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MESH Experience is a marketing effectiveness consultancy working with Fortune 500 companies like LG Electronics. The company focuses on measuring the whole customer experience to help forward-thinking organizations to make better marcoms, CX, and path-to-purchase investment decisions. MESH Experience’s unique Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) aims to help clients see the world through the customers’ eyes. The company collects and analyses data in real-time across the full spectrum of what people experience about a brand - all paid, owned, and earned touchpoints – allowing brands and campaigns to be set in their proper context. 
 
 
MESH Experience is a founding partner of Crater Lake & Co, launched in 2021 to help clients make sense of all their measurement data by creating a Clear Performance Narrative.
 
 
As a women-owned business, MESH is certified by WEConnect International and in June 2022, MESH launched Diversity Unlimited, a collective of award-winning insight consultancies, to provide clients with a one-stop-shop for buying insight from diverse companies.

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We measure the whole customer experience to help forward-thinking organizations make better marcoms, CX, and path to purchase investment decisions.

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Marketers have moved from grief to action over the last week as they grapple with the rapidly evolving COVID-19 crisis.
Only a week ago the disaster facing CMO&#8217;s 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.
“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?
<h3>Let&#8217;s Talk About Brand Purpose</h3>
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 10th, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/10/rbs-natwest-mortgage-loan-coronavirus-bank-credit-card-limits">TSB, NatWest/RBS and Lloyds Bank</a> 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 19th before announcements were seen that <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/bank-of-america-says-customers-impacted-by-coronavirus-may-be-able-to-defer-mortgage-payments.html">Bank of America</a> 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.
<h3>Brands Living Up to Their Purpose</h3>
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.   
<a href="https://www.motor1.com/news/404215/hyundai-genesis-coronavirus-payments-6-months/">Hyundai and Genesis</a> offered up to 6 months of car payments for those losing their jobs due to coronavirus on March 14th.  By March 16th Ford pulled its national vehicle ads in the US and offered customers help with re-payments with <a href="https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2020/03/16/ford-offers-customers-community-assistance-covid19.html">Ford Credit Support</a>.  And by March 19th <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/automakers-offer-build-ventilators-us-faces-critical-shortage/story?id=69689489">Ford and General</a> 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.
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/18/brewdog-begins-making-hand-sanitiser-shortages-uk">LVMH</a> acted quickly and on March 15th announced that it would be switching perfume production to hand sanitizer production.  Beer manufacturers, including <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/18/brewdog-begins-making-hand-sanitiser-shortages-uk">Brew Dog</a> in the UK, also began making hand sanitizers on March 18th.  Meanwhile, <a href="https://youtu.be/GWVW5p62sO8">Guinness</a>, 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.
<a href="https://www.latimes.com/socal/glendale-news-press/news/story/2020-03-20/spectrum-and-other-internet-providers-offer-free-internet-for-students-at-home">Spectrum Comcast and Cox Communications</a> offered free internet for students now working from home.   
Verizon, AT&amp;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 <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-51931050">BBC</a> 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 <a href="https://www.marketingweek.com/mark-ritson-marketing-covid-19/?cmpid=em~newsletter~weekly_news~n~n&amp;utm_medium=em&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=weekly_news&amp;eid=12584550&amp;sid=MW0001&amp;adg=C43D6231-5A4C-4ECF-926F-925936AD623F">Levi’s and Apple</a> are reassuring their employees that they will be paid even if their stores are closed.
<h3>From Plan to Action</h3>
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.

