Marketing Week November 2019

NOVEMBER 2019

marketingweek.com 160.096

22.289

THE MEASURE OF 16.185

16.091

16.149

16.149

14.79

16.091

16.091

5.25

5.50

171.152

171.987

172.916

172.916

169.898

171.152

171.152

IS THE WAY BRANDS JUDGE SUCCESS FIT FOR PURPOSE? M E A S U R E M E N T The limitations of NPS 24

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ROI under the spotlight 28

S P E C I A L

Helen Edwards: The case for forensic analysis 16

The problem with econometrics 34

The case for new corporate KPIs 36

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Does the received wisdom of marketing success measure up to scrutiny? he demand for marketers to be more robust in the measurement of the value of what they oversee dates back decades. Indeed, Philip Kotler’s 1967 Marketing Management textbook was an attempt to make the finger-in-the-air approach to insight and analysis a thing of the past by introducing mathematical rigour to impact assessment. Fifty-two years on, there is no shortage of means to inform action and communicate success.

The density of data and the explosion of supposed silver bullet solutions should, in theory, be a blessing for a profession that continues to be dogged by a perception of profligacy. More data plus greater precedent equals more accountability, you would think.

But what if the methods used to assess success are outdated? What if the determinate of what good looks like is no longer fit for purpose? In an age where there is greater expectation of good corporate citizenship, is profit the only barometer of business success?

Received wisdom has it that marketing is changing at a pace. Accepting this aphorism as true for a moment, it’s fair and timely to ask whether the key indicators of progress clung to by marketers are still up to scratch.

And this is the conversation we are attempting to start at least with this, our ‘measurement’ issue.

Some of the sacred cows of modern marketing measurement come under the spotlight.

With marketers noting the importance of customer experience as if a mantra, the worth of Net Promoter Score (NPS) is being questioned. Starting on page 24, we dissect the veracity of the maligned but still widely used score.

Although return on investment is widely used as a demonstration of effectiveness, it has been accused of being a blunt measure that feeds short-termism. In the face of such criticism, we ask whether long-term planning is compromised by the measure chosen to define impact, from page 28. We also unpick the merits and limitations of econometrics, starting on page 34.

Meanwhile, amid vociferous calls for companies to up their corporate citizenship game, from page 36 we look at how brands are introducing non-financial KPIs. You could draw the same conclusion from each piece – there are as many pros as there are cons to each measurement tool. An NPS score is nothing without qualitative assessment of why someone is a cheerleader or detractor. ROI is one gauge of a campaign’s impact, but only if quick wins are the extent of your ambition.

It is also true that any one measure or means to measure is not enough in isolation. Brand success should be determined by tracking of profitable growth, which can only come through finding and retaining customers, satisfying them sufficiently enough they drive revenue and charging them enough your efforts are profitable. Econometrics should be used as a qualifying guide; indicative but never instructive.

There is a temptation in 21st century marketing to declare redundancy on established practices. This issue is not an exercise in sounding the death knell. It’s a call for interrogation of limitations, nuanced adoption and revised thinking.

The pulling of each lever at each stage should carry a different strategic objective. Daft to stick to any one number. All have flaws, all have advantages, all, as my colleague Helen Edwards puts it on page 16, require “forensic analysis”.

T

GET IN TOUCH WITH OUR EDITORIAL TEAM email firstname.surname@centaurmedia.com Editor Russell Parsons News editor Sarah Vizard Acting features editor Charlotte Rogers Writer Matt Barker Senior reporter Ellen Hammett Reporter Molly Fleming Digital content producer Torera George Commercial content editor Michael Barnett Creative lead Lex Guerra Editorial production PA Media Ad production Wendy Goodbun Managing director Richard Breeden Subscribe at marketingweek.com/subscribe, call 020 7292 3716 or email customerservices@marketingweek.com

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CONTENTS NOVEMBER 2019

24

6 INSIGHT Diageo’s ‘profound shift’ in belief in marketing; Brands failing to meet customer expectations; Adidas overinvests in digital marketing; CMOs need to get better at marketing marketing

8 DIGITAL THINKING In-store retail is going digital, which means marketers need to work with the likes of Amazon, says Ben Davis

10 MARKETERS WHO MATTER Samsung’s Benjamin Braun on why econometrics needs to be at the heart of marketing

14 ENDING BREXIT UNCERTAINTY

14

Can a general election get brands and consumers spending again?

16 HELEN EDWARDS Even the simplest of metrics need forensic analysis

18 MARK RITSON Learning the hard way about LinkedIn’s limits

20 OPINION JP Hanson The answer to modern big-brand market challenges is not a default to startup mode Colin Lewis NPS should be seen as a starting point to prompt more insight Tanya Joseph Monitoring and evaluating should not be an afterthought

24 AN OBSESSION WITH NUMBERS Why NPS needs to be part of a holistic plan

28 JEOPARDISING FUTURE GROWTH

34

Fixating on ROI leads to a blinkered approach to success

34 THE PERFECT CURE Is econometrics the answer to marketing’s problems?

36 JUDGING SUCCESS Why non-financial KPIs need to be given prominence

40 GREGGS’ ROGER WHITESIDE The food chain’s CEO on changing perceptions about the brand

42 THREE QUESTIONS I WISH I’D ASKED Mars’s Berta de Pablos on ending stereotypes

44 STORY OF MY CV Burger King UK’s marketing director Katie Evans

46 THE INSIDE STORY The launch of Channel 5 4 MARKETINGWEEK.COM NOVEMBER 2019

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IN THIS ISSUE

SAVE THE DATE

27 November 2019 Oystercatchers Awards St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, London BENJAMIN BRAUN

JUSTIN BELL

European marketing director, Samsung

Head of research, effectiveness

“If you have a great idea, it will carry itself” p10

awards.theoystercatchers.com

and planning, TSB

“To help relations there has to be empathy” p28

2 December 2019 Econsultancy Live in association with Marketing Week St Paul’s etc.venues, London conferences.econsultancy.com

21 April 2020 Marketing Week Mini MBA Next course begins MARK EVANS

ALINE SANTOS

Managing director of marketing and

Global executive vice-president of marketing, and chief diversity and inclusion officer, Unilever

digital, Direct Line Group

“It is important to retain a high level of capability and curiosity internally” p34

mba.marketingweek.com

“We look closely at our employee inclusivity and satisfaction as a measure of business success” p36

November 2019 Cover image: Lex Guerra

HANNAH SQUIRRELL

KATIE EVANS

Marketing director, Greggs

Marketing director, Burger King UK

“Having a small marketing budget forces you to look at ways to cut through and do things differently” p40

“You learn from the things you take on, and whether you succeed or fail they are all learnings that you take into your next role” p44

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INSIGHT

November DIAGEO’S EFFECTIVENESS PUSH CREATES ‘POWERFUL SHIFT’ IN CONFIDENCE

Diageo has described a “profound” shift in the belief in marketing across the business, and among its stakeholders, after embedding its effectiveness platform Catalyst throughout its marketing teams.

Catalyst was launched two years ago with the aim of providing marketers with instant data that would help them make planning and strategic decisions on how and where to invest. The plan, as Diageo’s global marketing effectiveness director Adam Ben-Yousef highlights, was to create an “army” of effectiveness ambassadors across the business.

Reframing marketing effectiveness at Diageo came in the context of a £500m productivity drive. Marketing promised to deliver £100m in improvements by eliminating inefficient spend and improving profits by shifting money, rather than through cost-cutting.

This, in turn, has created a “powerful shift” across the business. Diageo had the aim of driving more profit from its existing marketing investment, targeting an eighttimes increase in gross profit ROI. It actually delivered a 16-times increase, unlocking improved performance everywhere it was applied across 60 countries and 350 country brand teams.

However, Ben-Yousef called the improved confidence in marketing across the wider business the “biggest and most powerful shift”. It has meant that, rather than the marketing effectiveness focus leading to reduced spend, Diageo has increased its global marketing investment by more than 30%, while at the same time its operating profit growth and share price have increased.

“We set out to drive more profit from our existing marketing investment. But we’ve achieved something greater and unexpected

– a more profound shift at the highest level in the belief in marketing investment.

Marketing is no longer the first spend to be cut when a market wants to deliver its annual plan,” he explained.

“We’ve [increased spend] because we know great marketing delivers for us financially in the long-term and we’ve been able to speak the same language as our exec committee and board to give them confidence in our marketing and grow our brands and business.”

BRANDS FALL SHORT ON DELIVERING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION A “disappointing” 10% of brands in the UK have a net promoter score (NPS) of 40 or more, with logistics, energy and water emerging as the worst sectors for delivering on customer satisfaction.

The study benchmarked the customer experience delivered by more than 190 brands in 15 industries across the UK. Researchers asked consumers to rate how likely they were to recommend a company move over their friends or family.

Scores of nine or 10 signify consumers who are likely to promote a brand; consumers who give scores of seven or eight are deemed passives; while a score of six or less means the consumer is a detractor.

The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

The industries leading the way are the ones investing in saving time for customers and simplifying the experience. A lack of communication and an inability to manage perceptions are key issues for the sectors at the lower end of the NPS spectrum.

There are also common ingredients among the brands that perform best.

“Be known for something and measure

success one customer journey at a time.

These companies deliver great customer experiences consistently, which translates into how they deliver great end-to-end customer experience,” says Bain & Company partner Stanford Swinton.

“They create a culture that handles things like complaints really well. One of the findings in the study is that it’s not the number of complaints that matters, it’s how you handle those complaints.

“If you think about what goes into a company to be able to handle customer complaints, it’s really a litmus test for how important the customer is to you.”

THE TOP 5 BRANDS FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE BRAND

NET PROMOTER SCORE

NFU Mutual

70

First Direct

63

Volvo

49

Netflix

49

Amazon

44

ADIDAS SWITCHES FOCUS TO BRAND DESIRE AFTER ‘OVER-INVESTING’ IN DIGITAL Adidas is on a journey to shift from marketing efficiency to marketing effectiveness, admitting a focus on ROI led it to over-invest in digital and performance marketing at the expense of brand building.

Drawing on a new marketing playbook – called ‘Creating the new’ – and a renewed focus on generating brand desire, Adidas introduced a campaign framework with emotional, brand-driving activity at the centre. This was an attempt by the brand to connect with consumers around major

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21%

of marketers feel they haven’t received enough training to be able to comply with GDPR

UK digital ad spend was worth £7.3bn in the first half of 2019, up 13% year on year Source: IAB UK

£

30% of B2B marketers admit they deliver a poor digital experience Source: Episerver

Source: Data & Marketing Association

effective, as do CFOs, CIOs and CTOs. “What we marketers need to remember is we are a profession, we need to earn our seat at the table and above all we need to deliver. And when we do there is no problem,” he said, speaking as part of a panel discussion at the Festival of Marketing.

He was joined by fellow members of Marketing Week’s Top 100, sponsored by Salesforce – our list of the UK’s most effective marketers, revealed in September.

“It’s lovely to see our C-suite colleagues don’t share [our doubts],” said Wheldon.

“On the whole they are not the ones saying marketing doesn’t deserve a seat at the table. Bizarrely it’s marketing people doing that. We really shouldn’t.” campaigns three or four times a year, while at the same time running advertising with a rational message.

Adidas also had a performance budget linked to ecommerce in the belief that digital ads drove digital sales.

The sportswear giant was keen to drive online sales because they were the most profitable part of its business.

“We had an understanding that it was digital advertising – desktop and mobile – that was driving those sales and as a consequence we were over-investing in that area,” said global media director Simon Peel, speaking at the IPA’s Effectiveness conference.

At the same time, Adidas brought in an econometric model. That helped it discover that, while the team thought loyal customers were driving sales and was therefore investing in CRM, in fact 60% of revenue came from first-time buyers.

Adidas also found that its business units were not just driving their own sales. It thought, for example, that football advertising would drive football sales, but found in reality that all advertising drove general Adidas sales.

The sportswear company is now working on what is the right media and attribution model. Peel believes that will involve econometrics, as well as a test-and-learn approach. “We are just walking, we have a long way to go. We do overly focus on digital attribution, but we are improving,” he said.

Salesforce’s vice-president of marketing in the UK and Ireland, Ashling Kearns, agreed that much of marketing’s lack of confidence is self-inflicted, pointing out she has never seen a report into the effectiveness of a CIO or CCO. “We are the worst marketers of our own discipline and brand,” she stated.

“Marketing is the only function that touches

WHY CMOs NEED TO GET BETTER AT ‘MARKETING MARKETING’ Barely a month goes by without a report into the “death” of the CMO, whether that is due to the rise of job titles such as chief growth officer or marketing’s perceived inability to speak the language of business.

Yet RBS CMO David Wheldon’s response to this is “bollocks”. He says he has never understood the “polemic” in the industry around the role of the CMO. He points to the fact that, in a recent survey by Deloitte, just 5% of marketers had confidence in their ability to influence the overall direction of a business and garner support from their peers, which wasn’t matched by their C-suite colleagues. Almost 50% of CEOs believe CMOs are highly

every other aspect within a company, has a true overview of the customer experience.

It’s fairly unique.”

That job of marketing marketing is especially critical in a business that doesn’t understand marketing. Wheldon recalled that, when he joined RBS, he spoke to each of his C-suite colleagues to ask what they expected of him and marketing, and whether they understood marketing. If they didn’t, he tried to educate them using data.

“If you engage, you usually find people go ‘I get that, now go away and get on with it’,” he said. However, Wheldon cautioned: “If you’ve got a CEO that doesn’t believe in marketing, then you have a problem. You can try to educate them. But it’s probably a good idea to go and work somewhere else.”

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DIGITAL THINKING

BY BEN DAVIS

In-store retail is finally going digital

Editor, Econsultancy

n September, Sainsbury’s put some tills back into its once till-free Holborn store. The supermarket’s experiment with an app-led shopping experience (scanning a QR code to pay on exit) seems to have been at least a partial success, but there are always commentators eager to point out where tech fails consumers.

Sainsbury’s, for what it’s worth, simply stated: “Some customers preferred to pay with cash and card, which sometimes meant they were queuing to use the helpdesk, particularly at peak times of day. This is why we’ve added a manned till and two selfcheckouts back into the store.”

Try to pay with notes or coins in an

I

Amazon Go store and it could take you a while, too. There is speculation the tech giant is currently looking for sites in the UK. In China, however, where the penetration of mobile payment stands at 86% according to PwC’s Global Con­sumer In­sight Sur­vey 2019, things are moving a little more quickly.

