Look at this table of data of aided awareness vs. brand shares from a household products category and you’ll see little relationship.

Aided awareness is what we measure but it isn’t really what we want to know.  In an era of shopper marketing and Procter’s call for store-back thinking, CPG Marketers want to know how to get their brands noticed at retail.  That means the brand broke through the clutter and became relevant to that shopper at that moment; it got in the game.  It could even mean that a shopper became instantly aware of your brand and bought it. THAT is shelf-back thinking!

Getting noticed at retail is NOT a no-brainer; it is hard and requires great marketing. There are 40,000 SKUs in a typical supermarket and a shopper buys 1% of them over the course of a year.  John Dranow from Smart Revenue says the first thing a shopper does on a given trip is deselect 90% of what’s in the store. The 90% of products that are deselected are like the gorilla in the video with kids bouncing basketballs.  You are so intent on counting the number of passes by those kids in white shirts amidst the chaos, you don’t see the person in the gorilla suit.  “Inattentional blindness” is the name of the phenomenon and it happens to shoppers on every shopping trip.

What a marketer should want from their communications efforts is to make their brand relevant to break through the chaos.  Create anticipation, curiosity, meaning, and desire pursuant to actions like getting people talking, searching, visiting your owned media sites, and looking for your brand at retail and ultimately buying it.  Post-purchase, media can help guide the experience consumers are having with the product to get them to want to replenish as they run out.  Yes, media is about post-purchase influence; can you say “below the funnel”?

The ability for a marketer to get their brand noticed on the shelf and then instantly have people make meaning or mentally retrieve information about it is critical. Even better, is if it gets noticed first, which, any behavioral economist will tell you, is a really good advantage to have.  The best thing for a marketer is if the shopper puts THEIR brand on the shopping list by name and then every other brand becomes the gorilla. The best marketing and media strategies for accomplishing this will vary, depending on how people shop for that type of product so shopper insights must inform media strategy.

Literally, awareness is a survey construct that measures the ability of a respondent to retrieve a brand memory during survey questioning regardless of whether or not the product category was relevant to their lives at the moment they clicked the link.  In contrast, what CPG marketers really want to know is how to make the retail experience evoke a brand memory and create meaning while someone is shopping and what communications approaches best accomplish that given the path to purchase for their product.

If marketing research wants greater impact on marketing decision-making, if it is to get that seat at the table, it has to start measuring what the business really needs to know.

Postscript: if you still think awareness is a prerequisite to purchasing, come back tomorrow where I will post a picture of my shopping cart at mid-trip from yesterday with commentary.

Own something other than a feature

What does your brand own? Not just “stand for”, but “own”?  Is there something consumers associate with your brand and with NO OTHER brand?  In this era when store brand quality is really good, the long-standing model of trying to differentiate based on product quality or unique features is not a sustainable strategy.

What you can own is your brand story, a personality, a community, a personage that brings the brand to life (like the “Dirty Jobs” guy and Ford), or most recently, the social media marketing success story that was launched with a superbowl commercial, the Old Spice guy.  Zappos’ brand is its culture and its culture makes it a unique entity in the marketplace.

If you do NOT own something you are at risk of being de-listed by retailers…and if they don’t carry you, shoppers can’t buy you.

Bring your brand to life at retail

For many products, over half of purchase decisions down to the brand level are made in-store. Clever packaging, mobile apps, solutions-based shopper marketing all give you the opportunity to give your brand differentiated meaning at retail.

Listen to all the signals and then engage

People are talking about your brand.  What are they saying?  This will help you to align your vocabulary to consumers for marketing and marketing research purposes, and know what search terms to buy. Where are they saying it?  A great case is Hennessy Cognac.  They discovered high levels of traffic between their site and blackplanet.com.  They found that people on blackplanet were interacting with and using the brand differently (e.g. more mixing).  Ultimately, Hennessy took the brand in a completely different direction, “the global art of mixing” (full case in The ARF Listening Playbook)

Spend as much as possible on virtual audiences

A virtual audience is not an audience for a given media property; it is the collection of impressions and communications across properties and vehicles that can be delivered (or pulled) via digital media at exactly the right time, right place, right message, to the right person.  For virtual audiences, the concepts of reach and frequency become less important as every “touch” has the potential for impact.