Don’t Grieve for Your Brand Ads, Use your Brand Purpose

Editor&#8217;s Note: Marketers struggle to develop well-grounded strategies for engaging with different types of customers. Given the plethora of touchpoints available, how to best use the different types of options available is difficult, to say the least. Research struggles as well to evaluate the effects of different strategies employed or to give evidence-based guidance for optimizing the strategies. In this post, Fiona Blades presents an argument for a customer-centric approach for banking that allows brands to understand how to optimize touchpoint strategies for people with varying relationships to a given bank. This is an interesting way to help make sense of a complex problem.
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No other sector needs to rebuild trust, consideration, and advocacy in the way retail banking does. It’s the 10-year anniversary of the financial crisis and the retail banking sector is still experiencing cynicism and negative media coverage.  
In addition, the continuing digital revolution is increasing media fragmentation, making it more challenging for media planners to get the best bang for their buck. Against this backdrop, many media are overlooked or not optimized.
Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders in 1957 and even today, as marketers we are still in the business of persuading our customers and prospects that our brand is worthy of their investment.
We believe marketers need to look through the eyes of the customer to see how they encounter brands in the real world – and the real-world is different from being forced to view an ad on a computer for research analysis. The longitudinal nature of the data we collect means we can pick out what brand encounters lead to other encounters. Recently, we were investigating online purchases for a client and on many occasions, people were buying brands they had never mentioned they were considering. In one instance, the online purchase was prompted by seeing the brand in-store six days earlier.
…which allows us to move from a disparate way of viewing the world to a customer-centric way 
<h3>Experience-Driven Marketing</h3>
Today, there is a new way to persuade customers and prospects towards your brand – we call it Experience-Driven Marketing. Working with Cranfield School of Management, we created an Experience-Driven Marketing manifesto to help marketers develop more compelling brand experiences.
It’s important to measure what people actually pick up, not simply what, as marketers, we push out….
Our methodology shows the impact of paid, owned and earned media touchpoints on the key brand funnel metrics that marketers put most stores by when gauging how persuasive their brand is.  We look at the brand funnel metric; consideration, a key brand image statement; trust and the crucial word of mouth metric; advocacy, for the retail bank sector.
The methodology captures over 100 touchpoints at the moment, and so provides the granularity required to show the impact media touchpoints have in paid, owned and earned media, split by customers and non-customers on these all-important brand metrics.
Over the course of two years, we have recorded over 40,000 retail banking experiences in our database. Based on this data &#8211; and using a new framework to help marketers understand which media touchpoints can be used to maintain or improve key metrics such as consideration, trust or advocacy &#8211; we can pinpoint which media to leverage for customers and non-customers to maintain or improve these metrics.
The benefits of this approach are: 
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">A single view of the customer – one cohesive data source so experiences and media are comparable  </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">The perspective of the customer – understand differences between customers, e.g. those who have had an experience and those who haven’t </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Real-time – collecting data closer to the event makes it more accurate </li>
</ul>
Applying advanced analytics, we were able to look at the impact that touchpoints have had on people’s perception of brands.  The analysis uses logistic regression, to identify the impact of explanatory variables on a binary dependent variable. This can tell us if having certain experiences will make a participant more or less likely to change their opinion. The brand opinion refers to a participant’s endorsement of brand key performance indicators, such as trust or consideration. There are two types of changes: 