There is much excitement about Alibaba’s Freshippo. Yes, you can still go to a helpdesk if you want to pay cash, but the retailer’s commitment to experiential smartphoneassisted retail is impressive.

There are reportedly more than 150 stores across 21 Chinese cities. The app allows shoppers to access information about products, add them to their shop, checkout with Alipay and arrange delivery to their home within 30 minutes (if they live nearby), as well as use a number of services in store such as restaurants and Starbucks cafés.

The key to Alibaba’s planned disruption of retail, though, seems to be delivery and data.

On the delivery side, each store also acts as an ecommerce warehouse, with overhead conveyor belts and a team of pickers allowing for rapid fulfilment.

The recent partnership with Alibaba’s Ele.me local services division (people on mopeds) further expands this capability. And with machine learning, Freshippo can effectively track product margins, target promotions using a wealth of user data, and improve the restocking process (as well as optimising which SKUs are carried in each store).

Jacques Penhirin, China retail and consumer head at consultancy Oliver Wyman, told the FT he estimates such data acumen

could help a retailer achieve “a strong 9% margin”.

Big ecommerce beasts like Alibaba and Amazon believe they can take a slice of the grocery market and bring the proportion of online sales more in line with the wider retail market. Amazon already offers a two-hour delivery service to Whole Foods customers in 30 US cities via the Amazon website.

Alternatively, online shoppers can filter only for products in nearby locations if they want to collect their order in store.

In the UK, Amazon’s grocery offering is provided via Prime and a partnership with Morrisons. The Times reports that Amazon is planning stores in the UK and the Wall Street Journal that new stores, distinct from the Amazon Go chain, are to roll out in the US – potentially by the end of the year.

Amazon is also reportedly looking to license its Go technology to both Cineworld and airport grocery retailer OTG. This may be another way of capturing data to bring consumers into the world of Amazon groceries (though it’s still unclear which app consumers will use at these thirdparty stores).

While these ecommerce companies look for physical infrastructure to round out a multichannel offering capable of taking greater share of wallet, the incumbents are returning the compliment and imitating parts of the online model.

Walmart and Target have invested in delivery and in-store pickup, with the former announcing in September that its ‘Delivery Unlimited’ subscription (which charges an annual fee of $98 instead of $9.99 for each delivery) will soon be available in more than half of the US. In the UK, Tesco is set to jump on the bandwagon as consumers become comfortable with subscriptions. Tesco Clubcard Plus will launch towards the end of the year, costing £7.99 a month and giving customers 10% off two big shops every month alongside ‘always-on’ discounts for Tesco’s line of clothing and homeware.

So, though the more eye-catching headlines may be about Tesco working with Trigo Vision Ltd on a camera-and-software based system similar to Amazon Go, as well as trialling app-based shopping at its HQ, the real battleground is for a level of convenience that fits busy lifestyles and perhaps eventually makes the big trolley shop an anachronism.

In a future where delivery is an increasingly attractive option for a consumer’s regular big shop, FMCG marketers will need to work closer with the online media arms of big retailers, be that Walmart’s ad exchange or Amazon Advertising.

Whether consumers are ready for till-free supermarkets may be by-the-by.

Multichannel loyalty may be just getting started.

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MARKETERS WHO MATTER

Benjamin Braun, Samsung

Less than a year into the role, the European marketing director of one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world shares his progress to date, what’s next and why econometrics must be at the core of any modern marketing organisation amsung’s Benjamin Braun is a self-declared “tech nerd”. He speaks about his old red Nokia 8210 and favourite game Snake II with as much enthusiasm as he does Samsung’s new “shelfie”-taking smart fridge and the stylus pen in his phone that makes the “disproportionate” amount of time he spends presenting much easier.

But Braun is more than a humble tech nerd addicted to watching YouTube videos of people making croissants and who has, by his own admission, “wasted days” of his life playing Snake.

At the beginning of this year, he became the European marketing boss of one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world. That same marketer, whose most-used emojis are the thumbs-up and smiling poo, has just sent the world’s first selfie into space.

“I’ve always had this natural love and passion for aesthetics and a way of taking something which is complex and making it easier to understand,” Braun says, recalling the time he decided to go against the advice of his professor and translate a 30-page university paper into a simple infographic (he got a First).

Of course, Samsung’s ‘space selfie’ was slightly more complex to execute. But Braun believes “if you have a great idea, it will carry itself”. In this case, attached to a balloon half the size of a basketball court 64,000ft above ground.

“Dare to be different” is Braun’s mantra at Samsung. His fear is “doing what everyone else is doing” and his strategy is to make complicated things easier for people to grasp.

S

Daring to be different

PORTRAIT: JOEL KIMMEL

BY ELLEN HAMMETT

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Over the past 80 years, Samsung has gone from being a small Korean company trading locally-grown groceries and noodles to a global powerhouse innovating in ways that, not so long ago, were only possible in science-fiction.

It is now the mammoth task of Braun, with his unapologetic love for tech and stylus pens, to bring that to life.

Samsung wouldn’t have hired Braun if it didn’t believe he was capable. From British Gas to Comparethemarket.com to Audi, his path to Samsung has been a wide and varied one, and everything he has learned along the way is very present in the marketer he is today.

It was at Comparethemarket.com where Braun reaped the rewards of doing the opposite of what his competitors were doing.

When the other, more established switching sites were talking about saving money, Comparethemarket.com was talking about meerkats.

“The whole idea was that it was so fundamentally different it will stick,” Braun says. A decade later, and it has certainly stuck.

This went on to influence his marketing decisions at Audi. When Audi’s competitors in the sports car space were doing what Braun calls “stereotypical guff”, Audi shot “emotional, narrative-based” ads in ultraslow motion set to romantic music.

Braun says sales went boom. “That was also the first time I got a taste for econometrics.”

EFFECTIVENESS Braun’s marketing effectiveness drive at Audi won the brand an IPA Award for its ‘Beautiful Cars with Amazing Brains’ work.

He has since made sure econometrics are a core part of Samsung’s marketing. In fact, he does not believe it is possible to run a modern marketing organisation that is “sustainable, progressive and trusted” without having econometrics as a core principle – especially with regard to marketers gaining influence in the boardroom.

“It feels like the marketing community and marketing professionals need to grow up and become more mature. We need to become

“Marketers need to become far more scientific, otherwise our credibility is undermined” far more scientific, otherwise our credibility is undermined,” he says.

“When Accenture or McKinsey or one of the other big consulting groups goes in and speaks to the CEO or CFO, they have their ear immediately because they’re so good at these very impressive slides and models. We, as marketers, need to do this and the way to do it is econometrics.”

When Braun joined Samsung, he set out a 90-day plan consisting of four elements.

The first was to create a clear vision that everyone could understand. The second was to create clear goals that were measurable and time-bound. The third was to shut down what Braun calls “zombie projects” – those that were perhaps right for the strategy at the time, but are no longer relevant – and reinvest the money and resource into other parts of the business.

The fourth was around Samsung’s internal organisation and agency network.

Did Samsung have too many agencies? (“Yes”). Were they spending too much of Samsung’s money? (“Probably”). Was Samsung measuring them in the right way? (“Probably not”).

Braun is currently going through the process of slimming down Samsung’s agency roster and creating a board where Samsung’s marketers and agencies can meet every month to make sure they “align and work together”.

“I don’t want an us versus them situation, we’re all working to one Samsung project,” he explains. “We also need agencies that are willing to give it all. There are many super

bright, great agencies, but that doesn’t really matter. It matters who you have on your account. You need to make sure you’ve got the super talent on your account.”

Another area Braun judges effectiveness on is employee satisfaction.

“If you’re going to perform, you’re going to have to have a team that is willing to give it all,” he states. “When I interview people, when someone has that passion for something, even if they might not know our stuff, you will learn all that technical stuff. But if you come with the passion, drive and energy, those are the people we want.”

MARKETING LEADERSHIP Braun might be less than a year into the role, but he already knows the introverts and extroverts in his team.

“When you’re new, everyone’s a bit guarded, so I took the team out for MyersBriggs training. We recently had a breakthrough; it was the first time I felt there was real brutal honesty in the leadership team where people said exactly what they thought.”

Braun is also on a mission to improve the way Samsung communicates internally. This has included introducing a Facebook-style app where employees can post, like and write comments, such as team selfies and presentation videos, sharing good work teams have done and posting job opportunities.

Importantly for Braun, he wants to create an environment for people where – whatever their personality type – they can “really flourish”.

“In the beginning of your career, you’re rewarded for being an expert in your area, so you just become better in whatever area you are. As you get promoted, you go from being one person to looking after a team of people and you need to realise quickly it’s no longer about what you can deliver, it’s about what you can deliver through others and with the help of others,” he states.

“As you grow to an even bigger team, your job is to craft a vision that people believe in, encourage them, motivate them and give them the tools to deliver it.”

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THE NEXT CHAPTER Samsung’s ethos is to “do what you can’t”, which Braun says is underpinned by a “relentless pioneering spirit” across the business. Every time he visits Korea to meet with Samsung’s engineers, he says he is gobsmacked by the velocity of innovation taking place.

“I’m just sitting there saying, I want it now,” he says. “I can see the marketing campaign growing in my head, going ‘oh my god you’ve just found a totally new segment of people who we can suddenly have a conversation with about something new’.

How cool is that?

“The company has a very good ability to see where a category is ripe for disruption and they jump in with their pioneering innovation and disrupt it.”

Braun and his team are responsible for making sure the marketing can express this technology in a “less-techy” way. It is the job of the CMI (consumer, marketing and insights) team to produce insights that go back to Samsung HQ and explain what European customers like and do not like, what they want and what they should be given next.

That then goes into the briefs that Braun’s team gives to the engineers in Korea.

Engineers will then show the marketing team the early models and mock-ups and ask for feedback.

“That is super cool,” Braun says. “I see so many things that will never, ever make it to market.”

What does make it to market, however, can be seen in Samsung’s new experience showroom in London’s Kings Cross. Phones, TVs, autonomous cars, virtual reality, washing machines, tumble driers, fridges: Samsung KX is an immersive tech playground and an example of what the future of retail looks like.

“When people come here they don’t get exposed to a specific Samsung product, they get to see how it all fits together, which makes it immensely powerful,” says Braun.

“That multi-device experience gives us a massive leap ahead of others. The question is, how do we best tell an emotional, warm,

SAMSUNG’S ‘SPACE SELFIE’

“The question is, how do we best tell an emotional, warm, non-technical story so people go ‘ah, I like that, I want to be part of that?’ ”

non-technical story so people go ‘ah, I like that, I want to be part of that?’”

Samsung is also looking to be more personal with customers. So personal, in fact, that the majority of people who visit the homepage of its website will get a personalised experience. Emails are personalised too, including the subject line, copy, images and call-to-actions.

“If we get that right – and it’s difficult – you will feel closer to and comfortable with Samsung,” Braun explains. “It’s not a hard sell. Rather than being creepy, it’s actually helpful and very useful. That’s where we’re going.”

While Braun hints at even bigger innovations in the pipeline and says he is currently exploring three “audacious” ideas for next year, they all remain top secret at Samsung HQ. “I’ve seen some of the stuff we’re going to do and it’s amazing, the sort of stuff you’d see in sci-fi a few years ago,” he says. “As pioneers you have to push yourselves forward, otherwise you get stuck with what we’ve got. The only way to evolve society is to create the next chapter of it.”

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ANALYSIS

Can a general election end Brexit uncertainty for brands?

Marketing budgets have been cut for the first time in seven years, consumer confidence is on the slide and companies are becoming more short-termist as Brexit uncertainty rolls on. But it’s hoped a general election could finally solve the impasse and get brands and consumers spending again

BY SARAH VIZARD

he UK is gearing up for a general election on 12 December in a move that businesses hope will finally end the Brexit deadlock and pave the way for a deal between the UK and the EU. The hope is an election will lead to a parliamentary majority and mandate to get a deal of some description (depending on who wins) past MPs in time for the new date for the UK to leave the EU – 31 January 2020.

Businesses will hope an election can finally put an end to a Brexit impasse that has forced many to spend millions on contingency planning and rein in investment elsewhere. Marketing has not been immune, with the uncertainty forcing budget cuts and a brake on hiring.

The IPA’s quarterly Bellwether report found UK companies cut their marketing budgets during the third quarter, the first time there has been a decrease in seven years. A net balance of 0.5% of marketers questioned in the survey revised their marketing budget down in the third quarter.

Nearly two-thirds (64.1%) reported no change in budget, reflecting a ‘wait-andsee’ approach adopted by many in the face of uncertainty about Brexit and its impact on business.

Companies were also worried about low consumer confidence, causing them to hold back on spending, particularly for bigticket marketing drives. Overall, 18.2% of

T

THE BREXIT IMPASSE HAS FORCED MANY BUSINESSES TO REIN IN INVESTMENT

“The industry is suffering from spending delays and subdued consumer confidence” Joe Hayes, IHS Markit

firms cut advertising spend, while 17.7% reported budget growth.

Joe Hayes, economist at IHS Markit and the report author, says: “The latest Bellwether survey spells further disappointment for the UK marketing industry, which is suffering, just like the rest of the economy, as a result of spending delays, firms placing projects on hold and subdued business confidence.

The UK economy has endured a tough year

so far and firms have subsequently withdrawn discretionary spending to protect profit margins.”

MOVE TO SHORT-TERMISM Only digital marketing recorded an increase in budgets, with a net balance of 11.1% of firms reporting growth boosted by new online tools, data and a push towards social media. Search (which falls under internet) also reported growth of 6.1%, though this was down from 9.9% in the previous quarter.

Main media advertising saw budgets put on hold following strong growth of 5.2% and 5.6%, respectively, in the first two quarters of the year. The remaining types of marketing all saw contractions, including mobile, which was down by a net balance of 0.6%, PR (-4.7%), sales promotions (-2.3%), direct marketing (-7%) and market research, which declined 16.9%. Events budgets fell for the first time in a year, with a net balance of

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5.9% of marketers cutting spend, while ‘other’ saw declines expand to 13.9%.

“Perhaps the most discouraging sign is to see firms sitting on the fence regarding main media advertising, which is a vital form of long-term brand building, following resilient budget growth in the two previous quarters,” adds Hayes.

“Overall, as long as political and economic uncertainties remain at large, it will be surprising to see noteworthy boosts to marketing spending.”

Marketers are also pessimistic about company and industry-wide prospects, which were in negative territory for a fourth consecutive quarter. Industry-wide expectations were among the most negative in almost seven years, down 25%, as were company prospects, with a net balance of 9.8% of those surveyed feeling the financial position has declined.

