Phuong Nguyen, Head of Advertising at eBay, commented in the October 2013 edition of Marketing magazine that the “increasingly complex” purchasing journey – where search and purchase behaviour are so intertwined that no one knows where one starts and the other will end – was making it difficult for digital marketers to measure the effects of their activities. Meanwhile, marketers using traditional media channels are lamenting the fact that their digital counterparts can track the effectiveness of their activities in a manner they can only dream of. Both these views start from the idea that marketing is “done” to consumers and that internal business metrics, if only configured correctly, could solve the riddle.
But that is an impossible dream. No individual company will ever have a complete view of each and every consumer. To seek it is to seek the modern El Dorado.
A more practical and more consumer-focussed approach is needed to measuring marketing effectiveness. One that looks at the 21st Century World through the eyes of the consumer and judges marketing effectiveness as its success in delivering the right solution to a customer’s needs. Today, tomorrow and for as long into future as relevant.
Almost all digital measurement is ‘transaction oriented’ and whilst some of those transactions can be used to infer likes, preferences, and other attitudes, the overwhelming use is simply as a more real time version of direct marketing. Offering deals and adverts to influence purchasing is hardly cutting-edge, no matter how much more sophisticatedly you can target them. It is simply information direction, and just one element of marketing effectiveness.
Consumer purchasing is driven by more than short term offers, who has the best looking web site or great customer service. It is driven by all of these and more. And what’s more this ‘pull’ can be measured using a wider metric to judge it by. One that tells you how powerful your marketing is at influencing customer purchasing behaviour whether there’s a deal or not. One that measures the “pull” a brand or store has, and explains why when a customer sees something online they go to a specific store to check it out.
This “pull”, which we term “Effective Net Preference” covers the five key dimensions that influence customer purchasing behaviour:
1. Relevancy (is this what I need?)
2. Identification (are these the people I want to buy it from?)
3. Accessibility (how much hassle is involved?)
4. Value (is it a fair deal?)
5. Confidence (what’s the risk I’ll be disappointed?)
If your marketing campaigns are getting you ticks in all these boxes with more consumers than your rivals then market share gains will follow, and not just because you are the ‘cheapest on display’ this week.
ENP measures the effectiveness of your marketing programmes whether online or offline through the eyes of the only person who counts, the buyer. It is not based on the retailer or manufacturer’s views of the outcomes but the buyer’s view of what all your overall marketing efforts mean to them.
The measure can be derived at brand level or for individual customers. It can be turned into propensity scores for targeting and predicting future spend behaviour. By measuring your strength on each of the five underlying dimensions it can be used to improve your offer in ways that increase preference without reducing price. It can be used to ensure you are becoming more buyer-centric and valued by customers for more than just convenience. And it can be used to track the preference for your brand over time, the “willingness to deal” that keeps your sales strong whilst others may falter.
Best of all, however, it is not confined to a single channel, a single media, or a single marketing lever. It can be used to convert social media dialogue into a real time measure of consumer brand preference. All social media comments about a brand, product, service or company can be classified under one of the five key headings listed above and ranked on their level of positive endorsement or detraction. This enables real time tracking of strengthening or weakening consumer preference and knowledge of the sources of those movements.
Moreover, using an endorsement scale instead of just ‘positive, negative, neutral’, makes it possible to produce ‘Sentiment Indices’ on each key driver so you can see whether you are staying in tune with buyer needs – much more quickly than via traditional research. So you know - all the time - whether the customer thinks your brand meets their needs and is delivering on its promise.
By Steve Messenger, Co-Founder & Senior Director, Head of Data Analysis, Modelling and Insights at RedRoute International.
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