<ol>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Create: The impact of experiences on creating endorsement amongst non-endorsers, e.g. move them towards being a Brand Considerer for example.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">Maintain: The impact of experiences on maintaining endorsement amongst current endorsers, e.g. preventing them from becoming say, a non-Considerer.  </li>
</ol>
We’ve used this approach to share some useful rules to help you unlock your own hidden drivers of persuasion.
<h3>The Hidden Drivers of Persuasion: Five Rules</h3>
<h3>Rule One: Don’t Expect Advertising to do all the Hard Work. Use All Touchpoints.  </h3>
You need to take responsibility for other channels.   
Our Retail Bank study shows that paid media accounts for almost half of the experiences people have with brands in retail banking.  To move the dial on brand consideration, you need to look at not only paid media but also owned and earned media. In our data, we saw amongst customers, that paid media is on a par with owned and earned media at maintaining brand consideration.  The picture is different for creating brand consideration, where owned media leads the charge. Amongst non-customers, paid media outperforms owned media at creating brand consideration.
<h3><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23221" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.48.11-PM-1024x425.png" alt="" width="1024" height="425" />Rule Two: Advocacy and Trust are Harder to Shift. Understand What to Leverage. </h3>
Our data shows that experiences people have with brands have a much bigger impact on brand consideration than they do on trust or advocacy.
However, paid media experiences do have a role to play at making an impact on trust. Interestingly, the Lloyds Director of Marketing Communications, Richard Warren was quoted in Marketing Week saying he didn’t think advertising creates trust. Yet our data shows that Lloyds paid media experiences outperformed the total market at making an impact on trust. So, using paid, owned and earned media appropriately can move the levers on trust and advocacy.
<h3><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23222" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.48.19-PM-1024x502.png" alt="" width="1024" height="502" />Rule Three: Neutral is the New Negative. Neutral Experiences Erode your Marketing Budget – Create Positive Ones.</h3>
When we look at experiences that create or maintain brand consideration, it’s positive experiences that really make an impact on this brand health metric.  What’s interesting is that neutral experiences, in a best-case scenario, don’t damage your brand and in a worst-case scenario, they negatively impact your brand. So neutral really is the new negative!<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23223" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.48.28-PM-1024x538.png" alt="" width="1024" height="538" /> 
<h3>Rule Four: In a Digital Era, Don’t Forget to Use Good Old Direct Mail to Acquire Customers.</h3>
In our evangelizing about using your entire media armory to move the dial on brand health metrics, our data shows that whilst websites are the most impactful touchpoint at improving brand consideration amongst non-customers, good old-fashioned direct mail is in second place.  And so old and new media have a role in your media plans to shift brand consideration.
<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23224" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.48.37-PM-1024x546.png" alt="" width="1024" height="546" />
<h3>Rule Five: Online Banking is the Touchpoint for Customers </h3>
When it comes to customers, our Retail Bank study shows that online banking is the touchpoint to improve brand consideration. It’s almost twice as likely as any other touchpoint to positively impact brand consideration amongst customers. This is because it fulfills the need for ease and convenience.
<img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-23225" src="https://wp.greenbook.org/mr/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-08-at-3.48.46-PM-1024x483.png" alt="" width="1024" height="483" />
This article was originally published on the <a href="https://www.fsforum.com/">Financial Services Forum</a>.