This pessimism has ticked over into hiring plans. Job prospects for marketers fell to their lowest levels in three years, with a net balance of just 1.4% of marketers expecting overall employment to be higher in three months’ time compared with now.

Some 65.6% expect levels to stay the same, 16.5% to see a decrease and 17.9% an increase.

The report has asked this question exclusively for Marketing Week since the third quarter of 2016. And in three years of data, prospects have never been lower. The 1.4% is below the net balance of just 2.7% seen the last time a Brexit deadline was

imminent and well behind the 17.2% recorded a year ago.

“Political and economic uncertainty remain notable risks to the hiring outlook, with firms looking to contain costs and protect profit margins by freezing their budgets,” adds Hayes.

Despite the pessimism, the IPA is leaving its forecasts for ad spend this year unchanged, though it remains “cautious” over prospects in 2019. It predicts a modest 1.1% increase in annual ad spend, but expects this to tick up in 2020 with growth of 1.8%, followed by 2% in 2021, 2.2% in 2022 and 3.1% in 2023.

The IPA is not the only one expecting budgets to rise. The Advertising Association (AA) and Warc’s Expenditure Report has upgraded its 2019 full-year ad spend growth forecast.

It expects the UK ad market to grow by 5% in 2019 to £24.7bn, up 0.4 percentage points on its last forecast in July, showing the continued strength of UK advertising and “resilience” of the British economy.

However, AA CEO Stephen Woodford says the industry still needs “clarity to continue investing for the future during these uncertain times”.

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE SLIPS While in the longer term a general election may provide some of that clarity, in the short term the outlook remains uncertain as Britain heads to the polls. That is bad news as businesses gear up for the Christmas shopping period.

Employment Prospects Do you expect overall employment to be higher, the same or lower at your company in three months’ time compared to current levels?

Higher %

Same %

Lower %

Net +/_

Q2 2018

25.7

59.5

14.8

+11.0

Q3 2018

31.1

55.0

13.9

+17.2

Q4 2018

27.7

55.0

17.3

+10.5

Q1 2019

23.6

55.6

20.9

+2.7

Q2 2019

22.0

61.2

16.8

+5.1

Q3 2019

17.9

65.6

16.5

+1.4 Source: IPA Bellwether

A net balance of 0.5% of marketers say their budgets were cut in Q3 Source: IPA Bellwether

Consumers’ propensity to make a big purchase fell by two points to one in October Source: GfK

The UK ad market is still expected to see growth of 5% in 2019 Source: AA/Warc

Usually, UK consumers are ready to make big purchases at this time of year, but GfK’s consumer confidence index shows the major purchase index falling by two points month over month in October to a score of one; that is also down three points compared with October last year.

Consumers’ views on their personal financial situation over the next 12 months are also dropping, down three points compared with both the previous month and October 2018.

GfK’s client strategy director Joe Staton describes that as a “big drop” that should concern business. And it comes despite positive economic signals, such as high levels of employment, pay increases and inflation being under control.

“Consumers are like the market, they look for certainty and confidence in what is going on,” he says. “There is a concern that the index is pointing to a slowdown in our plans to spend going forward. People think they won’t have the money. In the run-up to the golden quarter, business would hope to see this at least remain the same or bob up a bit. This shows people are not feeling better off.”

The hope among business will be that a general election can deliver a stable government with a mandate to finally sort Brexit out one way or another. Whether that is what voters deliver is another thing entirely.

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“Even the simplest metrics require forensic analysis” arketers at US budget airline JetBlue had a conundrum. Net promoter scores (NPS) from passengers departing from a single gate at Philadelphia Airport were consistently well below the average of NPS scores for the airline overall. What was going on at that gate?

NPS is a simple metric. It takes the proportion of customers who would enthusiastically recommend the brand to others and subtracts from it the proportion who would definitely not – either side of a ballast of neutrals in between.

It is very much a brand metric, capturing, in theory at least, all the practical and associational facets that contribute to the overall consumer experience. JetBlue’s scores were generally strong – so naturally, the airline’s marketers looked at reasons for how the brand might be under-performing at this one departure point.

Everything that the airline offered at that Philly gate was rigorously assessed – but the team could find nothing different in the way that its staff, systems or punctuality performed compared with its other airport gates. It was all classic JetBlue.

They could have accepted the NPS finding as a statistical quirk – since variance around any average will tend to include outliers – but they didn’t. Instead they looked at the broader context surrounding their flights from that gate, and noted that it included one that took off every day at 6am.

At that time, the airport’s shops and cafes were yet to open. Customers couldn’t buy a coffee or a muffin to pick them up from their early start. Could this grumpiness deriving from a failing at the general airport level spill over to the specific airline scores?

Seemed it could. When the airline introduced a refreshments service at the gate for that bleary-eyed flight, scores picked up and normalised. They fixed a poor, brandspecific metric score caused by something outside the scope of their brand.

M

HELEN EDWARDS Former BSME and PPA business columnist of the year, and co-founder of Passionbrand

COMPLEX INTERACTIONS The JetBlue story – unveiled at a US conference last month in a presentation about

data analytics by SAP – illuminates two important truths about marketing metrics.

First, they have a tendency to tell you how you’re doing without telling you what to do: that bit comes down to marketing department detective work.

And second, even though the metrics themselves might be simple, what they measure exists within something infinitely more complex.

You can have a bunch of metrics, each accurately assessing a single facet, but all missing the interactions between them. And yet, as essayist Nassim Taleb observes, in complex systems it is the interactions that really count, with the result that “the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components”.

A business-to-business brand competing in a dynamic market might constitute an “ensemble”. A simple metric within that might be sales data by customer. A common finding deriving from that might be that 80% of sales come from just 20% of the customer base – the so-called Pareto principle in action.

BEYOND THE OBVIOUS Professor Byron Sharp has shown that this 80:20 Pareto skew is less common in consumer brands, but in my experience it is alive and well in the B2B world. And, at an anecdotal level, I can include my own consultancy business in that.

The finding, whether revealed by your own observation or by an outside analyst, gives you an uncomfortable feeling that you should be doing something about it.

But what? Look for maximum efficiency by cutting off the 80% customer tail that’s bringing in just 20% of revenue? Treat those smaller customers a bit like second-class citizens so you can focus better on the big ones? Try charging smaller customers more?

The conclusion that would be dangerous to miss is that what you should probably do is nothing. And the reasons for that derive from a combination of detective work and a recognition of Taleb’s dictum.

Once you stop seeing the two types of customer as distinct groups, and look for the interactions between them, you get a feel for

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“Just as painting by numbers will not get you much of a picture, so branding by numbers will not get you much of a brand”

why you have any big customers at all. I’ll use my own business as an example, since it’s just about the only one for which I have not signed an NDA. How did the customers in the big-butfew cluster get to be there? Some started as small customers but grew large – either organically or through merger. Some had become led by individuals who had previously worked in one of our smaller customer businesses. Some were there through recommendation, including by smaller customers.

It’s not hard to see the impact on the overall business if the “small-but-many” crowd had been rejected early on for size, or

been served relatively poorly. There wouldn’t be any big ones.

Viewed like this, Pareto distribution can be seen as a healthy sign, not something to be fixed, which perhaps is why it is observed so ubiquitously, not just in the commercial sphere but in nature, too – including by the eponymous Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted that 20% of his garden pea pods produced 80% of the peas.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE Marketing is not short of candidate metrics and, given the data-driven bias around corporate board tables, neither is it short of reasons to employ them.

And there is no shame in veering towards the simplest possible metrics, especially if they can more elegantly produce the data-point accuracy of the fancier models.

But there is a danger in extrapolating from that methodological simplicity the notion that the interpretation and implications are also simple. They rarely are. Just as painting by numbers will not get you much of a picture, so branding by numbers will not get you much of a brand.

Metrics matter. But forensic interpretation and imaginative action – or even, sometimes, considered inaction – add up to more.

TENETS SUCH AS THE PARETO PRINCIPLE OFTEN HOLD TRUE, BUT YOU NEED TO ANALYSE WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOUR BRAND

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MARK RITSON

BSME business columnist of the year

“After 30,000 connections, I’m all LinkedOut” am ever so slightly dependent on LinkedIn. It’s a very good source of marketing and branding perspectives and, more importantly, the only realistic way to communicate with my students.

I’ve taught 600 MBA students annually for about 20 years now. Add to that about 2,000 executives on the Mini MBA in Marketing each year, plus the usual collection of marketing randoms I meet along the road. So, back in September, it was hardly a surprise to see a build-up of around 50 invites. But as I casually clicked on them an error message kept appearing.

A few days later the list had grown to 80 and I tried again. Once more my attempts met with failure. And it was then the penny finally dropped: I had reached the end of the road. Thirty thousand connections is the maximum LinkedIn will allow. Apparently, that limit was set to “keep LinkedIn working smoothly” because “exceedingly large networks impact site reliability and member experience”.

LinkedIn does offer a fall-back position in the form of ‘followers’, who can follow me on the site and read whatever I post. But that idea fills me with dread and embarrassment.

Concluding my class with my LinkedIn profile and a request that all the students ‘follow me’ makes me sound like Ramses the Great. Or Jesus. I

I

“You have to manually scroll through your 30,000 contacts like a fucking sniper"

want to connect with peers, not lead the masses to the Promised Land. Then I got a couple of what I would call ‘celebrity invites’. One from a senior administrator at a very famous football club.

There was also a hearty invitation from a very important CMO who I left standing in the virtual rain. I tried writing an explanation that I had reached my quota of 30,000 contacts. But this, much like this column I expect, just made me sound like such a total wanker. I opted for silence from that point on.

I have to admit that I started to review the successful contacts in ‘my network’ with something akin to buyer’s remorse. There were also a lot of faces who, with a little hindsight and a new appreciation for the scarcity of business connections, would not have made the cut.

That bloke I met on the Jubilee Line who had the same shoes as me.

My Dad – FFS. Everyone from Carpet World. And Andy Dorkins, who had fallen asleep on the bonnet of my car on Australia Day in 2010. I was currently ignoring the CEO of one of the top five luxury brands for a bloke that sleeps on random cars in the middle of the day. The opportunity cost was massive.

I looked up at the professional waiting list, which was now hovering at the 800 mark.

“Fuck it,” I said out loud. “Let’s cull.”

It turns out that LinkedIn is the exact opposite of dating. When meeting a hot date for dinner, I always found it super-difficult to make any kind of connection but surprisingly easy to knock bad relationships on the head. LinkedIn is the other way around. There is no ranking you can do on salary or seniority or even proximity.

You have to manually scroll through your 30,000 contacts like a fucking sniper.

In the end, the inhumanity of pulling the trigger on so many perfectly lovely people took its toll. I gave up, with a paltry body count of 28, to reassess my approach. It was then I started to contemplate the concept of death.

The annual mortality rate among adults in the UK is about nine per 1,000 people. Given I have gradually built up to 30,000 connections and have been on LinkedIn for 15 years that means I am probably connected to around 225 dead people.

That’s a sizeable number and, clearly, represents a sub-group who offer limited future

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Mark’s marketing month “In my pre-30,000 days I would have connected with you for giving me athlete’s foot in a public swimming pool"

potential for me on LinkedIn. But while it’s a very meaningful distinction, it’s also a very unactionable one. It’s not like deceased contacts’ photos change. Or loved ones go online and remove their profiles.

Disappointed by the invisible dead populating my network, I turned to a less terminal, but more identifiable, condition: retirement. You can search your contacts for the phrase ‘retired’, so I culled 93 people in what can only be described as a grey massacre. The qualmless bloodlust was insatiable.

But that still left me with 10 times as many potential connections as spaces. It took about two minutes to allocate the newly freed up spaces and I was back to the same problem again. Of course, I was now being a lot choosier about who to connect with.

In my pre-30,000 days I would have connected with you for giving me athlete’s foot in a public swimming pool.

Now, short of being a god or goddess of marketing or owning a seven-figure training budget, your chances were tiny.

It was obvious I had to find a better way to cull my contacts. I considered removing all the sales managers from my network. They are lovely people but, professionally speaking, they come from a different planet and offer me little, if any, value.

I looked hard at removing all the Canadians on the basis that they are largely pointless and would probably take their extermination in the decent, self-effacing manner I have come to admire and detest about this noble race.

But in the end, I came up with a better solution. I am good mates with a bunch of people from LinkedIn, the company. I deleted them all last week.

Hopefully the fuckers have no choice: either remove your fascist constraint on my network or never hear from me again.

Interbrand’s ‘iconic moves’ make a mockery of branding Interbrand’s essay ‘The End of Positioning’, published alongside its annual Best Global Brands list, is meant to demonstrate its brand mastery and strategic chops.

Instead it makes the team look like they need to go back to business school.

Apparently, things are moving too fast for brand positioning to be a thing anymore. Interbrand claims that “accelerating markets where customer expectations are perpetually moving ahead of business” make a strategic decision about what your brand is meant to represent completely pointless.

Worse still, in an age that is meant to be evidence-based, it is entirely devoid of any proper data to support this pronouncement.

There is an interesting debate about positioning and differentiation going on, and the degree to which brands can possess a perceived difference from alternatives in the market. But it’s a nuanced, evidence-led debate that Interbrand has clearly not

bothered to read up on.

Not content with killing off positioning, Interbrand would also like to introduce ‘iconic moves’ as the new strategic standard for brand building. I am not making this up.

Interbrand needs to look at the new sources of strategic brand consulting that make it look flaky and out of touch by comparison, because another report like this risks making it a laughing stock.

McDonald’s marketing deserves more praise It has become commonplace today to point to Burger King and its newsworthy CMO Fernando Machado, and bow down in marketing awe. But is Burger King engaged in famously effective marketing or marketing that is effectively famous?

Take the marketing stunt Machado is most famous for, the ‘Whopper Detour’.

Customers were asked to walk to their nearest McDonald’s, order a Whopper using the new BK app, and then head over to Burger King to collect it for one cent.

The campaign generated acres of publicity, but is it really

that effective to blur the lines between your main competitor and yourself, spending a fortune promoting the app and losing money on one cent burgers in the process?

While Machado has been picking up awards, samestore sales at US Burger King restaurants have been OK, but patchy. When you stand them next to arch-rival McDonald’s, a brand that many commentators have suggested has been outmarketed by Burger King, that performance looks even more sketchy.

For all its distinct lack of flash, McDonald’s marketing

is working. Recent analysis

by UBS concluded that “McDonald’s US brand strength remains robust, with McDonald’s outperforming peers across a number of important customer perception metrics”.

