Transcript

Elena: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research-first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

Elena: I'm Elena Jasper, I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, Rob DeMars, the chief product architect of Misfits and Machines, and Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects.

Angela: Hi!

Elena: We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. This episode is going to be all about marketing effectiveness, specifically what are the most important principles you should know? We'll start by sharing some research and then get into that discussion.

Elena: And today I chose an article from MI3. The title is almost overwhelming: "How an Ex P&G U.S. Marketer Ditched Cohorts, Personas, Blended Ehrenberg Bass, Binette and Field Textbooks Word for Word, Landed Biggest Marketing Budget in 7 Billion Company's History, and all KPIs Are Powering" - which that long title spoils the article a little bit.

Elena: But I think the details are still interesting. Piedmont Healthcare CMO Joe Berg joined that brand in 2020, and he had a background from P&G and he quickly realized that their hyper segmentation personas and chasing every hot new tech trend wasn't delivering the results they needed.

Elena: So he turned to the proven frameworks of Sharp, Binet and Field, principles that are well known in Australia and the UK and some parts of Europe, but aren't always front and center in the US. He said that he hit the reset button at Piedmont training his entire team and agencies in a few fundamentals: share of voice, broad targeting, balancing the short and long mental availability, distinctive assets, emotion, creativity, and proper measurement. This led to the biggest marketing budget in the firm's history. And their brand awareness favorability and key metrics increased like office visits followed that. An important move for them was scrapping their narrow personas and instead defining broad healthcare categories, such as heart or cancer patients, then reaching them with a more universal message.

Elena: Bergman also said he shifted his PR and digital teams to focus on brand building and trust building. So that's one recent success story for marketing effectiveness, but we've heard many others just chatting with marketing leaders on this show. And we probably don't need to convince you if you're listening to this of the importance of marketing effectiveness. However, there was one more recent debate that I wanted to talk about before we dive in and that's a conversation that began late last year when Professor Philippe Thomas published some work. He said we shouldn't take a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing effectiveness principles.

Elena: And he really focused on broad reach as the biggest one. He said that it really varies by category and even a channel like TV could have better or worse results depending on your brand. So it sounds like he's advocating for a more category-specific approach. And honestly, I'd like to have him on the show so we could learn more about it. But Ange, I wanted to ask you, do you think some of his more recent critiques are valid? And should marketers and listeners keep this in mind when they listen to or read marketing effectiveness research?

Angela: Yeah, I think it's fair to question. I think we should always question versus blindly trusting something that we're reading, even if it is research. But I think it's important marketing effectiveness principles like broad reach or related to TV's unique strengths aren't about rigid one-size-fits-all applications. I think these are foundational truths. There are evidence-backed principles that explain how brands grow, but the execution of those principles, I think that's where nuance and category-specific thinking can come into play.

Elena: I'm with you. I agree with you. I think that also some of the article headlines around his work have been a little bit spicy, like challenging Ehrenberg Bass, but a lot of the stuff he's saying, I think aligns pretty well with things other marketing effectiveness thought leaders have said, like Mark Ritson coined sophisticated mass marketing and that's basically what he's saying. If you're selling toilet paper, you can go out and target everyone. A lot of those brands have the funding to do that, but if you're a small upstart, if you're a company that's just beginning.

Elena: I still think starting with these principles in mind is really smart because that's what's going to power your growth in the future. But then you have to look at your budget, your company, your business model, and decide how can we do this? And for some brands that might just mean when you're setting up your first Facebook campaign, you're going to keep your targeting broader. Like it doesn't mean, alright, I just founded my company, I'm going to go spend 10 million on TV. And that's obviously not realistic for people. So it does depend on your brand, but things like distinctive assets and the stuff we're going to talk about today, I do think that most of it can be applied right away, no matter the situation.

Rob: And I think there's always a difference between a principle versus an indisputable law, right? It's like, these are great points of discussion, great frameworks that we should be looking at. Are there going to be situations where they don't always apply? Of course.

Angela: Well, and I think it causes marketers to go: Do I know where my brand exists in my category? What market dynamics might be at play? What audience dynamics might be at play? If I'm a snacking brand versus a hair restoration brand, certainly the 95-5 rule doesn't apply perfectly to both of those segments.

