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Think marathon, not sprint

Brand management is a long-term strategy and a brand tracking program is a significant investment of both time and money. But, I promise you, if you collect and analyze customer data on a continuum—rather than at a moment in time—the rewards will be well worth the effort. Using your brand tracking results to guide your marketing strategy will not only help you make the most of your research investment, it will ensure that your brand, investment, and research strategies come from a place of knowledge, so you’re making the right decisions at the right time. 

Digital transformation isn’t the only process that has accelerated in recent months: so has in-housing. Gradually becoming more popular over the past few years, the trend has suddenly become table stakes for some brands amidst production challenges.

“Whatever creative that you need to develop has come, in a great part, from in-house capabilities,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice told Campaign in an interview about marketing challenges during the pandemic. “So, I think it’s actually been a boom to be able to lean on that infrastructure that has, in many cases, developed quite significantly over the course of time.”

That’s great for brands that have built up in-house capabilities over the past few years—but for those that have relied heavily on external agency partners until now, how can they adapt to continue serving their audiences? “In-house teams will do more of the work that companies would have previously sent to agencies, but that doesn’t mean the internal agency is ready themselves,” says Warren Chase, COO of Firewood, which merged with MediaMonks last year.

The true measure of who will not only survive but thrive in the coming months are brands that are prepared to digitally transform, he says. Simply seeking short-term gains that don’t provide longstanding value won’t cut it. “You have to adapt to the mindset of how to become productive when you can’t have your creative team around you,” says Chase. “But people will adapt—they’ve been forced to catch up.”

Strategic Alignment is Key to Long-Term Success

As many brands embark on their in-housing journey for the first time—or seek to adapt new skillsets and ways of working within an existing in-house team—collaboration and alignment is critical to long-term success. “It’s not just about the marketing department,” says Marco Iannucci, Senior Director of Strategy at Firewood. “What is the CMO’s relationship with the CTO, CIO, CSO and the rest of the C-suite? More than ever, the CMO must be a true partner with the rest of them—and if not, everything fails.”

This heightened need to align marketing’s efforts throughout the organization reflects the nature of marketing today. “Intertwining of marketing and technology is inevitable,” writes Thomas Husson, Forrester VP and Principal Analyst, in a recent report. “As the designer and orchestrator of personalized customer experiences, the CMO must increasingly leverage big data, real-time analytics, and a host of technology platforms.”

This means strategic success relies on solving the CMO-CIO paradox, ensuring that tooling and workflows enable collaboration throughout the organization. Iannucci notes that dashboards and new tools have made it easier than ever for teams to take specific capabilities in house, but “everyone loves their specific tools, and whenever something isn’t working, they say, ‘If we only had these tools, I could do my thing.’ But then you end up with tools that aren’t syncing up or talking to one another, making it hard to see things big-picture.”

Prioritize, But Be Open to Shifting Gears

In establishing an in-housing strategy, brands must be committed for the long term. Chase balks at the idea that things will ever go back to normal as we knew it. “We have to create the next normal, and that requires feeling comfortable with being uncomfortable, and recognizing all the opportunities to do things differently right now.”

He notes that this idea of adapting to discomfort or inconvenience is something that external agencies are already used to managing, though in-housing brands can achieve stability by ensuring their priorities are clear and in order. Consider the primary motivators that drive the in-housing trend: cost savings, faster speed to market and consistency over the brand narrative. Brands must carefully prioritize which is most important to them and instill a sense of purpose in the existence of their in-house team.

While that might look different for everyone, Chase advises that enabling faster speed to market should be a top concern for most brands, as it puts a strategy in place to quickly come up with solutions to new, unprecedented challenges. As shifts in the digital and economic landscape continue to reverberate, brands must be ready to act. “When you have clarity on your priorities and need to put one in front of the other, right now it’s time to act quicker, adjust and pivot, and that’s where being in-house gives you an upper hand.”

Embrace the People Factor

Acquiring and energizing creative talent has historically been a challenge for in-house agencies—a challenge that may feel compounded when the need for new skillsets emerge and budgets tighten. This presents a new challenge to in-house teams: how do you keep teams inspired and build space for innovation?

“Bring in the people that know how to do this well, that have gone through this and can speak that language,” says Chase. “We all know we have to accelerate, but the big question is: how? Bring in the folks that are comfortable with that ambiguity.”