Some examples:

• Shopping apps like stickybits for smart phones allow you to bring a persuasive offer or message right to the point of purchase with sight, sound, and motion.  Apps like Shopkick are location aware and can tell if you are in the store, triggering offers
• Screens at gas stations that advertise convenience store items
• Anything you can do in conjunction with search
• Re-targeting

Encourage people to interact with your brand beyond functional purpose

This will build attachment that differentiates your brand.  Microsites (including Facebook pages) allow you to create gaming elements that can be turned into sharable assets. They allow customers to be heard, like “My Starbucks Idea”. Rich media allows for interaction. Interactive TV is starting to emerge.  Smart phone apps, owned media sites all give the opportunity for interaction and play.

Find a way to build a service component into your brand experience

This also builds attachment. Apple’s genius bar is genius.  On-star by GM/Cadillac was perhaps the first significant breakthrough of taking a product (a car) and finding a way to give it a service dimension.  You don’t just buy a Gevalia coffee maker, you join a club that offers shipments of coffee to your home. Adding service to your product builds constant involvement and also gives you additional monetization opportunities.

Simplify people’s lives

We live in a world that is potentially overwhelming.  There are 40,000 SKUs in a typical supermarket.  We have hundreds of TV channels to choose from, and that is a tiny percentage of the number of websites we might be interested in visiting.  We are bombarded with thousands of brand messages every day.  Consumers use rituals and heuristics to simplify their life (think of how the first 30 minutes of your day is probably on auto-pilot).

For example, manufacturers partner with retailers to improve store shoppability, that is, making it as easy as possible for shoppers to find what they are looking for, to find solutions, and to navigate the store as efficiently as possible.

Monitor all signals of what brand success looks like in a digital age

The sensing of brand success has gotten much more complex as signals exist in many more places.  Your insights team needs to collate all of these signals into a cohesive picture.  Brand sales and tracking data are still important, but what are people saying about you in social media?  What are you hearing from customer care? How many fans do you have to your Facebook page?

Brand equity refers to the size of a brand.  A brand with high brand equity has lots of customers, big market share, and a presence in the marketplace that leads one to believe that it will stay big.  Take two brands—Microsoft and Apple.  Both have lots of brand equity and because the corporate name is the brand, we can think of market cap as reflective of brand equity.  I am an outsider to both firms but I think the marketplace would believe that the trajectory of the two brands is somewhat different at this point.  Their brand health is different.

So, let’s think about brand health.  When David Meer and I worked together at The NPD Group, we had an impromptu “Synectics-style excursion” one day to explore the meaning of brand health by thinking about how you can tell if your dog is healthy.

Signs your dog is healthy

• Has a normal appetite
• Comes when you call it
• Looks like the breed it is
• Heals fast
• Puppies need to grow into their paws to normal size
• Has a bright, shiny coat
• Doesn’t have accidents in the house
• Cold, wet nose

So, following the metaphor, here are the signs that your brand is healthy

So, we’re not talking about the size of the dog, we’re talking about if it’s healthy.  Brand health is critical to understand and measure because it is predictive of the future.  A big brand that is unhealthy won’t stay that big for long.

OK, that brings me to my final point.  At the ARF Research Transformation initiative, we talk about “The River”.   Today in our digital society there is a constant river of information that is fed by numerous tributaries.  The river is flowing continuously so conversation about your brand and people’s needs don’t happen on your schedule but on theirs.  Someone can search for your brand (or a competitor) anytime they choose to. Today, tracking surveys alone are not enough to fully understand brand health.   We must also look in the river and consider ALL the signs and signals in a digital age to see if your brand has a cold wet nose.

What happens when that is wrong?  What does marketing do when it STARTS with the purchase?

This is an extreme version of what Procter calls “store back”.  However, based on shopper insights research I have conducted, I believe that, for grocery products, over half of first-time purchases are unplanned; in fact, the shopper might not even have been aware of the product before buying it.  In those cases, it all STARTS with the purchase and ENDS with awareness.  The purchase funnel is totally flipped.

When it all starts with the purchase, the role of marketing communications changes.  Now marketing must get the product noticed at shelf and impart meaning to it instantaneously for the shopper.  Packaging, shelf placement, thematic displays, signage, mobile messages that are location-aware, shopper offers based on that shopper’s history, and master brand familiarity become the main vectors for creating meaning.  In this communications model, when someone encounters a product they were unfamiliar with they should be able make sense of it instantly; to tell YOU (the marketer) what the product is about, rather than you having to tell them in a concept statement.  After the product is bought and being used, there is more sense-making that occurs.  If the consumer is really into the product as they are using it, now you have an opportunity to build engagement:  they might join a community, become a fan in Facebook, share comments, start seeking out advertising and recalling it, seek out the brand’s “creation story”, etc.  In this scenario, the impact of brand narrative, brand values, social media engagement, etc. come AFTER the purchase, so they solidify rather than precondition the brand-customer relationship. 