The Hidden Drivers of Persuasion in Retail Banking

<div>Editor&#8217;s Note: I’ve felt for a long time that there was much business value to be gained by combining data sets.  No one data set should be forced into trying to answer all of a client’s business questions.  It is gratifying to see progress being made on this front, and that combining data sets is becoming more of a regular practice than an exception.</div>
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In medieval times people sought a universal elixir. They failed, just as modern insights professionals fail if we proselytize one approach is ‘the future’. We search for truth through data – but history tells us there is no universal solution.
Rather, we believe research, tech, insight entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs should join forces to unlock new truths and create a stronger ecosystem &#8211; where each collaborates to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Marketers are awash with data. Which data sources should we use? Traditional metrics seem like old, blunt tools.
But what should we put in their place? How do we deal with the increasingly systemic limitations of survey work and integrate new tech methods whilst recognizing their synergies and limitations?
Having data sources that look through the eyes of the customer to see how they encounter brands in the real world – and the real world is different to being forced to view an ad on a computer for research analysis. It is crucial to help marketers optimize their marketing and media budgets.  All the better is these data sources are longitudinal as the nature of the data means we can pick out what brand encounters lead to other encounters. Using our own Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) data source, recently, we were investigating online purchases for a client and on many occasions, people were buying brands they had never mentioned they were considering. In one instance the online purchase was prompted by seeing the brand in-store six days earlier.
<h3>Using one data source to illuminate other data sources</h3>
We have always combined this Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) data with other sources, such as media spend to look at the cost per experience to ascertain media effectiveness. However, only recently are we seeing, firstly how this data source can illuminate many others in an ecosystem and, secondly how AI can unlock insights never seen previously.
When you look at a data source it becomes the focus, which is both a good and a bad thing. For years, because we focused on measuring the effectiveness of TV advertising, we assumed that this was the key marketing lever for success. And, often, that our brand metrics, like consideration, were driven by advertising. We know now, that other paid, owned and earned brand encounters can have a more profound impact. Personal interaction with branch staff or trying a new drink in an on-premise environment can be the key to changing behavior and attitudes. Sometimes it can be tempting to look at social media data, like Twitter, to assume this is how everyone is experiencing the brand.
But perhaps social media only accounts for 5% of people’s experiences with your brand and encountering the brand in real life accounts for 25%. We saw how people were encountering Heineken and its competitors. The TV was important, but so was In-Store, On-Premise and At Home.
By taking the Real-time Experience Tracking data, which looks through the customers’ eyes, we can put all our other marketing data streams into context. We can see that TV experiences account for about a quarter of experiences and paid TV slightly less than this (with owned accounting for some too – say 5%). Within paid, there is the manufacturer ad (e.g. Heineken) and the retailer ad featuring the brand (e.g. Tesco – say 5% of experiences). What’s more, we might know (and we have seen this across studies) that seeing the brand featured in a retailer ad can have a significant impact on brand consideration. From the quarter of TV experiences, about 15% are for the manufacturer’s TV ad. This means that we can look at the detailed data, such as GRPs, ad recall, in this context.
<h3>Using AI to unlock new insight within data sources</h3>
We have thousands of comments that relate to each experience in any MESH study. Whilst we have always used these for qualitative analysis, we can now use AI to uncover new insight. Working with Signoi, we discovered for one client that the topics (such as picture quality) have very different levels of positivity (The experience made me feel Very or Fairly Positive).
The fact that we already have participants’ own evaluations of the experiences is helpful to quickly see which topics are most positive and persuasive. This evaluation can also help to validate the coding by the AI. Negative experiences, as coded by our participants, come out as Sad, Fear, Disgust, etc. through Signoi.
We can also look at the AI topics by touchpoint to see if some of the most engaging topics are being communicated through certain touchpoints. And by applying logistic regression we can see which topics are changing people’s perceptions because we know a participant’s brand consideration before and after they reported their experiences.
AI can completely refresh an existing data set.
<h3>Understanding how data sources fit into an insight ecosystem</h3>
The way we see this data source fitting into the ecosystem is different from the Real-time Experience Tracking. There are already many techniques for evaluating display in-store and technology is bringing in many more – from beacons on trolleys to virtual reality testing of material. We see different techniques working in a complementary way along the path to purchase.
We are also combining the camera ethnography data with other data sources, such as sales. For one client we saw a very strong correlation between sales and the numbers of people viewing the display.
However, the data doesn’t answer everything! We are also combining observation and exit interviews with the camera ethnography. Someone may have stopped at the display and purchased the product, but how has this changed their perception of the brand? Survey data via exit interviews can help to answer this.
We are right at the beginning of this exciting journey using algorithms and they are being continually improved. We are making assumptions that may not be correct and will certainly be refined over time. There has been much research to suggest that positive emotions lead to positive brand outcomes, so we look for advertising to create a positive/happy impression. The algorithm we use picks up emotion and we count the number of people who exhibit a happy emotion to report on. However, over time, I am sure that we will uncover the optimum emotional signature – the sequence and combination of emotions that lead to a sale or the change in perception of a brand.
<h3>In Summary</h3>
<ul>
<li>Speed</li>
<li>Use new data sources</li>
<li>Learn from other data sources</li>
<li>Blend and fuse</li>
</ul>
In many ways, artificial intelligence is surpassing human beings – particularly when it comes to speed.  We have been blending research methodologies for some time now. However, the data blending and fusion that we will see in the next five years will make what we have done in the last five years seem like child’s play.
This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.amsrs.com.au/homepage">ASMRS</a>.

