audience, do the work. It always pays off.
When you believe that you know enough, turn your attention to your audience’s relationship with the category and your brand. It isn’t our job to force consumers to think about brands. It is our job to encourage them to think about our brand first, whenever they are making decisions in the category—even if that is a year from now. We can encourage this predisposition only if we are seen to align with their needs and their values. A consumer chooses Dunkin’ over Starbucks because they believe they belong to one “team” more than the other. And how do they pick a team? They pick the one that they buy into on a deeper level, even if they think they are responding to messaging about a new flavor of fall coffee. That kind of retail messaging engages consumers in the moment, but brand messaging engages them for the long term. To attract consumers to your brand, you need both types of messaging. Or at the very least, that phrase de jour, “branded retail”—a hybrid of a brand-oriented campaign with a heavy retail component, such as a car video with a dealer tag at the end, including details such as price, offer, and the call to action.
How does this help account planners as we plan a brand’s positioning or advertising? It reminds us that an optimal level of engagement comes from understanding our consumer as deeply as we possibly can. Not only their mindset, but also their attitudes and behaviors in life, in the category and towards your brand. The who, what, and why. Who they are, what they think of the category and your brand, and why they think this.
Let’s start with the who.
Today’s clients have limited budgets, to the extent that it is not unusual to be working with a national media and production budget of less than $5 million annually. As budgets shrink, agencies need to become smarter. Insurance companies with $200 million annual budgets can afford to target pretty much everyone who might buy insurance (so, any adult) across all 50 states. These brands can afford to take risks on highly irreverent campaigns featuring animals and cavemen, not only because they are in a very low interest category, but also because if one idea bombs, it’s not the end of the world—they just pull it and redistribute the spend to the more successful ads that are in the market. And, of course, they can afford to produce several ad campaigns and indeed, they have to, because ads do ultimately wear out. After too much exposure, the consumer tires of seeing the same execution, resulting in irritation and the dreaded diminishing returns. It’s best to avoid this at all costs—but it is a luxury problem most brands don’t have.
Overexposure is not the issue for the majority of campaigns. Usually, we have to be extremely selective on behalf of our clients, focusing on certain regions and specific demographics. There are several means of delving into audience demographics: customer databases, syndicated research, proprietary online surveys, social media, or quantitative or qualitative research. Or work with your media partners, who can collaborate with Google and Facebook to identify your best customers. And, again, if you are lucky enough to have access to your holding company’s data stack, start there.
For the average planner at the average-sized agency, it makes sense to learn about a brand’s best customers first. By obtaining this demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data, you can target copycat audiences who have access to your clients’ brand but who, for whatever reason, do not buy or use it. Surprisingly, many clients do not collect any data from their users. If your client does keep a customer database, you can analyze it (adhering to all privacy codes) to find their best customers. This database is only as good as the information it has captured, which is sometimes excellent, but not always. If your client will let you add questions to upcoming or ongoing current surveys, this is a quick, free way of getting more intel.
Let’s assume the worst-case scenario: that their database is poor, they have no existing partnerships with tech or data companies who can help them, and they do not have any surveys onto which you can piggyback. In that case, you turn to subscription-based syndicated research—the traditional tools of media planners globally. Each syndicated brand owns a panel of over fifty thousand respondents who complete an annual survey that covers everything they see, do, buy, and believe, from the brands they prefer and the channels they favor, to what kind of person they feel they are. Two examples: “Others come to me for advice about electronics,” or “I am a very stylish person.”
This is a useful baseline tool. You simply input your client’s brand (if the brand is big enough, it will be listed), and the tool spits out the demographics, behaviors, and preferences of its current users. What you are searching for is anyone who overindexes on each question, from a baseline of 100. Say, for example, you are thinking of including Pinterest in your media plan. When you look at women who actively use Pinterest, if a segment of women aged 55–65 underindexes at 86, versus the general population within the syndicated database, they are not a great target. But if women aged 25–35 overindex at 175, they are a significantly more viable target. By cross-tabulating data points, you can establish the best audience for a brand.
Media planners are generally the owners of syndicated and other media tools, but my team is extremely skilled at using these tools, too. Modern strategic planners need to be able to use every tool at their disposal, and in smaller agencies that subscribe to syndicated services but have no in-house media, the strategic planner often plays the role of communications planner. Either way, strategic planners need to understand their audiences’ habits and behaviors as least as much as media planners do, so learning to use these tools is a must.
What if your agency, or client, does not subscribe to syndicated research, and your media partners cannot or will not allow you access? You can create a proprietary online survey to collect not only demographic, but also psychographic and behavioral data about existing customers. Your client can embed a link to the survey in an e-mail or SMS to their customers, put it on their social sites, incentivize it with a coupon, and with luck, enough people will complete it to give you a strong indication of their best customers.
