Episode #11. The topic in this episode is a technical skill – Brand Measurement. Joining host Abby to share practical tips and advice is Richard Bambrick, Global Senior Insights Manager at Pentland Brands (Speedo, Mitre plus more). Richard shares the importance of brand tracking as a tool for marketers to understand consumer behaviour and demonstrate impact, as well as some great advice for what you should/shouldn’t be tracking as a KPI. Plus why marketers should be sceptical and develop their skills in critical thinking to challenge market research.
Resources/brands mentioned in this podcast:
Grow – by Jim Stengal
Richard Shotton review of Grow
Factfulness – by Hans Rosling
The Attention Economy – by Karen Nelson-Field
Mark Richardson
Peter Field
The Halo Effect – by Phil Rosenzweig
Andrew Ehrenberg
Bernard Shaw
Judy Ramani
How Brands Grow – by Byron Sharp
Sponsored by Labyrinth Marketing
FULL TRANSCRIPT (with timecode)
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This podcast is brought to you by Labyrinth Marketing.
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So hello and welcome to the Whole Marketer podcast.
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Today’s skill,
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We’re going to focus on is a technical skill. We’re going to focus on insight with a particular focus of specialism from today’s guest in brand equity tracking. Before we do I’m just going to give you a bit of context around insight and brand measurements and then why it’s so important. Before introducing today’s guest Richard Bambrick. So why is this so important and what about it? Brand measurement isn’t a new technical skill but it’s often one that is overlooked or outsourced with quarterly updates and the likes of Kantar and Millward Brown brand measurement is a popular form of research that quantifies the association consumers have of brands in their mind.
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In today’s world they’re typically carried out by an online survey asking consumers a range of questions such as spontaneous awareness of brands in the category consideration what they think of them in their image and brand personality by asking the same questions at different points in time. It allows marketers to understand how their activity or activation is impacting consumers memories about their brands relative to their competition. So why is this important? The role in which brands play is changing is changing both internally as a form of equity and it’s also changing externally in the expectation consumers have.
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We’ve moved from a brand being just a logo or design identity to one that reflects our values aspirations and the tribes who want to be part of the measurement of how brands are doing. From a consumer perspective also needs to change because one is the acknowledgement that brands are indeed an asset to any business. When invested in and looked after. That’s the biggest caveat. They also sat on the balance sheet and the way in which we track and measure their performance needs to reflect these changes. If done well brand management can be a powerful tool both in the upfront strategy and also to help evaluate our success of our marketing activity.
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Today’s guest is Richard Brambrick an award winning insight marketeer. He is currently responsible for the Global Insights of Pentland brands across their broad brand portfolio that includes Speedo, Canterbury, Berghaus, Elesse, and many many more. Prior to joining Pentland Richard led the insightful Britvic Soft Drinks on the adult brand portfolios also globally. As well as having worked agency side for Kantar formerly Millward Brown managing the Heineken, Kellogg’s, and Vodafone accounts I met Richard when I was leading strategic projects at breakfast and discovered that he is almost but not quite as passionate and geeky about marketing as I am.
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Richard welcomes the Whole Marketer podcast. Hi Abby, nice to be on. Thanks for coming. So first question before we go to brand measurement, maybe we could just warm up with insight as a whole. So what would you say in your words is insight?
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Start would be the biggest rabbit hole you can possibly go in. My definition of an insight is a person’s true want, need or desire that the business can leverage in its sounds relatively simple but more important aspects to it. One is that it’s a person that could be a consumer a shopper or a customer. It’s true if you set it for a few people they would not their head is not some ivory tower marketing jargon. A want, need or desire. It covers what people actually want whether that’s emotional or functional
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And the business can leverage so it can be actioned in some way and not just sit on the shelf gathering dust like some insight does that be my definition
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That’s what an insight is. Thank you. And what do you think the biggest changes have been in the role the insight plays today from where it’s been?
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And probably that’s not the most exciting and so I could give to a change question but I’m not sure the role the insight is supposed to play has changed that much. Kind of like marketing in that way I think actually we might have different tools at our disposal nowadays probably more tools and hopefully better tools. But at the heart of a role of insight is to understand consumer behaviour and what the driving motivations are. And that’s been the same for a long long time. I think our understanding of that hopefully improves as well as the tools that we have at our disposal.
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Hopefully it is improving but I think change is probably the context is that so much rubbish out there that filling marketeers heads I mean just take 60 seconds on LinkedIn for an example of that and you’ll see you’ll see what I mean. I think the role of insight professionals is to shine a bit of a light on the things that actually matter and help marketers navigate the 99 percent of crap that’s out there and focus on the 1 percent of stuff that actually is important and actionable.