Angela: You're willing to buy snacking items a lot more frequently than you are to get hair restoration. But do you know what your 95-5 is? What percent of your consumers are in market versus out of market and therefore how much long-term brand building and future demand for your brand might matter?

Elena: Agreed. So it's not like knowing the principles, but then it's okay to look at it through a lens of your category through your phase of growth to apply to your brand. Well, let's get into these principles. So we each came prepared to talk about, I think two each, hopefully that's what I had in mind for today. So Rob, why don't you get us started? What's your first principle?

Rob: Oh yeah. Such a fun one. Distinctive assets. All right. So what are distinctive assets? Distinctive assets when you think of things that are nonverbal brand elements, things like colors and logos and sounds and characters. And they really can lead to some really great outcomes. One of those being faster brand recognition, right? So a distinctive asset is a great hack to get someone to remember your brand.

Rob: And when they see it, associate whatever they're seeing with your brand, I think that pays homage to memory structures. Right? So distinctive assets really help to connect with your mental availability, your memory structures that help you to trigger those brands in those moments when someone is at the shelf and needs to decide between two types of tuna and Charlie the Tuna wins because he's a distinctive asset.

Rob: You feel something about it. It helps to break the tie. Distinctive assets are fantastic for consistency across multiple channels. Again, 1 plus 1 equals 3. That's the greatness of marketing. And that's obviously a key element of distinctive assets and then also being able to evoke emotion, which I know we'll talk about more later, but at the end of the day, as marketers, that's what we need to be doing. We need to be able to trigger those emotive feelings about a brand so that the brand has more value.

Elena: I love the distinctive assets topic. We went through an exercise at the agency looking at our distinctive assets, and it ended up leading us to a little bit of a brand update that we didn't originally want to do. But once we saw the data and the science behind it, we just couldn't help ourselves. And one thing that we learned in that process was it's important to make your distinctive assets neurologically diverse.

Elena: So it's good to have an audio mnemonic and a color and packaging if you can, but you don't want to have too many. So Jenny Romaniuk has this great distinctive assets grid. And you can decide, one side is fame and the other is uniqueness. And you want distinctive assets that are very famous - a lot of people know and recognize them - and then very unique in your category. So that's why it's important to look at your competitors. So like for us Marketing Architects, we ended up narrowing in on a couple of distinctive assets, like our blue color, our Mobius logo.

Elena: But it was fun because we got to rank them all in the grid. And then sometimes she says you should dump some, you shouldn't have a million distinctive assets because you can't maintain as many, so some focus can be good.

Rob: I think that's such a good exercise. I think you get so familiar with your brand that you think you're special. And then being able to look at yourself up on the wall with all of your competitors and you're like, Holy smokes, maybe we do have to work a little harder to get more distinctive. So yeah, it seems like an obvious exercise, but one, I think few marketers actually spend the time actually going through.

Angela: Awesome. Should I go next? All right. I'm hitting light buyers along with what that means then from a broad reach standpoint and the law of double jeopardy. So kind of three in one. So light buyers, one of the most important yet often overlooked, I think drivers of growth feels a little counterintuitive for marketers to say, you know what we're really focused on this year is finding people that buy less from us.

Angela: Like that just doesn't feel like a strong strategy, but the idea is actually pretty simple. And that is that most of our brand sales come from light buyers, not heavy buyers. So if you think about the focus of loyalty programs, et cetera, which aren't necessarily bad strategy, but they need to be coupled with this principle. Heavy buyers or those more loyal customers who buy often are great, but they are a small percentage of your audience.

Angela: And in order to grow, you really need to consistently reach the light buyers who only purchase occasionally. They may not be loyal, but they represent the largest opportunity for incremental growth. And so it's really important - broad reach is so critical. Light buyers aren't actively seeking you out. They're not following your social channels. They're not engaging with your loyalty programs. You have to go to them. And that is where channels like television or just mass channels in general ensure you get in front of those light buyers. And they build that mental availability for when they're ready to buy.

Angela: So then we start to layer in the law of double jeopardy, which is another fundamental principle that ties directly to this. So double jeopardy would be smaller brands don't just have fewer buyers, they also suffer from lower loyalty as a brand. And so it's sort of a double hit - fewer people buying, and then there's less frequency from those who are buying. So if you want to grow, the solution isn't squeezing more out of your existing customers, it's reaching more people and expanding that customer base. And that's why acquisition should always take priority over loyalty programs or retention campaigns.