You can also mine information from the brand’s social media sites (again, adhering to all privacy laws). Incredibly useful information is available, via Facebook, in particular, including basic demographics, geography, their likes, their status, their preferences of brands, music, video, books, and hobbies. Facebook offers other useful tools, including an ad builder, which helps you find entire groups of people who fit within your target market. You can even jump into a conversation with them and ask specific questions about them and their relationship with your brand, or you can conduct polls among fans, as well as sharing links to surveys, as mentioned earlier.
Finally, what if none of this works? Your client has no useful data, you have no access to syndicated research, and the brand has few followers in social media (it happens). If you are working with a brand that is nonetheless quite popular, it is time to conduct your own primary quantitative research. To find users of obscure brands, it may be better to stick with qualitative research, such as online focus groups. Otherwise, your research vendor will have to reach deep into expensive consumer databases, and your survey will have to spend a long time in market as it struggles to screen out your audience. Deeper and longer equals more money.
Let’s now assume that you have some great information about your current audience, and you are now looking to target prospects. To do this you use the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral facts that you learned about your existing audience to find a new audience that mirrors them, but is not yet buying your client’s brand. To illustrate how this might work, let’s pick an example.
If you are working with an upscale dairy client, you could use the syndicated tools to find people who enjoy cooking, are discerning, read high-end food magazines, stream food shows, and earn over $100,000 a year. The cross-tabs may indicate that the majority of these people are women aged 35–55 who are married or in a relationship, who have children, who are working full time, and who primarily live in the northeast.
This allows you to plan media around this specific target, so that the budget has the best chance of engaging the right audience. In this instance, you may plan to spend most of your $5 million in the Quad-State area and New England (avoiding Manhattan, which is very expensive), because you know your client has distribution there, but the brand isn’t doing as well there as it is, say, in the Midwest. Because you know that your audience likes to watch upscale food programs, mostly on YouTube and other streaming services, you may dedicate the bulk of your spend to creating and producing a content series about cooking that you can air around their favorite shows. You may also know that your audience uses search to find recipes on a regular basis—so you place banners or rich media (digital ads with video, audio, or other interactive elements) in paid search or in their favorite recipe websites.
If syndicated isn’t available to your agency (it is not free), you can also use some of the methodologies mentioned earlier, including engaging with your brand’s social media fans and followers or by creating proprietary online surveys. Better still, if your client has captured data on lapsed or occasional customers, or, for example, those who abandoned baskets on their websites, or who downloaded a coupon but never used it. As well as retargeting those consumers to push them along, you can send a survey to them, along with an incentive, such as a coupon. Coupons are ideal, because not only will you get the research you need, but also your clients will benefit from encouraging a new group of customers to make a purchase and, hopefully, to engage with their brand.
When you have established who your target audience is, it’s time to understand what they think of the category and the brand and why they think this.
Since you are potentially conducting some proprietary quantitative research to understand who your consumer is, in the same survey, you can ask questions about why they enter a category (the triggers), how they navigate it (the discovery process), and how they make decisions (the transaction). The benefit of quantitative research is, of course, scale, typically, on a national level. Most surveys have sample sizes of between at least one thousand and two thousand respondents, which can reassure you that the responses are consistent and likely representative of the broader target base. A larger sample size may reassure you and your clients, but it adds significant expense and it may not be necessary. In my experience, even at sample sizes of ten thousand-plus, the responses are not significantly different from those at a sample of two thousand.
Now, the downside of quantitative research is that while it can tell you what the consumers thinks and how they behave, unless you plant open-ended questions into the survey (and typically you can only add one or two before the respondent gets bored to death and exits the survey), it cannot tell you why they think and behave in this way. This can only be achieved through qualitative research.
I have gone into qualitative research in some detail in earlier chapters, so I will not overexpand on it here. Suffice to say, decide if ethnographies, shop-alongs, focus groups, online focus groups, one-on-ones, or another type of qualitative is best for your specific project. As mentioned before, I tend to favor ethnographies over traditional focus groups, because consumers are in the privacy of their personal space and thus more likely to be their authentic selves, rather than behaving formally or trying to lead or seek the approval of a group.
The corporate setting of a focus group facility doesn’t always elicit more formal behavior. If the group isn’t genuinely useful, it may at least provide you with stories that you will be telling friends and family for the rest of your lives. I have sat on the other side of the glass and witnessed respondents falling asleep in groups and actually snoring. I have seen many raise up their shirts to show the moderator their impressive scars. And on many occasions in the UK, typically, in the last groups of the day, I have seen people take advantage of the readily available alcoholic beverages on the drinks cart, to the point where they were slurring their words, becoming belligerent, or even keeling over mid-group. On one unforgettable occasion, a poor woman quickly tried to excuse herself from the group because she was feeling ill, didn’t make it as far as the door, and projectile vomited over the one-way mirror—causing the large group of client observers to duck, somewhat unnecessarily. I once observed a focus group of older respondents discussing a new type of incontinence drug. When everyone had left the room, the poor facility manager had to scrub clean some of the chairs and blow-dry them with a hairdryer in preparation for the next group. While mentioning this might sound mean spirited, I included it because it did give us a real sense of the severity of their condition, and the embarrassment it could cause when out in public. All good information.