McDonald’s is better at marketing than Burger King, provided, of course, you see marketing as the connection with and impact on customers. If you prefer flashy tactical promotions and clever ideation that makes little sense other than to get marketers’ attention then Burger King is killing McDonald’s.

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OPINION

In marketing, looking at the past is, if not considered an industry faux pas, at the very least practically unheard of. We are much more concerned with what shiny new toys the future might bring than the teachings of yesteryear, so we are thus doomed to JP Hanson repeat mistakes that have already been made.

The way that big brands currently are approaching strategy is similar to how Victorians approached dieting. In 19th-century England, to be thin suddenly became fashionable.

The poor already were. Though one would imagine that it may have correlated with the downtrodden not being able to afford food, the thought apparently did not enter the collective mind of the elite. Instead, they came to the conclusion that the cause of the slim figures of the destitute had to be that they were ridden with diseases and parasites. And so, the tapeworm diet pill was created.

Brand category incumbents are repeating the mistake. They are falling over themselves to announce that they have become “officially agile” or are “acting like a startup”. Just as the Victorians failed to grasp why the poor were thin, the brands are failing to see why startups act like they do.

Small brands do direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales and ecommerce not because they necessarily want to – though they may – but because they practically have to. Few, if any, startups will be able to obtain distribution in traditional channels, and even if they did, they would not have the scale necessary to provide adequate supply. Nor can they afford TV advertising, so their media investments inevitably have to go elsewhere.

As the companies grow and mature, the key contextual factors change.

In order to maintain reach – be it through product, distribution, media or otherwise – the approaches do too. Nielsen data, tracking 120 DTC

Big brands mustn’t play the startups’ game

Colin Lewis

NPS is where customer insight starts, it’s not your ultimate goal

Lots of businesses use net promoter score (NPS), as well as a host of other customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. But are these scores any more use in predicting loyalty than reading tea leaves? It’s a seductive idea: one number to rule them all, which will tell us how we are doing.

We always want the ease of use of one measure, not the potential messiness of multiple measures. Humans love a ‘theory of everything’ that can cover all

bases. We know it is flawed but NPS is still useful for comparison as everybody else is using it. This has resulted in a cult of NPS, so we are all surrounded by people begging us to “rate our service”.

The strongest selling point of NPS is its simplicity. It is easy for people to understand the goal of having more promoters. And given the obsession with the idea that ‘what gets measured get managed, and what gets

companies, showed that the group’s TV ad spend increased to more than $2bn (£1.56bn) in 2018, up from $1.1bn in 2016. Similarly, key contextual factors explain why small brands have to continuously change the game to improve the odds of winning.

The bigger the brand, the more likely it is to win.

To improve the odds, the weaker player has to add dimensions to the game. The more dimensions a game has, the less certain the outcome, as the weaker player will force the stronger player into allocating resources more thinly, weakening its relative advantage.

This is where we find the strategic argument for agile.

Importantly, however, the decision to refuse to engage where the strong player has a power advantage is a strategic one. It thus inherently requires a strategic process and must factor in complexity, randomness and other similar market traits. Consequently, agile is not an excuse not to do strategy. In fact, agile requires one.

Large companies can deploy defensive-cover strategies to deal with the added dimensions, but that is not the same thing as taking a ‘hedonic’ route and covering everything. Resources, even for category leaders, are not endless. Nor is ‘pivoting to agile’, as is currently oft-argued for, a very clever solution. Much like how the Victorians saw the poor, the brands fail to recognise key contextual factors. The effort required to continuously change course is much larger for an aircraft carrier than a dinghy.

Instead, large companies should aim to be as anti-fragile as possible, acknowledge their weaknesses and play to their strengths to the extent possible. All of which should be considered in the strategic process.

So no, the answer to modern big-brand market challenges is not a default to startup mode. Doing so is the tapeworm diet of marketing and will do little else than eat you up from inside.

You can quote me on that.

JP Hanson is the chief executive of international strategic consultancy Rouser and a marketing keynote speaker

managed gets done’, NPS gets pushed to the front of the class.

However, contrary to the purveyors of ‘brand love’ and ‘brand purpose’, customers are not lying awake at night thinking about your brand. At a more practical level, NPS and CSAT scores do not measure whether your responder is a top customer, a one-off client or a person who just likes to rate things badly.

Nor are these scores consistent in terms of context.

Should the question be asked early in a customer’s journey or later? You will get a different result depending on the context.

Also, NPS does not tell you why a score is bad, or getting

better. There is no diagnosis, which is the starting point of defining strategy, as Mark Ritson of this parish rightly points out.

Talking to a couple of fellow marketers about NPS really proved to me how deep its adoption is. One service brand’s senior management are bonused on the score, simply because it correlates with one of the company’s key business drivers.

I’m not so sure; this industry has so many moving parts that ascribing the voice of the customer to NPS is fallacious.

When I’ve used NPS, I’ve quickly realised the consumer view of the industry drove perception more than I would have liked.

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They say a sign of madness is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I always wonder who ‘they’ are, but in this case I am not arguing with them. It is bonkers to expect a different outcome when the input is the same. And yet we as Tanya Joseph individuals and as marketers do it all the time. Worse still is when we do the same thing time and again and don’t even know what the outcome is – we just hope for the best.

Not us, we don’t do that, I hear you say. But can you honestly say that you evaluate the outcome of every campaign you undertake, even the quick and dirty ones? That you know the ROI on every piece of work you do? I cannot and I am obsessed by monitoring and evaluation (M&E).

I admit I used to take a more cavalier approach. A more ‘we had loads of positive feedback, let’s carry on’ stance. I might even have been guilty of once or twice taking a ‘nothing bad happened last time, let’s do it again’ position. But then some years ago I had a Damascene moment when I found myself telling my then boss to “trust me, it will work” about, as they would say in the civil service, a ‘brave’ intervention.

Seeing the somewhat sceptical response, I realised that if I wanted to be bold, to be brave, if I wanted to do impactful and outstanding work, I would need to prove its effects. I would need to prove it to the boss (or client), to the board, to internal and external stakeholders.

That means investing time and money in really understanding the problem you are seeking to solve, how you expect the intervention you are making to have an impact and how you are going to measure that impact. Of course, marcoms does not operate in a vacuum and there will be many factors that will influence your target audience; some in your control, many not.

The doyen of marketing measurement and author of Marketing and the Bottom Line, Tim Ambler, speaks to this point in a paper entitled ‘Assessing marketing performance: Don’t settle for a silver metric’. He agrees marketing performance can and should be evaluated.

However, he rails against the idea that there is a single number, financial or otherwise.

NPS and other measures are being asked to work too hard. It should be a starting point to prompt more insight; today, NPS is seen as the end point.

Tanya Joseph is a consultant and former Nationwide and Sport England director

MARKETOONIST.COM @MARKETOONIST

PHOTO: REHAN JAMIL

Measure as you go, not at the end

It is hard to design robust M&E tools, but if you want organisational buy-in, stakeholder support, more funding or – yes, I am saying it – to win awards, you need to put in the effort.

To be clear, this is a specialist gig, not a side project. You need to have someone on the team who knows what they are doing, and can help develop tools and work with your agencies to ensure your money is being spent effectively. You can delegate responsibility to an agency, but having in-house expertise will help guide the development of work as it is being designed and make sure it meets the varied needs of your stakeholders.

I would advocate thinking about M&E at the start of each piece of activity. There is no point setting campaign goals that can’t be measured.

I am also a big fan of having the M&E work run alongside campaign deployment so that you can assess the impact of activity in real time, or as close to it as possible. It allows you to finesse activity, dialling up and down, giving you the freedom (yes, freedom) to turn off activity that is not paying its way swiftly.

I realise I risk stating the obvious, but on more than one occasion I have worked with organisations that pride themselves on their M&E capabilities, which dutifully carry out comprehensive consideration of activity, but only when the activity is completed. As a result, their insightful reports went unread, sitting in the digital equivalent of the cupboard in the corner.

All of this comes at a cost. But M&E should not be an afterthought or done on the cheap. If you get it right, it will ultimately save you money, ensuring you can focus on the activity that is truly effective and don’t throw good money after bad on the things that fail to hit the mark.

So whether you are a client or an agency, make sure that you have set aside enough money to provide the evidence and insight you need to deliver impactful campaigns confidently and consistently. No need to cross your fingers.

Colin Lewis is CMO at OpenJaw Technologies NOVEMBER 2019 MARKETINGWEEK.COM 21

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Would you recommend NPS to a friend?

BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

TO S O ME, I T ’S PRACT I CA L A N D CO M P E L L IN G , TO OT HE RS RED U CT I V E A N D S I MP L IST IC , B UT I S N PS A T RU E GAU GE O F CU STOM E R S E N T I MEN T O R A SYMPTO M O F M A R K E T E R S’ O BS ES S I O N W I T H N U MBE R S? nsight into how consumers feel about your brand is marketing gold dust. Gaining the nuanced reasoning behind whether an experience satisfied or disappointed customers can mean the difference between a brand thriving or disappearing.

How realistic is it, then, that this rich insight can be reduced to a single number?

The fact is, marketers the world over are increasingly basing their business decisions and defining their company’s performance by their brand’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).

According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of earnings conference call transcripts, “net promoter” or “NPS” was cited more than 150 times by 50 S&P Index 500 companies last year.

Devised in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at consultancy Bain & Company, NPS measures how likely consumers are to recommend a company to their friends or family. Scores of nine or 10 signify loyal,

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enthusiastic fans or “promoters”; scores of seven or eight are deemed “passively satisfied”; while a score of six or less means the consumer is an unhappy customer or “detractor”. The overall score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

NPS is a good measure to help align your organisation around the customer, says Andrew Mann, head of insight and loyalty at Marks & Spencer, who sees a strong correlation between organisations with higher NPS and positive financial performance.

M&S uses NPS to measure customer sentiment at a total business level, store level and across its online business, linking it to long-term customer behaviour. The team then use the verbatims, or free text, as an in-depth measure of customer sentiment.

The retailer is rolling out a programme where, if a customer gives a detractor score, and has provided their permission to do so,

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the store manager will call them to talk through their frustrations.

While NPS is a good starter measure, it is important to think about customer lifetime value and consider how the score evolves to reflect a changing consumer base, says Mann.

“If you’re losing customers, your NPS could be going up because you are only left with more loyal customers, and if you’re growing customers you’re bringing less loyal customers in, so therefore your NPS will be lower,” he explains.

“That’s why you have to look at it over long periods, look at trends and split it out in terms of different loyalty levels to really understand what’s driving your activity.”

For Tom Goodwin, executive vicepresident of innovation at media agency Zenith, NPS is symptomatic of the current era of marketing – namely that, unless you have a number attached, people do not know how to feel about your marketing.

Goodwin’s first problem with NPS is the sampling. He argues that typically when brands send out surveys, the only people who respond are either extremely unhappy or extremely happy. Furthermore, he takes issue with the questions being asked, suggesting that they lack empathy by failing to appreciate how real people interact.

Crucially, Goodwin believes NPS scores fail to discover why someone feels a certain way about a brand and the context is what matters. For this reason, he believes a movement is building against NPS. “There is an acknowledgement that this is a big waste of time, but I don’t think that’s started to affect companies yet because they’re so desperate to have KPIs they can track,” says Goodwin.

DETERMINING RELEVANCE In principle, Yilmaz Erceyes, marketing director at Premier Foods, can see the attraction of a simple, quantitative measure of customer sentiment. A year ago, his team

looked at integrating an NPS system, but decided it was not a good fit for the business.

The swing in scoring from detractors to passives to promoters did not feel robust to Erceyes, who also noticed how people could be influenced by the line of questioning. He points out that if you ask consumers if they like your brand and they say yes, and then you follow up by asking ‘how likely are you to recommend?’, you generate a positive halo effect.

Premier Foods prefers to measure the strength of its brands in terms of brand saliency, as well as the breadth and depth of their distinctive assets. Rather than being focused on recommendations, it cares more about whether consumers can easily identify its brands among the clutter on the supermarket shelf.

“Our main driver of purchase is not who recommends what. It has some influence, but it is not the key driver of purchase,” Erceyes explains. “When people think about the category and consumption occasion, we want our brands to come to mind first.

While they are shopping, we want our brands to jump out, be easy to identify and have the right value equation.”

However, for a scale-up like online mortgage broker Habito, NPS is an important part of the mix.

The team measures customer sentiment after a person has first interacted with the brand and later when they have taken out a mortgage submission. The NPS score is then published internally every Friday as part of a weekly round-up, alongside Habito’s Trustpilot score.

“The idea is you’d see Trustpilot go up, NPS go up and brand awareness go up, and on that basis we would be able to say that marketing is having an impact,” explains CMO Abba Newbery.

“As our marketing is so responsive, we can make our NPS go down with marketing because we can generate too much business.

We get too busy and then the wait times are too much for people, so we have to be really careful to measure demand in advance.”

Habito is in the process of building an econometric model into which the team will feed the weekly NPS. By developing this new model, Newbery will be able to see if there is a correlation between NPS and an increase in base level sales.

The important thing is that NPS is understood by the wider organisation. The score itself is owned by Habito’s operations team and mortgage experts, who have created a Slack channel devoted to customer feedback and Trustpilot reviews open to everyone in the business.

EXTRAPOLATING THE MEANING Such is the popularity of NPS among boards and marketing departments that it is even being used to define staff bonuses, determine new product development and decide upon divestments and investments.

TSB measures its NPS at a bank and channel level on a monthly basis, as well as in the context of a three-month rolling average, which is reported to the executive team. All verbatim responses are codified using natural language processing, which determines whether the text is positive or negative.

Crucially, the bank has abolished sales targets for its staff. Bonuses are focused on delivering a great customer experience and

“There is an acknowledgement that this is a big waste of time, but I don’t think that’s started to affect companies yet” Tom Goodwin, Zenith

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NPS verbatim text is directly fed back to the ‘partners’ (as the bank refers to its employees), explains Justin Bell, head of marketing effectiveness and planning at TSB. “That means you’ve got partner-level performance management based on the NPS scores they achieve. Then you can pick up themes and which of your staff are getting it right, and which aren’t, so corrective action can be taken to help improve,” Bell explains.

“Branches run the rewards scheme and it’s based on NPS. That’s absolutely right for the customer, as a sales target produces a very different type of behaviour.”

As a brand’s success is multi-faceted, it could be divisive to rely on NPS as an internal bonus score, argues Helen Edwards, branding consultant and founder of Passionbrand. She can, however, see instances where uniting behind NPS could help people join forces.