Rob: Holy smokes, that was a lot.

Angela: I know it's a mind bender. It almost feels like a counterintuitive approach when you think about how to grow, but it's really important. And if you think about your own buying behavior, we're not overly loyal. We all have our favorite brands, but I buy Coke, I buy Pepsi. There's a good reason when you think about your own activity, why light buyers matter.

Elena: This is one of those principles that I think is easy to grasp as a marketer, very easy to get as a consumer, but very hard to apply. Like when the rubber hits the road as a marketer, because our temptation is always to target our ideal customer.

Angela: Well, it feels like optimization, right? You're like, okay, who's buying the most from me now? Let's learn everything about them. What do they do? How do they think? How old are they? Are they male? Are they female? How do we go find more of those?

Rob: What's the stat on Coca-Cola? Is it something like 95 percent of their buyers are actually first-time buyers? Some ridiculous stat that just like blew my mind when I heard that.

Angela: Yeah. Yeah. They have a lot of light buyers.

Elena: Love it. Great principle. And yeah, a couple in one, but they're all kind of related to each other. So they belong together. So I will share my first one. I want to talk about one of, if not the most famous marketing effectiveness principle, I think, which is the 60-40 rule. This was popularized by Binet and Field. And let's talk about first what is it? I'm sure everybody listening pretty much knows, but it's this guideline that roughly 60 percent of your marketing budgets should focus on more long-term brand building. It's like emotion, broad reach campaigns and the remaining 40 percent should go towards short-term activation promos, direct response, sales pushes.

Elena: And this rule matters because it's very easy for us to over allocate budget towards short term. But it can weaken your brand and cause a reliance on promos and a bit of a discount doom loop. But if you can commit a healthy portion of your budget to brand building, you're going to build that trust, familiarity, mental availability. So when your customers are in market, you don't have to pay extra at the bottom of the funnel to grab them. It's going to make those short-term channels work even better.

Elena: Now disclaimers that relate to, I think the Felipe Thomas discussion at the beginning of this episode. Binet and Field - they never claimed that 60-40 is the exact ratio, but it's a guideline. It's going to depend by your brand's growth stage, what category you're in, but it is generally a good guideline. However, I'll also say dividing your channels between short and long is not easy. We try to do this with our quarterly marketing reports, and it's really hard to debate.

Elena: Like, if we went to an event - feels like brand, but we also paid for meetings feels like DR. So it's not always easy to separate them. I have heard more recent arguments that the idea of long and short as language should just be abandoned since marketing a lot of channels do both. I personally think it's still useful because some channels do build brand a lot easier than others like paid search versus TV, for example. It's pretty easy to bucket those. So that is it. The 60-40 rule.

Angela: I think that's a great one. Again, you're keeping the principle in mind so that we maybe aren't swayed by the data that's in front of us right now. We all love data and that sales activation of the 40 side of that equation can be really addictive. And yet the 60 matters a lot in mental availability and building that future demand. So yeah, that's a great one - kind of having a balance.

Elena: Okay, Rob.

Rob: All right. The power of emotion and creativity. And I like this one for a lot of reasons. I often think that emotion and creativity are second cousins, right? They kind of come together.

Angela: They might be sisters or brothers, right? Might be closer than that.

Rob: I think you're right. And obviously, Binet and Field have written extensively about the use of emotion and creativity in campaigns that it helps to really drive long-term success of a brand, that it actually can improve a brand's efficiency, which seems crazy to wrap your brain around. But the more memorable your campaign, the less you actually have to spend in terms of media. Because the ad is that much more effective, which in some ways is like obvious, but then in other ways, it's not really obvious at all.

Rob: Right? Like, wow, we actually get an ROI when we increase the creativity and the emotion within an ad. We talked earlier about this as well with distinctive assets, but it really does help to create and tap into those memory structures. One thing that I thought was really cool is a gentleman by the name that I've mentioned on the podcast before, Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads.