Shop-alongs are always informative if you are working with a retail brand. Follow the respondent through the store and ask them to speak before, during, and after they shop, about the range of products they are considering and how they make selections. It’s amazing how quickly people forget to be self-conscious and happily skip up the aisles, babbling loudly while you scurry to keep up. In this unguarded state, you will learn a consumer’s true shopping habits. In a focus group environment, someone may try to impress their fellow respondents by saying they always buy the most expensive brand, but in the store you’ll see them comparison shop and only buy leading brands if they are on sale. A demonstrated lack of brand loyalty is much more valuable and useful information. Remember to take notes, but unless you have advance permission from the store, do not film these outings, or you will soon feel the firm grip of a large hand on your shoulder.
Try to combine ethnographies with shop-alongs. Start in the respondent’s home, go to the store with them, accompany them back to their home to observe them unload their groceries, and maybe even stay for dinner and see how they use the products and engage with their families. It’s all good, honest insight. Do UX research by sitting down with respondents, after instructing them to, say, “spend fifty dollars on a new pair of jeans” and observing how they navigate different websites. Or ask them to give you permission to take over their screens, so that you can witness their behavior remotely.
Use whatever methodology works for you to get the best insights within the time allotted. At this point, a clear picture will be forming of the space your brand can uniquely occupy. This a very exciting point in the process. You’re almost at the brief and briefing stage—all that is left to do now is to analyze your brand.
Brand analysis is essentially a brand health check: an opportunity to pull apart and examine all of your brand assets and elements. If a brand is a promise made and kept with consumers or customers, then it is important to determine the state of that relationship (and prospective relationships).
Start by determining what kind of brand you have. Use the brand family tool in Chapter 3 to see if your brand is an Alpha, Youth, Newborn, or Old Dog. Learn about how your brand ended up in the space it occupies now. What happened? What didn’t happen? What needs to happen? Establish where you are now and where you need to be to succeed. Typically, that will involve moving from:
Now use your research to create one or two perception maps to establish how current customers and prospects feel about the brand and what they associate it with. (You can add these questions to any quantitative surveys going into the field for your consumer analysis.) For example, if you have chosen to map brands against adjectives, and your brand is considered brave, forward thinking, innovative, progressive, and modern, then all is well. If you are considered old-fashioned, tired, conservative, slow, or lazy, then it is time for some serious brand repositioning. If they feel that your brand is a lion, you are in good shape. If they feel your brand is a tortoise, not so much.
After establishing what kind of brand you are, what you need to be, and how you might get there, it is time to examine your current brand assets. These include:
brand heritage—Why does your brand exist? Who created it and why? Is the heritage well-known, but holding the brand back? Or is it dormant and unknown, but very relevant today?
Remember Fred the Baker? Because Dunkin’ Donuts’ focus was on beverages, and Fred was associated with donuts, it was time to leave him and his “Time to make the donuts” line behind. It can be hard to walk away from a strong brand heritage; consumers grow sentimental about certain brand assets and will often beg you not to change anything. But sentimentality does not make the cash registers ring. If consumers are not engaging, and the brand is entering Old Dog territory, it’s time to move on. Time to evolve.
The opposite can also happen. When I first started working with the Chili’s brand, it was a generic casual dining brand with no known heritage, indistinguishable from many others in the crowded category. In stakeholder interviews—including one with a Chili’s founder—we were astonished to learn that Chili’s had been created in the 1970s by a group of hippie bikers who, quite simply, loved chili. They opened their first Chili’s shack in Dallas, and the brand soon took off. Over the years, this heritage had been lost, and the brand had become generic.
Younger Millennials and Gen Zers, who seek authentic brands with a strong sense of self and shared values, did not know this story and were not dining at Chili’s. So, we created a campaign that introduced the brand heritage with grainy footage reminiscent of the 1970s shack and the original founders. We found in our research that younger generations were pleasantly surprised to learn about Chili’s past, as were their core users, who had been equally clueless. Knowing the brand had a strong, authentic provenance allowed customers to form a sense of pride and allegiance to Chili’s.
visual identity—These assets include the logo, typeface, visual style, colors, and design elements. Look at each visual asset. Check the home page and the rest of their website. Look at any other brand design elements, from brochures to white papers, annual reports, and social media presence.
