Fiona Blades - Mesh Archives - GRBN.ORG

Hold onto to your purpose rather than your brand ads

GRBN_News — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 06:26:57 +0000

Only a week ago the disaster facing CMOs was the sadness of not being able to air a new campaign that may have taken months to create. The care with which the idea had been nurtured, the negotiations to get the best talent, the budget secured from the C-suite, all were about to be lost. All that hard work, gone.

Marketers have now moved from grief to action over the last week as they grapple with the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis.

“Meeting the needs of your customer at a profit”, the famous definition of marketing from Professor Philip Kotler, needed rethinking. What good is a highly paid celeb in your ad enticing you to buy your product if your customers are losing their jobs and can’t pay to keep their homes? What are the needs of your customers now? And should you be thinking about short term profit or lifetime value?

For the last few years, talking about brand purpose has been in vogue. Last week was a great test for brands to stay true to their purpose and values. How could these values guide decision-making?

On Tuesday, March 10^th, TSB, NatWest/RBS and Lloyds Bank in the UK announced they would help customers affected by coronavirus with mortgage payment holidays and other measures. These were the urgent needs that many banking customers had. Yet in the US, it was Thursday, March 19^th before announcements were seen that Bank of America would help customers to defer mortgage payments if they were impacted by coronavirus.

MESH Experience, the company I founded, is a small data, analytics, and insight business. We work with big banks and other very influential clients in companies that can make a difference to the economy and the way society feels. We added new questions to our UK retail banking study and by Thursday discovered that 49% of people felt that UK banks were doing enough to help customers during the coronavirus pandemic and 51% felt they were not. Let’s see how this sentiment changes in the coming weeks.

Never has there been a more important time to live up to a company’s purpose! And we have seen some wonderful examples from companies big and small over the last week.

Hyundai and Genesis offered up to 6 months of car payments for those losing their jobs due to coronavirus on March 14^th. By March 16^th Ford pulled its national vehicle ads in the US and offered customers help with re-payments with Ford Credit Support. And by March 19^th Ford and General Motors were offering to make much-needed ventilators. It is noticeable that Hyundai offered support in 2009, during the recession when owners could return their financed purchases or leases within one year if they lost their jobs, which created considerable goodwill. Ford’s advertising shows how the company has helped during two world wars by creating planes and tanks. Acting quickly, decisively and with a true sense of purpose can build long term trust.

LVMH acted quickly and on March 15^th announced that it would be switching perfume production to hand sanitizer production. Beer manufacturers, including Brew Dog in the UK, also began making hand sanitizers on March 18^th. Meanwhile, Guinness, a brand that has been around for 260 years, acknowledged that St Patrick’s Day 2020 was going to be “different” in its brand ads. Quite rightly, it pointed out the importance of being with people you care about and hit the right notes with a touch of humor. This weekend, Olive Garden TV advertising was suggesting to order online for those dishes you might be craving.

Spectrum Comcast and Cox Communications offered free internet for students now working from home. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile are waiving late payment fees, increasing Wi-Fi hotspots or providing higher mobile data for their customers. In the UK the BBC is providing a whole host of content offerings applicable for the times – not simply coronavirus updates, but educational programming for children, Health Check UK Live for people in isolation and virtual church services.

Personal communication via email has become much more important. Those from companies severely hit by this crisis stood out to me for their customer focus, including some from Ed Bastian at Delta Air Lines and one from Arne Sorenson at Marriott International. However, with Delta owning 51% of Virgin Atlantic, it was disappointing to see 8,500 employees being asked to take 8 weeks’ unpaid leave. On a positive note some retailers, also severely hit, like Levi’s and Apple are reassuring their employees that they will be paid even if their stores are closed.

This last week was pivotal. We need to quickly overcome the grief attached to well-laid plans for new campaigns and move on to action, guided by our values and purpose, in helping customers and society in the way that each of us, however big or small, can do best.

