Your Way Into the Hall of Fame of [Your Brand]
Listen to the audio version here!
How can you move the needle for your brand? What one project could catapult you into your company's hall of fame? Too often I get the impression that marketing and marketing insights are working on the urgent projects, not the important ones. This is your inspiration, your call, your chance to rethink your 2025 planning.
I am sitting in this annual planning meeting for Nonprofit Brand, presenting our work. We all dive in and discuss all their activities from OOH, face2face, SEO, SEA, emailing, cold mailings, warm mailings, loyalty calls, internal magazine and much more. In the past we at Supra have done churn scoring, mix modelling, new product positioning and pricing for this brand. All good, all useful. But as I sat in that meeting, it dawned on me.
Two thirds of new donations come from conventional mailings and probably half from warm mailings. I became aware of this lever when it became apparent that the brand was sending 40% fewer mailings due to an operational lack of topic occasions, which resulted in a significant drop in donations. A surprise for the brand!
“If you want a step-change, you need to step up your research game”
Even more interesting: No one was thinking about optimising mailings from an insight perspective. The brand felt that they were sending out too much to donors anyway. Also, the mailings were regularly 'optimised' by their specialist vendor anyway. These are the limiting beliefs we too often have:
Failure #1: We assume that we cannot do much better.
Failure #2: We assume our customers don’t want more…
Failure #3: We assume because nobody is doing it, it does not make sense to do it.
What did we do? We looked at different mailings, different envelope designs, different letter designs, different headline wordings. We measured perception implicitly, both archetypically and in terms of content. We categorised features that experts expect to be important. We even used AI tools to predict where people would look. Causal AI then identified the link between the perception and the features and the success metrics.
Based on the findings, we developed a briefing that led to optimised mailing designs. The result: Donation results increased from around 5 per cent to an average of 7 per cent. 2 per cent may seem small, but this improvement equates to a 40 per cent increase in fundraising, just from the first optimization run.
By tackling the right problem, we achieved an impact that exceeded the impact of all previous projects combined.
You don't improve by doing the same things, engaging in the same research and looking at the same metrics.
My Top Three Tipps
There is a wide range of insight topics you can work on in marketing research. CX, UX, product testing, brand tracking, MMM, and so on. All good, all relevant. But the following three are my favorites in terms of their overall impact on profits and growth.
#1 “Why Your Customers Buy” Analysis
Do you really know what drives consumer decisions in your category? Sure, a lot of analysis, from qual to positioning, touches on this question. By mastering this question, you will separate the wheat from the chaff and be able to defend your brand from crazy and diluting ideas.
Examples? In a beer category, we found that it wasn't about product quality or brewing tradition, but about the promise of refreshment. For a skin cleansing market, we found that a lot is important, but the key hidden feature that drives or prevents decisions is fragrance. For a nonprofit brand, we found that it is not age that drives donations (as a spurious correlation suggests), but "having savings".
Or as in the good old example of T-Mobile USA, where we found that reinforcing the brand's "Robin Hood" positioning drives unimaginable growth. All of this can be found with proper Causal AI analysis. All it takes as data input is a carefully crafted holistic survey of category buyers.
#2 Ad optimization
Building a brand has a variety of long-term benefits for everything else in the marketing mix. It's easier to get distribution, it improves willingness to pay, the mind share will create customer loyalty, and so on. To build a brand in most categories, you have to advertise. Many studies show similar results: 50% to 70% of the impact of your advertising is determined by how good the ad is, and only 20% to 30% by how you allocate your budgets across channels.
In six category studies, we analyze what drives ad performance in the category. One surprising fact was that while about 70% of ads are mediocre at best, only a small number, about 10% of all ads, are killing it. These 10% of ads pay for themselves in a fraction of the time.
The leverage on your research dollars is HUGE if you crack the code on how to consistently get into that 10% of great ads.
It amazes me that no one seems to be taking a truly scientific and holistic approach. Ad testing is descriptive, not prescriptive. All optimization is left to the interpretation of creative professionals. We will always need the creative mastermind, but there is some causal truth, some evidence to be discovered that the qualitative mind cannot fully grasp.
At supra, we have developed a research approach for this (we call it Creative AI). The insights are always enlightening. Like this insurance brand. It turns out that the ads they aired over 40 years ago hit all the right notes. The ads were so good that the modern replicas of the classic ads outperformed all competitors by far. Even generations not yet born loved the ads. They had the winning code stamped on them.
Only ... the actual creative agency dismissed it as "old fashioned" and convinced the CMO with elegant storytelling.
#3 Price optimization
What is your profit margin? The average margin across all industries is around 5% of sales. Imagine that you could raise your price by 1% and still sell the same volume. The NEXT DAY you would enjoy 20% higher profits (6 instead of 5 percent margin).
The cost of getting that 20% higher profit is zero!
Not quite. First, you have to KNOW that the customer will not react to the price change. In short, you need to study your price-demand curve. Ideally for all major SKUs and all markets. This sounds like a lot of work, but think about the impact it can have. When you do the math, it's a no-brainer.
A few brands work with massive sales data, which they use to derive price-demand curves in the range where prices vary in the market. But even they lack information for new products, price promotions, and niche products.
Most brands, however, have little data to do all the magic. Conjoint studies for all products are costly, time consuming and often not accurate enough. This is where Supra's Implicit Price Intelligence comes in. Because it's a simple and standardized process, it's streamlined, agile and scalable.
There is no easier and faster impact that marketing research can deliver than measuring the price-demand relationship and providing a framework for optimizing pricing.
“But we already tried it”: Think Bottleneck
"But we've tried everything" is a response I sometimes hear. It always reminds me of the study we did with this massive dataset on new product launches, where we learned that it is important to look at the whole orchestra:
Traditional modeling could not explain at all why new products survive. Only our flexible Causal AI model revealed something experienced marketers already know: Products only succeed if you get the entire marketing mix right: You can have the best product, but if it's not on the shelf, it won't sell. If the packaging looks awkward OR the pricing is wrong, no one will try it and the product dies. If the product itself is not good, no one will buy it. If the brand is weak, no one will remember and recognize the product the next time it is at the POS. You have to be good enough in ALL factors. They do not compromise. They multiply.
You tried to optimize your product and it did not increase sales? Maybe it was because the brand, packaging, messaging or pricing was wrong, not because your product optimization was bad.
The advice from this is this: It's smart to work through the bottlenecks. Your growth will skyrocket if you open up all the bottlenecks. Always work on the weakest link until the system works.
Make 2025 the Year You Move the Needle
The road to your brand's hall of fame is paved with insight-driven actions that challenge the status quo and focus on the levers with the greatest impact. From understanding why your customers buy, to optimizing ads that leave a lasting impression, to optimizing pricing, each step has the potential to transform not only your marketing efforts, but also your bottom line.
Innovation doesn't come from repeating the same processes or settling for good enough. It comes from rethinking, reanalyzing, and having the courage to tackle the overlooked and undervalued. As you plan for 2025, dare to go beyond the usual. Focus on identifying and addressing bottlenecks, breaking through assumptions, and implementing strategies that deliver measurable results.
Your brand's hall of fame isn't a destination; it's a mindset. Choose the impactful over the urgent and step up your research game. Let Causal AI help you get there.
THIS is how you 10x your insights game.