Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, everyone, it's Elena.
B (0:01)
This week you're going to hear a.
A (0:03)
Special episode of the Marketing Architects podcast. A couple of weeks ago, Angela spoke with Dale Harrison at Brand Week. They did a talk on reach and how reach is the most powerful force in marketing. How that insight shapes how we buy, plan and measure tv. There's a lot of great marketing effectiveness knowledge in here. It's short and sweet and I hope you enjoy it. And I also hope that you have a very happy holiday and safe times with your friends and family this week. Enjoy Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.
C (0:43)
I want to start with this idea of reach primacy, which is a bit of a contrarian view. And the idea is that reach, not creative, is the strong force in marketing. One of the things we know is that the level of ongoing reach is the metric that corresponds most closely with share of market. The idea is that no one buys a brand that they don't remember or that they don't know. And so a lot of what we have to do in marketing is to reach as large a fraction of future buyers as possible. If we think about campaign effectiveness, it's really driven by two factors. It's how effective the creative is at persuading a single individual times the number of people that are are exposed to that creative. And one of the things that we see is that there is much broader ability to expand reach than there is to expand the creative effectiveness. So, you know, a 2x better creative is not going to beat 100x greater reach. And you know, this is one of the challenges with smaller brands is the struggle to be able to reach a larger part of their of their future buyers. And one of the things we can see, there's a notion called the surface area of effectiveness, and that's this idea that we've got a certain level of creative effectiveness. How persuasive the ad is times the number of people we can put it in front of. And one of the things that we see is that with large reach, even small improvements in creative effectiveness have a magnified effect simply because we're spreading that out over many more potential future buyers. Where if you're a smaller brand or you have smaller reach, even significantly large improvements in creative effectiveness tend to have little impact simply because they're reaching so few people. And so this is really an argument for the importance of trying to achieve as broad a reach as possible. Now, again, broad reach doesn't mean everyone on the planet. It means the largest fraction of potential future buyers. And then this leads to this idea of reach consistency. Reach is not a one and done. Reach is an ongoing process where we need to continuously reach people over time. And the reason why is there's this notion called brand recall at purchase. So brand awareness only has commercial value when the buyer comes in market. So the buyer's not in market. And we know that, you know from the 95, 5 rule that most buyers are not in market at any given point in time. And so that level of brand awareness is only useful when they come in market and they're able to recall you at the time of purchase. And what this, this brand recaller purchase does is it puts us in the consideration set. And we know that about 90% of final purchase decisions come from that initial consideration set. So, you know, a buyer comes in market, they typically will have a small number, two, three, four, maybe five brands that will come to market. And it doesn't mean that they won't discover something along the way once they're in market. But typically, let me say, most of the buying, 90% of the final purchase decision comes with that initial consideration set. So it becomes very important that we be able to reach these buyers well ahead of when they come in market. But the problem here is brand memory. Reach is what is implanting the brand memories or refreshing the brand memories. But those memories are being forgotten. And so we're in this kind of dynamic equilibrium between reach and forgetting. So this is one of the reasons that reach is not a number, reach is a rate. So it doesn't make sense to talk about reaching your entire market. Because if most of those people have forgotten before they come in market, it doesn't matter that you reached them a year ago or two years ago. So what matters is that you reach them often enough and consistently enough that when they do come in market, you're going to be able to come to mind. And again, they don't have to be top of mind. What matters is to simply come to mind. Because once you come to mind, you then have a reasonably good chance of being able to be chosen. Reach is an ongoing process where you're attempting to reach buyers and plan to refresh those memories. But at the same time, you're fighting against the fact that they're forgetting and the forgetting is occurring continuously. If anyone has looked at MMM studies, the concept of Adstock is essentially capturing and measuring this rate of forgetting that occurs. And if you've seen ad stock curves, what you realize is that rate of forgetting occurs relatively quickly. I Mean within a matter of depending on the product and the product category. You know, it's a matter of days or weeks or a few months. Which is why we need to continuously be trying to achieve relatively broad reach with continuous always on campaigns. So what you end up with is this kind of dynamic equilibrium between your rate of reach and your rate of forgetting. The problem is forgetting is constant. So whether we're reaching the audience or not, the audience is constantly forgetting. So in order to fight against that, the reach also needs to be constant. This is really the kind of the underlying rationale for this idea of always on broad reach. And again, broad doesn't mean everyone who can fog a mirror. Broad means your market, your potential future buyers. But the more people you can reach that are potential buyers, the more likely they will will still have the ability to recall your brand at the time they come in market. And for B2B, this becomes really important because the inter purchase periods tend to be very long. For many B2B products, the Inter purchase period can run years. And so that ability to continuously be in front of people so that you're in their head at the time that they come in market becomes critical. And there are actually some ways to model the dynamics of this process between implanting and refreshing memories and, and then people losing memories. There are specific dynamic models that have been developed that look at this. And one of the things that you see is that as you start to do brand marketing, what you're going to do is you're going to reach an equilibrium where some fraction of the market at any given time will be able to recall your brand as they come in market. Higher level of reach means a larger fraction of the market. A lower level of reach means a lower level. And there's a time lag. There takes time to be able to to reach enough people that you've got a high level of recall and then to be able to continuously re reach them before they forget. This is an example of one such model. So we're looking at four brands here. They're all starting from essentially zero and they're all marketing at different levels of reach based on their market share and essentially based on their budget. And then what this shows is a point where they turn off marketing for a period of time. You see that brand recall start to drop back down and then they turn it back on and it comes back up. So there are time delays on this. You can't instantaneously be able to have the entire market recognize you and remember you. It takes some period of time to reach enough people to have an effect.