“If a marketing team is trying to move its NPS score, it could bring people together because it forces you to work as a team to understand what’s driving NPS and not be siloed,” says Edwards.

She describes NPS as a useful “one measure” metric that provides a sense of how your consumers feel about your brand, but the skill comes in analysing how you got there and what makes a difference. Edwards believes marketers need to get out of the habit of looking at their NPS in relation to their specific category.

“When you look at the NPS for financial services, the score for the whole category is

“NPS as a measure is one tool, but the real tool is the ability to understand why you are delighting the customer” Andrew Mann, Marks & Spencer

pretty shocking, and then if you’re doing comparatively well you can delude yourself into thinking that’s really good, but of course consumers don’t look at it in that same way,” she notes.

Instead, Edwards advises marketers to take a multi-pronged approach that encompasses all the different proxies of customer sentiment, such as sales, web searches and internal staff satisfaction.

“What you really need to understand is why consumers are detractors or promoters and what’s working or not working, so you can build your strategy going forward. NPS needs to be tempered by other measures,” she says.

UNDERSTANDING WHY This opinion is shared by M&S’s Mann, who urges marketers to look at NPS as part of a holistic plan that takes into account customer growth measures, such as average basket size or purchase frequency.

“NPS as a measure is one tool, but the real tool is the ability to understand why you are delighting the customer and driving NPS, or whether you are making customers into detractors and therefore destroying brand equity,” Mann adds.

A single number will never be enough to express the intricacies of consumer satisfaction or disappointment, but by delving into the verbatim comments and pairing NPS with other holistic measurements of customer growth, marketers can build a much clearer picture.

NPS FOUNDER FRED REICHHELD ON ITS FUTURE In the 16 years since the launch of NPS, its founder, Fred Reichheld, has seen the system implemented with “extraordinary creativity”, while also being terribly misused.

He can appreciate how the practicality of using a single question to analyse consumer sentiment has appealed not only to marketers, but CEOs and CFOs, especially as customer experience climbs up the corporate agenda.

Despite NPS’s widespread use, Reichheld believes some concerns about the system are justified and argues that linking the score to bonus renumeration, for example, is “just asking for trouble”.

“There are way too many companies which obsess on the aggregate score as if it were magic and link bonuses to it, make decisions based on it and they don’t even know how to measure it,” argues Reichheld.

“By linking it to frontline bonuses, they’re

distorting the store experience itself by all the pleading, gaming, manipulating and selective sampling that goes on. The more you tie it to frontline incentives, the less useful it becomes in reporting the truth or for decision-making.”

Reichheld believes businesses have “just scratched the surface” in terms of how NPS can be linked to big data and customer behaviour.

He argues that, rather than obsessing about the score, marketers should dig into the verbatim comments and pair them with reported behaviours, retention and repurchase stats, usage rates, referral rates, share of wallet, online commentary and ratings.

The companies where executives read the hundreds of NPS verbatim comments are the ones Reichheld admires the most.

“They get together and decide what that means for changing priorities and responsibilities," he explains. “It’s not the guys who get a superficial measure of a very important idea and then try to link it in with other KPIs.”

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B R O U G H T TO Y O U B Y N E U S TA R

You hit your numbers, but did it work?

Efficiency and effectiveness need to coexist in marketing, and to achieve that requires having the right metrics and the tools to measure them

BY MARK GOODING

n this increasingly digital and data-centric marketing era, nearly every brand is chasing quantifiable results.

How do we typically measure marketing results? It varies, but we tend to love our KPIs in this business - particularly the ones that gauge performance. In the name of efficiency, we fixate on cost-per-acquisition measures, along with leads, site visits and the cost of every last click.

Unfortunately, I see first-hand that our analytics-obsessed, quarter-by-quarter mentality can cause too many brands to obsess over marketing performance-driven metrics (which, yes, are important) instead of effectiveness.

Too often, brands track what is easy to measure – or easy to manipulate – rather than which numbers are truly indicative of success. They view their KPIs in isolation, ignoring brand-oriented metrics such as purchase intent and favourability, while focusing solely on direct response figures that lend themselves to efficiency.

John Paul Getty summed up the problem well: “It’s no use sharpening the bit if you’re drilling in the wrong place.”

At its best, marketing should be about driving a company forward, promoting new products, projecting a new vision, reaching new consumers and telling a new story. It should be an active mission.

From our point of view, that mission is best achieved using a marketing intelligence approach. That sort of holistic look at marketing can shed light on the true influence of all customer touchpoints, leading to better conversations between a company’s various divisions and more constructive decision-making.

It is important to note that marketing represents only one part of most companies’ profit-driven strategies. Truly holistic thinking requires each division to be pulling every potential growth lever – not just relying on marketing to do the job. Ideally, the smartest brands are able to isolate the incremental impact of individual marketing channels and make intelligence-based decisions on where to spend. But not every marketer is there. In our

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experience, marketers can make one of two mistakes when contemplating what strategy makes sense to their brand: – They view effectiveness and efficiency as an either/or, when they are clearly complementary.

– They focus on efficiency before first figuring out their goals. They elect to optimise towards a KPI, without first making sure it’s the right one. Essentially, they do things out of order.

Let’s unpack each of these mistakes.

For starters, marketing is not an either/ or decision. There’s a common misperception we encounter: the more that a brand employs sophisticated modelling and attribution techniques, the less it thinks it needs or should care about brand measures.

This could not be further from reality.

If done correctly, predictive marketing intelligence is completely customised for each brand’s unique needs, goals and data availability - incorporating both performance and brand-lift data. In fact, you might be surprised how bespoke this process is.

That covers the big picture. Unfortunately, we often find that it’s in the on-the-ground tactics where effectiveness can end up being ignored in favour of efficiency.

One common challenge among big brands is simply a lack of organisational alignment on what metrics matter most. This can occur when companies take a bottom-up approach to tracking efficiency versus a top-down one.

In that scenario, each individual division defines success using its own KPIs (the ecommerce team cares about sales, the email team cares about leads, etc).

As William Bruce Cameron put it: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

On the flipside, CMOs can make their own biased decisions – sometimes because they lack an intimate understanding of how different ad vehicles work. For example, we’ve talked to several companies with a history of pouring money into paid search advertising at the end of any sub-par quarter.

This direction often comes straight from the top. If CEOs or CMOs see that search ads pay off with the most efficient ROI, the answer is often to just do more – discounting everything else the company is doing in marketing, and how that might also impact search behaviour.

The fact that there are conflicting points of view within a company about what success looks like can cause problems for brands. You can’t optimise towards efficiency if what you define as efficiency varies.

We see this play out all the time.

From our point of view, the ideal solution is for CMOs to think about and measure marketing in a holistic fashion. The best way to find out what’s really working is to start by adopting a marketing analytics solution that gives you an accurate and complete picture of performance effectiveness across channels.

That’s the necessary starting point to be able to then identify ways to optimise and improve efficiency within each channel.

Having the right tools and organisational alignment is essential to being as effective as possible, while still striving towards efficiency.

Mark Gooding is head of growth and client solutions, EMEA & APAC at Neustar MarketShare

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Why chasing ROI could kill your business

BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

R E TU RN ON INVEST MENT I S T HE ME T RI C O F CHO I CE FO R MA N Y M A R K E T E R S LOO K I NG TO DEFINE T HE S U CCES S , O R FA I LU RE, O F T HE I R LAT EST CA M PA IG N , BU T WHAT IF A FOCUS O N S HO RT - T E RM GA I N S I S J EO PA RD I SIN G T H E POTE N T I A L FO R F U T U RE GRO W T H? eturn on investment (ROI) has become close to an obsession in marketing in 2019. Finding a formula to demonstrate the effectiveness of your work is an extremely attractive prospect for marketers, but how do we define ROI? And moreover, is this desire to pin marketing’s success down to a single number damaging long-term brand growth?

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“There are lots of flaky, woolly and totally moronic definitions of ROI floating around in the world of marketing, but there can really only be one – which is the definition of ROI that an accountant would understand,” explains effectiveness expert and consultant, Peter Field.

“It’s an accountancy term and any attempt to use the term ROI on any of these flaky measures is completely misguided. ROI is simply what you get back, divided by what you put in. In marketing, it is how much extra cost did you generate as a result of investing in marketing.”

Field stresses that both he and his collaborator Les Binet, head of effectiveness

at Adam & Eve DDB, see ROI as an “incredibly dangerous metric”. He believes using ROI as a decision metric, as per the definition, is dangerous because ultimately the best way to maximise ROI is to spend less money.

This approach, Field argues, is leading businesses into marketing activity that generates “very mediocre improvements in trading, but at a minute cost”. These are typically short-term, digital, highly tactical initiatives that look fantastic in terms of ROI, but are not scaleable and do not drive long-term growth.

The rise of ROI as a metric of success is, in part, a response to the historical criticism that marketing was not being business-like

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enough, says Field. “Marketing was seen to be too concerned with flaky, woolly aspects of brand-building and not concerned enough with the hard business end goals. It’s a very understandable and laudable response to that pressure to say as a discipline we must get more business-like. Measuring and reporting ROI is an important and good thing to do in that context,” he says. “[The] danger is if you become too obsessed with it and you use it to make simplistic decisions about things, you end up only looking for low-hanging fruit. You go for the quick wins and easy sales in a market. You often go for incentivised sales, a promotion or a deal, all that tactical stuff.”

Field is clear that this approach might drive a quick sale at relatively low cost, but long-term growth is not about low-hanging fruit. Marketers, he says, should stop trying to maximise ROI and get back to a growthdriving agenda.

ACCEPTING RESPONSIBILITY Taking an ROI-focused approach is essentially marketers chasing the lowhanging fruit without watering the tree for the future, agrees Shane O Leary, strategy director at creative agency Rothco. He can see various reasons why ROI has become the default marketing metric, primarily because it is easy to measure.

“It’s a fairly intuitive rule-of-thumb metric that you don’t need a huge amount of data to calculate. That’s appealing to a

“If you become too obsessed with ROI and use it to make simplistic decisions about things, you end up really only looking for low-hanging fruit” Peter Field, consultant

modern marketer,” says O Leary. “Secondly, ROI is inherently short-term in how it’s measured and this fits very well into the default time horizon of modern marketing.

We’re all under immediate pressure and so the metrics we use tend to reflect that.”

Furthermore, ROI plays into the narrative that narrow, targeted campaigns, which use cheaper media, are always a better option than ‘wasting’ money on broad campaigns that reach a lot of people using more expensive media, O Leary explains.

With marketers looking for quick wins, the temptation is to engage in “scorched earth tactics”, he says, which means focusing on the bottom of the funnel to the detriment of everything else.

This being said, O Leary is clear that marketers should be careful not to dismiss

ROI, as it can provide a solid indication of the success or failure of a given piece of activity.

However, taken in isolation ROI can be very misleading.

“ROI gives a false picture because it excludes longer-term cash flows and brand equity. The best way to increase ROI is often to decrease your spend and thus reduce your overall profitability,” O Leary points out.

“That mentality results in optimising towards short-term efficiency and longterm stagnation. Taken to its logical conclusion a relentless focus on ROI can destroy your business.”

Marketers are responsible for this preoccupation with ROI admits Justin Bell, head of research, effectiveness and planning at TSB, who notes that a general preference for analysing metrics on a weekly, or even daily basis, has conditioned agencies to believe they need to constantly improve cost per acquisition.

He also points to the importance of marketing’s relationship with finance. Bell argues that marketers need to educate finance if they want the focus to shift away from reducing spend to drive up ROI. Finance departments are typically in-year focused, whereas marketing departments should be multi-year focused, which is where the tensions can arise.

“To help relations there has to be empathy,” says Bell. “Finance has to understand marketing and marketing needs to understand finance. The two need to meet each other half-way.”

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ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF SUCCESS To avoid being blinkered by a pursuit of ROI at all costs, marketers should focus their efforts on driving profitable growth. Yilmaz Erceyes, marketing director at Premier Foods, acknowledges that while there may be an element of marketing activity that requires an instant ROI, marketers cannot be myopically focused on short-term gains.

If a marketer wants to have a critical influence in their business and a seat at the top table, they need to have a good understanding of the short-term and long-term ROI of their activities, and then be able to link them to delivering sustainable, profitable growth, says Erceyes.

By taking personal responsibility for the results and carefully linking all marketing activity to the goals of the business, he has been able to forge a close relationship with the CFO, which has resulted in Premier Foods more than doubling its media investment compared with 2018.

“Admittedly, we are starting from a lower base but we are choosing to more than double the investment through discussions with our CFO and the board because we are able to link everything we do to delivering ROI,” he explains.

“In some cases where the activity doesn’t pay back fully within the investment year, we have a clear rationale of why it’s going to pay back in the mid- to long-term.”

Erceyes advises marketers not to link their key performance indicators directly to monetary ROI, but instead to align them closely to the business goals to show how they can deliver both short- and long-term profitable growth.

At online mortgage broker Habito, the business is run on OKRs – objectives and key results – which are shared across the business, with multiple employees working to achieve each result.

In marketing there are three core metrics: how much does an activity cost and how did it convert the customer, is Habito becoming the most well-recognised brand in mortgages, and how many returning customers can the team convert.

There are eight measurements against which the company is measured collectively, which are shared in an open document that the business consults every month.

Underneath that, CMO Abba Newbery has 15 separate metrics she is measured against, which are published and scored each month.

“We are entirely transparent,” she explains. “We also understand that we can’t hit all of our numbers all of the time.

Sometimes we are going to have to focus on other things and other things are going to go

“ROI is inherently short-term in how it's measured and this fits very well into the default time horizon of modern marketing” Shane O Leary, Rothco

by the wayside, but as long as that is measured, clarified and agreed, then that’s fine.”

EMBRACING COMPLEXITY Chasing a neat number that can define the success, or failure, of your marketing activity is an approach that fails to take into account the complexity of human behaviour, explains Helen Edwards, branding consultant and founder of Passionbrand.

She urges marketers to consider the wider competitive context and the impact this can have on their ROI, arguing that just because thinking in a holistic manner is challenging, it is no reason to oversimplify ROI. Instead, Edwards identifies a whole “package of success” that spans everything from ROI, net promoter score (NPS), brand equity and tracking scores to the general growth of the business, share within category and a brand’s ability to maintain a price premium.

She acknowledges that marketers are chasing success, because their careers rely on it and having a number to hand – such as ROI, a sales figure or NPS – is an easy shorthand for success. However, Edwards believes this is not helpful if marketers want to raise standards across the wider industry.