How to Choose the Right Data Source

Editor&#8217;s Note: Benchmarks are useful, but often used simplistically; a decision is made at some point to compare themselves on Metric A to Companies B, C, and D, and it goes on for years. As the business situation evolves, Metric A may no longer be a critical market for business prospects, and Companies B, C, and D may no longer be relevant. One of my favorite CMOs to consult for would regularly ask me which companies faced a similar situation to what his company faced, and what they did about it. His benchmarking was flexible, depending on the issues. Here, Fiona Blades gives us a mature discussion of how to think about benchmarks, and how to use them.
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Benchmarks are an important part of our decision-making. However, pick the wrong benchmarks, or contextualize them misguidedly, and you risk making the wrong decisions.
<h3>What Benchmarks Should We Put in Place?</h3>
In the marketing context, our metrics are often not as ‘hard’ and certain as sales and revenue, which can be frustrating. Often marketing is demonstrating how it contributes to these metrics through well-established measures like brand consideration. But over the last 10 years, clients have been questioning brand consideration. One approached us because their media agency could find no relationship between brand consideration and sales in their econometric modeling. When tackled from an individual, rather than aggregate level, we found a strong relationship – people considering the brand at the start of the buying process often ended up buying it. However, the buying process varied in length of time meaning that the relationship was lost when looked at in aggregate.
Looking at consideration by occasion can be highly illuminating. For another client with a brand leader, we could identify specific occasions, growing in importance, where competitors were winning out. Yet this was masked when consideration was asked in a more traditional way.
Don’t underestimate the power of having benchmarks that your organization understands. Two clients have approached us about NPS. The link between NPS and advertising is often weaker than brand consideration and advertising, but if everyone else in the company is following this goal, there is something to be said for marketing joining in. The trick here is to understand how marketing can best influence NPS. It is difficult for people to recommend a brand they have never tried, so we need to separate out users and non-users. The marketing task with users was to keep them loyal and increase advocacy. For non-users, it was to gain trial.
A one-number score can be very helpful. But it is important that this can be dissected to understand what is influencing this. MESH created a Marketing Impact Score for one client. We had been capturing people’s experiences with their brand and others in the category for a number of years in real-time. These included paid, owned and earned experiences. We isolated the paid experiences (what people picked up and reported). The resulting score consisted of Experience Reach and Experience Positivity and Persuasiveness. So, if a brand spent more money on its marketing activity Experience Reach was likely to increase, and if the quality of the activity improved, Experience Positivity and Persuasiveness increased.
<h3>Stay Competitive</h3>
Creating new benchmarks can reveal fresh insight. In 2007, Unilever wanted to benchmark Lynx with other cool brands like PlayStation and Nike. When we captured people’s brand encounters Unilever was able to see how brands, like PlayStation, relied less on TV and more on experiential and online.
Clients have had campaign benchmarks for years, but these can often miss the context of competitive activity or real-life situations. In a retail banking subscription study that we have been running for over a year, we can see that Nationwide poetry ads can work well in the cinema, where people have time to pay attention to the creative. However, they can be annoying and dismissed when someone is busy getting the meal ready for dinner and the TV ad is on in the background. This contrasts with other ads, like TSB, where simplicity is the key and even making dinner, the music is picked up positively.
Whatever your benchmarks make sure you have a process set up in advance to avoid wasting time. “Only take action if consideration goes down by x%. If it does, take the following steps…” If you don’t, you may waste time debating insignificant results.
<h3>What to Consider</h3>
Benchmarks are a fundamental part of our decision-making framework and with the wealth of data available today and new ways of capturing data that give us a clearer view through the eyes of the customer, there is no excuse for not using multiple sources to make quicker and better decisions.
<ul>
<li>Choose benchmarks carefully to have resonance in your organization, link closely to business outcomes and enable quick and confident decision-making.</li>
<li>Introduce new benchmarks to unlock fresh insight.</li>
<li>Consider new framing and contexts to avoid poor decisions.</li>
<li>Try to get as close to the real world rather than artificial lab data.</li>
<li>Develop a robust decision-making process around decision-making to avoid wasting time.</li>
</ul>
This article was originally published on <a href="https://www.warc.com/content/paywall/article/admap/choosing_the_right_benchmark/120609">Admap</a>. Looking to benchmark your company against the MRX industry leaders? Check out the latest <a href="https://www.greenbook.org/grit">GRIT Report</a>. 
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Choosing the Right Benchmarks