Could it really be that it all starts with the purchase?  Well, for certain types of products and retailing situations, I believe it does.  Consider this:

• Conduct a study to measure the percent of products bought for the first time that are discovered in-store (I got 50%+)
• Do you think the products bought for the first time on impulse in a Kroger’s, Trader Joes, Costco, Target, etc. are all the same and were previously known? If not, then you believe that brand adoption can START via the shopping experience.
• Consider shopping styles that people have, reflecting their relationship with a product category.  Can you imagine categories (e.g. artisan cheeses) where shoppers like to explore and find new interesting products to buy?

This last point is perhaps the most important.  People have different shopping styles for different product categories which means that the heuristics they use to make decisions are systematic.  You might not ever buy carbonated soft drinks the way you buy interesting dips that you just tried at a tasting station.  This is where behavioral economics intersects marketing; the study of how people decide is often more interesting than theoretical purchase intentions.  Hence, some products will predominantly be bought via a process that starts in-store.  Others will be bought based more on the traditional marketing model requiring awareness built via mass media. You need to study HOW people decide in order to understand when to start from the traditional end of the funnel and when you start from the other end of the funnel.

When it all STARTS with the purchase, everything that you thought was upstream becomes downstream and the thing that was the most downstream of all, the purchase, becomes the most upstream event. 

This is “store back” on steroids.

Now, the researcher in me has to ask the rhetorical question, “Does the marketing community have the research tools to act on this new way of thinking?”  Rhetorical because, I don’t think we do.

Everything will become digital

Digital used to be synonymous with online but everything will become digital. Dave Poltrack from CBS predicts a huge increase in HD, 3D, and IPTV TV sales.  David Verklin, President of Canoe Ventures talks about the interactive TV advertising experience that will be nationally available via Canoe (a joint venture of the biggest cable operators).  video in Facebook?  How about facebook built into your new 55″ HD 3D TV? The future of print media is being revolutionized by electronic readers like iPad.  One can also imagine codes being inserted into print advertising or editorial pieces that, when captured by a smart phone, instantly leads to a multi-media experience or electronic coupon. Radio sees a digital path forward with servable audio streaming.

Digitization is transformational to the media experience, advertising possibilities and media businesses.  No longer is CBS a TV company or Time, Inc. a magazine; no longer is “media platform” the business organizing principle.  Now, the media property is the organizing principle and it must live synergistically across platforms.  Advertising on traditional media no longer has to be static and served to a whole audience (but more on this later).

As traditional media reinvent themselves in a digital age, they will hold onto, even increase, their attractiveness to advertisers.

Data will always trail the media possibilities

New touchpoints are emerging weekly it seems.  Advertising via the iPad is exciting and was born so very recently.  Apps for smart phones that create amazing location-aware and shopper marketing options are emerging so fast it is mind-numbing.  How can a manufacturer not want to put codes on packages that, via a reader that any smart phone can now have, bring a brand’s story to life with sight, sound, and motion at point of purchase?

Digitization allows a marketer to guide a consumer along the path to purchase right to the check-out.  Imagine a TV commercial where you can request a coupon that then gets delivered to your cell phone and is integrated with cell phone payment via a reader (exists in Asia already).

The point is, syndicated media research data bases, custom marketing research assessment can’t possibly get ahead of this; they will always be playing catch-up, focusing on the most significant of the touchpoints that are attracting substantial funds. The marketer who is cautionary and wants to wait for “solid evidence” of the effectiveness of a new media option will find themselves behind their competitors.

The importance of understanding audience size will diminish as we go to ad serving

The most important things in traditional media, the stats we all understand, relate to audience size ( GRPs, circ, etc.) However, imagine watching an episode of House on a platform that allows for selective ad serving.  As soon as two different households start getting different ads served to them, measuring total audience becomes less important to the advertiser.  They need to know how many got served the ad according to targeting ad serving rules, but total program audience is not a measure of reach in a targeting world.  Online, monthly uniques are a guide to which sites an advertiser should consider but they are paying for impressions served (or clicks).  “Traditional” media could/should move to this model as it becomes digital.

If this comes to pass as traditional media become digital, imagine the implications for syndicated media currency databases, and media tools.  While this will be traumatic to the existing infrastructure for “traditional media”, the increased business value of advertising and the increased CPMs that advertising should command when it is made more relevant based on intelligent serving rules are potentially very significant.