The B2B Institute will be sharing a short run through of some of the research presented at Cannes this year which shows that campaigns that have Promise-to-the-Customer at perform much better - across brand health, market share, penetration and sales effects - than those that don't.

-

Nudgestock is the world's biggest festival of behavioural science and creativity, where we inspire brands and people to impact the world.

Our theme this year is MESSY. That's because our heads are messy, our organisations are messy, and the world is messy. But where there's mess, there's opportunity to change behaviour.

The annual festival, curated by Ogilvy Consulting, features a wonderfully eclectic mix of talks and case studies from some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the worlds of behavioral science, marketing and creativity.

Curated by Ogilvy Consulting.

-

About Ogilvy Consulting’s Behavioural Science Practice

At Ogilvy Consulting, we work to creatively apply behavioural science insights to solve the world's most pressing and interesting challenges.

A magical combination of science and creativity, we are a unique global team of psychologists and behavioural economists embedded within the Ogilvy network. We bring proprietary tools, proven experience, expert facilitation and the power of Ogilvy creativity to unlock the hidden 'psychological power' within our partners' brands and channels.

We create unseen opportunities that generate giant impact.

---

#Nudgestock2023 #LiveStream #Live #Psychology #Nudgestock #BehaviouralScience #BehavioralScience 

-

Join our community of trailblazing behavioural thinkers! 

Head to www.nudgestock.com and sign up to receive the best bits of Nudgestock straight to your inbox.

I Never thought I'd have anything in common with the previous speakers because I'm here to talk from LinkedIn about B2B brand building and they're talking about misogyny.

But in my last but 1 job, I was the first marketing director of Lab Bible and we did the UOK Mate campaign and I can speak to the use of the word mate as a really engaging thing.

But I also think that my experience from that job told me 1 thing, which is that the best way to change behavior in men is to recognize the great goodness and generosity and decency of their vast majority.

And to use that as an insight delivers much, much more change, in my opinion.

And we spent some time thinking about that.

Before I start to tell you about some research that we did, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn has, I think, 1 job.

We work with researchers, we work with academics, and we create IP and strategic work to help guide the way that our clients invest their marketing spend.

But what we really, really do, I think, is we help CMOs get more brand money from their CFOs.

And there is a problem with the word brand, especially in the very highly logical, rational, professional environment world of B2B advertising.

These are big businesses spending much more money on advertising, much more money on marketing, and getting savvy about brand building.

But the problem is brand is difficult to explain even to another marketer.

If I ask 10 marketers what they mean by brand, or 10 creative directors, I'll get 11 answers.

So what I wanted to do about a year ago is to to set To run an experiment and we worked with Roger Martin.

So I don't know if you know Roger Martin's the reason that I became a marketing strategy person.

He wrote Playing to Win, Design Thinking.

I think he's Harvard Business Review's most published author.

He worked with Procter and Gamble for decades, still does.

We worked with him on this piece of work.

And now Starbucks and Lego, if you go to their websites, you will see that they are defining their mission in terms of the promise that they make to their customers.

And that was even before the research came out, when we took the preliminary results to Roger because he advises SEOs.

I think that there's a lot to do with brand that I cannot crystallize.

The 1 thing I wanted to test was, if I articulate the value that my product creates for the customer, do I get better, different, similar, or completely different results when it comes to commercial performance?

Because That's the discussion that we have to have and this is what we try to do a promise to the customer And if I had longer than 6 and a half minutes, I'd explain Well, it's really a wrapper for the 4 Ps but in a way that everybody understands your granny can understand it your six-year-old can understand it and Critically your CFO can understand it if your CFO understands brand.

It's frequently to just take brand on your spreadsheet and say, oh, you know, Mimi, I don't need to spend that money this year.

Our whole model of financing has really gone out the window.

I'm going to find that bit of brand spend, and this year we're not going to have it.

Try to say that about your promise to the customer.

