There’s a Holy Grail for brands and retailers: to embed themselves so much with the families that make up their core demographic that their place in the family shopping basket is secure. Some try this through sporadic, tactical promotions which tap into interests and trends – collect tokens for a free tennis lesson, for example – whilst others try to create initiatives that lead to deeper, longer term engagement.
So it seems with Waitrose, which has unveiled a national ‘Grow and Sell’ initiative aimed at encouraging 7 to 11 year olds across the UK to grow their own produce and sell it to Waitrose customers, and Heinz with a Grow Your Own campaign to encourages families across the UK to grow their own tomatoes. Heinz is giving away free seeds via Facebook.
There are sound commercial as well as social reasons for these initiatives. The growth of online shopping and Click & Collect will lead to fewer people coming in store. With less pester power going on in the aisles, brands need to find new ways of engaging with parents and their children, whilst over the longer term consumers are going to be expecting brands and retailers to be engaging with them more at this deeper, more genuine level. Note the difference between “engaging” with them and “marketing” to them.
Both Waitrose and Heinz seem to have found something with authentic consumer appeal. The initiatives not only tap into families but, by virtue of their educational content, to teachers and businesses as well. They warm up the parents, remain close to each company’s particular brand values, fit with current trends and interests whilst being undeniably child friendly and educational.
Unlike the more sporadic promotions, where there seems to have been little contextual research undertaken into what parents really value and what would have a legacy beyond the immediate life of the promotion, here research appears to have helped create something distinctive but which has genuine appeal. Using a more experiential approach to qualitative research, promotions teams can create that engagement with mums as part of the ideation process for these initiatives. Quantitative research can also be designed to better engage with respondents – getting them involved with the issues, enabling and empowering them to feed back.
There’s a lesson here for all of us. Creating authentic engagement requires brands to work harder, think longer and research their promotions better. It needs them to research again once the initiative has happened to undertake a proper evaluation and explore how it can be developed further. Above all, it’s about showing not telling and demonstrating a willingness to have an authentic two-way relationship.
Friday 19 April 2013
Thursday 4 April 2013
Putting everything into promotions risks unbalancing the marketing mix
New research from the British Promotional Merchandise Association says that half of the British public have taken action after receiving a promotional product, compared with only 19% after seeing TV advertising, 11% for online advertisement, 10% for print and 9% for direct mail. Promotional products are also considered the least annoying by consumers.
But what does this actually tell us and are there lessons that brands can draw as a result? First, the top line shouldn’t really come as a surprise to most of us. It merely underlines the fact that people love free stuff and that in a world of virtual complexity and interactive communication, the brute simplicity of a classic marketing approach can still cut through.
The other caveat we would add is that consumers, generally, ALWAYS ask for free samples. It shouldn’t be a surprise they claim this to be the most effective form of promotion, because it is tangible and they are aware of the link between getting a sample and then making a decision to purchase. You don't necessarily rush off to the shops the moment you see an ad on TV but it will subconsciously warm you up to that brand next time you're in the supermarket. And a promotion might lead to a very short term response whereas advertising is more likely to build brand perceptions over the long term.
Given we know that other forms of marketing work, often at a more subconscious level, we would caution that research used to identify (a) what sorts of promotional strategies brands should adopt and (b) what has been effective, need to take account of the unconscious effects of different comms strategies. This will range from observational qualitative approaches which explore the effect that a range of communications, media etc, have on people's behaviour, perhaps over time, to quantitative work which uses behavioural economics frameworks to cut through what people claim, to identify what they are likely to actually do.
We should also be careful in research not to equate likeability with effectiveness - e.g. before the now familiar approach to Cillit Bang advertising became all post-modern and iconic, consumers just found it plain annoying - but it worked!
Promotions are also rarely used in isolation and are usually part of a wider marketing mix. If I've seen an ad for Cereal X and I get given a sample at the same time - it's more likely a combination of the two that leads me down the brand bonding route. This makes it problematic to genuinely measure the effectiveness of a promotion quantitatively or try and disentangle it from a wider campaign mainly because few people ever claim to have seen/experienced the promotion and if they had it was mixed up with a multitude of other brand touchpoints.
Brands, for example, which use digital and social platforms most effectively, are those who do so to engage with their target market and reward users for their time. Promotions may deliver short term spikes, but persistence is the key to sustainable relationship-based marketing. This means combining engagement with measuring RoI as far as possible and then repeating if successful.
That's not to say promotions aren't effective. As well as getting a product into people's hands they can also work to build good feeling towards a brand - consumers are getting something for free. And that is probably the real message here - marketing these days is much more of a dialogue with consumers - consumers don’t want to just be told to buy something, more and more they expect something in return.
But what does this actually tell us and are there lessons that brands can draw as a result? First, the top line shouldn’t really come as a surprise to most of us. It merely underlines the fact that people love free stuff and that in a world of virtual complexity and interactive communication, the brute simplicity of a classic marketing approach can still cut through.
The other caveat we would add is that consumers, generally, ALWAYS ask for free samples. It shouldn’t be a surprise they claim this to be the most effective form of promotion, because it is tangible and they are aware of the link between getting a sample and then making a decision to purchase. You don't necessarily rush off to the shops the moment you see an ad on TV but it will subconsciously warm you up to that brand next time you're in the supermarket. And a promotion might lead to a very short term response whereas advertising is more likely to build brand perceptions over the long term.
Given we know that other forms of marketing work, often at a more subconscious level, we would caution that research used to identify (a) what sorts of promotional strategies brands should adopt and (b) what has been effective, need to take account of the unconscious effects of different comms strategies. This will range from observational qualitative approaches which explore the effect that a range of communications, media etc, have on people's behaviour, perhaps over time, to quantitative work which uses behavioural economics frameworks to cut through what people claim, to identify what they are likely to actually do.
We should also be careful in research not to equate likeability with effectiveness - e.g. before the now familiar approach to Cillit Bang advertising became all post-modern and iconic, consumers just found it plain annoying - but it worked!
Promotions are also rarely used in isolation and are usually part of a wider marketing mix. If I've seen an ad for Cereal X and I get given a sample at the same time - it's more likely a combination of the two that leads me down the brand bonding route. This makes it problematic to genuinely measure the effectiveness of a promotion quantitatively or try and disentangle it from a wider campaign mainly because few people ever claim to have seen/experienced the promotion and if they had it was mixed up with a multitude of other brand touchpoints.
Brands, for example, which use digital and social platforms most effectively, are those who do so to engage with their target market and reward users for their time. Promotions may deliver short term spikes, but persistence is the key to sustainable relationship-based marketing. This means combining engagement with measuring RoI as far as possible and then repeating if successful.
That's not to say promotions aren't effective. As well as getting a product into people's hands they can also work to build good feeling towards a brand - consumers are getting something for free. And that is probably the real message here - marketing these days is much more of a dialogue with consumers - consumers don’t want to just be told to buy something, more and more they expect something in return.
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