Fiona Blades

President & Chief Experience Officer, MESH Experience

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Calling for Nominations for this year’s Ginny Valentine Awards for bravery in Market Research

GRBN_News — Sun, 25 Mar 2018 23:33:40 +0000

Since 2011 market researchers have been winning a different kind of award, one for bravery rather than cleverness or profitability. In conference after conference and forum after forum, speakers have spoken of the importance of researchers not going with the flow but being willing to step out against the flow. Stan Sthanunathan, Vice President of Unilever made it one of his 10 commandments of market research. If you know someone who has shown bravery in the course of research, visit www.ginnyvalentine.com to nominate them. A distinguished panel of judges from client and supply side will pick the winners with awards given out in Atlanta in June at IIeX North America. The Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage awards were set up in memory of one of the most distinguished researchers in the UK who pioneered the use of semiotics in the marketing community against the odds. It took her decades. It seemed fitting to remember Ginny with an award celebrating persistence, risk taking, or raw physical courage. Now in its 7^th year we have a gallery of remarkable winners whose stories have inspired their peers. The Ginny Valentine awards are open to clients and suppliers, to junior as well as senior researchers. Our youngest ever winner was a teenage interviewer – sadly honoured posthumously after she was shot by the Taliban for conducting in home surveys. One of our most senior had worked an entire career to put conjoint analysis at the heart of the quantitative research industry worldwide. Once an entire client team won because of the way their funding of start-ups galvanized the way the whole industry thought. Last year’s winners included Pravin Shekhar who founded a research company predominantly staffed by those with a disability. Then there was the research conference organizer and speaker who redesigned a conference session around the needs of a dementia sufferer so she could tell her story without distraction and distress. Oh and the research team who conducted a very tricky study somewhere in the Middle East – but we aren’t allowed to tell you where. It’s complicated.. We have never been able to codify exactly what bravery means- every year the judges find a fresh example. Clients who risk their careers to buy off-roster. Or cancel a tracking study they no longer believe in even if that means starting from scratch without a benchmark to work from. The Ginny Valentine award is the only way we know to recognize such guts and gumption. But you can’t win without a nomination. So get nominating. You CAN nominate yourself! And hurry up – because there are only a few weeks to go. Perhaps the best thing about the Ginny Valentine awards is not just that they are helping to make researchers braver, but better at noticing and applauding bravery when we see it. So time to get started. Are you sure you haven’t seen a single piece of bravery in the last 12 months? We bet you have. Fiona Blades / John Griffiths, founders

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How is advertising working today?

GRBN_News — Tue, 02 May 2017 06:50:47 +0000

Fascinating new insight from the Advertising Research Foundation at seminar with MESH clients in London MESH Experience is one of many contributors to the ARF’s $1 million study and we were honoured that Horst Stipp, PhD and Manuel Garcia-Garcia, PhD, joined a select group of our clients in London to showcase findings from this ground-breaking work. How would our UK audience react? We started with insight that had our audience nodding:

Advertising across multiple platforms delivers incremental ROI, with digital and TV providing a kicker effect of plus 40% over other combinations. In the UK, data also indicates that with up to 6 platforms we see incremental ROI.
75% of ad effectiveness derives from the quality of the creative.

Then for more provocative insight from Manuel:

Unified creative strategy across platforms enhances ad memorability, with a 60% impact if the content is customised to the platform. Sounds sensible. Yet only 38% of campaigns currently do this. Why is that? We all know we should be creating unified campaigns and tailoring content to the medium. As the debate unfolded we found the practical difficulties of getting different parts of an organisation focussed on achieving this.
Customised mobile video ads deliver greater effectiveness than repurposed content across viewability (+53%), UX (+39%) and engagement (+49%). So don’t expect to put your TV ad onto mobile and hope that it will work effectively! Horst posited that in future we might be making ads for mobile and repurposing for TV. This makes a lot of sense because MESH sees how much more impactful the same TV ad is when seen on the cinema screen.

