How brands can drive and deliver compelling messagesYOUR BRAND CUT-THROUGHmaximise

Future Thinking | Maximise your brand cut-through

Delivering compelling messages across touchpointsWith a multitude of brands vying for consumer’s attention across a growing number of channels, it’s no wonder that the battle for share of mind is ferocious.

The advertising landscape is fragmented and noisy and it is increasingly difficult for marketers to make their message stand out and engage audiences. Harder still is making sure this is seamless across all channels and platforms, ensuring message, tone and brand personality are all aligned.

With so many channels and platforms available, identifying the right medium for the right message is key to the success of a campaign. Whether that’s growing reach through TV ads or delivering a call to action through radio, marketers need to know which platform has delivered on which KPI and how best to optimise their ROI.

The long held truism that ‘the better the content, the higher the engagement’ can only take brands so far nowadays, as engagement does not necessarily translate into brand loyalty. However, the opportunities to engage consumers has grown beyond traditional advertising, to encompass social, sponsorship and experiential events. Delivering the right message at the right time in the right place is no easy task but when done correctly, is an important tool in a marketer’s arsenal to help nudge consumers into changing their behaviour.

1 POSITIONING

Plenty of brands differentiate themselves from their competitors, but very few are distinctive enough to stand out from the crowd. By knowing how consumers perceive their brand’s personality and that of the competition, clients are able to hone their messaging to focus on the personality traits they want to dial up and those they would rather avoid. Using brand archetypes to map out brand personality onto a standard-ised positioning framework allows them to see where their brand sits.

Traditionally, brand archetypes have been used as a qualitative method to map brands. When used quantitatively with a set of validated adjectives and statistical analysis, archetypes can identify your brand’s unique personality and how it compares to competitors; helping to identify opportunities to strengthen brand messaging along well defined personality dimensions.

When advertising personality is overlaid onto brand personality, it shows where brand and advertising are consistent and where they are misaligned. Ensuring a consistent message whatever the channel, is key to growing a strong brand.

DELIVERING A COMPELLING BRAND EXPERIENCE IN TODAY’S WORLD REQUIRES A 360 DEGREE UNDERSTANDING OF THE BRAND AND CONSUMER:

Positioning: Where does the brand sit in people’s minds versus the competitive set?

Optimising: Which is the right media mix to ensure the best ROI?

Behaviour: What are the triggers to engagement and behaviour change and how can they be activated?

Future Thinking | Maximise your brand cut-through

2. OPTIMISING

With brand and advertising personalities aligned, brands are better positioned to focus on delivering the optimum brand experience. There are a range of areas that need understanding, from campaign evaluation, to advertising engagement and content evaluation. Understanding how advertising, sponsorship, and content are optimised, draws on evaluating both behavioural and attitudinal engagement.

Centred into all understanding is the role of behavioural economics (BE). From a research perspective BE has, in recent years, fundamentally changed the way consumer behaviour is researched to understand brand engagement. For marketers, it enables them to further understand and optimise their brand’s position, the experi-ence it provides, and the behaviour it influences.

SO, HOW DO YOU EVALUATE AND OPTIMISE...

In any campaign, platforms are selected to play certain roles, whether its TV bought to raise brand awareness; print to provide context and influence, or radio for more tactical call to action messaging. Added to this, further complexity arises from the increasing number of digital platforms, which brands need to engage audiences through. As a result, measuring, evaluating and predicting campaign effectiveness is increasingly complex and campaigns can often need fine-tuning before the balance between cut through, message take out, platform mix and budget are aligned.

Marketers need to identify the contribution each individual platform has on overall campaign awareness and other key brand metrics such as image and purchase intent. By achieving this for their brand, they are then able to identify (when spend is overlaid) the effectiveness of spend across platforms to predict the optimum media laydown. Simulators also exist, enabling cleints to amend actual or percentage spend per platform, to show the effect a different media laydown would have had on the brand.

To supplement understanding and measurement of advertising there are also a variety of biometric measures such as Galvanic Skin Response (think lie detector test), that will help evaluate engagement and understand the emotional response.

