Regular readers of this blog will know that I delight in taking the contrarian viewpoint. All too often, I think, the collective view of what is popular or effective gets swayed by pundits with their own agenda and news media looking for a good story. So I try to look beyond the buzz to see whether there is any substance to an idea based on the evidence available to me. But, as one of my colleagues pointed out, by doing so I may risk making Millward Brown look reactionary. Well, in the spirit of Web 2.0, I thought I would throw this issue out for your comment.
There is little doubt that many people still associate Millward Brown primarily with television advertising. Given that pre-testing and tracking remain a large part of our business, that is perhaps not surprising, but it also speaks to the company’s strong heritage in that area.
However, when the company was founded in the 1970s, Millward Brown was a jack-of-all-research-trades. As a client, I used MB for product testing, qualitative research and market-mix testing, in addition to continuous tracking studies. After I joined the company, we developed the first version of the Link pre-test, and pre-testing joined tracking as a cornerstone of the business. Our clients were focused on TV advertising, and that naturally led to our developing specific capabilities and learning in that area.
But as many brands have found out, strength can turn into weakness should times change. Kodak is an iconic brand, pre-eminent in camera film, but the arrival of digital technologies pulled the rug out from under their business. TV is our “film,” and, if you accept the buzz at face value, it too is going the way of the dodo. So the onus is on Millward Brown to demonstrate that our strong credentials extend beyond TV advertising to research about brands, media and marketing communications.
If people only think of Millward Brown as experts in evaluating TV advertising, then that’s what they will consider us for. They will ignore the fact that the majority of the research we conduct is not focused on TV advertising, as well as the fact that we pre-test print, radio, outdoor, online, and in-store ads. They will likewise ignore the fact that we maintain a vast and growing database of brand equity studies, and that we have a strong and growing marketing science practice conducting segmentation, market-mix modeling and cross media studies. People will ignore the fact that we have one of the largest qualitative networks around the world. Perception is reality. Trite but true. Like many strong brands before us, we need to change our image if we are to remain successful.
This has led to a conscious effort to get involved with the latest emerging trends in the marketing space: DVRs, search marketing, word of mouth, viral advertising and online video, to name a few. Millward Brown has either partnered with clients to investigate these areas or conducted its own proprietary research. The findings are reported back on this blog, in Points of View, and in papers and platform presentations. So what should we do when that research suggests that the latest marketing trend is not the silver bullet it is made out to be? Tell it straight, or spin it?
Take the case of word of mouth. Initially it seemed that most of the attention was focused on digital word of mouth, but our own research suggested that this was far less influential and trusted by consumers than advice from personal contacts. In other words, 90 percent of the attention was being focused on the word of mouth that had only 10 percent of the impact, because it was easily measurable. The most important word of mouth was being ignored. Do we call it like we see it and suggest that questions added to a tracking study will pick up the buzz that matters, even if we may be dismissed as not “getting” it, or do we just go along with the conventional wisdom? No prizes for guessing the answer to this one—but it does give a sense of the continuing dilemma.
I gave a presentation to the Warwick office recently, titled “Beyond the Buzz.” Afterward, there was more concern about what it might do to our image than about the accuracy of my conclusions.
I think it was the section on TV viewing that raised the concern. It is a fact that over the last ten years there has been no drop in the average proportion of time people claim to devote to TV and that the proportion of time spent online remains very small by comparison. I did not come up with this finding; I borrowed it from Nat Puccio, EVP & Co-Director of Global Strategic Planning, Grey Worldwide, and updated it with 2006 data. Even if we look at well-educated 18- to 24-year-olds who use the Internet and the mobile phone daily, we find that TV is still hanging in there, getting a substantial share of their media time. It seems that there is far more hype about TV viewers migrating to the web than the evidence would suggest. But if we point this out in public there is a risk that it will it be seen as self-serving: “Oh, they would say that, their business depends on testing TV advertising.”
Personally, I do not see a choice. I am a researcher and my job is to figure out what is really going on and advise my clients on how to react to the changes taking place. That does not mean advising them to jump on the latest bandwagon for no good reason. Rather, I think we need to work with our clients and their agencies to judge what might be in the best interests of their specific brands, and then, together, devise research to test the effectiveness of the new additions to the mix.
Over to you. Does Millward Brown risk being written off as reactionary if we don’t hail new media as a marketing panacea? How can we better put the case for and against using new and different marketing channels? And what new media opportunities do we need to understand better?
Tags: Millward Brown, Nigel Hollis, research, TV advertising, new media, beyond the buzz, word of mouth
(14 votes, average: 3.29 out of 5)
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August 17th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Isn’t the problem that (quantitative) researchers tend to be empiricists? This is certainly Millward Brown’s approach to the world. Empiricists want evidence that something will work and older things tend to have much more evidence associated with them than the new.
I’d argue that the research we have been doing over the last few years demonstrates our healthy interest in new ’stuff’ - we really do want to understand how it works.
Of course the other natural trait in researchers is scepticism. Hopefully our scepticism is healthy, and our empirical leaning demonstrate our commitment to proven effectiveness.
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:04 am
I don’t think “new media” is a “panacea” but consumer-generated comment can certainly impact brand health at least in the short term and as such needs to be treated as a channel/medium like any other. I think Millward Brown is uniquely placed to demonstrate and pursue a rational, empirically-based approach which in the long term will demonstrate the true value of these new communications concepts rather than the excitable nature of some other proponents.