“Imagine marketing is like a cockpit with all these dials that you can play with. Which dial was it that helped the most in achieving that success? That’s helpful for the next marketer coming into the business,” she says.

“There’s a danger we’re too fixated on thinking ‘has this been successful?’, rather than seeking to understand what has made it successful or not, and how we can learn and improve what’s done the next time.”

Marketers who fixate on ROI are in danger of taking a blinkered approach, that prioritises short-term sales over long-term growth and fails to decipher what really drove success.

This kind of in-depth insight would help not only their business, but the wider industry, move forward.

PETER FIELD: MARKETERS NEED TO GET THE C-SUITE ON-SIDE Part of the shift away from an overreliance on ROI comes from getting senior leaders in the business to better understand the job of marketing.

Peter Field urges marketers to communicate with the CFO and CEO about why an obsessive pursuit of ROI is dangerous and explain why they are perfectly positioned to drive sustainable, long-term profitable growth. Having this conversation could make a big difference.

“We know the pressures of business from short-term investors are acute and it’s a courageous CEO who stands up to investors and says ‘look, we’re going to have one or two bad quarters, but no need to worry about that because we’re interested in years here and the long term’,” says Field.

These CEOs understand, for example, that a price premium cannot be built up and defended overnight.

“It has to be done gradually through the strength of the brand and creating that aura of desirability around a brand, which everybody knows in marketing you simply can’t do overnight. You can’t do it in a quarter or six months,” Field points out.

He credits the business leaders who have taken the “brave decision” to prioritise long-term profitable growth over short-term ROI. “It’s important that we arm them and continue to argue to CEOs that if you put quarterly targets on marketing, you kill its biggest contribution to the business, which is long-term growth.”

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Think long, learn fast for effective B2B marketing Some of today’s most successful B2B marketers have revealed their winning strategies – with honest insights about the speed, agility and timing of campaigns and warnings about the dangers of siloed environments

BY DAVID VAN SCHAICK

arketing Week and The Marketing Practice recently conducted research with 600 B2B marketers that showed a link between long-termism and effectiveness in B2B marketing. We found that those who have outperformed their competition over the past two years are twice as likely to think long-term.

But why is this? What is cause and what is correlation? And how can we structure our teams and behaviours to adapt?

We spoke to a few of the most successful B2B marketers we know and dug a little deeper into the research to try and find some answers.

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BRAND AND DIRECT RESPONSE, OR BRAND RESPONSE?

behind a long-term plan. And a long-term plan allows the business to keep moving; it means we don’t pause every January and have to reboot again,” she says.

Zoe Hominick, head of business marketing at O2, agrees: “The key is to balance long and short term,” she says. “It’s about having an agile approach, which you continue to iterate throughout the year.”

THINK LONG, LEARN FAST Here we see surfacing the magic formula that many agree drives effectiveness: long-term goal-setting and alignment, paired with agile approaches to test, learn and adapt.

Our research points to the effectiveness of this combination of long-term thinking and

fast learning. Outstanding marketers – those who outperformed their competition over the past two years – are more likely to let a campaign run for longer before deciding if it’s effective.

This suggests patience perhaps, but also points to a willingness to learn; to continuously evolve a programme rather than seeing it as something set in stone.

As Gemma Davies, director of global account-based marketing strategy at ServiceNow, points out, this adaptive approach allows marketers to build relevance: “This takes time. Nobody makes these decisions overnight, so by truly understanding what’s driving an organisation we can build relevance and, by building that relevance, we stand out.”

Most of the debate about the link between effectiveness and long-termism has been about the importance of brand building, thanks to the great work at the IPA by Les Binet and Peter Field. A lot of the focus has been on the power of emotive messaging to build memory structures and salience.

But this focus is creating a false dichotomy, between brand and sales activation, separating two things that are part of the same spectrum.

Field himself is keen to point out the importance of integration. In the book The Case for Creativity, he argues for “multichannel creativity” that delivers “the same long-term benefits” but also replicating that creativity “across multiple channels [to] capture…the short-term urgency”.

Rachel Lockwood, marketing director for SAS UK and Ireland, takes this idea to its logical conclusion. At SAS, the whole front office – marketing, sales and service – works to a ‘One Plan’ approach.

“We set goals that everybody shares.

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BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE MARKETING PRACTICE

Michael Cunningham, marketing director for Surface for Business at Microsoft, argues we need to balance being “super-surgical on the businesses and individuals you want to target” with the need to “come back a bit to ensure that awareness and purchase intent are built at the top of the funnel”.

IT’S ALL IN THE TIMING One often underestimated factor that may explain why longevity works is serendipity, the fortuitous – or perhaps deserved – upside of marketing activity that is ‘always-on’.

As Neil Dowling, VP of global integrated marketing at Genpact, puts it: “Your audience will tell you that they don’t care for your campaign timeframes. You have to think on a long-term basis and meet them where they are in the market.”

In recent times this idea has been framed as a buyer journey, and we’ve been encouraged by the likes of Sirius Decisions to map content to a series of stages on that journey. The journey metaphor lends itself to the idea that the buying process is linear, that one thing follows another from awareness to consideration to purchase. The reality is of course a lot more messy, random and, to be frank, interesting.

THE PRODUCTION LINE PROBLEM The wicked stepsister to the belief in a linear buyer journey is the way we have chunked up the funnel into functional teams to create a production line approach to marketing. Hence the need to navigate a creative agency in Soho, a social content agency in Shoreditch, a team doing performance marketing in Hyderabad, marketing operations in Texas, and so on.

This chunking up of the funnel by function not only makes things more complex, the more insidious consequence comes from perverse incentives.

Each functional team has its own measures and priorities. Digital marketers create conversions, field marketers generate leads, content marketers get off on engagement.

They all squirrel away, determinedly optimising their own specific KPIs. The assumption is that if you optimise every part, you will make the whole machine more effective. But what happens is efficiency in each silo but not effectiveness overall.

Conversions, leads and engagement improve, yes. But the results that really matter, like growing market share or

“By truly understanding what’s driving an organisation we can build relevance and, by building that relevance, we stand out” Gemma Davies, ServiceNow

profitability, remain not so much out of reach as not even on the radar.

In a siloed environment, it becomes very hard to accommodate the messy, human behaviour of the audience. We cannot easily respond to feedback, learn from what works outside discrete disciplines or take an audience-led approach to market.

STRATEGIC THINKING, AGILE WORKING The combination of long-term goal-setting and agile working suggested by Lockwood and Hominick gives us a direction of travel to overcome the problem of silos and improve effectiveness.

We need to unite skills and diverse opinions from across the front office. We need to break the tyranny of upward reporting on effectively meaningless KPIs and be brave enough to be measured on something that is not in our direct control.

If we give people the remit to think ‘gestalt’ and solve problems that lie in the way of selling more stuff, to look at the problem holistically, we will get better results.

David van Schaick is CMO and CDO at The Marketing Practice. To find out more go to themarketingpractice.com

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THE TRUTH ABOUT

ECONOMETRICS Annual Sales

sales = a1 base sales + a2 media + a3 availability ✓ ✓

POSSIBILITIES

Seasonality 10%

PROBABILITIES ✓ STRATEGIC UNDERSTANDING ✓

Macro economics 15%

Short-term activity 20%

DESIRE

Long-term activity 55%

x

EC O N O M E T RICS IS INCREAS I N GLY BE I N G U S ED BY MA J O R BRA N D S TO M E ASUR E TH E EFFECT IVENESS OF T HEI R S PE N D, W I T H S U PPO RT E RS CLA IM IN G IT H AS STOPPED M ARKE TING BEING S E EN AS A CO ST TO BE CU T. BU T A R E M A R K E T E R S TAK ING ITS USE TOO FA R W I T HO U T CO N S I D ERI N G I TS S HO RTC OM IN G S?

BY SARAH VIZARD

s a means of suggesting possibilities and probabilities rather than anything else, taken with enough grains of salt and applied with superlative common sense, [econometrics] won’t do much harm. That is how the method ought to be used.”

That’s the view of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who was notably critical of econometrics, questioning the inherent bias in both the data inputted and the conclusions drawn from it.

Yet this view of econometrics is not seen much in marketing. As budgets come under increased scrutiny and businesses look for costs to cut, econometrics is often viewed as the answer to marketers’ problems. That’s why major companies from Diageo to John

“A

“Econometrics is one of those capabilities that any marketing organisation, if it wants to be evidence-led, needs” Nick Milne, Samsung

Lewis, and Audi to Samsung, are using econometrics to try to quantify the link between marketing and media activities, consumer behaviour and, ultimately, sales.

“It is one of those capabilities that any marketing organisation, if it wants to be evidence-led in terms of investment and de-risking that investment, needs,” says Nick Milne, European consumer and marketing analytics director at Samsung Electronics.

Such is the proliferation of econometrics, that advertisers that do not have it are starting to feel left behind, as marketing effectiveness becomes an increasingly compelling subject.

“In the past five (and definitely 10) years, econometrics has gone from a nice add-on to

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a must-have for large advertisers,” says Gain Theory senior partner Matthew Chappell.

HOW BRANDS ARE USING ECONOMETRICS At Direct Line, econometrics is used to give a holistic view of how media investments are performing, enabling it to optimise and drive effectiveness. Most important for Direct Line, because of price sensitivity in insurance, are top-of-funnel customer leads.

“Over the past five years, we have built the sophistication of our models with a continuous feedback loop in order to become ever more effective. This can be hard yards, but is worth it for the impact it drives,” says Direct Line Group’s managing director of marketing and digital Mark Evans.

For global companies such as Samsung and Diageo, obtaining a consistent view on where and when to invest market-by-market is key.

Diageo has done this through its Catalyst software solution, but Samsung’s Milne admits achieving that consistency has been difficult across markets with different levels of marketing maturity.

“The challenge is, how to get the right blend of supporting a programme built at distance that then delivers what the markets need,” he says.

Marks & Spencer (M&S) is using econometrics in three main ways: strategic understanding of marketing activity; tactical understanding of campaigns; and understanding what competitors are doing.

“It is partly about demonstrating the value of marketing activity, but also about making investment choices within our budgets as well,” explains M&S clothing and home marketing director Nathan Ansell.

Econometrics is a relatively new addition to the clothing and home marketing team at M&S, though it has previously been used elsewhere in the business. Its use is part of wider organisational change aimed at helping the business make more databased decisions.

A customer insight team reports into the marketing function and within that there is a data science and analytics team which built the retailer’s econometrics model. For Ansell, having this in-house capability has been key to building a culture of effectiveness across the team.

“I want the team close to the data and understanding customer perceptions and behaviours. Outsourcing makes it feel like a project or a one-off,” he says.

Although Direct Line has brought someone in-house, it still works with a partner, Ebiquity. While Evans sees internal capability as crucial to translating outputs into the business and fostering buy-in, he believes outside help can “raise the bar”.

“We believe it is important to retain a high level of capability and curiosity internally, but this is complemented by the insight of a specialist agency that can see how best practice is evolving,” he adds.

PROVING MARKETING’S VALUE Evans describes how econometrics has given marketing “a currency” for commercial conversations with its board. And this, it seems, is key for marketers trying to show the real business impacts of marketing.

“Media spend is now viewed as an investment rather than a cost and we have moved toward the back of the cuts queue whenever a cost challenge arises,” explains Evans.

At Audi, econometrics has been able to show how soft brand metrics such as ‘desire’ can impact a business.

The car marque has shown that if it can move desire by 10 percentage points, this leads to a 3.7% uplift in sales. It can then look at the factors that drive desire and communicate those in its advertising.

“We can say to hard-nosed business people that we are looking at ROI, but feeding that is desire, a soft, fluffy metric for what people feel about your brand,” explains BBH managing partner Will Lion, who works on the Audi account.

“We couldn’t have got to the bravery of creative work in this building if it wasn’t for [econometrics] and a way to have a hard number against it.”

LIMITATIONS OF ECONOMETRICS Given all this, it is not difficult to see why econometrics has struck a chord. It takes time, resources and effort to build an effective econometrics model, but once a marketer has it in place, it seems the impact is only positive.

So why aren’t all brands using it? For starters, econometrics are “slow” compared to tools such as Google Analytics, says Anang Pandya, senior director of advisory services at martech company Neustar.

Typically, econometrics are run quarterly, though Direct Line says it has fine-tuned its model to the extent it can run a full-remodel in just under a month.

It is also costly. Founder of analytics consultancy Diametrical, Andrew Willshire, recommends spending 5% of overall marketing budget doing evaluation work. If a budget is already small, that doesn’t leave enough to justify the investment in econometrics, though new technology and automation are bringing down the cost.

Critics also call out the complexity of econometrics as a reason why correlations are difficult to find, giving a perception of

“Econometrics is just one input. You have to look in the round, with a healthy dose of gut instinct” Nathan Ansell, M&S

precision when media is anything but. There is also the issue of incorrect causality. As marketing professor Byron Sharp points out, both retailers’ advertising spend and sales go up at Christmas, but how much of that increase is down to advertising?

“If you have the wrong data, the results will not be reliable and you can’t then use it to justify spend,” adds Pandya.

Models are also inherently subjective, with decisions having to be made on what data to put in and what to leave out, and what model to use. Analysts might pick the model that best fits historic data, but if data changes in the future it might not be the best fit.

“An important thing for a model is you have to understand all the factors influencing the dependent variable,” says Willshire.

“Some factors are intangible and turning these factors into data is [more difficult].”

There are also limitations on granularity and depth, according to Chappell. Brands cannot, for example, use econometrics to understand the difference between display ads on The Guardian versus The Telegraph.

What is important for marketers is not to put all their eggs in the econometrics basket.

The best marketers are using a broad range of measurement techniques and analysing all of those to get to the best outcomes.

“We would always advise using a few methodologies together,” adds Chappell.

Sharpe recommends marketers consider a mixture of media and copy experiments, analysis of single-source data and simply their own judgement.

At M&S, econometrics is used alongside other measurement approaches, such as brand tracking, attribution modelling and net promoter score (NPS).

And a test-and-learn approach is taken, meaning econometrics are used as a guide, but any decisions based on them are tested before being implemented.

“You need a balanced scorecard approach,” says Ansell. “Econometrics is just one input. You have to look in the round, with a healthy dose of gut instinct, to help inform better creativity.”

