Lessons from Effectiveness Week

The inaugural IPA Effectiveness Week took place this week, including the two day Effectiveness Genesis Conference.

Of particular note was how the conversation went way beyond the IPA’s heartland territory of creative effectiveness and long-term brand performance, but into the very client-focused worlds of data-driven decision making and marketing optimisation.

A Math Men theme therefore underpinned many of the conversations. And given this it seems appropriate to share the combined lessons from myself and Damian, one of our Concise data strategy leads. Here are our top 7 takeaways:

Find growth in uncomfortable places

Delivering consistent growth is hard. Businesses increasingly need to look for it in uncomfortable places e.g. new segments / routes to market / business models

What we can do about it: We’ve been doing a lot of work helping to facilitate market entry including opportunity sizing, proposition development, concept testing. But there’s always room to be more surprising and embrace the outlier growth opportunities.

Address the influence gap

Newly published research by London Business School shows that marketers often lack importance or influence within their organisation, due to a lack of trust (marketing is mostly about the future, so what they say is less reliable), power (the people responsible for creating a firm’s products / services / customer experience usually don’t report to marketing) and skills (it’s impossible to keep abreast of continually evolving marketing techniques, platforms etc).

What we can do about it: iris Concise’s mission to ‘put marketing back in the boardroom’ is more relevant than ever; to deliver on this promise, we need to give our clients tools that help them break out of their silos and mobilise their teams and peers.

Address the measurement gap

The longer-term effects of marketing are far more important than short-term sales spikes: to deliver sustainable value, marketing needs to help the brand stay relevant and useful, so it produces a dividend of loyalty and continued spend.

What we can do about it: keep evolving our tools to better integrate short term measures with longer term business and brand effects (example: O2 links their brand tracker with social data to show how social media experiences build brand love and drive retention).

Customer experience is the secret to business performance

The organisations where marketing is most influential are the ones where it has taken on responsibility for joining up the organisation around outstanding customer experience. Considerable work has been done in the past 5 years to prove the effectiveness of investment in transforming customer experience. For example M&S where it has driven 20% uplift in NPS, TUI where it has increased NPS by 10% and retention by 5%. Success is when ‘promise and delivery are married across all touchpoints’.

What we can do about it: Customer experience is fundamental to brand building in the Participation Age. To do it successfully means considering nothing that a brand does for customers ‘out of scope’ for marketing. Staff engagement and organisational restructuring may be less sexy but can have even more impact than a good telly ad.

Client frustration emerging with the gap between data reporting and tangible action

“A valid, actionable insight achieves nothing unless it reaches the relevant decision makers and they act on it” Jane Frost, MRS. Many clients now realising that they have been too focused on data, and not enough on using it to drive effectiveness. To put it another way, ‘Decision support is the dead zone’. Data teams need to shift from providers of information to definers of the brief.

What we can do about it: Leverage the power of integration. We should be helping siloed organisations to better join the dots, but we can only do that if we proactively deliver as integrated strategic/creative leadership teams.

From Big Idea to Big Strategy

According to O2, Land Rover and others, a fundamental cultural shift within client organisations is taking opinions out of decision making. The impact of this is that amongst marketing teams the concept of a ‘concept’ is eroding. It’s more about having a provocative and insight-led strategy that leads to extraordinary executions.

What we can do about this: Planning should work harder! There’s still plenty of room to build creative output that is rooted in provocative, data-driven strategies.

Creativity vs Automation

The gap between Big Data (targeting, marketing automation) and Big Creativity (Emotion, Fame, Qualitative insight) is greater than ever. Distrust and misunderstanding between the two sides is visible, with some rhetoric between the two sides sounding Clinton vs Trump-esque.

What we can do about it: Continue to seek the best of both worlds by building Participation Brands can play in positively disrupting lifestyles (Domino’s, Samsung, MINI). But be mindful that many marketers like to be purist with their beliefs and are still happier picking a side.