Every time we watch a good TV commercial or read a catchy copy on a newspaper ad, the world gets divided into three types of people:
- The layman who knows he loves it but doesn’t know why
- The competitor who purposefully calls his ad agency to share his disappointment
- And the media guy who envies the client service, research, strategy, design, production and media buying team this other agency has.
Decades and billions of dollars on research on consumer behaviour, psychology, decision making, culture studies and brand frameworks later, branding still remains a highly intuitive scope of work. It is mortifying to know that even today, guesswork trumps science at the strategy table as well as the Client’s mind.
Research done by Forbes shows that presenting a brand with the same consistency across all platforms increases revenue by 23%. Sounds intuitive right? But had the research not been done, we’d have never known for sure if consistency across media channels would be beneficial or harmful for brands.
The truth of the matter is that branding is not just about narrating a good story. (Granny would have headed the strategy table then!) It is about taking a high quality bullet packed with the right message and shooting it at the right angle and from a precise distance such that it hits the target audience with enough impact to evoke their purchase instincts. And this comes as much from the knowledge about the bullet and the audience as from the experience of being a trained shooter. And if one fails, they will disappear into the shadows of shrinking brand recall and perennial sales.
In 2006, TATA Nano was launched. It was all set to be the cheapest production car in the world. But the car never stood a chance, did it? Priced at only $2,000, it was targeting first time car buyers in India. Anyone with some market analysis and a couple of focused group interviews at their disposal would have understood that the Indian consumer is aspirational. A car is a symbol of pride for the middle class. Nobody wants to lose face by driving a cheap car.
On the contrary, IKEA – the Swedish home furnishing giant – with no roots in India, made history by attracting 1,00,000 visitors to its Hyderabad store on its launch day. Ulf Smedberg (Country Marketing Manager at IKEA India) said, “Before coming to India, we did a lot of research about the market and consumer behaviour. Then we did a deep study of Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi. Three years ago, we created the long-term positioning of Ikea in India. We focused on the strengths of both India and Ikea and put it in our direction. That positioning and direction helped a lot when it came to the opening campaign.”
It was all about proper research and strategy. Their success was no stroke of luck, gifted intuition or experienced guesswork!
Despite an existing risk evading established science of branding, neither is the Client keen on paying for educated advice nor does the average strategy team have the time to spend weeks worth of resources on proposals that might not mature into agreements.
It is time that the strategy process is assisted with adequate time and resources to come up with strategies based on research and not guesswork or intuition alone. Remember, good strategy is at least as (if not more) important as good execution.