Reconciling Apparent Conflicts in Targeting Theory

These things didnamp8217t have the desired effect of reducing the use of promotion Brand managers knew that promotion caused spikes in sales whereas advertising had harder to read effects The more obvious effects of promotion had psychological benefits within advertiser organizationsByron Sharpamp8217s and Peter Druckeramp8217s and Mike Von Gontenamp8217s exhortation to get new customers to a brand also worked against Mike and Larryamp8217s idea of focusing on existing brand loyalistsToday Mike Donahue is still extolling the value of brand loyalists and is also trying to get advertisers to measure the ROI effects of Influencers Experiential Marketing Purpose Marketing and eCommerce all worthy causes He groups the latter four categories of stimuli under the rubric of Brand Activation and points out that Brand Activation investments are 25X greater than advertising investments globally Indeed there continues to be a trend toward short term performance results over long term effects and my invention of big data singlesource TRA now widely emulated contributed to this trend So did digital which all existing data show to be better at activating current purchasers of a brand than bringing in new buyers to a brand vs television which all existing data show to be better than digital at bringing in new buyers to a brand Digital and Mikeamp8217s four versions of Brand Activation all act more like promotion in that sense except perhaps Purpose MarketingAs I explained to Mike recently he is thinking of a dichotomy when a trichotomy would be more realistic Mikeamp8217s dichotomy is brand loyalists who are profitable vs brand occasionalists who only buy on deal This is not what TRA found to be the case in reality TRA found three types of brand buyers loyalists occasionalists who buy only on deal and occasionalists who without the need for discounting are the most sales responsive to advertising amp8211 we called the latter group amp8220swingamp8221 purchasers after the political notion of amp8220swing votersamp8221 amp8211 the influenceables where persuasive stimuli can make the biggest positive difference in outcomesSince TRA had frequent shopper card data going back for years in over fifty million US households including what they paid for each UPC purchase they made it was easy to identify the folks who bought on deal and those who bought amp8220greenamp8221 etc and distinguish them from the swing purchasers who would pay full price for the brand if the new ad reminded them of positive experiences with that brand from the past and caused them to buy it againI frankly had been looking for a way to distinguish that group for decades as a result of an experience I had in my first few years in the business Norton Garfinkle had invented the idea of syndicated studies which measured many product categories and also measured media so that product and brand usage data could be used in media selection His legacy today is seen in MRISimmons TGI Vividata and other popular syndicated services around the globe Nortonamp8217s questionnaire showed a list of brands within each product category and asked the respondent to put a amp82201amp8221 next to the brand they buy most often and a amp82202amp8221 next to their second choice brand and a amp82203amp8221 next to all the other brands they bought in the categoryOne year shortly before I became Executive Vice President of Brand Rating Index BRI the name of Nortonamp8217s company BRI reinterviewed respondents who had been interviewed six months earlier I became fascinated with analyzing the results of that reinterview study What I discovered was that more than 4 out of 5 of the people who switched their 1 brand from their first to their second interview had switched to the brand they had considered their 2 brand six months earlierThis fired me up with a strong intuition that advertising probably was largely responsible for causing these switches from 2 brand to 1 brand Why did I feel that way Because I knew that advertising is a amp8220light tapamp8221 according to Erwin Ephron one of my idols along with Ed Papazian and my many other mentors not as powerful as the recommendations of an unbiased friend or relative so that other than during new brand launches advertising had a hard time getting people to try a brand they had never bought before But if someone had a positive experience with a brand in the past but had not been buying it recently advertising could bring that person back as a buyer It took me many years to come up with a way of measuring and making use of that guesswork on my part TRA won 77 major brands on the power of swing purchasers and the ability to target them based on the TV programs they watched and the websites they visited The average ROI increase produced by this method was 28The TRA user interface enabled the plannerbuyer to set the target based on heaviness of category usage specific brand usage percent share of requirements the client brand represented for the household and price buyers could be filtered outToday a more modern approach would assign different weights to different targets so that all prospects would receive some weight appropriate to the likelihood of their adding an incremental sale in response to the specific ads being used RMT is the only service currently on the market and validated by five separate disinterested research organizations which enables a measurement of the resonance alignment congruence between a specific creative execution and a specific individual or household and also between that specific ad and each alternative media context The true optimizer today would cover all marketing stimuli would measure swing and pricebuying characteristics and would measure the resonance between each stimulus and each target and the resonance between each stimulus and each context In CPG Cars and other categories the distance between shopping trips could also be applied at the individual household level within such an optimizer As taught by Howard Shimmel and Dan Aversano the optimizer would be buying projected future audiences not using historical data per seJoel Rubinson has done the most advanced work on the shopping cycle approach and also discovered what he calls the Moveable Middle which is the same as what I had called amp8220swingamp8221 Leslie Wood called the same phenomenon amp8220Category HeaviesBrand Lightsamp8221 They probably are aware of the need to filter out the pricebuyers and the ways that can be doneThe distance between the scientific possibilities for marketing and the way marketers actually operate is still quite large Hopefully in the years ahead we can significantly narrow that gap Before we can cause such major behavior changes we shall need to prove that our measurements of incremental sales and profits are accurate enough to base decisions uponBill Cook who was Executive Vice President of the Advertising Research Foundation ARF at the time led an ARF Research Review of TRA and while giving TRA high scores also agreed with my thought that the big data singlesource method as well as marketing mix modeling needed to be validated by random control trial experiments Alas more than ten years later this quest for hard scientific validation of our industryamp8217s ROI estimation models is still in abeyance Marketing Science Institute MSI now part of ARF is engaged in a study of MMM which could be where this important change comes from and I know that CIMM is looking at it as well The explosion of interest in measuring attention values of ads and media contexts is also generating a more inclusive reconsideration of impression quality measures including resonance alignmentcongruence between ad and person andor between ad and context brand attraction EEG frontal rightleft asymmetry positive emotion long term memory encoding specific brand perceptionsThings happen fast and slowly in our industry The more scientific the more slowly The less scientific the faster Itamp8217s our industry we can change itPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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Reconciling Apparent Conflicts in Targeting Theory

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Reconciling Apparent Conflicts in Targeting Theory

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