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So on that point the 99 percent of crap what is that crap that’s filling marketers minds unnecessarily. We have been lured into marketing over the last 20 to 30 years I would say marketing theory which isn’t backed up by evidence.
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Because someone says it and someone says it really powerfully that it must be true and there’s a very very high profile examples out there such as a brand purpose if I take that as an example a lot of that has stemmed from a book called grow from Jim Stengel which I would encourage readers to have a look at Richard Shotton’s analysis of that book. Essentially it fall foul to some people halo effect which means you’re looking at all these successful companies and defining what made them successful.
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But it’s falling foul of the fact that a lot of other companies have done those kind of things and not been successful. Looking at the big hitters and not the big losers. I think that’s a real big example of the things that would be lovely to have to think the purpose and big lofty brand purpose is commercially differentiating factor. But the evidence that’s been shown so far is counter to that.
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I think that also reflects consumers expectations of brands today. You know it’s not necessarily about their purpose is it is about does it reflect me. And what I aspire my life to look like in the tribes I want to be part of. I don’t think any
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Consumers walk around thinking about brand purpose. I’ve struggled to articulate some of the brand purposes that we have nevermind.
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The ones of competitors and obviously not in the normal consumer mindset. Yeah we’d like to think that consumers think about brands more than we do but they don’t. And so our first job as marketers is to get our brands thought of at all.
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What skills do you think marketers are lacking when it comes to being competent in either gathering mining or sharing insight?
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I think there’s probably one that’s knowledge base which I think is actually understanding and being obsessed with how people really think feel and behave in the real world not in kind of a marketing eutopia that has big implications for marketing and also further kind of research that we do. So I think one is just just understanding people and how they behave. I think you need to be obsessed with two skills. I’d probably go number one is a ability to think sceptically which is kind of linked to my previous answer given how much stuff there is out there that’s filling marketeers heads is the ability to challenge people hiding behind jargon or generic waffle or think about you know when you’ve been presented with numbers what’s the context of these numbers and what aren’t I being shown it’s incredible skill that allow you to challenge in a really kind of constructive way and help you get to a better answer.
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So I think sceptical thinking is a skill that definitely needs to be developed as a book completely changed my mindset on this which is called Factfulness written by Hans Rosling and it’s not about marketing but it’s completely applicable to marketing that. I’d encourage anyone to read if they want to improve. Their sceptical thinking. It also makes them feel
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Make them feel better about the world they live in the second skill I’d probably say is I cringe when I say this word because it’s one of my jargon words but I can’t think of another way to describe it is storytelling.
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And this is in the context of a mainly internal tools that marketers have to fight. I think about CEOs and CFO is often they look at marketing departments like they’re a bit of an extraneous cost. They probably don’t trust in some cases and sales teams for quite similar. So I think it’s the job of marketeers to be able to get much better at measuring their efforts independently sharing them transparently and telling good stories around them.
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And I think we’ll have a lot less conversations around but if we were to do that well. I think there’s probably too much blame boards for not giving us enough budget but I think don’t think we’re doing a good enough job of selling the story and doing good marketing that is proven and effective.
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Yeah taking what’s given from a hundred and 40 page deck in actually extracting it and landing the key message in benefit of what they’ll bring to the organization might be more willing to part with their budgets when they actually see something they can use. I mean if the hundred and forty page deck is useful at all which a lot of them unfortunately aren’t know there’s a lot of the shotty research evaluation that goes on out there unfortunately and you have to mine through it and I think that’s the important point is that not just taking what’s given to you as facts and actually thinking that because the research agency has given you the hundred forty page deck we’re done.
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I think for me that’s that’s only the start. Actually how do I mind this, find the inferences, find what’s useful, extract the insight digest it and actually present it back into the organization in a way that emotionally lands and is actionable I think is probably a bigger skill than data collection wouldn’t you say?
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100 percent.
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Yeah it’s it’s very easy to say it’s actually quite a difficult endeavor and a time timely one as well. Time intensive one.
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So in your words getting onto brand measurement what is it and why is it important?
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So I think if I think about the context marketing in its simplest form for me is a process to kind of drive behaviour change and one of the ways to enjoy behaviour is changing the way people think about brands is not the only way and in fact it’s probably not common way but it’s certainly one way and brand tracking tends to be in most businesses the only kind of quantitative window into the mind of a consumer. So if I had to summarize what it is it’s a tool to objectively understand. And quantify brand associations relative to competition over time.