The final section of the seminar revolved around context. The London audience knows context is king! What the ARF brought was new evidence of WHY context is so important. The ARF context effects model has two key processes that trigger effects: Attention Transfer and Priming/Halo Effects. But what about Low Involvement Processing? Maybe the world has moved on? The research from the ARF was pretty compelling! The more attention paid to Content, Platform, Device and Media Brand the more likely the ad is to perform better. Nielsen shows a very strong correlation (0.81) between programme engagement and ad recall. So if you are highly engaged with Game of Thrones you are more likely to pay attention to the ads. Heval Ceylan-Gilchrist, MESH, had recently found engagement levels for service brands increase from 6pm onwards, particularly with posters seen during the commute when people have more time to absorb communication.

Aligning advertising with content can provide dramatic improvement in performance. And ads in break impact too. The ARF results highlight the dangers of programmatic advertising which privileges serving an ad to a particular person over valuing their context.

If brands are to create compelling experiences for people and avoid ad blocking, we have a lot to learn. Sessions like this (see video http://bit.ly/2oEbU4A) help to share best practice as people’s consumption behaviour and the media landscape evolves. Fiona Blades CEO MESH Experience

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Acknowledging bravery in market research raises the bar

GRBN_News — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 09:00:14 +0000

Market Research and “bravery” are two words rarely associated with each other. Being brave suggests risk-taking, and, so often, market research is used to reduce risk in the marketing industry. Sometimes, however, we need to take bold steps, to put our money where our mouths are, and to fight for causes in which we believe. In memory of the late Virginia Valentine who fearlessly brought semiotic analysis to our industry, the Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Award acknowledges bravery in our industry from individuals, teams and organisations. Now in its 5^th year, every award is unique. When John Griffiths and I initially conceived the awards, we realised that the stories we heard defied categorical boundaries. How could fieldworkers’ deaths in Iraq while attempting to share on-the-ground data compare to entrepreneurs risking their houses as collateral or a client succeeding through off-roster innovation? Choosing a Grand Prix “winner” felt inappropriate. Instead, we sought to share these stories of courage to inspire others in our industry. And inspire us they have. In 2016, there were 6 awards:

Ilka Kuhagen, of IKM GmbH for fearless qualitative experimentation
Daniel Fazekas, of Bakamo Social for doing the right thing
Keri Dooley, of The Garage Group for redefining market research
Yasmin-Jane Scott of Razor Research for making inclusivity her professional mission
Annie Pettit, Peanut Labs (Ca), for calling the industry to account on diversity
The Unilever CMI team, for making bravery acceptable within the industry

In today’s world, innovation in market research is of paramount importance. However, large organisations often hesitate to embrace such changes due to the fear of failure. Under the stewardship of Marie Wolfe, Director for Research Innovation, Unilever has created a culture of innovation by engaging with over 400 start-ups and conducting over 180 pilots. While this might be difficult and risky, the industry cannot move forward without taking on such challenges. Daniel Fazekas of Bakamo Social uncovered some uncomfortable truths that surfaced in social media upon President Putin’s announcement to build a new nuclear power station in Hungary. Working with Greenpeace, Daniel managed to change the administration’s plan by using social media listening as a force for good and maybe saving lives. Yasmin Scott joined the market research industry with a brave spirit. While proud of her working-class background and mixed heritage, she has admitted to feeling like an occasionally lonely wolf in an industry of classically educated, middle-class and predominantly white colleagues. She made it her mission to educate her colleagues at Razor Research about the importance of weaving inclusivity throughout their work. She has also voiced her clarion call externally, an admirable and often challenging feat in a world where this topic can be seen as a haranguing or politically loaded mission. The GBRN challenges us to change our industry for the better. Is it too much effort when we have so much to do? Remember the value of befriending start-ups, challenging Putin and educating our community on inclusivity, and dive in! Fiona Blades President and Chief Experience Officer, MESH Experience Fiona set up MESH Experience in 2006, following a career in marketing and advertising. With offices in New York, London and Sao Paulo, MESH helps clients, like Delta Air Lines, to make smarter investment decisions taking an Experience Driven Marketing approach. Fiona co-founded the Ginny Valentine Badge of Courage Awards.

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