In discussing the embedded team model that Firewood is known for, Chase notes, “Across the board our culture is fundamental in making things work. We are zooming along again because our focus is on, ‘How can I help you do better for our client?’ And that attitude really spills over beyond our internal team and permeates into our client culture as well.” Despite the talk of upskilling tech, strategic alignment and agility, don’t overlook instilling a purpose-driven creative culture—a critical factor in long-term in-house success.

From new ways of working come new ways to engage.

A new Forrester report by Jay Pattisall, unveiled at the start of Cannes Lions, highlights how the pursuit of customer experience (CX) as a go-to strategy has in fact inhibited growth for many brands. Instead, brands must invest in creativity (and identify the right partners to help them do so) to achieve higher returns. It’s welcome news at Cannes, which celebrates creative excellence and serves as a benchmark for best-in-class communications—and MediaMonks is proud to have been interviewed alongside other agencies for the report.

Pattisall relates CMOs’ focus on CX to a diminishing prioritization of creativity; one   finding in his Forrester report is that “Every brand offers the same digital experience because they all address the same customer needs, use the same technology platforms, and design for the same mobile use case.” Brands shouldn’t put all their eggs in one basket by focusing purely on function, but place greater attention on offering creative experiences.

A recent article published by Marketing Week agrees that brand creativity is on an overall decline, yet is a key indicator of success: 67% of companies with top ratings on McKinsey’s Award Creativity Score—measuring quantity, variety and consistency of Cannes Lions awards won—have above-average growth, according to the article.

Learn more about the cost of losing creativity.

What does this mean? Creativity might not be immediately quantifiable, but it can go a long way in increasing enterprise value. MediaMonks Global Executive Creative Director Jouke Vuurmans has long spoken out against brands failing to take advantage of the creative opportunities available to them. He has noticed a “suburbanization” of design where bold brand identity has taken a back stage to sanitized interfaces that tick off the same boxes. Because digital interfaces are often the most common—or even first—settings in which users will engage with a brand, this results in a lot of wasted potential for brands to differentiate themselves and deliver on the brand promise.

Building content and experiences requires input from many people across the organization, each perhaps pursuing their own goals—but they must collaborate to ensure their efforts are on the same page. “Just because so much focus is on digital doesn’t mean we should ignore brand within this relentless creation and distribution of content,” says ter Haar as quoted in the Forrester report, “The Cost of Losing Creativity,” highlighting the importance in remembering that even the most solutions-oriented approach shouldn’t dismiss the brand-building opportunities of creativity.

The Interface is the Brand

At MediaMonks, we believe every engagement that users have with a brand is an opportunity to represent its core products and services. Most apps that exist to fulfill a specific function essentially look and feel identical, lost in a sea of sameness where differentiating factors are slight, if they exist at all. This is especially true in travel brands, for example: any airline app will let you book a flight or check in with a digital boarding pass. But brands can stand out by fusing creativity and technology to fulfill a wider purpose. The Aeroméxico app is a great example of this by offering smart content based on users’ itineraries, helping them easily find offers most relevant to their trips.

The use of highly relevant and targeted personalized content shows how even the smallest interactions can make a big impact on the user experience—and those interactions directly translate into brand loyalty. “Creative experiences that embed the brand’s purpose and values within a tech-fueled solution connect the uniqueness of the brand, the emotional needs of its customers, and the convenience of technology,” writes Pattisall in the Forrester report.

We agree. While brands have come under great pressure to engage their consumers through always-on content, it’s become easy to view small pieces of content as disposable or having limited impact on the overall consumer experience. “People underestimate the creative value of always-on communication,” cautions ter Haar. “Just because it’s 6 seconds on Facebook doesn’t mean you can’t think about distinction.”

Drive Purpose Across the Ecosystem

A remedy for unlocking the creative potential in any touchpoint or piece of content is to begin thinking in terms of ecosystems. The user journey extends beyond individual channels and platforms. Likewise, brands should take a more holistic approach at the creative experiences they provide. “We spend a lot of time thinking about creativity as a broader term—something as part of UX, digital design, flow—across anything that’s building people into an ecosystem,” says ter Haar. “How does the work we do for brands lock people into an ecosystem?”

Take grilling brand Weber, who also realized audiences were beginning to care less about objects—like grills—and gravitate more towards experience. This shift in consumer focus provided Weber with an untapped opportunity: how could they use creativity through content and experience to position grilling (and by extension, their brand) at the center of social experiences that consumers crave?