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I suppose what historically and probably even to the present-day brand tracking is focused on is a bit obsessed with trying to understand what you think about our brand. So when I think of X brand what thoughts and associations come to mind? Which I think misses out on the most important aspects of what brand tracking can do which is instead of thinking about what the brand associations that come to mind. Is living on his head and thinking okay what are the moments, the motivations goals evoke the brand in the first place?
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The biggest job we have to do as marketers is get the brand noticed but the brand tracking and we do a lot of the time kind of skips that out quite a bit and focuses in on what you thought about it while the associations that come to mind. It’s a big big issue.
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Why do you think it’s important that we have that window? One of the reasons it kind of goes back to getting marketing in the boardroom and giving seat at the table is it’s a tool which can prove the
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Effect of your marketing activity on your brand. The ideal would be obviously a direct relationship to sales so you do an activity you strip out all the category noise everything else going on the category and you understand what did that activity in isolation do that if you didn’t do it you wouldn’t be seeing in your new sales results. That’s quite hard to do a lot of the time not impossible were quite hard to do. Every brand tracking is kind of a secondary way of trying to demonstrate the impact that it’s had on memory.
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It’s a bit more intangible but the quantitative nature of it. Means that if you articulate the brand tracking results in a simple way, I think most people will be able to relate to it. Most people have associations of brands themselves and think about brands themselves. So I think it’s a way of helping marketers demonstrate the impact they’re having on their brands when they’re in the boardroom and also learning from them for future campaigns.
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And what do you think that marketers need to have in their skill set in order to simplify the data they’re getting from their measurement trackers?
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Focus is probably one of the big things we’ve all been in presentations where you get a list of metrics 140 page deck you mentioned earlier, not uncommon, and they’re all given equivalent space on a page. They’re all given an equivalent number of pages and then you don’t know what to picture and what happens is you get cherry picking from you know what’s gone up, what’s gone down, and what suit best suits my story. Instead what you should think about has the most important things so focus on, in my opinion, this would be what are the motivations the needs that
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Evoke my brand and how am I doing on them. Before I dive into thinking about my brand cool or modern or trendy all those kind of things that’s a secondary thing. So you get to essentially a hierarchy of this is our KPI. Below that there might be some nice to know diagnostic measures but you’ve got a real kind of clear transparent measurement framework that everyone kind of can hold themselves accountable to and you’ll see consistently if you work on a portfolio you’ll see consistently from brands around. So almost taking the same principles of with commercial effectiveness or performance saying what side lead measure commercially well missed what’s a lead measure when it comes to measuring our brands internally? Spot exactly and what that enables you to do is instead of having 40 measures from a brand equity tracker in to try and squeeze into a CEO scorecard you typically get one or two which makes it much easier to get in front of the most important people in the business.
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I think I’ll follow up with a specific second point in terms of things to be aware of with tracking and this is one of those weird one that’s been known for 60 70 years but not widely known in the because the way brand tracking is done it’s a survey asking people their opinions and their associations and what you tend to find is when you’re asking people these associations if you think about your own associations you have in your head about some brands a lot of them are driven by the experience you’ve had historically in the past with them
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So they’re driven by your behaviour. And voice is really important in brand tracking is because the types of questions that you’re asking risk just reflecting market share and you end up buying a brand Tracker which is just another measurement of market share and doesn’t tell you anything incremental to that just simply because the number of users in the sample. If there are lots of Nike users and lots of Adidas users they’re going to be positive about Nike and Adidas on pretty much everything.
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So what we need to do is trying to counter that both in the types of questions that you ask and also the analysis that you do very very basic level you need to be splitting them by buyers of the brand and numbers of the brand and comparing those things over time. Unfortunately, that’s not something that’s commonly done even though that issue in the research industry is commonly known.
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I love that two great bits of advice there. One, choose a lead measure the brand get it up at that CEO board level and two, strip out that consumer user bias that we’re looking at who’s actually buying the brand and their perception is versus someone who’s not buying the brand we historically bought the brand so yeah.
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Otherwise you just end up with a rear-view mirror of what people have previously done rather than what they might do in the future.
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You as well as I are two massive marketing geeks and we are always talking about.
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Have you read this book? Have you seen this latest kind of data source? What do you think what would you say the new sources of consumer or customer data that have come or are coming that we should be getting excited about?