CONTENT OPTIMISER

With an increasing number of channels and ways of watching TV, measuring content value helps inform on channel and content strategy, whatever the platform and wher-ever in the world it may be. Whilst BARB provides viewing numbers and an idea of who is viewing, it doesn’t answer the why? It’s not just about establishing viewing behaviour i.e. did they watch, it’s about capturing engagement through understanding the emotional connection and identifying the content that drives KPI’s/brand metrics. For example, research can identify the content that both enhances a channel brand, but also ensures that the channel fulfils the audience need states.

Future Thinking have developed an analysis tool called Content Optimiser, designed to measure the impact of different programmes on channel perception, or alterna-tively can be used to measure the impact of different channels on overall perceptions of a TV provider. It allows exploration of the relationship between content and overall image perceptions, in order to pull out the programmes that best drive channel viewing and perceptions such as advocacy, affinity, word of mouth and relevance; where different programmes over or underperform relative to reach or viewing figures. This allows clients to understand the right content mix needed to create the greatest reach and impact.

Future Thinking | Maximise your brand cut-through

3 BEHAVIOUR

With brand messaging aligned and advertising mix optimised, the final step is influ-encing consumer behaviour. Understanding how a brand can trigger engagement and drive behaviour change is a science. Being able to identify the precise tipping point requires a detailed understanding of a customer’s previous interactions, but also an ability to understand and predict future behaviour. Importantly there is a need to understand why they behave in a certain way.

By understanding motivations, brands are more able to identify and deliver the product or experience that are relevant at each stage of their journey. Historically research would question people on how likely they are to change behaviour, recording a yes/ no response. The problem with this is that you miss those people in certain stages of contemplation that may be on the cusp of engaging with your brand. Whilst category or EPOS data can and has historically provided evidence of actual spend, and there-fore can be attributed to a specific activity i.e. npd or marketing activity, there are newer behavioural approaches, which can help better understand a brands potential.

Behaviour Change Model (BCM) is a different way of looking at understanding behaviour and is used to quantify, predict and explain a consumer’s likelihood and motivations to change behaviour. It is based on a proven psychological model that reveals the influences on behaviour, as well as recognising that people will only change their behaviour when they are ready to do so. BCM understands that all behaviour change goes through clearly defined psychological stages. It’s great news for brands as it enables them identify how close people are to engagement and achieving ROI. It also enables them to engage and effectively target their most recep-tive and profitable consumer groups, even when they haven’t yet demonstrated any kind of behaviour change.

Future Thinking takes a consultative approach to market research with commercial focus driving everything we do. That’s why we focus our attention on the three key areas that drive competitive advantage: Launch, Communicate, Experience.

Our mission is to deliver consumer and business insights that tells stories, inspires action and travels within an organisation, long after the debrief.

Visit: www.futurethinking.com or Follow us on Twitter: @FutureThinkHQ

Speak to Future Thinking At Future Thinking, we believe brand tracking needs a rethink. That is why we’ve developed a range of tools within our BrandBox toolkit to help drive brand success. Our expertise provides global brands, media owners and media agencies with in-depth and actionable insight through brand tracking, from one-off health checks to global tracking studies, campaign development, and advertising/sponsorship evaluation.

For more information on our wide range of brand experience, please get in touch with Shaun Austin, Head of Communicate. Shaun has a broad range of experience within the media sector, working with brands and media owners across TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema and digital - looking at the changing ways that people consume news and content and opportunities for advertisers.

Shaun Austin, Head of Communicateshaun.austin@futurethinking.com+44 (0)3333 208 220

IN SUMMARY

The opportunity for brands to develop a deeper customer understanding continues to grow. Ultimately, marketers need to understand how brands can be optimised to ensure they are distinctive, engage and retain audiences with the hope (in today’s less than loyal world) of developing deeper relationships and brand loyalty.

Here at Future Thinking our work has helped marketers understand their brand for over 20 years. We have a range of bespoke tools, including behavioural science and data science techniques that help to evaluate and understand a brands position in the market.