“Blunt Truths”
EffWorks 22 was appropriately themed “Blunt Truths/ Sharper Strategies” this year and, among many others, Les Binet set the tone starting his presentation with: “the world turned upside down”.
Dealing with chaos and upheaval requires both: a good dose of perspective (despite how bad it looks, “wiser” people will know there has been worst times, everything is cyclical, keep calm and carry on, etc) and an even greater dose of practical sense (focus on evolution, optimisation, adaptation). As the day wrapped up, one thing struck me: no new groundbreaking effectiveness concepts were revealed… no new long and short, no new share of search vs market, no new system 1 vs system 2… I realised my own “blunt truths”. We shouldn't always aim to break new grounds, disrupt and change everything. In an age of constant and deep disruptions, we ought to thrive for smart, stable, salient thinking upon which long term strategies can be built on.
Now is not the time for outlandish strategies and risky moves (most of them anyway) but the time for smart, adaptable, resilient thinking. Not reinventing the wheel but oiling it with proper elbow grease. Not revolution, but evolution.
And brands can evolve in crisis by balancing a few levers.
Balancing familiar marketing tools
Price/ Product and Promotion: nothing new here but, when facing unprecedented challenges, brands should consider the effects of optimising all “P’s” in their marketing mix first. Making or adapting Products to growth sectors (not all sectors are tanking) may have significant business effects. Adjusting Price to solid demand and supply research in each sector, can help tremendously too. And price promotion is not always the answer as it tends to erode margins and brand resilience. Reversely, Promotion (advertising) and brand building reduces price sensitivity and protects margins. Brands can also leverage tactical media investments in recessions and gain increased share of voice (watch out for these CPTs in Q1) to maintain these profits. Econometrics can hugely help with that (but not last-click attribution!).
Media and creative
Just as balancing focus between brand and performance is necessary in media to maximise diminishing returns in profit (it will vary by brand/ sector but a 60/40 split is always a good start), balancing focus between the creative message and the media investment can massively help brands unlock multiplier effects from both creative and media making any investment work much harder.
Test, measure, optimise your brand mixes (brand v performance messages, geographies, portfolio, channels, paid, owned and earned media) and measure on long term incremental revenue and profit, not ROI.
Short term ROI and long term incremental profit
Optimising marketing budgets to net profit and measuring diminishing returns will yield better incremental profit than relentless short term ROI focus.
Remember that a 3-years gross profit forecast will tend to paint a more accurate and positive picture than a 1-year one.
In stressful times, we can all find comfort in knowing certain effectiveness principles remain true: TV is still the most effective short and long term ROI driver, even though Meta seems to be saying it tops it...
Balancing the shares
Share of Voice
As with any downturns, we know that maintaining or, when possible, increasing the brand’s excess Share of Voice is crucial in delivering incremental Share of Market and that this effect is stacking up over time. Known and important.
Share of Search
Using SoS as a proxy to Share of Market has been available for some time and is indeed a good indicator of consumers intent and purchase. But brands can now seemingly use Behavioural Brand Power (BBP), a real time brand health metric built on SoS and SoV showing the impact of brand health on the efficiency of its media investment and the brands resilience to price fluctuations.
Share of Attention
A point that tends to be overlooked in Effectiveness is that there is a direct causality between making sure your ads are not only seen but also paid attention to and both improvement conversion (short term) and brand preference and choice uplift (mid term). And that has direct implications to both creative messages/ visuals and media buying hygiene, both again able to drive incremental profit short and long term as well as potentially help lodge the brand in longer term memory.
Rising “shares”…
Share of Mind, Share of Wallet, Share of Relevance, tons of “share of” concepts were banded around but one seemed to stick out and make even more sense currently: Share of Experience. It feels important as it is related to people’s brands experience as prospects or customers, with a focus on owned channels. It provides an interesting way (with new KPIs like XP positivity, Return on Experience) to balance and combine with paid media to grow long term brand equity and incremental profits.
Balancing creativity and…
…resilience
Brands have shown resilience through Covid via creativity. Whether it be Britain’s Beer Association saving the pubs by getting people to lobby their MPs to support pubs or Specsavers tapping into its brand repertoire of “should’ve gone to spec savers” at a moment when no one could (home deliveries), creativity helped deliver short and long term profits for these.
…technology: from martech to VR, AR and the metaverse
Optimising (martech) adtech stacks, using Snap or TikTok’s Augmented Reality or immersing ourselves in Virtual Reality or in the metaverse, the common point of all this is not only to remain or shape cultural relevance between brands and consumers’ deep cultures but also to facilitate consumer experiences with the brand (from interest to sales to post sales interest). All of them expand the lens of effectiveness to a more holistic view of how consumers interact with brands short and long term.
…data
The digital knowledge paradox says that more data is not equal to more knowledge. Know the decisions that matter for the brand, build closed decision loops, be selective of the data and knowledge created, build a repeatable and agile process allowing the use and spread the knowledge across people, process and technology. Connect marketing and sales, brand, partners and consumers, people and systems. Unilever’s Elida’s unified data model was an interesting stab at it….
…closed feedback loops
Whether it be complex martech systems, business infrastructure or content creators, they all have one thing in common: they have tight, ongoing and closed feedback loops and are continually learning from their experiments. Good content creators are immersing themselves in their sub culture and gaining direct feedback from their own consumers, efficient data systems thrive on connected martech ecosystems that prioritise learning (and therefore necessarily sometimes failure) to
…diverse talent pools: Creators/ Influencers/ Cultural sonars
Just as any investment, talent and content diversification is good when measured and tested properly. TikTok, Snap, content creators, influencers are reflective of cultural changes, themselves tied to the evolution of the internet. We shouldn't suddenly only produce online content but should equally test its impact, short and longer term and it allows brands to resonate with sub cultures in the most engaging ways.
What is the net net of all this? Don't boil the current choppy ocean, focus on tools that are at our disposal, tweak, optimise, test, learn, and iterate. Engage both brand and performance, creative and media, short and long term outputs, what we call at Bicycle, the power of “and”. Be aware, test and learn from new creative talents, tools, frameworks but don’t hesitate using, reusing, challenging models that we already have, an interesting effectiveness model may come of it.