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The new measures of business success As attitudes change, brands old and new are changing the way they measure corporate success, with non-financial KPIs such as diversity and care of the ecosystem becoming an increasingly important part of the mix

BY ELLEN HAMMETT

rom the Chinese Wei Dynasty rating the performance of the royal family in the 3rd century; to a 13th-century Venetian merchant sailing vessel monitoring the efficiency of buying and selling goods; to a 19th-century Scottish miller putting different coloured wooden cubes on workers’ desks: humans have been measuring performance for millennia.

It was not until the 20th century that businesses started to develop and implement much more sophisticated metrics and frameworks, which are now more commonly known as key performance indicators (KPIs).

Most brands have been governed by metrics linked to their financial performance and customer growth. But this is now starting to change.

Increasingly, organisations are judging their success on metrics that are not directly

F

“If you are looking at and understanding the value return of your business against stakeholders, it will be more diversified than a business that only has one ultimate KPI – delivering value back to shareholders” Alex Weller, Patagonia

linked to traditional business performance, such as sustainability, diversity and employee wellbeing. Some are even looking to put a KPI on ‘hope’.

Mars has recently made sustainability a key business measure with metrics as “detailed and sophisticated” as they would be with regard to its profit and loss.

“It is very much built into our business operations,” says Mars’ vice president of corporate affairs, strategic initiatives and sustainability, Andy Pharoah.

“It is a business objective for us. It is our ownership objectives for the company. It’s a shareholder objective. We have [our business objectives] around strong financial growth, being well-positioned for future growth, having a positive impact on society and being a trusted partner in society.”

Just like Uber has done with diversity, which it now uses as a “key metric” to

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evaluate the job performance of senior leaders, Mars has started basing the remuneration of its top executives on carbon emissions.

“This is absolutely core to how we do business,” Pharoah adds. “It’s not an optional extra choice we have decided to make.”

Unilever’s Unstereotype initiative, meanwhile, encompasses a range of metrics that “marry” traditional business metrics with other KPIs. Now, the FMCG giant is starting to put some numbers behind the business case for doing more progressive advertising.

According to Unilever, Kantar data shows unstereotypical and progressive advertising creates 37% more ‘branded impact’ and a 28% increase in purchase intent.

“This is useful for making the economic case for our work,” says Unilever’s global executive vice-president of marketing, and chief diversity and inclusion officer, Aline Santos.

“Unilever has always considered how businesses can be truly purpose-driven and have a positive impact on society, looking beyond traditional business performance to other criteria that should also be used to measure performance and success. For example, we look closely at our employee inclusivity and satisfaction as a measure of business success.”

ECO-STAKEHOLDERS Brands such as Patagonia and Allbirds are B Corp certified and therefore held to a different set of standards. B Corps are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment.

As a result, non-business performancerelated KPIs have been enshrined into their business models from the start.

Patagonia takes a “multi-stakeholder point of view”, which means it treats the environment, ecosystem and the planet as a key stakeholder, on top of its customers, employees and workers in its supply chain.

“If you are looking at and understanding the value return of your business against all of those stakeholders, it ultimately will be more different and diversified than a business that only has one ultimate KPI – that is delivering value back to its shareholders,” says Patagonia’s marketing director, Alex Weller.

“Our business is first and foremost a business; it’s a full-profit business that has an environmental mission at its heart. What we are really focused on is knowing and measuring the impact of what we make and how much of it we make. On a basic level, it’s about keeping a close eye on how we move around, how we travel and being honest with ourselves about the impact that we make.”

From the sheep on its farms and the light bulbs in its offices to its employees’ commutes, sustainable shoe brand Allbirds also keeps a close eye on measuring its environmental impact. So much so that it treats carbon as a line item on its balance sheet: the less CO2 it emits, the fewer offsets it has to buy.

“Which essentially means we’re imposing an internal carbon tax on ourselves,” says Julie Channing, vice-president of marketing.

“As a business, we approach this by measuring, offsetting and then reducing our impact on the environment. It incentivises us to invest in better material innovations and it also provides a financial incentive to continue to reduce our footprint.”

LIFECYCLE ANALYSIS As with Patagonia, Allbirds tracks its environmental impact through its own lifecycle analysis tool that measures every part of the business. Both brands say these KPIs are fairly easy to update and measure.

The challenge, however, is that there is no industry standard for brands to measure their sustainability efforts against.

Purpose-driven media company Change Incorporated, meanwhile, is thinking about how it can use ‘hope’ as a measure for having a positive impact on the environment.

The Vice-owned company’s business model means it undertakes behavioural change ‘missions’ that are funded by a third party.

Each of these is editorially independent from its funder and assigned its own single KPI. It is currently in the first year of a threeyear mission with tobacco giant Philip Morris

International to persuade people to “quit cigarettes”. The aim is to increase the number of people attempting to quit and show the difference between those who have been exposed to Change Incorporated content and advertising, and those who have not.

This is measured through a combination of smoking statistics collected by the Office for National Statistics, NHS and a monthly smoking study, as well as a smoking panel that tracks the different exposure responses.

Change Incorporated’s climate goals are underpinned by something called the ‘hope gap’, which refers to an increased feeling of despair and despondency when it comes to the climate.

According to its global publisher, Dominic Shales, this could be measured by looking at the difference between those who feel hopeful and those who feel anxious.

“There is a correlation between feeling hopeful and taking positive action. That could be recycling, better transport choices, switching the light off,” he says.

“Sustainability is a business objective for us. It is our ownership objectives for the company. It’s a shareholder objective” Andy Pharoah, Mars

MARS HAS RECENTLY MADE SUSTAINABILITY A KEY BUSINESS MEASURE

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ALLBIRDS KEEPS A CLOSE EYE ON MEASURING ITS ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

“What we are looking to do is change at a population level these feelings of hopelessness and increase these feelings of hopefulness, measuring the impact that has on positive behaviours in all those different areas.”

Change Incorporated believes it could break down the component parts of climate change and have separate funded missions to drive each area.

They would then have specific behaviour change targets underpinning the ‘hope gap’ KPI.

A CALL TO WALL STREET Environmental and social performance indicators have, for many years, either been towards the bottom of many shareholders’ list of priorities or the preserve of a small number of ethical investors.

But as the link between good corporate social responsibility and financial performance grows stronger, so too is the interest from Wall Street.

“As business ethics, sustainability and wellbeing become more important to the consumers of goods and services sectors, so the importance of these more varied and sometimes subjective factors becomes more important,” says Clive Black, head of

“Ethical, environmental sustainability is going to be a central part of how businesses are run, an existential part of how businesses are run and a central part of the investment piece” Clive Black, Shore Capital

research at independent investment group, Shore Capital.

“Indeed where, say, sustainability and wellbeing come together today, it can be a source of material investor interest, such as meat-free protein in the US, which then brings with it greater scrutiny. For consumer brands, therefore, where they sit relative to these environmental and social factors is an increasingly important feature of both the market and investor narrative.”

If good business ethics are not motivation enough, research by Oxford University shows that good sustainability and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) practices correlate with lower operating costs, better profitability and superior share price performance.

Meanwhile, the Financial Analysts’ Journal says earnings no longer reflect changes in corporate value and are thus an inadequate driver of investment analysis. This means there is much business value to be found beyond the balance sheet.

The challenge is that this kind of value is less easy to measure and report. Whereas financial reporting standards have been developed over hundreds of years, nonfinancial business measures are still in their infancy and lack sufficient frameworks and standards.

A lack of comparable metrics, as well as the need to improve the reliability and transparency of this data, means they do not currently give investors the same level of assurance as financial data.

A MARKETING GIMMICK? Cynics have argued that ESG investing is a marketing gimmick and more of a ‘feel-good investment’ than a genuine driver of change.

However, Black does not believe there will be a place for businesses that fail to invest in ESG in the future.

“A journey is starting around a number of elements of society, be that the environment, animal welfare, labour rights or health and wellbeing. The genie is out the pot and you don’t put the genie back in,” he states.

“Ethical, environmental sustainability is going to be a central part of how businesses are run, an existential part of how businesses are run and a central part of the investment piece.”

Going forward, brands must work hard to be as robust with their environmental, social and corporate governance KPIs as they are with their financial KPIs. This will be key to keeping investor interest and proving cynics wrong.

At the end of the day, businesses will have no success to measure if they have no planet to measure it on.

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How Greggs got customers to see it with new eyes

BY SARAH VIZARD

GR EGGS CEO ROG ER WHITES I D E CLA I MS PE RCEPT I O N S O F MA RKE T IN G W E E K ’S B R AN D OF T HE YEAR ARE S HI F T I N G FRO M SAU SAGE RO LL S A N D ST IC K Y B UN S TO C O FFEE, WRAPS AND SALA D S , AS I T LO O K S TO CO N V I N CE MO RE P EOP L E T H AT GREGGS I S A BRA N D FO R T HE M

hen asked to think about Greggs, most consumers have typically thought of sausage rolls, sticky buns and steak bakes. That’s a perception that Greggs has spent the past six years trying to shift as it looks to food-onthe-go – and in particular the coffee, breakfast and healthy eating sectors – to drive a brand and business turnaround.

It is a transformation that has seen huge success. In its most recent quarter, total sales were up 12.4% year on year, while like-forlikes increased 7.4%. And for the six months to

W

“A lot of people would go ‘I know about Greggs but it’s just not for me’” Roger Whiteside, CEO

29 June, pre-tax profits hit £36.7m, up from £24.1m in the same period a year ago.

That is a far cry from the almost 30% drop experienced in the first half of 2013, when pre-tax profits were just £11.5m. And it is a turnaround that helped Greggs win Brand of the Year – a category sponsored by YouGov – at the Marketing Week Masters awards in October.

One of the issues the company faced was in marketing. Awareness of the brand was “massively high” but dropped off when it came to consideration.

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“A lot of people would go ‘I know about Greggs but it’s just not for me’,” explains CEO Roger Whiteside.

“We couldn’t lose our reputation for things that most people knew us for – sausage rolls, sweet bakery. But we had to try and establish a reputation alongside that for other things that were growing in demand. A reputation alongside bakery for healthy eating is part of the strategic objective.”

With that in mind, the launch of Greggs’ vegan sausage roll was key. It was meant to be a one-off product released to coincide with Veganuary, but its popularity meant it became a menu staple.

HOW MARKETING ‘THINKS DIFFERENTLY’ While the vegan sausage roll no doubt tapped into the growing desire for vegan options, the marketing around its launch propelled its sales. With Greggs’ scale, it knew it could make vegan food mainstream, hence the idea to model its introduction on an iPhone launch and try to make it a “cultural moment”.

Greggs’ marketing director, Hannah Squirrell, believes that key to its success was the team’s ability to “think differently”.

“We have a pretty small marketing budget and it forces you to look at ways to cut through and do things differently,” she explains. “We just thought we really needed to make this launch the biggest and best we have ever done.”

Part of Whiteside’s strategy when he took over as CEO in 2013 was to give marketing a bigger role at the company. When he joined, marketing sat under the trading function and was “a little group of people doing their best” in a company that didn’t prioritise their role. Squirrell was hired in 2016 to “bring in skills we didn’t

GREGGS UNVEILED ITS VEGAN SAUSAGE ROLL WITH AN IPHONE-STYLE LAUNCH

have” and now has a role that incorporates the customer, marketing and insight.

“The role is about representing the customer at every point and decision-making process in the business,” she says. “The team structure matches the customer journey and that’s why it’s successful.”

Although Whiteside admits most people didn’t believe Greggs could change brand perceptions, sales tell another story. He claims Greggs is number two in the UK for breakfast, number three for coffee and has overtaken Tesco for sandwiches at lunch.

“Can you achieve a brand reappraisal for things that are not bakery but can sit in juxtaposition next to bakery? Most people say you can’t but I’m saying you can,” he explains. “[Coffee, breakfast and sandwiches] aren’t the bakery items you would normally associate with ‘tell me what you think about Greggs’; they all say sausage rolls. That’s changing. That is what the tracking and everything else shows.”

JUST AT THE STARTING LINE Having shifted the business and customer perceptions from bakery to food-on-the-go

transformed the back end of the business, and with sales and profits on the rise, you could be forgiven for thinking Whiteside and Squirrell’s jobs are done. They would disagree.

“I see this as simply getting us to the starting line because the plan goes beyond this to the next phase, which is that Greggs becomes multichannel and seamlessly integrated from a customer experience perspective,” says Whiteside.

It is already running trials for delivery and click-and-collect, with electronic kiosks to come next and plans to link the customer experience through its loyalty programme.

Greggs also wants to move into the hot food and evening sectors, which Whiteside describes Greggs as being “in the foothills of”, and to reconsider what it takes to be a successful food business as tastes diversify.

“We have a pretty small marketing budget and it forces you to look at ways to cut through and do things differently” Hannah Squirrell, marketing director

“That’s the bit we’ve all been gearing up for. It’s a really exciting prospect because this market is on the cusp of major disruption,” he concludes.

“We can see that delivery and click-andcollect will disrupt food-on-the-go and we need to be part of that movement.”

HOW GREGGS BECAME BRAND OF THE YEAR Greggs’ triumph as the Marketing Week Masters Brand of the Year was based not just on the opinions of the expert judging panel, but also data collated by YouGov from its BrandIndex tool, which informed the judging process.

The data combined metrics ranging from ad awareness and buzz to value and quality perceptions.

According to YouGov’s UK head of data products, Amelia Brophy, the brands that featured on the Brand of the Year shortlist performed well on both the short-term metrics and those

related to long-term brand equity.

Greggs stood out, however, and at one point last year, one in five Britons recalled seeing a Greggs ad in the previous two weeks.

Greggs also “harnessed a trend” with the launch of its vegan sausage roll, she told the Festival of Marketing in October. “We have data that says four in 10 Brits are actively looking to reduce their meat consumption, so it really spoke to that group of people and made Greggs perform in a way that we really didn’t expect them to.”

Greggs’ win also pleased TSB CMO Pete Markey, one of the senior marketers on the Masters judging panel, and a regular Greggs customer.

“They know their audience really well... but they’ve innovated. The vegan sausage roll is just one aspect.

If you go into a Greggs, the customer experience has been enhanced,” he said. “They have also been quite clever and edgy with knowing where their brand can go and how to push that brand.”

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3

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Questions I wish I had asked

BY MOLLY FLEMING

AS CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER OF MARS, BERTA DE PABLOS IS DEDICATED TO ELIMINATING STEREOTYPES, BUT AS A JUNIOR MARKETER, ONE SENIOR LEADER’S ADVICE TO GET RID OF HER ACCENT AND ADAPT HER LEADERSHIP STYLE NEARLY CHANGED THE COURSE OF HER CAREER

W

hen looking back at Berta de Pablos’ high-flying career, largely spent climbing the ranks at Mars, you would assume that the now chief growth officer’s journey was faultless.