Editor&#8217;s Note: The CX movement has exploded in recent years, and has gone beyond traditional product or service satisfaction. Smart marketers now realize that every experience with the brand &#8211; not just with the product, but every person or touchpoint connected to the brand &#8211; can affect the relationship, for good and for bad. Here, Fiona Blades gives us her take on the importance of going beyond just product concerns and argues that the total experience is what really matters.
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Gone are the days when a great product alone drove profits. Marketers today need to consider every way that people encounter their brand. Great experiences creating real value for people, build advocacy, which leads to acquisition, as well as retention and increase in the share of wallet.
<h3>Forget the 4 or 5 P’s and Embrace a New Approach – Experience Driven Marketing</h3>
Can you draw a pie chart of where you are investing in your brand? Yes, that’s easy! Now, can you draw a pie chart of how people are experiencing your brand? This is the question we ask Marketing Directors.
How do you know if what you push out in advertising is picked up? What proportion of owned and earned media are people experiencing? What does that pie chart look like?
<h3>Cutting Through the Noise</h3>
We are overloaded with data – it’s coming from our call centers, our websites, our retail partners, our media agencies. Yet in spite of being awash with data, we have a data black hole. We’ve got GRPs, click-throughs, Likes, Share of Voice to help us to measure marketing activities but this leaves us with a dizzying array of metrics where we are comparing apples and pears.
We don’t have a way of connecting the different data sources easily, we look at everything in silos. The marketing team looks at ad recall and media spend. The trade marketing team works with retail partners. The customer experience team pays attention to the call center and CRM metrics. Who is looking at everything from the perspective of the experiences that our customer is having? And isn’t this fundamental?
<h3>The Power of Experience</h3>
More and more marketers are becoming attuned to the power of experience. Whether this is about creating a seamless customer experience, the power of experiential touchpoints or linking with people’s passions. We believe you need to understand every experience or encounter with your brand, whether this is a momentous experience in being offered your first mortgage or a fleeting glimpse of a poster.
And in almost every sector, there is a real focus on getting back to the customer. We need understanding from a human-centered perspective. We need to understand how sectors and brands fit in with the rest of someone’s life, with their passions, when they are busy, when they have time to listen to us, what will help them achieve their goals.
We need a new marketing framework, new data and metrics to help us.
We need a human-centered marketing approach that puts the customer center stage. We call this Experience Driven Marketing. It’s based on learnings from capturing experiences over the last 12 years and our proprietary Experience Model and Metrics.
Why does Experience Driven Marketing grow brands? Because great experiences create real value for people, build advocacy, which leads to acquisition, as well as retention and increase in share of wallet.  We urge you to embrace our Manifesto for Experience Driven Marketing:
<ol>
<li>Take responsibility for every brand touchpoint – even those you don’t control.</li>
<li>Measure Share of Experience, not Share of Voice.</li>
<li>Emotion matters. Insist on Engaged Reach.</li>
<li>If Content is King, Context is Queen. Use it.</li>
<li>Experience is a journey. The destination is not the purchase, but customers meeting their goals.</li>
<li>If our customers buy experiences, we need to organize around them. Not products, functions or channels.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Take on the Customers Perception</h3>
Once you look through the customer’s eyes and experience your brand as they do, it will transform your decision-making. Pepsi discovered that experiences in bars, restaurants, and pubs as well as KFC TV ads featuring Pepsi in the end shot, made people feel closer to Pepsi. Packaged goods clients found that cheery TV ads at the beginning of the day enhanced people’s moods whereas for financial services people start to engage after 6pm on the commute home. For electronics, seeing the product in someone’s home significantly impacts on brand consideration. One client found that a retailer ad featuring their brand was as engaging and persuasive as their own brand advertising – this changes where to invest for the greatest return.
With Experience Driven Marketing you will uncover new, unexploited touchpoints to activate, you will be faced with negative ones you need to minimize, you will understand which are helping customers to achieve their goals and ultimately to build enduring brands in their minds.