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Not surprisingly going to link to behaviour. So up until now measuring behaviours been quite difficult and it still is but it’s getting better and that the technology that is available is getting better. Practical example of how what used to be something that was very expensive not scalable and didn’t work very well was eye tracking my tracking up until recently has been pretty terrible. But there’s a few companies that are doing a really really good job of making something that’s scalable
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Practical effective. And if anyone’s read Karen Nelson-Field’s recent book The attention economy. A lot of that is driven by eye tracking data which basically says how much attention are people paying to advertising. And some of the insights from that are quite shocking for marketers spending billions and billions of pounds on advertising and then realizing that very very little of it. Gets even in view. And then second of all
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The majority of it gets little to no attention. And. I think probably has the potential to change the way media is bought in the future instead of buying and cost per thousand impressions you buy in customers thousands on the quality of the attention you get.
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So yes, behavioural measurement and eye tracking be one of them I think Lumen are really kind of leading the way there as an agency. If I think of eye tracking I’m thinking of kind of looking at where consumers are placing their eyes hot spots on content and websites is that correct.
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Yes yes that’s exactly the type of thing. It’s been rolled out on to mobile, I think that’s that, Rolled out well onto mobile recently is what I would say and that’s a big change instead of having to power up a laptop or a P.C. and switch on a webcam and you know all those kind of things create a very artificial research environment. Whereas you if you you’re capturing people on a mobile phone who have an app installed and they’re passively tracking you what your actual behaviour and you’re not even consciously thinking you’re in a research environment you’re getting closer to what the reality is.
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And as I say some of the numbers in there are quite scary.
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Yeah. And more natural as well you’re more likely to view something on your phone these days than you are necessarily sat on a laptop.
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Unortunately what was the view on the phone typically not the other I.
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Thank you for that. So I know you love a good read. We’re just talking about that. You’ve mentioned probably three or four books alone and in today’s podcast is there any book or content that you would recommend as a must-read for fellow marketers? Probably two come to mind. I think
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Twitter is a bit of a brilliant marketing uni course every week. I think a lot more in one week on Twitter than it did in the whole three years at university. That probably says more about me than the content of the course. If you go to there’s a guy called Shann Biglione, also has his own podcast and his handle is @LeShann. L E S H A N N. And he’s created a list of a hundred nine marketeers the essentially you can create as your own Twitter feed and you just listen to what they say and it’s absolutely fascinating.
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Some of the stuff that they they share you learn a huge amount by doing that and you don’t have to go through and click on 101 people to follow. The list is already there for you to follow. So kudos to him for doing that.
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And this will give a kind of overview of what’s been discussed as well or is it mainly a list of other? It’s essentially works like this imagine your Facebook friends for want of a better word and you’re seeing the feed of marketeers like Mark Richardson, and Byron Sharp, Les Binet, Peter Field their own thoughts on a daily basis. Amazing. So it’s less that it’s summarize it you’re hearing it live and there’s always something interesting that somebody’s saying it’s a really good place to learn you don’t know what you can learn everyday but it’s really really interesting no one’s gonna summarize it for you if that’s your that’s your own job to do to make insight right.
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In terms of books I’ve already mentioned Factfulness by Hans Rosling the second one I would recommend again it’s not a marketing book necessarily but we encourage sceptical thinking is The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig.
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I think those two books together have completely shaped the way I look at the world and particularly marketing. Really help me to learn how to think rather than just to remember facts. Those two books I definitely encourage people to read, and I have to say this I’ve read neither of those
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I guess so even I’m gonna put this on my book list. Thank you so much for the knowledge that you shared with us so far in today’s podcast. If I may just ask one final question of you Richard. What one piece of advice would you give to today’s markers?
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I’m debating two, you can give us two we’ll take them. Number one would be about your own personal development and link to the previous conversation actually is quotes that Matt Colebatch was
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Follow more people that make you feel stupid. They make you smarter. And I find that incredibly useful particularly the world of Twitter there’s lots of very very clever people out there and you do feel dumb at times but you realize you’re getting smarter all the time by listening to them.
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That’s personal development. The second one more a marketing one and linked to a lot of work done by Andrew Aronberg and Bernard Shaw and Judy Ramani is focused your marketing efforts on the uncaring of many, most people aren’t paying attention.
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So to focus your efforts on the uncaring many i.e. lots and lots of light buyers who don’t think about you don’t buy you very often but because so many of them really important sales and because they don’t buy you very often and their memories are fragile and they forget about you very easily, got you.
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It’s almost like the Ehrenberg-Bass principles from How Brands Go.
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Yeah perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. No worries it was a joy. Thank you for tuning in to the whole market podcast. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode please do click follow below for more weekly podcasts. Thank you.