It's a different conversation altogether So what we tried to do is to find a data set because that's always what's really difficult To help us to understand how to test this and We worked with walk which is they have campaign metadata from dozens of different campaigns around the world and across a long period of time and And what we did is we got their researchers to do an analysis of what campaigns that make a promise to the customer they clearly in the campaign objectives articulate the value that that creates for the customer and make that the through line of a campaign so it could be a campaign on multiple different channels it could be different creative and Here are some examples of a campaign that makes a clear promise to the customer.

We're articulating some value that we create for you and we're going to stand by it big campaign lots of different executions 1 core promise This is 6 if you've rented a car You will know that quite often the shiny thing that you want and the banger that you end up with are not the same.

Sixt had the go-to-market innovation to decide that if you order a specific car, you're going to get that car.

And their promise is Don't rent a car, rent the car.

Snickers, every time I see this, I want a Snickers.

But Snickers Satisfies is 1 of the biggest and, I think, most successful B2C campaigns around.

And 1 of the reasons I contend it's really successful is that it makes a promise to the customer about what it's going to deliver.

And when we said the researchers went through all of them, We had 2 teams of researchers because it's a subjective thing.

I said I really want it to be clear and explicit in the objectives.

Of the 2021, 808 made a defined promise to the customer, which sort of means that 1, 200 did not 60% of campaigns are doing something other than articulating customer value.

And in a way, that 600 is just as interesting As the 800 you did.

And to give you a sort of thought about it, what those campaigns were mostly is rather inward looking.

They were brands telling you about their beliefs or their values in the hope that they would mirror, and in some way, some magically attach themselves to the client purchase.

But I think we saw at least 2 bits of analysis earlier today that said, not necessarily true.

I would also say that we're not saying that not making a promise to the customer is a bad thing or a good thing.

We're not saying that making promises a good thing.

All I wanted to test is what are the financial outcomes.

So there's some brilliant campaigns that do different things.

I just wanted to test The commercial outcomes.

I'm going to run you through really quickly Brand health a bucket of different measures But the thing about campaign metadata is you get what was increased you get a good story From what we tried to do to what happened And that's harder to do Measurement of brand is so difficult because people don't have that time 56% of all the promise to the customer campaigns increased brand health compared to 38% of a larger number 30 38 percent of 60 percent Did not increase brand how they did but 56 percent of the promise of the customer campaigns Increased brand health now in my non lab Bible job the previous job I was the director of strategy and messaging and research at the Liberal Democrats.

And Liberal Democrats, as everybody who's ever had a leaflet will know, are the best people at bar charts in the universe.

If there's a bar chart that you can skew, it's probably from the Liberal Democrats.

So if I was a Lib Dem, right, this bar chart would probably start here.

It would start at something like 25%, and it would give you a visual thing.

But because we think this might be published by the HBR and Rogers is a stickler for this kind of thing.

These don't look massively different, but that is a 48% greater likelihood of increasing brand health when you make a promise to the customer This is a 75 page white paper, which we will send everybody.

I'm just going to take you through a very high level Market share market share.

I think I can take to my CFO and say This is the thing that matters to you.

27% of campaigns that made a clear promise to the customer increased market share compared to 17% of non-promise to the customer campaigns.

You are 60% more likely to increase market share when you make that promise to the customer Now that was a binary yes or no So what I then wanted to find out is like so you're telling me that you increase market share what is the magnitude of that increase?

Because if the magnitude of the promise to the customer campaigns is 40% but there's only 3 of them.

There's a difference So then we took all the sample that had that data Smaller sample so you're not correlating this with the previous findings But in this sample on a mean annual basis you had a 4% increase in market share from those promise to the customer campaigns versus the ones that didn't.

Now, the last thing, which is I think the 1 that maybe you want to take away with you, is then we looked at long-term brand and sales growth.

WALK have this kind of categorization of results for all of that.

