Want killer marketing ideas? Start with killer insight.
A few days ago I saw an old TV commercial for Tim Hortons steeped tea. While the commercial was somewhat amusing, what struck me was that the team that made the spot nailed a very important element, which made it relevant and effective: INSIGHT.
We consistently tell anybody who will listen that great creative ideas begin with deep insight. In the case of this commercial, the insight was noticeably clear. If I could hazard a guess, it might have been about capturing the desire of many parents of teenagers, “I would like to stay relevant and cool in their world”.
The key to this insight is that the core audience for that product is not young or without children, but, people in the demographic group who have older children, etc. I get the sense that the audience listened intently to the message and got it. BTW: The tea product rose to become Tim Hortons second most requested beverage. The funny thing is, most teas are steeped!
B2B marketing that’s steeped… totally…
The commercial led me to ask, how can B2B marketers produce effective and relevant communication in a crowded and noisy environment? I think similar principles agencies use for consumer brands like Tim Hortons can work just as well for B2B brands.
The solution should always start with the development of deep customer insight. The majority of creative agencies spend time trying to develop messaging meant to elicit an emotional response from the buying audience. And many times they use a variety of methods to figure out which strategy and/or creative message will spur on the customer to action.
How to Avoid Creative Mediocrity in 3 Steps
Step 1: Research, research, research
- First and foremost know who the audience is. The objective is to identify, qualify and understand.
- Learn where the target audience spends the most time getting news, entertainment, information.
- Understand which medium they digest most effectively.
- Learn which drivers affect the group the most (price, quality, value, quantity, convenience, etc).
Step 2: Analyze
- Review the data objectively from different points of view to ensure that there is a clear distinction between hunch and empirical evidence.
- Ask questions to better understand which themes are developing from the data and evidence.
- Become your customer by taking on their persona and resolving their needs and issues.
Step 3: Summarize
- Collect all the information that appears to point to one or two obvious themes about the customer group’s mindset.
- Often the simplest theme is the closest match to the group’s desires.
- Focus the articulation of the insight on describing the customer’s point of view. For example, the Tim Hortons ad shows the insight from the mother’s interpretation of her teenager’s point of view.
Once the insight has been written, presented and accepted, the next step is to start the creation of both strategic planning and idea generation (but that’s another post).
Let us know your thoughts and how you develop customer insight.
That looks like solid advice. My question is “How do we get the target group to see things from different perspective that they may be unfamiliar with?” I think it is one thing to relay the information to the target from a perspective they can understand, but in my experience that creates an air of similarity in almost every advertisement. The question is “how do we open them up to a new perspective?” Or is that in the “planning and idea generation” post?
Good question and I can see why you asked it. You actually answered the question at the end. To be as clear as possible: The role of insight is to provide the planners and creative teams with the right starting point on consumer desires, questions or ideals…that position is a great base to start the idea generation from. The stronger and clearer the insight the easier it is to develop ideas that may go in various directions, as long as it stays relevant to the mindset of the consumer.
In your opinion, have agencies just been taking the easy way out. The formulae for most TV commericials seems very cookie-cutter to me. (i.e the inept male, and kids who make a mess of the house, and in comes heroic female with “xyz”product to save the day). I can only assume that these are the paradigms that we have become used to, and a test audience would probably not responds well to the situation in reverse. I don’t doubt that some of the examples we see on TV are based in reality. It begs the question “Is our reality sometimes based on the things we see on TV?” At the end of the day, clients want results, and fast! I think agencies have to use the tools available to them to accomplish this. So if that means going in the desk drawer, and taking out the book entitled “Cookie-cutter recipes for successful ads” I guess that is just the way it will be.
Insight drives results. Sometimes that may come off as cookie-cutter because proven principles often lead to what appears to be formulaic solutions. This is also more evident with consumer brands (B2C) because we are exposed to them more often (TV, radio, etc).
The walk-away for this post (for me at least) is really about implementing principles for the B2B market that will garner the right insight. TV and radio are rarely used in B2B, but we can learn a lot about insight from agencies marketing to consumers as the Tim Horton’s example illustrates.