In the Box features in Ad Media
Thinking inside the box – measurement in marketing
NZ company thinks inside the box to create world-first tool to track marketing response
Marketers live and die by their ability to catch customers’ attention. But how do you know you’re getting it? How do you measure it?
Response is everything. And savvy marketers have identified demonstrating customer response as a way to carve out a real competitive advantage for their products.
“Return on investment is the name of the game,” says Dave Bibby, senior lecturer, Advertising and Marketing Communications at AUT University. “Marketers have had a poor track record of convincing senior management that marketing is more than a luxury. And in a downturn marketing is the first thing to get slashed because perception is it’s a cost that needs to be reduced as opposed to an investment. If you stop advertising – it’s like a relationship. Any relationship. If you stop talking or communicating – the relationship dies!”
One industry that’s made strides in tracking response is unaddressed mail. Yes that’s right - one of the most traditional mediums is at the forefront of developing new ways to listen to customers. In the digital age – unaddressed mail has not died. It’s evolved and thrived as marketers search for new ways to build one-to-one relationships.
Traditionally, unaddressed mail has been monitored by GPS tracking or independent survey panels run by research companies. But for marketers carefully analysing their advertising spends – that’s not good enough. GPS devices placed with staff to track ‘where’ catalogues are delivered can’t guarantee independent results. And paper-based research groups and survey panels deliver results too slowly to be of real value.
“Another challenge specific to this industry is what to measure,” says Matt Cowie, an executive on the Direct Marketing Network, a special interest group within the New Zealand Marketing Association. “Deliverability in the unaddressed mail channel is pretty good. Showing the catalogue has turned up is not really the issue. It’s about measurability – or the stickiness of it in the household - meaning ‘have people seen the catalogue?’ The challenge for marketers using unaddressed mail is understanding how to make the message relevant to that group of households by integrating insight and data into the channel.”
Adds Bibby: “You assume delivery statistics are reasonably valid. GPS is essentially a negative strategy that functions on a breakdown in trust between delivery person and employer. I would prefer to know even from a sample base how many people actually read the catalogues.”
David Nation, GM of Sales and Marketing for Reachmedia, the country’s largest letterbox advertising and catalogue distribution company agrees and recently set about looking to build a better measure: “The more we talked to clients the more we heard that the priority was on understanding consumer recall of their catalogues. It helps gauge the effectiveness of advertising dollars.”
“We searched the world to find best practise,” says Nation. “What became clear is we needed an independent auditing tool if we wanted to have results we could stand by. In the absence of finding anything that met our brief, the obvious next step for us was to build our own solution.”
That solution was “In the Box” – a website that hosts weekly online surveys that can be answered by anyone who chooses to register and indicate which catalogues they receive in the mail and when. There are incentives for participating but the site and surveys are run independently. Up and running for a year, each week data is collected from a core group of over 16,000 registered panel members split evenly across Reachmedia’s 5000 national urban delivery rounds .
It is a first for the industry, and makes it New Zealand’s only true independent measure of unaddressed media in the New Zealand market.
Nation explains why he believes customers are finding this independent auditing tool to be a missing piece of the puzzle. “Marketing is all about creating an action. To evoke a response it’s critical to get the right message, to the right people, at the right time. The trick is knowing who, why and when – ultimately consumer insight helps to answer the who, why and when and that’s what In the Box provides.”
In the Box is now being looked at by overseas customers for use in offshore markets. “We believe this product is actually a world-first in independent auditing of delivery and we’re really proud that it is a NZ-developed and created tool.” In the future, Reachmedia plans to use the product to offer richer research findings for clients.