How even the best brands fail to track the one metric they care about.
Having spent the past three years talking to brand managers and consumer insight analysts at the leading brands andagencies in the world, I continue to hear the same problem repeated over and over.
“We don’t know if our campaigns are actually effective with our intended consumer.”
To best highlight this, I’m going to walk-through (an admittedly simplified) marketing campaign process that leading brands follow.
Step 1. As highlighted in the graphic to the left, begins with an understanding of consumers provided by the Consumer Insights team. Consumer segmentation at these brands goes far beyond demographic & behavioral data to look at how these consumers feel about the brand and how that brand makes the consumers feel about themselves.
A short example is Starbucks. People who drink Starbucks every single morning make up one of Starbucks most valuable consumer segments. That behavioral information fails to effectively understand who these consumers are and why to go to Starbucks every morning. By combining behaivoral data with consumer research, Starbucks understands the consumers who come in every morning feel they actually need Starbucks to start their day. They crave their custom ‘triple nonfat two vanilla pumps mocha’ with their mis-spelled name handwritten on the cup. It’s this understanding of why consumers take certain actions and their fears, desires and needs that makes consumer segmentations so valubale.
Step 2. The creative team builds campaigns to appeal to each segments’ emotions, needs & motivations.
Step 3. Ad buying teams and agencies purchase the media for each targeted segment. The best brands target based on consumer demographics, media consumption & interest profiles provided for each segment by the Insights Team.
Step 4. The final step tracks the performance of the campaign. While brands track metrics from click-through-rate to conversion and even attach that data to web analytics & purchase behavior, there is no way to track that the campaign reached and converted its intended consumer segments.
As a recent agency told me:
“A brand’s segmentation drives our whole marketing process until it comes to tracking our success. We have no way to know that we’re reaching the segments we care about.”
To fix this, consumer segmentation needs to move from being a one-off massive research project every 3 to 5 years to a living, ongoing analytics platform that integrates directly into your customer data.
At Tandem, we enable brands from a 1-person operation to a Fortune 100 company to finally track the success of their marketing initiatives back to their desired consumer segments by incorporating consumer segmentation directly into your existing customer systems.
We’re a small team that is slowly adding new brands everyday. If you want to learn more, sign-up for a demo here or email me directly scott@intandem.io