Rob: He actually talks about how increasing the adrenaline in a human makes that experience more memorable, and he applies that to advertising. He says that adrenaline is the adhesive of memory, which I think is cool. So how are we really tapping into the emotive nature of the ad to literally physically make them feel something to increase that adrenaline, which then triggers the amygdala and makes something that much more memorable.

Rob: Ultimately, how are you using all of this to make your brand famous? Because fame gives you the ability to amplify your brand and give you that disproportionate return on everything that you're ultimately spending. And then definitely as you're making a more memorable campaign, people often go, well, that doesn't trigger those immediate responses, but that's not what the research is showing. That actually helps to increase activation within a campaign.

Elena: Rob, what's that Bob Dylan quote you love about...?

Rob: Oh, I just love this quote. I just saw the movie, and now I'm pulling this out of my brain right now. So I'll probably butcher it, but he basically says I'd rather be beautiful or ugly, but I don't want to be plain.

Elena: Yeah, he said if you want to be famous, you can be beautiful or you can be ugly. You can't be average or something like that.

Rob: Yeah. Permission to be doing it like Bobby Dylan.

Elena: And I think we all kind of gravitate towards, I want my brand to be beautiful, but there's also some pretty famous brands that have built their brand off of being a little bit controversial too.

Rob: Well, like Liquid Death.

Elena: I was going to say...

Rob: That's like the poster child, right? We've talked about them before, but jeepers. I mean, you're going to call your fluid that gives life, you're going to talk about it as death. I mean, that's just perfectly contrarian.

Elena: All right, Ange.

Angela: Right, I'm up. I'm covering excess share of voice, commonly seen as ESOV. It's one of my favorite topics because it's so straightforward and it's so powerful. So the idea is if your share of advertising spend in your category, so your share of voice is greater than your share of market current share of market, you're likely to grow. Simple.

Angela: It's why it's called excess share of voice. It's the extra investments beyond your current market position that is what is fueling growth. But what I think makes ESOV so effective is its scalability. And I think a lot of people would be like, well, I mean, I've got a huge competitor. I just can't play that game.

Angela: I don't have enough budget. You don't necessarily have to be the biggest spender in your category to leverage it. It's not outspending your competitors dollar for dollar to get there, but it really asks marketers to be smart in their investments, investing in high impact channels. Efficiency as a focus - channels like TV and not to toot our own horn can really give you broad reach and visibility without requiring the same budget as maybe a digital first competitor throwing money at hyper targeting.

Angela: So TV can work harder for your dollars because it reaches mass audiences. It builds trust and it creates that all important mental availability. So if you want to know the formula, there's a formula for this. And again, this is the principle. It's not going to play out in this case every single time. But research notably by Binet and Field suggest that on average, every 10 percent of excess share of voice leads to about a half of a percent growth in market share for a typical brand. So the elasticity factor might vary by category or market conditions or brand size. But generally, half a percent is average. At least it gives you a target to shoot for. Just measuring your market share as a brand today with so much fragmentation can be hard.

Rob: It's not absolute physics, right?

Angela: Right.

Rob: It's directionally relevant.

Angela: Yep.

Elena: And I think if you haven't brought this up to your CEO or CFO as a case for advertising, you should try. Who wouldn't want to grow their market share?

Angela: Absolutely. It's a great way to talk to them. Elena, what's your last one?

Elena: All right, my final principle is mental and physical availability. So these are concepts that are championed by Byron Sharp, Jenny Romaniuk. And mental availability is how easily and often your brand comes to mind in buying situations. So when you're thinking, all right, I need X, Y, Z, is your brand popping up? Physical availability, on the other hand, is how simple it is for people to find, buy, and use your product or service. So that could be in a store, but it also could be online.

Elena: And both of these are important because our customers, as we know, don't give us unlimited attention. So they tend to default to brands that are top of mind and easy to buy. And I think we've talked about this before, thinking about your own buying behavior. When you need something, you're probably going to default to what's top of mind. If you only focus on fun ads, but you're out of stock everywhere, you're going to lose. And then if you're in every store, but no one recognizes your brand, you're just basically wallpaper. If you can combine both mental and physical availability, that's what's going to truly drive growth.

Elena: I do have a couple of disclaimers for this one as well. Again, not all categories are identical. So I know Ange talked about this a little bit earlier, but if your customer buys infrequently, then having that consistent brand presence is really important because when they come into market, you want to be first to mind no matter when it is.

