A Marketer's Guide:
Proving Value
Key Insights and Best Practices to Prove the Value of Your Marketing Efforts and Impact on Brand Love
Love is a complex human emotion that can be difficult to define or measure. Yet marketers require rational proof of whether their strategies are working to create brand love and generate value for consumers — and they must be willing to adapt when things are not going according to plan.
CORE CHALLENGE
Brand love is a complex human emotion to measure, but marketers require rational proof that their efforts are working
ENGINEERED SOLUTION
Create a holistic view of what customers say and what they do
KEY PRINCIPLES TO PROVING VALUE
- Clearly defined brand purpose and coordinated measurement system are critical to achieving marketing performance and business results
- True holistic measurement of brand love must include both sentiment data and action-based metrics
- Willingness to rethink strategies that aren’t working can get marketers through volatile periods and economic uncertainty
INSIGHTS & BEST PRACTICES
Understanding how the C-suite prioritizes business challenges is critical for building and maintaining marketing support.
Many tools purport to measure brand love but are comprised of only social listening and survey data. Comprehensive brand love measurement must account for what consumers do in addition to what they say about a brand.
TOOLBOX: PULSE
Blake Williams, Director of Data Strategy, The Shipyard writes that Brand Love measurement is ready for a revolution:
- Virtually all available measurements of Brand Love are focused exclusively on social listening and survey data, ignoring more direct consumer action
- Marketers need a solution that incorporates not only what consumers say about a brand but has a dedicated focus to what consumers do – the actions they take that indicate Brand Love
- The Shipyard has developed a product called PULSE as a solution to create a holistic measure of brand love
Read our whitepaper: Taking the Pulse of Brand Love: A Comprehensive Measurement Solution
Recognizing that even best laid plans can stumble or fail when market conditions change is part of the frank internal assessment that every company must make.
GUT CHECK
When faced with product launches or campaigns that are falling short of expectations, do you own the failures or try to tell a story about why things aren’t as bad as they seem?
Ask the Expert
“Like any of us, we have weaknesses,” says Stealey. “And one of the weaknesses we had was in our T. Marzetti franchise. We had two [salad dressing] sub-brands, both of which had been long ago created and were dying on the vine. We made the choice to blow them up, to consolidate them, to bring them together and make them more relevant as one.”
Launched in May, the new line includes clean-label products with 50 calories and two grams of sugar or less. “It tastes really, really great. No trade-offs whatsoever,” he says. However, “full disclosure. We’re three months in. We’re not where we want to be. That’s okay. That’s what we have to face into. We’re about 20% short of where we thought we would be right now. There’s a whole host of reasons that drive that, many of which are beyond our control externally. But we learn from it. We adjust our plan, and we come back and we build, rinse and repeat.”
Download the FULL guide
The Marketer's Guide to Engineering Brand Love