So they have the metadata for did the campaign improve metrics, Did it deliver a short-term spike in sales?

Did it live a sustained sales success and right there at the top long-term sales growth on a rank of 1 to 6?

So 1 to 6 is where where 1 is, you know Everybody showed up and everybody got a medal and 6 is you really really made a difference All you need to look at here is the shape of the red, which is the promise to the customer as you go up the ladder, versus the shape of the gray, which is a non-promise to the customer, as you go up the ladder.

Here, at the bottom, if you just want to show me some improved campaign metrics, it's kind of much of a muchness.

You know, 51, 49, actually, those campaigns that didn't do a promise to the customer, many of which were social buzz or PR value, actually did, you know, it's in the margin of error.

I wish this hadn't been the Brexit vote because I wish we'd understood margin of error in a really profound way about 6 years ago.

But nonetheless, when you get to the top, 67% of the campaigns that were brand icons Delivering long-term growth were promised to the customer campaigns 33% were not now what is important about those ones at the top is that they are the big budget campaigns.

We did kind of, we controlled for different factors, but you have to look at the white paper.

If you're a Formula 1 car already, if everything is not just about the amount of money, if it's not just about the duration, if it's not just about the distribution, then 1 other aspect of it is about the promise to the customer.

And the reason that I think a promise to the customer matters and a reason I think it kind of has an implication for everybody here is because in my whole long life of trying to get ideas from 1 place to other people through communication channels, I started to realize in my elderly pre-Alzheimer's years that it's not the communication stupid.

Instead of thinking about what we're saying, we need to think about how it's being received.

I now contend that advertising or messaging or political messaging of any kind, if it is not optimized for the wetware of the human brain, it's just not going to work.

And that is the behavioral lens that we are here because we believe in and think about.

So a promise has a lot more behavioral weight than a set of words or a random set of phrases.

And if you want to test that, just imagine if 50 people in your company had to stand up and recite your company's mission and vision, if they could even tell them apart.

Somebody has got to go back to a PowerPoint and find out what that meaningless set of words is.

We don't really respond to meaningless set of words.

A promise is the thing that our psyches and our civilizations have been built on.

When you get married, you make a promise.

I promise to do these things we respond to promises Promises are implicitly already going to be better understood than some vague phrase.

So Our conclusion at every level of commercial output make a promise to the customer and your creative, and I would contend, in fact, I think I'd almost promise that you'll get a better result than if you don't.


Speaker 0: I Never thought I'd have anything in common with the previous speakers because I'm here to talk from LinkedIn about B2B brand building and they're talking about misogyny. But in my last but 1 job, I was the first marketing director of Lab Bible and we did the UOK Mate campaign and I can speak to the use of the word mate as a really engaging thing. But I also think that my experience from that job told me 1 thing, which is that the best way to change behavior in men is to recognize the great goodness and generosity and decency of their vast majority. And to use that as an insight delivers much, much more change, in my opinion. And we spent some time thinking about that.

So I just wanted to drop that in. Before I start to tell you about some research that we did, the B2B Institute at LinkedIn has, I think, 1 job. We do a number of different things. We work with researchers, we work with academics, and we create IP and strategic work to help guide the way that our clients invest their marketing spend. But what we really, really do, I think, is we help CMOs get more brand money from their CFOs.

That's really what they come to us for. And there is a problem with the word brand, especially in the very highly logical, rational, professional environment world of B2B advertising. But B2B is a growth category. These are big businesses spending much more money on advertising, much more money on marketing, and getting savvy about brand building. But the problem is brand is difficult to explain even to another marketer.

If I ask 10 marketers what they mean by brand, or 10 creative directors, I'll get 11 answers. I guarantee it. So what I wanted to do about a year ago is to to set To run an experiment and we worked with Roger Martin. So I don't know if you know Roger Martin's the reason that I became a marketing strategy person. He wrote Playing to Win, Design Thinking.