Elena: If you have frequent purchases, like say snacks, widespread distribution, recognizable packaging, that can be a big differentiator. And then also just to disclaimer, maintaining mental and physical availability, it's an ongoing job. That's why we see brands on TV that we all know really well, like a Coca-Cola, Pepsi. Like, why are they on TV? Everybody knows about them, but everybody knows about them because they continue to advertise. You have to keep re-earning your attention and your shelf space as new competitors enter your category or consumers just change their habits. I know I said this earlier, but I love this phrase: You want to be first in mind and easy to buy.

Angela: First in mind and easy to buy. Great principle to live by.

Rob: I love the re-earn. I think that's a great way to put it. Got to re-earn that spot.

Angela: Well, this is a space that didn't get a lot of love. I mean, if you think about just the explosion of DTC brands and all of the energy around that, everyone was so excited about like, Oh my gosh, I don't have to go to a store. I can buy everything online, all the eCommerce focus, which is fine, but it has its limitations. And now you see a lot of those DTC disruptor brands, we would have called them back in the day...

Rob: Mhm.

Angela: Throwing up brick and mortar and now they're on the shelf at Target. And that's why...

Elena: I was going to say the most successful DTC brands today have physical availability, so a lot of those other ones are just gone that were only operating online. So if you can have both, you probably need both. All right. So to close today, those are all the marketing effectiveness principles we're going to cover.

Elena: I think that was a pretty good summary. I wanted us to share kind of a personal or professional guiding principle that's important to you. So, Rob, why don't you get us started here?

Rob: Well, I am a huge fan of a gentleman by the name of David Allen, who wrote one of the great books out there called Getting Things Done, and he has a principle, which is the mind is for having ideas, not keeping ideas. And his whole principle is about getting stuff out of your head, writing it down and into a trusted system. And I just can't speak more highly of Mr. Allen and what is affectionately known in the nerd world as GTD.

Elena: That's a great one. And Rob, you know that I think you're unique as a creative because you are one of the most organized and operationally excellent people that I know. And it probably helps you be more creative because you like creating systems and tracking.

Angela: Rob is an engine for systems. He has a system to create systems. It's unbelievable.

Elena: Yeah, we should have like an episode on that. That might be helpful. Because I do use Rob's system. I use the Getting Things Done framework and you introduced that to me when I started here, like five, six years ago. And I still use it for all my daily tasks like the take action, waiting kind of buckets that you have tasks in. That's how I organize my day.

Rob: If you steal from me, you're stealing twice because that's Mr. Allen.

Angela: Just resourceful. So good. All right, you want to go, Elena or you want me to?

Elena: You can go.

Angela: So I thought about this, and one that I feel like I'm sharing with my kids a lot, must be important. And it shows up in my life, too. And that's just to leave gaps in your plans. It sounds counterintuitive versus like having everything always figured out, but leave room for spontaneity or even chaos to guide potentially unexpected success paths, I think is important, professional life and your personal life. More often than not, when those shifts are happening, they don't feel great at the time, but in the end, a lot of times it plays out in your favor. So that'd be mine.

Rob: That's such a good one. And I think it's hard in a world where you always have a phone, you always have the ability to be doing something right at any given moment. And how do you give yourself that space for serendipity? That's a great one.

Elena: That's hard to do as Control Freaks, where we like to have our whole life planned.

Angela: Everything all planned out, every T is crossed and I is dotted, yep.

Rob: So we got a nice yin and yang there between GTD and hey, just chill out a little bit. This is good. Take us home, Elena.

Elena: Yeah, mine might be a mix of both. Mine's more philosophical, which is - I don't know where I originally heard this phrase, but life is an echo. So whatever you send out there comes back. I try to remind myself of that if you're in a situation that feels unfair or feel like, oh, this isn't happening the way I want it to. If you're sending out good things, you're working hard, you're being nice, it might not right away seem like it's coming back, but it always does. It's kind of like karma. I definitely believe in that. And things just seem to come back around no matter what, in some way.

Angela: Great one.

Rob: That's a really good one.

Angela: So true.

Elena: Well, there we go. It's a good place to wrap it up.

Elena: We survived.