Creating Engagement: Depth Over Reach Omaid Hiwaizi and Dan White Admap January 2015

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Creating engagement: Depth over reach Omaid Hiwaizi and Dan White Admap January 2015

Title: Creating engagement: Depth over reach Author(s): Omaid Hiwaizi and Dan White Source: Admap Issue: January 2015

Creating engagement: Depth over reach

Omaid Hiwaizi and Dan White Geometry Global and Millward Brown Europe

While both reach and depth approaches are likely to glean a return on investment, the nature of depth strategies will allow brands employing them to create greater and more sustainable impact by generating advocacy and driving repurchase.

Since the early 1990s there have emerged a plethora of different brand-building media and touchpoints – ranging from personalised direct mail, experiential events, shopper marketing, digital media and platforms through to social media – which are now available at scale. While the marketing communications industry has traditionally concerned itself with the efficient delivery of optimised messages to target consumers, this growth of digital and the strategic maturity of below-the-line communications has torn up the rule book, creating an unprecedented opportunity to provide more immersive, participatory and even profound experiences for consumers, and empowering brands to have a much more significant role to play in people's lives.

These media have a deeper effect on the audience through being more experiential – multisensory and immersive – resulting in deeper, more vivid memories, which result in more frequent recall. They're better conceived as branded experiences, whichever touchpoints are utilised, and as such should have an interesting story, which the audience can easily share. We do not study the specific psychological and physiological impacts of these media in more detail here. This is the subject for another article in its own right.

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Red Bull: through events such as Red Bull Flugtag, it builds a depth of engagement with customers

Crucially, because these media enable brands to connect directly with people and influence their behaviour, the success of strategies employing them is naturally quantified in a more direct, scientific and transparent way. Where once – dispossessed of a better alternative – planners appraised communications in terms of their reach, evaluation models are now available which gauge the depth of engagement and response a campaign has elicited among its primary audience (how much it mattered to them, how long it affected them and how exactly it influenced their propensity to buy) as well as the secondary audience which results from the word-of-mouth effect of deep engagement.

In our view, the best example of a brand built through depth of engagement is Red Bull. Since its launch in 1987, Red Bull has focused on a distinctive depth-based marketing strategy to deliver its 'gives you wings' idea, with digital and social integrated into a series of interesting and inspiring events including Red Bull X-Fighters and Red Bull Air Race, where the world's top motocross riders and pilots respectively show off their tricks in front of tens of thousands of spectators, and which then reach an audience of tens of millions. They focus on authentic relationships with key athletes and with passionate fans – giving fans opportunities to take part through events such as the Red Bull Flugtag competitions, where fans can comically fly their home- made human-powered aeroplane creations.

Red Bull has also directly engaged its audience in promotion and sampling through a multitude of initiatives – the Red Bull Wings Team sampling squads, the Student Brand Manager Programme – and generated content via the Red Bull Bedroom Jam (musicians) and Red Bull Reporter (young reporters at events). Indeed, Red Bull has shown that initiatives such as the Red Bull Wings Team have a measurable effect on brand launches and take-up.

The pinnacle of Red Bull's depth approach was perhaps Red Bull Stratos. On 14 October 2012, Felix Baumgartner became the first person to break the sound barrier with a freefall jump from 128,000 feet above the Earth that reached a speed of 833.9 miles per hour. Some 8 million people watched live via YouTube and the video has been viewed over 10 million times subsequently. This represents around £100 million in worldwide media value and Red Bull Stratos will continue to be talked about and distributed socially for a very long time. This represents extraordinary global reach.

Red Bull's different approach has been well documented, with Nancy F Koehn, professor of business administration at

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Harvard Business School, commenting: "In terms of attracting new customers and enhancing consumer loyalty, Red Bull has a more effective branding campaign than Coke or Pepsi. Red Bull is building a beverage brand without relying on the essential equipment of a mass-marketing campaign. Perhaps the indispensable tools of marketing aren't so indispensable after all." (Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, Harvard Business School Press, 2001)

Despite this, why then do agencies and clients continue to have challenges in embracing these new opportunities to find better ways to build brands? First, tipping the scales in favour of depth strategies will almost certainly serve as a catalyst for industry revolution. It sets a new framework for effectiveness for brands and agencies to value experience over reach. It brings a whole new set of priorities to the fore and with them an onus on the industry to behave differently.

How should we, therefore, value these lower-reach immersive experiences versus higher-reach shallow experiences such as TV viewing or reading the press? While the cost per contact is likely to be orders of magnitude more, and the reach orders of magnitude less, the effect on the recipient will be stronger and longer lasting.

Understanding reach is simple and the typical KPIs well established, focusing on cost-per-contact. Depth of experience is more complicated, measured by the enduring impact it can have on the recipient, specifically placing a brand as part of a human relationship and shaping how they relate to the world around them. These mental patterns create opportunities for recall and advocacy, that have a significant role in driving frequency of purchase and penetration of a brand, which is ultimately more valuable.

Our intention is to provide the tools to provoke a more intelligent, grounded and practical conversation about the true success of multidiscipline communications. To effect this, a fair comparison must be made between these very different kinds of brand activity, and a number of considerations and variables assessed.

