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There is lots and lots of data
available to analyse path to purchase and give us a microscopic
look at digital media behaviour. We now know more than ever about
the consumer's decision-making process from studies by marketing
research companies and Google Analytics. But none of the
information that we can get from any of these sources can replace
the power of empathy.
At MediaCom London we have been
encouraging every planner to put down the data and walk a mile or
two in the target market's shoes. Funnily enough for some of us who
have been working at MediaCom for a while, or in my case at the
company MediaCom acquired at the turn of the last century, The
Media Business, this is real back-to-our-roots stuff.
Before we had the resource and budgets
to buy all the exciting research that we do now, we had no
alternative but to go out and find out about real consumer
behaviour for ourselves. In fact, one of the first things Nick
Lawson - now our EMEA CEO - did when he first joined the company a
couple of decades ago was go out to Euston Station in London and
ask rush-hour commuters about early evening drinking (I should
point out that this was for a pitch for a wine company not because
he was looking for someone to go to the pub with!)
However, as the UK office grew in
size, acquired more data and, dare I say, more professional
expertise, we noticed that our planners were turning to our
brilliant Real World Insight team for consumer understanding. It
worked very well but it also tended to mean that the planners were
outsourcing insight rather than trying to empathise with what their
target audiences were feeling.
Back in 2008 we were discussing how to
cope with this situation - both the frequent bottleneck caused by
resources and the sense that there was sometimes lack of emotional
insight from some of the planning teams - when our strategy head
Steve Gladdis came up with a brilliant solution: Method
Insight.
He suggested that we free the planners
from their desks and the tyranny of too much data and send them out
to experience the consumer journey in person. So with a bit of
guidance from Pauline Robson, head of Real World Insight, the
planners set off to find out what really made the consumer tick.
This is now mandatory on every client brief. We believe
passionately that no great strategy comes without great consumer
insight, and for truly great consumer insight Method Insight is a
must.
And it's incredibly simple to do. Our
planners for Müller have spent time lurking in the chilled food
sections of supermarkets, our planners for Met Police have been to
hairdressers in Brixton and our planners for holiday firm TUI spent
a day meeting holidaymakers at Gatwick.
One outstanding example was when
Nicola Jopling spent an evening with her sister's National
Childcare Trust group to understand how to sell baby monitors to
pregnant mums. Nicola, who is single and has no plans to become
personally involved in pregnancy, nevertheless immersed herself in
the group and picked up lots of great insights. Those insights
helped her persuade the client to ditch the existing strategy,
which involved daytime TV and parenting magazines.
She was convinced that the true target
market for Tomy's new baby monitor, which had a very premium price
and substantial technical superiority over its competition, was not
the broad mum audience that standard research measured. Instead,
she wanted to go for upmarket pregnant opinion forming mums to
be... not an audience easily measured by standard industry
research.
This upmarket target audience worked
and therefore didn't watch daytime TV. On top of that they found
mother and baby magazines patronising. Instead they were hugely
swayed by what a few years ago was still a newish trend... blogs by
mums online. The new strategy involved winning over these bloggers
by publishing their top tips for new mums in a leaflet that was
then distributed via exhibitions, in-store and promoted by the
bloggers themselves. And, of course, it promoted the Tomy
monitor.
It was an unusual solution that proved
to be a huge success. And it was all because of Method Insight.
Sue Unerman's new book, Tell The
Truth, which includes a fuller case study of the Tomy baby monitor,
is now available for pre-order at Amazon.
THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS
EXPRESSED IN THIS DOCUMENT ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR.