By Caspar Yuill, senior strategist at AFFINITY
The IPA Awards has always been the bellwether for brands and effectiveness. And from what we’ve heard from our friends in London, is that it’s a less than sunny outlook. (But isn’t that always the forecast in the UK?)
Catherine Kehoe, the CMO of Nationwide, gave a blistering opening address noting that the top 100 brands were 20% less valuable than a year ago according to Kantar. If we, as marketers, are supposed to drive growth and value for brands, this means we’re getting worse at what we’re meant to be doing.
The good news? There is no shortage of brilliant ideas to help reverse this trend, as evidenced by some of the work being celebrated. The upshot is that to be more relevant and effective, your brand should look to the exemplars of great marketing and see what lessons can learned.
Break Rules. Honour Traditions.
Every category has norms, rules and traditions. Differentiating between what’s a valuable tradition to uphold, and what rules you can break, is the art.
Take Lucky Saint, for example, the non-alcoholic beer brand that has enjoyed 180% year-on-year growth. Kerttu Inkeroinen, Marketing and eCommerce Director, spoke at length about how Lucky Saint have stayed true to the tradition of quality beer brewing, but have broken several beer marketing rules along the way. The brand started with a Dry January partnership and negotiated inclusion in Sainsburys’ £3.50 lunch meal deals. They targeted active sport “doers” rather than viewers and focused on draught distribution. So, by breaking old beer category rules that only a non-alcoholic beer can, they’ve continued to be distinctive, interesting, and desirable.
Takeaway: Zig when others zag. What are the category rules? Which ones should you break?
Worry About Creative Wear-In, Not Wear Out
Consistency was the word du jour this year. Andrew Tindall from System1 presented some blockbuster research revealing the shocking statistic that inconsistency cost UK brands £474 million in extra media spend per year.
How? Because creative inconsistency means that brands need to spend more in media to “make up” the loss of effectiveness that comes from running the same creative, over and over. Creative wear out seems to be yet another marketing myth, and marketers should be more concerned with creative wear in.
A more consistent approach to marketing generated 27% more very large brand effects (substantial shifts in awareness, perception, or loyalty) and 28% more business effects (substantial shifts in sales, market share, or profit) when the same creative was used year in and out.
Consistency was also the no-so-secret ingredient in McCains’ Grand Prix win. Over 10 years, McCain produced work that had a consistent creative flavour. By doubling down on their distinctive brand assets, like music, visuals, branding, and messaging, McCains created long-term brand growth. Consistent client and agency teams no doubt helped maintain the single minded approach to their success too.
Takeaway: What are your distinctive brand assets and how can you keep these consistent across campaigns?
The Value of Experimentation
It’s easy to be consistent when your ads are working. But what if they’re not? What if you don’t have a great creative platform to start with?
That’s where experimentation comes in. Laithwaites’ Gold IPA-winning paper showed how a rigorous testing approach could measure the impact of a brand-building campaign. Laithwaites’ sales were in continual decline since COVID. To reverse them, they committed to a brand-building campaign. And to convince the business that this was a good investment, they set up a rigorous testing approach by allocating regions to either a test or a control. The test was exposed to brand ads, and the uplift was measured to build the case for results and further investment.
At the conference, Head of Brand James Morrison emphasised the importance of committing to the experiment at an organisational level and always having a control group. Perhaps more importantly, marketers need to be okay with failure — even failed experiments can provide valuable insights.
Takeaway: Be bold. Answer the right problems and always have a control in place when running experiments to measure your impact properly.
Validate. Then Scale
How do you know when an idea is good enough to invest in long-term? The answer is to validate it with short-term tactics. If a low-cost campaign drives sales, brands can take cues from that and use to accelerate longer-term growth campaigns.
The relationship between the long and the short term isn’t as different as people may think. Take Cadbury’s Secret Santa, for example. The campaign cleverly prompted short-term behaviour by allowing consumers to anonymously gift chocolate through a poster. So, it had a clear short-term sales increase, but it also built a long-lasting brand impact, resulting in Cadbury’s investing in the strategy for years to come.
AFFINITY’s very own Concierge Car Wash case study proves the point from a more immediate, 12-month period. Our team used a limited budget and existing customer data to re-engage car wash visits. Through meticulous analysis of weather patterns, customer behaviour, and the most effective communication days, we created a personalised, hand-crafted text message campaign to customers.
And the use of the humble text message as a marketing channel ultimately delivered an additional $3.7 million in revenue and increased average transaction values, demonstrating the power of data-led, shorter-term tactics when executed with precision.
Takeaway: Use your most effective short-term activities to inform your long-term strategy.
Getting CFOs Onside
One of the biggest hurdles for marketers is often securing budget approval from CFOs, who don’t (often with good reason) trust that “brand awareness” will actually deliver results for the bottom line. To overcome this, marketers need to do two things. They should understand the commercial imperatives and work with CFOs rather than against them. Building business cases and speaking the language of finance always helps. CFOs are constantly balancing funding requests from many areas of the business and they’re most likely to invest in projects that can prove a strong return on investment.
McCains provided a perfect example of how to dovetail marketing metrics with financial ones. By demonstrating that their campaign reduced price elasticity and therefore increased profit over the long-term, they made it easier for CFOs to see the value in continued investment over the ten years of their marketing activity.
Takeaway: Understand the needs and demands of a CFO and then ask help them to make educated investments in the right projects.
Conclusion
The insights from the IPAs 2024 are clear and prescient. In a world where marketing effectiveness is declining, it’s more important than ever to take a strategic and informed approach to accelerate growth. (Which is not-so-coincidentally something we at AFFINITY pride ourselves on.)
And by breaking the right rules, staying consistent, experimenting with controls, validating ideas before scaling, and collaborating with finance teams, marketers can turn the tide and see both short and long term results.
See also: Caspar Yuill: New Balance’s resurgence from daggy to desirable