‘It’s worse than not advertising’ – how your TV ads can boost your rivals
It sounds perverse, but what if your competitors are nabbing all the goodwill from your big-budget campaign? It’s a phenomenon that is startlingly common, as Neuro-Insight’s Richard Silberstein explained at Mumbrella’s MSIX conference.
Professor Richard Silberstein is the world’s foremost authority on using neuroscience to optimise advertising. It’s a sector of market research he practically invented after pioneering a form of measuring brain reaction called Steady State Topography (SST) in the mid-1980s. Yet, a few years ago, a business approached him with a discovery he’d never encountered.
The client, a financial services provider, found that its sales bizarrely increased when its competitor, ING, ran big-budget promotional campaigns. Was this just a coincidence, they asked, or was this something they could capitalise on?
Silberstein and his team set to work.
Neuro-Insight provides neuroscience-based market research to businesses. Headquartered in Melbourne, it has offices in US, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
But I love creating ads where the brand logo appears only at the end, after the punchline. Sure, customers are wired to look away while they laugh, or to disengage because the story is over – but hey, that’s the approach we have always taken!
TV advertising that can sometimes help competitors. See http://www.originplan.com – link at very end of ‘Author’ section – reveals the marketing & advertising tracking technique invented by Unilever Australia in the early sixties. There were instances when content or copy points for Brand A were sometimes associated with Brand B. Sometimes helping competition.
Surely this is an example par excellence of spending money to discover something we already knew? OF COURSE the brand should be baked into the narrative. OF COURSE you want to maximise attribution by having the brand appear early and/or directly associated with the key message. This is basic, basic stuff.
While we’re at it, an old NZ client of mine used to note that every time his main competitor advertised an offer, his own brand’s sales improved. He attributed this to the offer stimulating purchasing behaviour in the category, and then customers undertaking some simple comparison shopping. By matching his brand’s offer to the advertised one, bingo, his sales improved markedly.
As a creative, I welcome the introduction of neuroscientific studies into marketing. But I’d hope it goes a deal deeper than confirming basic (and proven) marketing principles when it does.
Please do some research before commenting on something you have no clue about
How about reading a ‘neuroscientific study’ before acting like you know it all about the topic
Ah, Roger. I’ve only just come across your curiously affronted reply. You’re some kind of professor or doctor in the area then, I can presume?
My point was not, if you read my comment again, that I already know all there is to know about neuroscience – far from it. Rather, that what this article does is use neuroscience to confirm some already proven marketing principles. A bit like using the latest high-tech solar technology to tell me it’s sunny.
The MLC example, for instance, is really, really basic. Say the brand name more often than once, include the logo with the call to action … it’s all stuff that’s been known by decent marketers for decades. Neuroscience is likely a powerful addition to the marketer’s armoury, but the summary and examples given here could (and indeed would) be done by any decent marketing practitioner without it.
It’s very easy to say “of course” when what seems logical was pointed out to you but the fact remains this phenomenon occurs constantly and most would argue that sometimes justifiably so. So even your “OF COURSEs” are not always ideal.
OF COURSE plenty of marketers are fully aware their campaign will expand the category and activity within the category before they launch.
What I concur most with is the in effectiveness of focus groups for the reasons stated. The media evolutionary road to failure is littered with ideas that tested well.
Perhaps agreeing with his findings and view was what made it entertaining for me. I’d like to see the nuances between cultures.
Luke,
Thanks for the comments.
The role of neuroscience in this context was not to simply affirm what good marketers already know (although, scientific rigor is a good thing), but to help marketers pinpoint the problem spots in their creative and make recommendations on how best to overcome this. An advert may tick all the right boxes – integrated branding through the narrative and branding with the call to action and still underperform in market.
This was the situation in MLC’s case, where the branding was in very close proximity to both the tagline and call-to-action and yet the advert still underperformed in market (in the video labelled Test 1). Using SST, we were able to identify that when the grandfather and grandson being to walk off screen there was a strong reduction in brain activity (specifically the memory encoding measure) that ultimately impacted the brand being appropriately linked back to the narrative. As mentioned in the article, the revised advert based on our recommendations had a huge impact in market, which is why I should add, the campaign subsequently won a Silver Effie – hardly ‘basic’ I would argue.
Thanks,
Shaun