Look at the history of the brand’s logo and color palette. Is the logo dated? If so, would the client consider a new or refreshed logo? A word of caution here: before you go telling a client their logo needs to be updated, consider the cost of such an exercise. A logo change entails renovated physical storefronts and other expensive changes. A new logo can take years to roll out, and such a dramatic shift is not always possible. Also, do your homework: check to see if your client went through this exercise recently. They do not want to hear you recommend a revamp when they made a big change just 2 years before. However, if the logo or colors are seriously outdated, and this is affecting brand perception and hindering progress, it is worth mentioning, even as a potential, longer-term objective, so also make that a consideration.
brand beliefs—Is anything the consumer believes about your brand holding you back? Assess the health of brand beliefs and the reasons behind them. You will have learned much from your brand perception maps and other research. Is the brand perceived negatively at all? Did the brand experience any recent scandal affecting its reputation? A severely damaged reputation can be fixed, but it takes time to ensure it can never fall into that dark space again and demands that the brand prove it has changed beyond every measure. It can take decades for a brand to recover from a corporate scandal. Consumers have very long memories. In rare cases, these perceptions are passed down from one generation to the next, and the brand never recovers.
Consumer memory can work in a brand’s favor, too. Do older consumers know something positive about your brand that younger consumers do not, but that would resonate? For example, working with the American Red Cross (ARC) we learned that while the ARC was associated with blood drives, fundraising, and of course emergency assistance, it touches many American families in everyday ways, including teaching kids at local pools how to swim and educating families about emergency preparedness. But because the ARC was associated with “disaster relief,” many research respondents did not feel as personally connected with it as they might. Learning about ARC’s involvement in their own communities gave them a sense of personal affinity with and ownership of the brand, which made more people more likely to give time or blood, or make a donation to the ARC.
There is one critical audience that is all too frequently overlooked. A brand house, or even just a new brand purpose or tagline, will not succeed if there is not buy-in from the internal audience: employees.
Few employees beyond the marketing department will know how to reposition a brand, but they will know how they feel about the work you share with them, whether they are inspired and excited, neutral, or not on board at all. Even if you believe it is the best work of your career, it will not flourish unless most employees believe in it. About 70–80 percent is enough for buy-in, especially if that number includes the culture keepers and influencers of the company. There will always be naysayers, and that’s okay—stay realistic and don’t be discouraged. You are looking for a majority vote to get things moving.
Engaging employees is tricky. You want them to help inform and inspire your new brand house or campaign idea, but you do not want to seek their approval at every stage of the process. For example, you definitely do not need or want their help in choosing positioning statements, or taglines. Some of the best taglines of all time probably sounded clunky or weird to employees on first exposure. Think about “Drivers wanted” for Volkswagen (VW), which was created by the legendary Lance Jensen and his team. This line would only have made sense to the extended employee base when it was paired with the ramp line: “On the road of life there are passengers and there are drivers. Drivers wanted.”
Employees do need to feel they have been involved, however. If they have influenced the work in some way, shape, or form, they will see their thumbprints in it, even if only in a small way, and they will be much more likely to buy in. When employees buy in, they will become the brand’s biggest advocates and champions.
The best way to involve them is to include as many as possible in your 1:1 stakeholder interviews at the beginning of the process. For the remaining (majority) of employees, a survey works well, again, early on in the process. Work with your client’s HR department (HR folks can understandably get prickly about this kind of stuff if they are not included or co-leading) to create and launch a custom survey. Ask employees questions such as:
The responses will provide much incredibly valuable information that can influence many decisions. You and your team will constantly ask yourselves, “Will the employees feel proud to be associated with a company that stands for this, based on what I know about them?” Or, “Does this campaign reflect the best of the culture of the brand now or where it needs to go?”
When the brand house or campaign idea is complete, roll it out to employees first, at a company-wide meeting (or a fun, virtual meeting). Find creative ways of sharing content and ideas with them. Branded swag is always appreciated. As analogue as it may seem, there is no better way to get the message out there than having ten thousand employees wearing a T-shirt with the brand’s new tagline and logo on it, or having them share that great new content on their personal social media sites. More importantly, a brand purpose and/or new tagline gives employees something to rally around. It becomes an important “war cry” for the entire company, from CEO to janitor. It provides that all-important North Star for the whole organization.
You have done a lot, but there is still work to be done. If your client doesn’t have a brand house, or at least a brand purpose, vision, or positioning, you will now be informed enough to help them create one using the brand house workshop guidelines in Chapter 4. Before the workshop, share all of your learning to date with the extended team. Hopefully, you and your client will have been in lockstep throughout the discovery process, but there will be many more client and agency team members who will benefit from the knowledge you now have, so include them at this stage.
When everyone is equally informed, it is time to let the rubber hit the road. Time to develop a campaign for your client that brings all of these new assets to their consumers and prospects, as well as their internal audience. All of that starts with the most important document that any strategic planner has ever owned and will ever own: the creative brief.