I think he's Harvard Business Review's most published author. He worked with Procter and Gamble for decades, still does. We worked with him on this piece of work. And now Starbucks and Lego, if you go to their websites, you will see that they are defining their mission in terms of the promise that they make to their customers. And that was even before the research came out, when we took the preliminary results to Roger because he advises SEOs.

I think that there's a lot to do with brand that I cannot crystallize. The 1 thing I wanted to test was, if I articulate the value that my product creates for the customer, do I get better, different, similar, or completely different results when it comes to commercial performance? Because That's the discussion that we have to have and this is what we try to do a promise to the customer And if I had longer than 6 and a half minutes, I'd explain Well, it's really a wrapper for the 4 Ps but in a way that everybody understands your granny can understand it your six-year-old can understand it and Critically your CFO can understand it if your CFO understands brand. It's frequently to just take brand on your spreadsheet and say, oh, you know, Mimi, I don't need to spend that money this year. This is like a heated steering wheel.

It's great when times are good. But you know what? Inflation's 10%. Interest rates are soaring. Our whole model of financing has really gone out the window.

I'm going to find that bit of brand spend, and this year we're not going to have it. Try to say that about your promise to the customer. It's a different conversation altogether So what we tried to do is to find a data set because that's always what's really difficult To help us to understand how to test this and We worked with walk which is they have campaign metadata from dozens of different campaigns around the world and across a long period of time and And what we did is we got their researchers to do an analysis of what campaigns that make a promise to the customer they clearly in the campaign objectives articulate the value that that creates for the customer and make that the through line of a campaign so it could be a campaign on multiple different channels it could be different creative and Here are some examples of a campaign that makes a clear promise to the customer. So this is BT, Beyond Limits. Unbreakable Wi-Fi for business.

That's a promise. We're articulating some value that we create for you and we're going to stand by it big campaign lots of different executions 1 core promise This is 6 if you've rented a car You will know that quite often the shiny thing that you want and the banger that you end up with are not the same. Sixt had the go-to-market innovation to decide that if you order a specific car, you're going to get that car. And their promise is Don't rent a car, rent the car. Snickers, every time I see this, I want a Snickers.

So that's how good this campaign is. But Snickers Satisfies is 1 of the biggest and, I think, most successful B2C campaigns around. And 1 of the reasons I contend it's really successful is that it makes a promise to the customer about what it's going to deliver. Now, we looked at 2021 campaigns. And when we said the researchers went through all of them, We had 2 teams of researchers because it's a subjective thing.

I said I really want it to be clear and explicit in the objectives. Of the 2021, 808 made a defined promise to the customer, which sort of means that 1, 200 did not 60% of campaigns are doing something other than articulating customer value. And in a way, that 600 is just as interesting As the 800 you did. And to give you a sort of thought about it, what those campaigns were mostly is rather inward looking. They were brands telling you about their beliefs or their values in the hope that they would mirror, and in some way, some magically attach themselves to the client purchase.

But I think we saw at least 2 bits of analysis earlier today that said, not necessarily true. I would also say that we're not saying that not making a promise to the customer is a bad thing or a good thing. We're not saying that making promises a good thing. All I wanted to test is what are the financial outcomes. That's the only thing I wanted to test.

So there's some brilliant campaigns that do different things. I just wanted to test The commercial outcomes. I'm going to run you through really quickly Brand health a bucket of different measures But the thing about campaign metadata is you get what was increased you get a good story From what we tried to do to what happened And that's harder to do Measurement of brand is so difficult because people don't have that time 56% of all the promise to the customer campaigns increased brand health compared to 38% of a larger number 30 38 percent of 60 percent Did not increase brand how they did but 56 percent of the promise of the customer campaigns Increased brand health now in my non lab Bible job the previous job I was the director of strategy and messaging and research at the Liberal Democrats. And Liberal Democrats, as everybody who's ever had a leaflet will know, are the best people at bar charts in the universe. If there's a bar chart that you can skew, it's probably from the Liberal Democrats.

So if I was a Lib Dem, right, this bar chart would probably start here. It would start at something like 25%, and it would give you a visual thing. But because we think this might be published by the HBR and Rogers is a stickler for this kind of thing. These don't look massively different, but that is a 48% greater likelihood of increasing brand health when you make a promise to the customer This is a 75 page white paper, which we will send everybody. I'm just going to take you through a very high level Market share market share.

I think I can take to my CFO and say This is the thing that matters to you. 27% of campaigns that made a clear promise to the customer increased market share compared to 17% of non-promise to the customer campaigns. That is a 60% delta. You are 60% more likely to increase market share when you make that promise to the customer Now that was a binary yes or no So what I then wanted to find out is like so you're telling me that you increase market share what is the magnitude of that increase? Because if the magnitude of the promise to the customer campaigns is 40% but there's only 3 of them.

There's a difference So then we took all the sample that had that data Smaller sample so you're not correlating this with the previous findings But in this sample on a mean annual basis you had a 4% increase in market share from those promise to the customer campaigns versus the ones that didn't. Now, the last thing, which is I think the 1 that maybe you want to take away with you, is then we looked at long-term brand and sales growth. WALK have this kind of categorization of results for all of that. So they have the metadata for did the campaign improve metrics, Did it deliver a short-term spike in sales? Did it live a sustained sales success and right there at the top long-term sales growth on a rank of 1 to 6?

So 1 to 6 is where where 1 is, you know Everybody showed up and everybody got a medal and 6 is you really really made a difference All you need to look at here is the shape of the red, which is the promise to the customer as you go up the ladder, versus the shape of the gray, which is a non-promise to the customer, as you go up the ladder. Here, at the bottom, if you just want to show me some improved campaign metrics, it's kind of much of a muchness. You know, 51, 49, actually, those campaigns that didn't do a promise to the customer, many of which were social buzz or PR value, actually did, you know, it's in the margin of error. I wish this hadn't been the Brexit vote because I wish we'd understood margin of error in a really profound way about 6 years ago. But nonetheless, when you get to the top, 67% of the campaigns that were brand icons Delivering long-term growth were promised to the customer campaigns 33% were not now what is important about those ones at the top is that they are the big budget campaigns.

They're already big budget. They already run on lots of channels. They're already running for a long time. We did kind of, we controlled for different factors, but you have to look at the white paper. But they're Formula 1 cars already.

If you're a Formula 1 car already, if everything is not just about the amount of money, if it's not just about the duration, if it's not just about the distribution, then 1 other aspect of it is about the promise to the customer. And the reason that I think a promise to the customer matters and a reason I think it kind of has an implication for everybody here is because in my whole long life of trying to get ideas from 1 place to other people through communication channels, I started to realize in my elderly pre-Alzheimer's years that it's not the communication stupid. Instead of thinking about what we're saying, we need to think about how it's being received. I now contend that advertising or messaging or political messaging of any kind, if it is not optimized for the wetware of the human brain, it's just not going to work. And that is the behavioral lens that we are here because we believe in and think about.

So a promise has a lot more behavioral weight than a set of words or a random set of phrases. And if you want to test that, just imagine if 50 people in your company had to stand up and recite your company's mission and vision, if they could even tell them apart. Somebody has got to go back to a PowerPoint and find out what that meaningless set of words is. We don't really respond to meaningless set of words. A promise is the thing that our psyches and our civilizations have been built on.

We make promises all the time. When you get married, you make a promise. I promise to do these things we respond to promises Promises are implicitly already going to be better understood than some vague phrase. So Our conclusion at every level of commercial output make a promise to the customer and your creative, and I would contend, in fact, I think I'd almost promise that you'll get a better result than if you don't. Thank you very much.

See all Nudgestock transcripts on Youtube

Nudgestock 2023 - Every product needs a promise - Mimi Turner