The result is an all-encompassing digital ecosystem that serves not only as a place to learn about grilling products, but to seek out and discover inspiration about grilling as a lifestyle. By infusing this promise across an ecosystem that encompasses personalized web content, connected apps, interactive demos, in-person experiences and more, Weber has achieved a compelling digital ecosystem that accounts for a griller’s every need, infusing emotion and aspiration into every step of the experience.

In his Forrester report, Pattisall highlights the importance of infusing creative problem solving at the beginning of every creative process: “Rather than bolting creative on at the end of the process as an established look or defined list of deliverables, initiate the project with creative problem solving to help define the problem and craft a solution at the start,” he writes.

It all boils down to instilling your work with a sense of purpose. When working with clients to narrow their efforts and align those goals with moving the business forward, we enjoy quoting the NASA janitor who proudly told President Kennedy that he was helping to put a man on the moon. A similar sense of purpose should manifest from every step of the creative process, at every level of an organization and at every touchpoint at which users engage. Such an approach ensures customer experiences differentiate a brand and uniquely affect consumers to strike a stronger, longer-lasting connection.

Focus groups may be one of the most well-known consumer research methods there is, but they’re not always the most effective in reaching your goals. Camera setups and a sterilized, corporate environment could make the experience feel very artificial for consumers, amounting to less than stellar (or super accurate) results. While focus groups have their opportunity to shine, some situations call for other options.

No matter which method you prefer in gathering user research, having multiple options is best: some methods are best for qualitative research while others are best for quantitative. Ideally, your research approach should include a method for both. “Research just for the sake of it isn’t good for the project,” says Fernanda Gonzalez, a Sr. UX Designer at MediaMonks who has done research on behalf of travel brands including Aeroméxico. “Use two methods that fit directly with your objective.” This allows for both broad, statistically valid insights as well as the deeper understanding required in maintaining a focus on the user experience.

Where Focus Groups Can Fall Short

Focus groups certainly have their uses: they’re versatile enough to use at different stages of the discovery or design process, and can aid in testing which creative approach resonates best with a handful of users. But their biggest limitation is that they often feel artificial. “The process is so well-known to consumers, and the setup can often alienate the subjects from those doing the research,” says Gonzalez—not something you want when seeking open, honest responses from your audience.

For UX Researcher Olivia Cabello, who has provided consumer insights to brands like ServiceNow, the potential for groupthink can also limit the value of insights derived from focus groups. “The loudest person in the group tends to influence others’ opinions,” she says. “In the past, I’ve prompted individuals to privately give written responses before the group discussion. When checking them afterward, you can see how their opinions changed throughout the conversation.” Therefore, this method can result in biased responses or ones less specific than anticipated.

Giving Research a Human Touch

“The more hygienic and clean the environment gets, the further you are from the consumer experience,” says Daniel Goodwin, a Digital Strategist at MediaMonks in Hilversum who has worked with brands like Heineken and McLaren. Highlighting this need, brands must introduce empathy through alternative approaches that bridge the gap between business and customer perspective. Each of the methodologies outlined below place their focus on validating the user experience on an individual level.

In this respect, Gonzalez stressed the importance of treating users as active participants rather than study subjects. “It’s a mistake to act as if we’re equally impacted by how a platform or service will affect us,” she says. “It’s more important to say ‘I am here to listen to you, to try to understand your challenges and to help build something useful.’ This frames them as part of the solution, not just someone being helped.’” Because consumer research relies on trust for open, honest responses, it’s important to treat subjects with sensitivity and care—a goal which leads to the more human approach we strive to take in research.

1. Good Things Come in Threes

Gonzalez’s favorite alternative to focus groups is the three-person method: simply gather three people of a similar demographic or persona, then interview them about their experience. While the loudest voice in a focus group often dominates others, these smaller groups comprising similar or like-minded subjects is more akin to a group of friends chatting about their experiences. The approach establishes a more collaborative and casual environment that makes it easy for subjects to share their perspective, making it ideal for validating creative concepts.

“When you have a group of people complementing one another in terms of persona or segment, you avoid the issue of a leader emerging, like in focus groups,” says Gonzalez. “Instead, group members build off one another’s ideas, which also makes it useful for gauging brand perception.” Gonzalez recommends working with two groups, resulting in insights from six similar subjects. This lets you gain a good scope of the user experience in just an hour or so.