However, when asked what question could have changed the trajectory of her career, one singular interaction sticks out.

As a junior marketer, one senior leader told her that in order to succeed she would have to change her behaviour, accent and dress sense. De Pablos, desperate to do well, did her best to comply.

“For a long period of time I became a diluted and mechanic version of myself,” she explains.

Sparked by a conversation with a junior member of staff, de Pablos eventually realised being herself was enough, although she wished she had the courage to challenge the opinion of her colleague all those years ago.

Courage is a theme that comes up constantly with de Pablos, from her first job,

where she didn’t believe in herself, to taking the leap after six years in FMCG at Mars to luxury goods - eventually becoming CMO of Lacoste.

“In order to be learning you always have to be outside your comfort zone,” she explains. “If you are not scared that means you are not learning enough and if you are not learning enough, at some point you are going to become irrelevant.”

Now, as the top marketer of an FMCG giant, de Pablos dedicates much of her time to instilling courage in others, from mentoring junior marketers and working on the cross-brand Unstereotype Alliance, which is dedicated to removing gender-based stereotypes from advertising, to ensuring others are never held back in the same way she was.

1. Why was I hired?

When de Pablos started her first job out of university, at Mars, she was sure she had

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on your learning agility and your personality’,” she recalls.

From that experience she learned a valuable lesson - always ask for feedback.

“Always ask for feedback to help you grow, but also ask for feedback that makes you shine because sometimes you have those strengths in you and knowing what the company values are and why they hired you in the first place will give you confidence,” de Pablos adds.

don’t we stop the launch 2. Why of this product?

been hired by mistake. “I remember I was in the interview process with another lady and when we met I realised her studies were much more appropriate. Plus, I joined in France and she spoke French and I didn’t. I basically felt that she was much more qualified for the job than I was,” she recalls.

When the company rang to tell her she was hired, de Pablos was convinced they had really meant the other candidate.

“I was very surprised and I truly and honestly thought that they had got it wrong, so I started thinking that one day they will come and say ‘We are really sorry, Berta, we got this wrong and it was the other person that we wanted’,” she explains.

But the months passed, de Pablos continued to deliver and - despite eventually posing the question - she wished she had asked why they had hired her, sooner.

“When I asked the question they said: ‘Yes that other person was more qualified and yes she spoke French, but in Mars we hire based

Innovation or ‘out-of-the-box’ campaigns are often lauded in marketing but rarely do we acknowledge how hard it is to point out when something isn’t working.

De Pablos “didn’t want to look silly” in front of her boss when she had an inkling that a new chocolate assortment box in Russia wasn’t going to land, and didn’t know how to articulate it.

Admitting the product was not working would have been humiliating, but ultimately could have prevented a worse experience.

“Yes, it is not the right thing for the brand plan next year. Yes, it is going to generate chaos and yes, I am not going to look very clever and it is going to show that I failed, but it is about being courageous,” says de Pablos.

“Sometimes you need more courage to stop things than to move things [forward].”

She also believes she was not asking the right questions earlier on - namely what could go wrong.

“I surrounded myself with people who were telling me the project was great, that everything was fantastic and the concept for the marketing was good.

“Of course, you are thinking you have a great thing on your hands and push the launch,” de Pablos states.

“The product failed in the market and it failed for things that if I had asked before, I wouldn’t have launched that product.”

you tell me how, with 3. Can my personality and accent, I can become a leader in this company?

Today, company leaders are keen to embrace diversity. Whether it is diversity of thought, country-origin, ethnicity, accent, gender or sexuality, the majority of brands are looking to build more varied workforces.

However, when de Pablos was starting out this wasn’t the case and she found herself being told her gender and accent were a hindrance, not an asset.

“I just started being myself. I said ‘so be it and if they don’t like me maybe I am not in the right job or the right company’” “When I started working as a really junior marketer, one of my seniors told me that he believed I was not going to make it with the company. I was in the UK and he told me my strong Spanish accent reminded him of vacation,” she recalls.

“He also said my spontaneity and the way I addressed things lacked the gravitas [needed to meet] the standards of the company and he felt it was very difficult to take me seriously.

That shot me in the stomach at 25.”

De Pablos wished she had challenged this view, but instead took his advice and “spoke with less passion, stopped moving my hands.”

She notes: “I wish I could have asked other people for opinions instead of relying on just one, but at the time he was my boss, so I didn’t. As a junior marketer it was my first company, so I thought my boss was always right and he was probably a representation of what everybody thought.”

Five years later a junior changed her perspective. “I was discussing her objectives and she looked at me and said: ‘Berta I really like you, but can I tell you something? Why do you always speak so weird?’,” she recalls.

“She told me I was so robotic and it was very difficult to understand what I feel. Then I thought ‘Oh my god. This person is seeing me as unauthentic’.”

It provided the “wake up call” she needed and being more sure of herself with age, de Pablos decided “enough is enough”.

“It was just too hard to control and so I just started being myself. I said ‘so be it and if they don’t like me maybe I am not in the right job or the right company’. The reality is they actually preferred me and I shouldn’t have let one person shape who I was,” she states.

Ultimately, de Pablos believes this senior member of staff had a “stereotypical view” of female leaders and what was needed to succeed. Now as a top marketer at Mars she is committed to ending stereotypes altogether.

“I don’t want any other young women to be told how to be a leader just because someone thought there is only one way to behave at work.”

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CAREER DEVELOPMENT

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT FOR THE NEXT CHALLENGE, KATIE EVANS DEVELOPED A LOVE FOR THE FAST-PACED WORLD OF FMCG THAT TOOK HER FROM HEINZ TO KRISPY KREME, BEFORE SHE LAUNCHED HER OWN FASHION BUSINESS AND THEN RETURNED TO THE CORPORATE WORLD AS MARKETING DIRECTOR AT BURGER KING UK

STORY OF MY CV

Katie Evans

BY MOLLY FLEMING

atie Evans likes to be challenged. Whether it was leading marketing on Gourmet Burger Kitchen’s brand turnaround or setting up her own business, the marketing director of Burger King UK likes to jump in at the deep end. “I don’t think I have taken on a role where I haven’t been slightly daunted by the challenge,” Evans explains.

Having spent an Erasmus year studying in France, Evans was convinced she wanted to work in the Parisian luxury goods market. However, after joining the graduate programme at global data science company Dunnhumby and working on brands such as Weetabix and Warburtons, she developed a love for FMCG. Two years later, and desperate to work brand-side, Evans began applying for jobs, despite being told by recruiters she would fail.

“Every recruiter I spoke to told me it would be hard as I wasn’t a ‘classically trained marketer’.

They said ‘you’ll have to start at the bottom again’, which I couldn’t really accept,” she explains.

Her determination paid off, landing Evans a brand manager role at food giant Heinz. The hierarchical nature of the business proved a stark contrast to the empowering environment at Dunnhumby. Six months later, Evans attained the kind of influence

K

she craved by becoming head of marketing at Krispy Kreme UK. “It was the first time I could fully manage everything from PR to creative and it was a very small team, but we had the opportunity to be hands-on,” she says.

Charged with working out how Krispy Kreme could sit on the shelves everywhere from Tesco to Harrods, the role offered her room to grow in a challenging, yet supportive, environment.

Five years later, Evans left to lead the turnaround at Gourmet Burger Kitchen, going live with a bold campaign celebrating the power of meat.

By 2016, she decided she had gained enough experience to fulfil her dream of establishing her own pyjama company, which Evans admits “reads like a strange move”. It soon became clear that the reality was not what she imagined and after two years she went back into marketing at Burger King. “I am not too proud to keep going without considering other factors and I think it’s important that I made that decision as quickly as I could to go back to what I know,” she explains.

Ultimately, Evans has “no regrets” and is grateful for every experience. “You learn from the things you take on, and whether you succeed or fail they are all learnings that you take into your next role – and I am still learning. I’ve still got a lot to learn.”

2004-2006

2007

ACCOUNT MANAGER

BRAND MANAGER HEINZ

DUNNHUMBY

Dunnhumby Falling in love with FMCG “When I look back at it now, it was such a good grounding in the role of data in consumer insights and decision making. I was client-facing, but my role was to sell in targeted media and consumer insight analysis across new product development and category analysis.

“It was relatively early days in Dunnhumby, with about 150 people working there when I joined. It was an amazing culture and atmosphere, and a brilliant place to work.”

Heinz Handling a hierarchy “It was interesting and a great opportunity, but having come from Dunnhumby, where we were very empowered and had a lot of influence, the transition to Heinz was quite a change.

“It was very hierarchical and while there was some excellent process, it wasn’t fast-moving enough for me. There were a lot of layers in decision making and I missed having the ability to influence the brand discussion.”

2007-2012

HEAD OF MARKETING KRISPY KREME UK

Krispy Kreme UK In at the deep end “I remember sitting [in the interview] thinking: how can I do this role? I have never actually managed a PR agency before. I had that conversation with marketing director Judith Denby and she was very supportive. They put a lot of faith in me, which was empowering and gave me confidence.

“Judith then went on maternity leave, so I had the opportunity to step up. It was a stretch for me, but it was great in terms of experience from brand collaborations to new product development.”

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Burger King UK Teaming up “Our former GBK CEO, Alasdair Murdoch, left to head up Burger King and we had a conversation about the role. I hadn’t worked in the quick service restaurant space before, but I know his working style and we work well together.

“I had recently had a baby and had lots going on, but it was absolutely the right decision. I am working in a team that has priorities outside of work and I have joined a working culture that respects that.”

2012-2016

2016-2018

2018-PRESENT

MARKETING DIRECTOR

FOUNDER

MARKETING DIRECTOR

GOURMET BURGER KITCHEN

Gourmet Burger Kitchen Turnaround project “I knew I was entering into a brand turnaround and it was really exciting. GBK was hugely dependent on discounting, with 40% of our business coming from offers. My role was to reinforce our brand positioning and stand for something.

“I felt a huge amount of pressure. We were looking at sales performance week-by-week and I had not been exposed to that before. However, we had a lot of fun along the way and were opening up a lot of restaurants.

“By the time I left, the majority of discount was going through the app or student app, which represented about 10% of our customer base.”

HOMECOMING

BURGER KING UK

Homecoming Going it alone “I had always wanted to develop my own brand and I felt there was a gap in the market for pyjamas that looked good and were still comfortable.

“I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I learned very quickly that it isn’t easy in the fashion retail space.

There is a lot of competition and it requires a huge amount of investment to get noticed.

“Although being your own boss is hugely attractive, I am much better with a team of people around me. That’s where I draw my energy – from the pace and passion of being part of a team.”

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BY CHARLOTTE ROGERS

From getting the Spice Girls to cut the ribbon at its debut event to pioneering an integrated approach to marketing, the launch of Channel 5 was all about challenging norms and channelling creativity

T

he opportunity to launch the fifth, and final, terrestrial TV brand was too good an opportunity to miss for David Brook, who left The Guardian after six years to become director of marketing and communications at Channel 5 in 1996.

“It was pretty much a blank sheet of paper, which was attractive,” he explains.

“If you like launching new products, which I do, then to be in at the start was great when it’s packing cases and all to play for.”

Brook had eight months to craft a launch campaign and recruit a team across marketing, PR, research and strategy, as well as convincing the general public they needed a fifth TV channel.

He immediately saw an opportunity for marketing to define the direction of Channel 5. Initial research found a gap in the market between mainstream brands such as the BBC and ITV, which were not perceived as modern, and edgy Channel 4, which was not seen as mainstream.

And so Channel 5’s modern mainstream positioning was born, with the objective of delivering a younger, 16-to-34-year-old audience. With the positioning nailed down, Brook assembled an integrated task force to deliver on the launch strategy. Known as Team Five, the group spanned PR, research, creative, media buying and visual identity.

Working on the creative was Mother, which was founded with Channel 5 as its first client. The agency’s co-founder Robert Saville was working at ad agency GGT at the time, which had a conflict of interest and so couldn’t pitch for the Channel 5 business.

“Robert decided it was the right time to leave and set up the agency, and the rest is history,” says Brook.

While Mother led on the creative, Wolff Olins was tasked with devising a highimpact visual identity for the billboard awareness campaign aimed at getting people to retune their TVs three months ahead of the switch-on.

Doug Hamilton, then Wolff Olins’s creative director, recalls the team running with the modern mainstream concept and the idea of being fresh, irreverent and novel, while also becoming the “new normal”.

To articulate this contemporary feeling, Wolff Olins went for bright, Pop Art-style coloured bars to visualise the bars used to tune TV sets. They added to this the tag line “Give Me Five” and a large numerical five.

“Back then, you had a tuning bar in TVs to calibrate the density of black and white and get the correct colour. There were seven vertical bars and we changed it to five, because this was the fifth channel,” explains Hamilton.

“We presented the idea on cardboard, it was the days before everything had to be on iMac computers. We had a big cut-out TV shape and we put the visuals on other bits of cardboard. When everyone saw Give Me Five, the tuning bars and the number five it was like ‘yes’ all at once.”

THE FAB FIVE Once the Give Me Five campaign had been live for three months, Brook knew the team needed to raise the bar when the channel was ready to go live. His idea? A partnership with the Spice Girls.

No money changed hands for the Spice Girls’ involvement because their manager, Simon Fuller, saw the benefit of the group being associated with the last big terrestrial TV channel launch.

“He saw we were targeting the same market the Spice Girls were,” says Brook.

“Like the Wolff Olins-created ‘Pop Art’ identity, the Spice Girls were an expression of that identity. There were five of them and they had the same feeling of freshness.”

Planning the launch in an integrated manner meant the team could get the Spice Girls to contribute across all aspects of the marketing mix. They even cut the ribbon at the Channel 5 launch event at London’s Marble Arch, which made all the newspapers’ front pages.

The group also recorded sketches, written by Mother’s Saville, nominating their favourite Channel 5 programme, and recorded their own version of Manfred Mann’s song ‘5-4-3-2-1’, which was the first thing to air on Channel 5 when it went live on 30 March 1997.

Looking back, Brook believes the original Channel 5 team created something of great value by setting themselves the ambition of launching a television brand, as opposed to just a channel. Not only does he believe the modern mainstream positioning has stood the test of time, but so has the Team Five approach to marketing.

“The idea of integrated marketing is something I then took into Channel 4 and that was something I do feel proud of because it did work,” says Brook. “We were able to apply the same philosophy to the launch of Big Brother on Channel 4.”

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