If You Want Brand Growth, Use Experience Driven Marketing

Editor&#8217;s Note: People who know me well know that cheese is one of my basic food groups (along with wine).  I’ve always loved cheese.  There are several markets in my area that have nice cheese selections, but there’s one star in particular that I tend to gravitate to because they always have many different kinds of cheese out for customers to sample.  The selection varies day by day, and it’s just a great way to find something new and interesting.  They’ve turned buying cheese from just another purchase to an experience.  Fiona Blades discusses in this post how creating in-store experiences can revolutionize brick and mortar retailing in the face of the online onslaught.  Pass the cheese plate!
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We are surrounded by headlines like “America is facing a ‘retail refugee crisis’ as thousands of stores shut down and millions of people become the ‘blacksmiths of their era’” (<a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-refugee-crisis-is-coming-with-store-closures-2017-9" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.businessinsider.com/retail-refugee-crisis-is-coming-with-store-closures-2017-9&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1554485108614000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFDnvM_JkDnxx54DN8BsdOUE2Qu0g">Business Insider,</a> September 2017). We knew that digital would transform retail as we knew it. But the speed is startling!
Back in 2011, we spotted a trend. Within two years the percentage of people reporting experiences in store for our client had halved! Further digging revealed that people were, indeed, going online, mainly to retailer websites. Moreover, we saw this early in the path to purchase, when they were researching what brand to buy, and towards the end of the journey, when they were searching where to buy their chosen brand at the best price. This insight changed the way our client worked with their retail partners.
<h3>Customer Values</h3>
We had no idea how radically the retail landscape would be changing in the next 5 years. We analyzed thousands of retail experiences in the MESH database to see what people value most:
<ul>
<li>Sampling. Consumption touchpoints are normally the most engaging and persuasive experiences that people have with brands. So, getting to try the product in a retail environment is very powerful.</li>
<li>Speaking to assistants. A great staff interaction transforms a retail experience.</li>
<li>Touching and feeling the product. Reading about the car online isn’t the same as sitting inside the car, smelling the leather and holding the steering wheel.</li>
</ul>
These give us clues to how bricks and mortar retail can be re-purposed. It needs to transform from transactional to experiential. The purpose of bricks and mortar retail is no longer to generate sales but to build brands. It needs to be on the media plan alongside TV and other brand building channels.
We are now seeing brands creating amazing brand touchpoints in retail. Take Hermes Dip-Dye Laundromat in pop-ups across Europe and the US. Customers are invited to bring their Hermes scarves, dye them and fall in love with them all over again. And what about the Magnum Pleasure store, another pop-up which sees lines around the block as customers await personalized confections that gleam like jewels?
These brands understand that the experience people have in these stores will have a long-term effect. Seeing and tasting the quality of a gorgeous Magnum ice cream has a greater chance of changing brand perception than being told about it in a TV or press ad. What’s more, not only is the depth and quality of experience greater but, with social media, the spread of messaging to friends and relatives means that those who haven’t ever been will hear about it.
<h3>If retail is transforming, we need new frameworks and tools to measure its impact.</h3>
We believe that in today’s world marketers should take an Experience-Driven Marketing approach.  We have discovered that Share of Experience (SOE) (all paid, owned and earned media) has a greater correlation with market share than Share of Voice so think “SOE” when it comes to deciding investment levels. A Positive Experience has three times the impact of a neutral one on brand consideration. So, if you want to grow your brand, ensure you are generating more positive experiences. You can give your brand an unfair advantage through message, placement, and context.
In terms of measuring the success of retail activity, we would advocate a couple of points:
<ul>
<li>Compare the quantity and quality of retail experiences in the context of all other paid, owned and earned media.</li>
<li>Don’t stop at sales, measure emotional response to retail display.</li>
</ul>
New tools can help us. To maximize the impact of retail, it is important to place retail in the context of all your other touchpoints to see whether to invest more here and less elsewhere.
More recently we have started using new tech-enabled tools within retail displays and have developed a way to evaluate retail display using cameras and algorithms, without video and the need to store personal information.
<h3>Let’s look at a case study</h3>
For Unilever, we took a store in Sao Paulo where we wanted to assess the impact from a change of store display for Knorr Seasonings. There was a new healthier seasoning range with natural flavorings and 25% less salt. To communicate this there was a shelf hanger “stopper” placed on either side of the product range. We compared two periods to see the change in shopper display interaction. The first, during November, had no display. The second, during December, had the display material. To contextualize our data, we used Google’s Popular Times feature. Of course, for a bigger study, we would envisage putting in cameras to understand footfall to the store and to the aisle and contextualizing with sales data, the weather, and other data streams.
We also created specific terminology:
<ul>
<li>A viewer is someone who looks at the display for at least a second.</li>
<li>Noticeability is the number of viewers.</li>
<li>Attention is how long the viewers looked at the display.</li>
<li>Engagement is the percentage of the viewers who displayed a happy, smiling emotion whilst looking at the display.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Results</h3>
<ul>
<li>Even with relatively small pieces of display (the Shelf Stoppers) we see a massive lift in Noticeability with over three times as many viewers. Of course, we need to better understand why. Maybe more people walked down the aisle? By putting another camera to observe traffic we could account for this.</li>
<li>Noticeability is relatively flat when there is no display (except around lunchtime on weekdays) but, for the display period it seems to stand out around peak times. Is this new information catching people’s eyes?</li>
<li>The display seems to be noticed more by men than women and this is particularly the case during those peak shopping times.</li>
<li>On average people pay attention for just 3 seconds. And most peak time views only last a second. So, it’s important that your message is easy to take out.</li>
<li>The percentage of people displaying positive emotions is fewer with a display than no display. Is this because we are capturing the attention of those not looking to buy stock cubes. We pick up a variety of emotions so there is plenty more analysis needed to understand how display is impacting on people’s emotional responses. For example, are they irritated to be interrupted in their shopping? Even if the display is not generating engagement, as it is getting noticed it should be increasing awareness and therefore longer-term brand building.</li>
</ul>
In terms of implications, we are seeing billions spent on display with a dearth of evaluation. Technology can help marketers understand the return on their investment. With real-time camera ethnography, we can see how many people the display is reaching – much more than store traffic, location matters. We can see whether the display is engaging people, doing a brand building job and converting to a sale. Moreover, this new technology enables us to do this cost efficiently without the privacy issues of video.