2. Dive Deep with Individual Interviews

The deepest insights come from individual interviews, whether it be through questioning about their experience or observing the way they behave with a product or platform. Trade shows and industry conferences make great environments for gathering several viewpoints in-depth. For example, one client that Cabello worked with wanted to target customers via old-school mailers. But when Cabello, who’s based in New York, spoke directly to this audience at an industry trade show with her team, they found that the target audience felt annoyed by mailers. After taking this insight back to the client, the business shifted focus on other channels that would better engage their customers.

Cabello advises researchers to gather perspective from several roles, personas and stakeholders with this method, and to keep interviews short and sweet: “At some events there is limited time between talks, so strategically selecting about five questions is best for keeping the conversation focused.”

User testing, meanwhile, is key for understanding an audience’s thought process and to test whether a design process makes sense. “What I love most is when people do workarounds, they find a way to do it differently rather than how it’s designed. That’s the perfect moment to ask why they did this, leading to valuable results.”

When applying these insights, it’s important that the brand supports—not replace—user behaviors. “No matter what you build or create, you’re not going to change people’s mentalities,” says Cabello. For example, a cloud computing service Cabello worked with wanted to build a documentation portal to help users learn how to use the platform effectively. But Cabello found that users already met this need by sharing tips through community-building. The insight prompted the brand to pivot away from a documentation portal and toward a community platform that would empower users to instruct one another and bounce off ideas.

3. Gain Insights Over Time with Diary Studies

When you need to know how a user engages with a platform, service or need over time, diary studies make for an excellent tool. Whether they really shine is by placing those interactions in the context of daily life: what motivates them to use the product? What barriers exist? For Gonzalez, prompting users to regularly reflect and record engagements as they happen leads to fresh results.

“By being involved in the day-to-day rather than taking subjects outside of the experience for gathering research, diary studies can result in more information than sitting subjects down and asking them to remember tasks from their day,” says Gonzalez. The approach is ideal for seeking inspiration before zeroing in on a specific solution to validate.

4. Poll Internal Stakeholders, Too

Consumer research shouldn’t just target consumers. In some cases, you’ll want to talk to other roles or stakeholders within the organization to understand how their interactions with customers can shape their experience with the brand. Goodwin has worked with clients in which their headquarters and roles working more directly with customers have become misaligned. In this situation, Goodwin recommends interviewing those with consumer-facing roles.

This practice not only aligns organizational goals, but also casts a wide net on user experiences. “Consumers have just one viewpoint: theirs,” says Goodwin. “But someone who interacts with them each day has a broad view of the different problems they run into.” By interviewing people with these roles, you can identify several opportunities to better support an audience’s need in little time.

Each of the methods outlined above aim to gather perspective on the customer experience without taking them out of the everyday. By engaging with research subjects out in the field and on their level, brands can achieve actionable insights without disrupting users or asking them to provide responses they think brands want to here. Instead, the approach should focus squarely on individual user need in the context of their daily lives.

As customer attention is placed more and more on a variety of digital channels, it’s increasingly important for organizations to appeal to them at the right place at the right time. The challenge? Most organizations feel limited—in terms of team size/bandwidth, awareness of local markets they might be catering to and more—in their ability to execute relevant, fresh content strategies.

From driving traffic to brand websites or engaging on social media with share-worthy, relatable content, a good content strategy is essential for boosting a brand’s presale capabilities. This is likely the reason why digital work makes up more than half of all US agency revenue today. So, how can brands of any size take better advantage of the technology available?

Good Content Begets Better Content

This method of creating and distributing content is powerful because it can react to users’ experience along their journey. Think of it this way: good content leads to more sales, which feeds into welcoming new customers or building advocates through a great experience. This in turn should fuel your marketing efforts, opening a feedback loop: what about the customer experience really resonated? Where could messaging be stronger?

When it comes to marketing, I feel the traditional ad model sticks to a channel-based approach, but it’s important to remember that today’s consumers view digital as a series of experiences across several platforms and channels. Likewise, your content shouldn’t be relegated to a single channel—don’t set up a blog and call it a day. Instead, you should relate to the user on all the platforms they visit across the user journey in a way that makes sense, then use that activity to better inform your content and continue to provide value. While the model of expanding a big idea worked in the past, it doesn’t translate well to digital. A modern content strategy instead starts with a strategic foundation, which is then retailored, varied and personalized across the different platforms available, which in aggregate build into a creative direction.

The good news is that today we have a myriad of new ways to give context through content, allowing for more engaging experiences that relate to the users no matter the platforms they frequent. By making use of the latest technologies available, brands of all sizes can boost their creative capabilities and deliver more engaging content at scale, paving the way for better customer experiences.

