How Research Simplifies the Complex
COVID has complicated life in a million ways, but it’s also simplified it — and as Steve Jobs, the master of simplicity said, “simple can be harder than complex”. We explore how marketers are navigating this simpler yet difficult moment with a data-driven approach.
For seasoned marketers, a diverse mix of platforms channels was a standard practice essential for creating a marketing plan that reaches a diverse set of consumers. But with the onset of COVID, some of those channels evaporated one after the other — live events, gone. In store, pointless. OOH, rarely seen. The options are slimmer than they’ve been in decades, and unlike ever before, live almost exclusively online.
This simplified ecosystem, with just one medium and a handful of platforms, presents a new challenge for brands as they transform their strategy and spend. Online, trends move faster, attention spans are shorter, and there are fewer alternatives to offset underperforming campaigns, heightening the need for a constantly updated pulse on their consumers, what they’re responding to, and how it varies across segments.
So how are brands leveraging research to simplify this complex new world? It has three parts — simplicity, speed, and scale.
Simplicity
As Stagwell Managing Partner Mark Penn notes, there is TOO much data — so what do you do with it? Data is only as valuable as the story it can tell and the storytellers that can properly leverage it — otherwise, it is a distraction from the task at hand. Action-oriented research can do some of this legwork up front, structuring the data to tell you what you need to do and how.
The National Research Group’s The Great Refresh proves the power of sophisticated, specific survey design. By providing varied but relevant response options and asking about both short and long-term expectations, the data paint a fuller picture of the audience segments, and gives brands a playbook for immediate responses as well as long-term planning.
While a brand without this information might have been fooled by general trend data into believing that all younger consumers would be attracted by fitness and workout content, this shows us that while Gen Z would most likely engage with cooking and food content, Millennials are more interested in social video calls. Without upfront investments in insightful research, these microtrends within populations can get lost in the sea of data generated by our increased online activity.
Speed
The move to online has pushed consumer sentiment to move with the speed of the internet. Previously shaped by our social interactions, surroundings, and other influences, what’s “up” and “down” is driven by our rapid-fire online interactions. Keeping track of where your consumers “live” online is easier said than done — platforms wax and wane in popularity with a subtle rhythm almost hard to detect unless you are part of the deciding cohort; on top of that, the massive disruption to routine caused fundamental changes in consumption habits once reliable.
At the Harris Poll, teams are increasingly seeing the timeline for relevance shorten as social and public health stories drive the news cycle and trickle into the sensibilities and preferences of consumers. An excellent real-time example was the speed and scale with which the racial equality movement entered the conversation for brands and consumers across the country.
As Andrew Strickman, CMO of realtor.com told us in Episode 8 of Back to the Future with The Stagwell Group, adaptability based on these changing dynamics has been essential to their marketing response:
“We threw our timelines out the window. We transitioned from thinking about things as campaigns to thinking about it as more of a rolling messaging platform where we had to be very cognizant of what the nation was facing at any given moment, whether it was the pandemic or racial unrest and social justice. We had to be ready to respond as well as be prepared for what the next step was.” — Andrew Strickman, realtor.com
Scale
Finally, research provides marketers and advertisers a powerful tool to unpack one of the most complex parts of moving online — a geographically diverse audience. For many brands, particularly smaller ones moving online for the first time, a digital footprint means that they are expanding their audience beyond those that can visit physical locations. Even for larger brands, geographically diverse audiences mean that complex online trends and on-the-ground needs are evolving at different rates, and with different subtleties across markets. Smart research design parces these differences, identifying the slivers where segments overlap and diverge to narrow in on opportunities for differentiated marketing that is market-specific and highly relevant.
“We’re in big cities and small towns, so the interest level in different issues is wide and varies greatly. So we have to be sure we are listening to what our employees say, and how we can drive what’s happening locally. It’s not a top-down approach- we’re delivering specifically what is needed in that community” — Kenny Thompson, PepsiCo
The opportunity this creates for marketers is remarkable, and one not available without audiences uniformly online across the country and around the world.
Ask any marketer, and they’ll say their job has gotten more complicated over the last five months, despite their entire ecosystem collapsing onto a screen. But when they stay true to core marketing research principles — simplicity, speed and scale — every brand has the capacity to navigate even the most complex of situations in our “simplified” world.
The Stagwell Group is a digital-first marketing company serving clients with simplicity and speed at scale. To learn more, head to www.stagwellgroup.com, or visit us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube.
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