The Retail Revolution: Success in the New Era

Editor&#8217;s Note: Perspective matters.  Being able to take another person’s perspective can lead to a more successful relationship, whether you are considering your personal relationship with your spouse or a business relationship with a prospective client.  One of the factors that have underpinned the success of companies like Amazon has been a laser-like focus on the customer’s perspective, understanding their needs and being relentless in fulfilling them.  Fiona Blades extends this type of thinking, arguing that marketers need to focus less on metrics of what they do or push out and focus more on understanding what customers experience.  A very timely read.
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The whole idea of ‘brand purpose’ is everywhere these days. For marketers, it’s not just about nice words, but about knowing how people really feel about their brand, and what is really driving brand loyalty in today’s world.
There are only so many things you can say to embody purpose. As part of our Retail Banking Experience data stream, we’ve been looking at this area through what we believe is a new universal lens: that of the drivers of human happiness.
So, for marketers, the question becomes is our brand and message tapping into these key drivers? After all, what is a brand for, unless to make people happy – or at least, not miserable. And does the reality of the brand experience reflect that aspiration?
As a summary, there are a number of drivers, across a spectrum from fleeting hedonic fun, through quality of life and agency, to deeper ‘eudaemonic’ happiness – a sense of feeling fulfilled. But in this article, we wanted to highlight just one aspect, and show how it relates to banking: cultural affinity.
After all, banks perform pretty well in terms of getting the basics right, delivering service, and broadly keeping your money safe. They deliver good tactical products and offers. Yet, ultimately, they are banks. So how can they try to differentiate and establish themselves in territories offering higher meaning?
<h3>Creating Cultural Affinity</h3>
We’ve found that it’s clear many banks are now converging around variations on the theme of human relationships, social good, and investments in causes, all in the pursuit of purpose. Lloyds is by your side. Barclays will ask you to ‘go forward together’. But notwithstanding that, the stars of what we term ‘cultural affinity’ – for different reasons – are Nationwide and First Direct – ‘standing for something’ and ‘helping people fulfill their goals’.
We found Nationwide stands in a unique position – ‘building society’ – and it reinforces this advantage through experiences from campaigns through to in-branch experiences. Nationwide is best in class on a number of fronts, and is one of the few players in the market seen as having a reason to exist beyond just making money. Its clever ‘building society’ message lands well. Nationwide is now a very dangerous competitor to the big five for this very reason.
Yet whilst First Direct is held in affection – and remains perceived as one of the most innovative players &#8211; it does not create a high volume of relevant and reinforcing experiences, and nor is it high in the consideration set. This perhaps is a barrier to growth: a vague perception that First Direct stands for something, but that something does not translate to the day-to-day.
Co-operative is appreciated for its overtly ethical positioning. But for some, the brand is damaged by difficulties through 2017, and it’s clear that many people aren’t aware that it is no longer part of the Co-operative movement.
But in many cases, we see the push towards purpose has yet to translate into true brand meaning. There is continued cynicism around social trust, and concerns about the inauthenticity of some brands – for example, First Direct’s parent HSBC. Again, they are seeking to communicate a sense of relationship and ‘advancing together’ – but it isn’t quite landing.
By looking at experiences holistically, we find many instances of customers struggling to reconcile positive messaging with recurrent news about institutional misbehavior or branch closures. All these trends speak to the need for banks to create a sense of relationship and wider purpose in a different way. But the financial crisis still casts a long shadow.
Where purpose lands it is through authentically powerful and focused associations with causes, such as Lloyds’ partnership with Macmillan or Barclays’ focus on life skills, fraud prevention and so on. TSB’s overtly challenging campaigns, executed in a highly engaging style, do the same job in a different way
All of these initiatives connect with people at a deeper social level: doing the right thing by society. It’s something that Nationwide has baked in; it will be interesting to see how the other big players evolve to build deeper brand meaning.
Meanwhile, there is no doubt that challenger brands are gathering momentum – capitalizing on a different kind of purpose altogether, the desire for change. Whilst small individually, collectively the likes of Atom, Monese, Monzo, Tandem, Virgin Money and Metro Bank are starting to make life interesting for the bigger banks, increasing their share of experience month on month.
<h3>To build a more meaningful brand purpose:</h3>
<ul>
<li>Highlight a point of difference signifying bank behavior, e.g. Nationwide making a feature of being a building society</li>
<li>Consider cause-related campaigns to fuel deeper brand meaning with people</li>
<li>Identify the experiences that communicate brand purpose most effectively and amplify those</li>
</ul>
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