Shopper Culture

Family and friends have greatest influence over our shopping

In an article in Advertising Age today, Zenith Optimedia are about to release some data that shows:

a) Friends and family are the most influential touchpoint when it comes to influencing our shopping decisions

b) TV is still top dog for creating brand associations.

What Zenith have done is create a database of all the studies they have undertaken using the Market Contact Audit (MCA) methodology, a proprietary research and analytics methodology belonging to Integration Marketing Communications that is used by many brands around the world (many agency groups have licenses to sell and use the MCA).

Being one of those agencies and having used the MCA with a number of clients as part of our Connections Planning approach (we're fans), these aggregated findings that Zenith are going to make available don't really surprise.  The level of detail they share though will be interesting.

One mistake that I've seen clients make when using the MCA is to look only at the surface level measures - like those shared in the AdAge article. What gives the most 'clout' in this category? How is our brand performing in each channel (through the association measure)? This is to miss a great deal of the value in the methodology and is a superficial look at the findings. The MCA delivers so much rich insight into the return that channels are generating, messaging effectiveness and competitor strategies amongst other things. It is a great single source approach when you know how to read it and apply it properly.  If you have any interest into how your marketing is performing and the return it is bringing, you should consider it.

Really looking forward to what the is shared by Zenith and their aggregation exercise

Luxury is a State of Mind

Reading a recent article in the Economist,I couldn't help but think of the implications on our work. There is a new study that provides scientific data backing up the effectiveness of brand building in marketing, an inherently difficult pursuit to quantify.  Call-to-action oriented campaigns have specific measures to quantify their success.  Branding campaigns are much more difficult to measure and often questioned by company executives especially when cuts need to be made.  But thanks to Dr. Antonio Rangel of the California Institute of Technology we now have the first study that demonstrates the effectiveness of branding.

The article is a synopsis of research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  In it Dr. Rangel proves that a person's perception of a product directly affects his or her actual enjoyment of the product.  One example stated is a wine tasting conducted with both normal wine drinkers and a wine club.  In both instances when they tasted what was described as a $10 bottle of wine it rated less than half as good as when they tasted the same wine and were told it was a $90 bottle of wine.  The interesting twist here is that it wasn't people simply saying they enjoyed the $90 bottle more, brain scans actually indicated that they did derive more enjoyment from the perceived pricier bottle.  When the same test was conducted without price information, there was not the perceived difference.

The article focused on the why this happens in the brain and traces two possibilities back to survival and evolution.  I on the other hand kept thinking about how great this news is for those of us lucky enough to work with retailers and manufacturers, and the author does give a nod to that very same observation in the last paragraph.  Scientific evidence that reinforces the need for a thoughtful brand strategy is good news to all of us who have known it to be true since we started in this business.

- Contributed by Todd Cameron