A common currency is needed to compare brand-building effects, one that can be applied fairly to any type of brand encounter and has been proven to relate to actual purchasing behaviour. The ideal currency should work for brand encounters that have a large and long-lasting impact on behaviour as well as those having a weak, transient effect. For this reason, brand predisposition measures that have been proven to relate to individuals' subsequent purchasing behaviour have been used in the calculations in this paper. We have chosen Millward Brown's Brand Power score – a generalised measure of consumers' predisposition to choose one brand over another. Crucially, this doesn't simply measure sentiment or attitude but also propensity to buy; indeed, there is almost a one-to-one relationship between changes in Brand Power and changes in Volume Share.

For example, word of mouth creates three times more impact with each person it reaches than does TV advertising, but TV typically reaches three times as many people (Figure 1).

The final dimension is the effect of marketing activity on a secondary audience via advocacy. We need to quantify effect on people who encounter the message initially and also the effect on other people who hear about the brand or its content through advocacy and sharing.

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Estimating the prevalence of advocacy is complex. Certain categories naturally enjoy far higher levels of conversation than others. Millward Brown's Social Pulse metric demonstrates this – putting electronics and automotive far ahead of categories such as FMCG and personal care, which reflects the due diligence people apply for predominantly rational purchases.

Sharing of branded content, however, does not follow this category pattern. The 10 most viewed brand videos on YouTube in 2013 included personal care (Dove), soft drinks (Pepsi), retail (Kmart), insurance (GEICO) and household products (Poo Pourri). What unifies these is the power of their creative ideas, which clearly can transcend traditionally staid and passive category norms to create depth experiences.

Millward Brown recently analysed the characteristics of brand videos that achieve this. Common traits of viral successes include being: highly original and distinctive; very enjoyable to watch, highly involving; loaded with social currency (i.e. people want to be the person who shares it with others); and well branded (hence easier to describe).

For example, in 2013 Unilever's Dove campaign 'Real Beauty Sketches' was one of the viral success stories of the year, attracting over 62 million views to date with its emotionally powerful message which felt true to the brand. According to Millward Brown's CrossMedia database, online video has an incredibly strong brand impact per encounter, but relatively low reach. Dove's campaign proves that truly creative and contagious depth strategies have the potential to create extraordinary reach.

We have developed an approach to assimilate the primary and secondary marketing effect of a brand activity, understanding the reach of each and their impact per channel: Effect of activity = (Reach of activity × impact per encounter) + (Reach of advocacy generated × impact per encounter).

For an established mainstream consumer brand then, with a target audience of 10 million, how do the two strategies compare using the Brand Impact metric when considering similar spend and creative input? Using Millward Brown's benchmarks, the

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differences are surprising. A reach strategy (to include TV, press, online display and price promotion) yields a 2.1% brand impact. A depth strategy meanwhile (comprising sampling, Facebook engagement, Facebook advocacy, shared brand videos and themed promotions) returns a 2.6% brand impact penetration on the overall audience figures – challenging conventional wisdom around marketing communications approaches.

The large volume of people who are exposed to a reach strategy message (even at a low impact level per exposure) drive its significant impact. It owes its resilience to sheer economies of scale, which have a tendency to augment overall figures by providing an enormous quantity of encounters (75% of the total target) at a shallow brand impact per encounter (4.7%).

While most reach strategies preclude a strong brand impact per exposure, 'depth strategies' drive the effects of advocacy and brand video-sharing. These, of course, are highly variable and depend on the quality of the creative – just 15% of word-of- mouth campaigns reach over 42% of the total audience. Brand videos do have the opportunity to achieve significant reach, with the 15% most viewed videos achieving an average of 454,000 views.

In short, while both approaches are likely to glean a return on investment, the nature of depth strategies will allow brands employing them to create greater and more sustainable impact by generating advocacy and driving repurchase.

By reimagining success in terms of brand impact, the spotlight shifts to the unquestionable power of great creative ideas in driving greater returns by not only engaging the primary audience but also through advocacy to a potentially huge secondary audience. Starbucks – now a $1.4 billion company – built its entire business this way: deliberately avoiding employing reach strategies and rarely investing in traditional media. A fixation with providing quality beverages and excellent customer service led to organic word-of-mouth marketing. Those who had a good experience told their friends, family and colleagues and the brand quickly grew.

There is an opportunity for agencies and brands to change their ways of working to increase the frequency of these 'hit' ideas which work across multiple channels. As broadcast media continues to fragment, this new standard will cease to be 'nice to have', and become mandatory for work to generate a return.

The fragmentation of media and its expert usage presents additional challenges to agencies and brands. Which to use? Why? How? What message? This demands a more precise understanding of human behaviour and the role of these specific touchpoints. Geometry Global, for example, has its unique 'Precision Activation' approach, centred on the 'Purchase Decision Journey' tool to map behaviour and the context at every touchpoint in the journey.

So it seems that where the question was once 'How do we disseminate a message to as many people as possible and ensure they see it?', the question is now 'How do we use human insight to provide experiences for audiences which resonate culturally, in ways that drive recall and advocacy?'

With the ability to comprehensively challenge the effectiveness of a wider 'reach' strategy with a performance-driven 'depth' approach, another – more solemn question – is advanced: 'How long can traditional advertising survive as the lead media channel?'

About the Author

Omaid Hiwaizi is chief strategy officer, UK, at Geometry Global, he began his career as a creative before becoming a

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strategist. He has also founded two agencies and led several planning departments. [email protected]

Dan White is chief marketing officer for Europe at Millward Brown. He has worked in market research for 25 years and has been integral to the development of techniques including Link, BrandZ and CrossMedia. [email protected]

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