Your analysis provides clear data that the campaign was a (glorious) failure.
It could not be clearer.
The KPI you chose for your brand campaign was Trust, it had a pre-set target of +5. The post-campaign analysis that compares performance across Test & Control cells shows that Trust did not move at all. (Suspiciously, there are indications that in a handful of Test DMAs it might have gone down!)
Every so often, the story is just as simple as that.
You do the best you can with a marketing campaign (creative, audience, targeting, channels, media plan elements like duration, reach, frequency, media delivery quality elements like AVOC, Viewability, etc.), and sometimes the dice does not roll your way when you measure impact.
You would be surprised to know just how frequently the cause for failure is things that have nothing to do with the elements I mentioned above. In future Premium editions we’ll cover a bunch of these causes, today I want to cover one cause that is in your control but often a root cause of failure:
Judging a fish by its ability to climb a tree!
AKA: You picked the wrong KPI for the campaign.
[Note 1: I’m going to use the phrase Success KPI a lot. To ensure clear focus, clear postmortems and clear accountability, I recommend identifying one single solitary metric as the Success KPI for the initiative. You can measure seven additional metrics – say for diagnostic purposes -, but there has to be just one Success KPI. Close accountability escape hatches.]
[Note 2: Although the guidance in this article applies to companies/analytics teams of all sizes, it applies in particular to larger companies and large agencies. It is there that the
Category: actionable analytics
Cookies To Humans: Implications Of Identity Systems On Incentives!
A story where data is the hero, followed by two mind-challenging business-shifting ideas.
At a previous employer customer service on the phone was a huge part of the operation. Qualitative surveys were giving the company a read that customers were unhappy with the service being provided. As bad customer service is a massive long-term cost – and short-term pain –, it was decided that the company would undertake a serious re-training effort for all the customer service reps and with that problems would get solved faster. To ensure customer delight was delivered in a timely manner, it was also decided that Average Call Time (ACT) would now be The success metric. It would even be tied to a customer service rep’s compensation creating an overlap between their personal success and the company’s success.
What do you think happened?
There is such a thing as employees that don’t really give a frek about their job or company, they just come to work. You’ll be surprised how small that number is. (Likewise, the number of employees that go well above the call of duty, look to constantly push personal and company boundaries is also quite small.) Most employees work diligently to deliver against set expectations.
Reflecting that, in our story, most customer service reps, re-trained, took the phone calls with the goal of driving down Average Call Time. They worked as quick as they could to resolve issues. But, pretty quickly customers with painful problems became a personally painful problem for an individual customer service rep. They hurt ACT, and comp. Solution? If the rep felt the call was going too long, self-preservation kicked in and they would hang up on the customer. Another
See, Think, Do, Care Wining Combo: Content + Marketing + Measurement!
There have been tons and tons of implementations around the world of my wonderfully profitable See-Think-Do-Care business framework.
This is immensely gratifying.
Over the last year, I’ve also worked with many companies to drive new and rapid innovation in their digital strategies using the framework. In the process, I’ve learned a whole lot more, evolved my thinking and refined the nuances.
In this blog post I want to share two strategic clarifications/extensions of my thinking about the See-Think-Do-Care framework. My hope is to better assist you in your own journey in using the framework to unlock imagination, build intent-based audience strategies, deliver joy to them and accelerate business profit.
And, just because I love you all so much, I’ll end with a little bonus. A thing three that shares optimally aligned See-Think-Do-Care metrics!
But, let’s start with the core intent of my post.
There were two key reasons I’d created See-Think-Do-Care.
Thing One.
I passionately dislike how most Marketers have become selfish – because most companies set deeply selfish goals for them!
There is a ton of pressure to show ROI, in 24 hours (!!). There is very little desire to “rock the boat.” There are ton’s of incentives to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. There are loads of “studies” and business frameworks from the ancient Romans and early Greeks to “guide” decision making. We expect to shout via TV or Radio or on AOL.com and expect our customers to follow a specific “path” down the “funnel.”
Shove, shove, shove, them down the funnel, and shovel, shovel, shovel in the money!
I saw this wonderful cartoon by Marketoonist somewhere, it captures the essence beautifully…
It is not that companies are silly. Remember, there was little data