But before going further, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page for what a content strategy is. Your content strategy encompasses the planning and development of all consumer-facing communication from your organization, including your CEO’s talking points, your PR strategy, how you introduce your organization in interviews and more. As the VP of Marketing at MediaMonks, I’ve led content marketing initiatives for organizations of all sizes. Through that experience, I’ve discovered a few strategies and takeaways for how brands big and small can take a more modern approach to their blog content.

The best place to begin devising such a content strategy is to define your organization’s purpose, so take a moment to consider your brand’s purpose and what it wants to achieve. Honing in on a purpose is easier for some brands than others; challenger brands by their very nature exemplify some sort of purpose, for example, while legacy brands might struggle to articulate the heritage and personality that they’ve built up within a fast-changing landscape.

Speak to Experiences

Today’s consumers are more concerned with experience than product. This shift might prompt a best-in-class grill manufacturer, for example, to devise a content strategy focused more on celebrating the act of grilling than the grill itself. Through content that seeks to inspire and inform, a key purpose for such a brand would be helping people make memories together.

If you’re uncertain on how to articulate your purpose, begin with your most profitable offering or differentiated value. From there, consider the white spaces—the stuff your audience is working to resolve or understand. This process helps you define talk tracks, or a handful of topics that your content will focus on. You should be able to examine a talk track from several viewpoints; for example, a talk track about “emerging tech” can explore AR, VR, artificial intelligence and more in terms of both their development, benefits and challenges. For our grilling example above, cultivating a sense of togetherness was key, which manifests in recipes, inspiration for entertaining or helping prospects discover which features of a grill or its accessories suits their lifestyle.

It may be tempting to chase several talk tracks, but keep it down to only three to five. Since you’ll consistently measure effectiveness for your content, you can always switch up or change talk tracks later.

The Demographic Death-Knell

On a basic level, you’ll need to divide your content up on where it sits within the sales funnel: whether someone is researching your product for the first time, is coming back from a retargeting campaign or is a repeat customer. Each step of this journey offers different questions the customer needs answered, which your content should support.

In addition to planning around specific steps of the funnel or consumer journey, specific forms of content should be built around user personas: who are your best customers, and what do they respond to? How does that differ from your second-best? How do different talk tracks relate to different segments? When developing personas and segments, it’s better to group users by preferences and interest than demographics. Why? Because demographics are dead: an older, midwestern man who likes American Crime Story might have more interests in common with a teen girl from LA who also likes the show, than his own demographic peers. Simply put, “Demographic information doesn’t tell us anything,” says MediaMonks Founder and COO Wesley ter Haar. “It’s all about the user’ preferences.”

Defining personas makes it easier to develop content because you know what sort of things to include or exclude. If writing for an individual who prefers content geared at business-related tips and tricks, but also watches sports and is interested in local events, you know to play up those preferences in your content. Some organizations have several personas to accommodate; for example, a travel booking site would need to generate content for all their destinations, and perhaps interests as well—is the customer a partier, someone who likes historical places, a foodie? For organizations who need to develop content on a large scale, we offer them a modular approach: where we define what variables exist in your content, which can be tweaked and revised in different ways for different personas. With this plug-and-play, modular method, we’re not just generating content but creating an entire content framework that not only targets users but A/B tests what’s effective. This lets us dynamically produce content without additional cost.

These kinds of assets at scale are increasingly necessary with the rapid demand for always-on, personalized content. From dynamic videos custom-built to preferences without any user input to thousands of pieces of localized content for markets around the globe, brands face many challenges in providing timely, relevant content at scale. Even though most brands don’t have the resources that Netflix or Amazon do—which have perhaps two of the most-effective recommendation engines in the world—partnerships can help them fill those gaps. For those just starting out and who prefer a little more flexibility, an embedded team that can handle your content production is easily capable of scaling up if your needs or situation change.

For example, we just announced a new always-on content hub that will accommodate Avon’s million representatives spread across more than 50 markets. These assets are designed to maintain brand consistency while allowing representatives room to customize to their local markets’ needs. With each piece of content tailor-made for different channels, reps can effectively engage with their customers and clients wherever they’ve built those relationships—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or somewhere else. In addition to reaching consumers in more relevant ways, the move helps Avon provide its reps with more autonomy in their messaging without risking the brand’s identity, supporting digital growth in the process.