Marketers’ fixation with efficiently maximising reach is partly responsible for the decline in advertising effectiveness, according to WPP Media’s strategy president, Stuart Bowden.
Chasing the same reach targets means ‘everybody’s buying the same formats on the same platforms at a similar price,’ says Bowden. ‘It’s quite possible, that is part of the reason why advertising has become less effective over time because plans become far more homogeneous.’
New research published today by WPP Media and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, aims to challenge that orthodoxy by highlighting the role that priming, customer receptivity and channel influence play in the purchase journey.
The white paper is based on data from 1.2 million consumer interviews and proposes a framework that divides the buying process into two stages: the priming stage, where people aren’t in the market but are absorbing messages that shape their attitudes, and the active stage, in which people move towards a purchase.
Across all product categories, 84% of purchases are for brands that people were already biased towards before they thought about buying, according to the data, and in no single category does that figure dip below 70%.
Which means that if a brand only seeks to persuade people when they’re looking to buy, it is fighting for — on average — just 16% of the total market.
‘One of the things that I found most interesting,’ says Felipe Thomaz, associate professor of marketing at Saïd Business School, who conducted the research, ‘was just how weak a force paid advertising generally is at the point at which you’ve sent a signal that you’re in the market, and [brands] start piling in with lower-funnel performance stuff.
‘Paid media there doesn’t really change many people’s minds. It is possible to change people’s minds at that stage, but you’re three times more likely to make that happen by working through earned, shared and owned [media] than you are through paid.’
But the likelihood that marketing will change someone’s mind varies depending on their receptiveness. According to the paper, gender plays a small part in determining receptiveness (women are 3-4% less open to persuasion), and age accounts for about 21% of the difference (with older people less receptive). But 75% is down to the individual and changes from category to category, and from channel to channel.
And rather than trying to make people more receptive, Thomaz argues for using the data to identify the channels (or combination of channels) that will yield the best chance of influencing specific audiences shopping in a specific product category.
Picking four media spots based on WPP’s receptivity and influence data, as opposed to buying the most efficient reach, increases a brand’s chance of influencing a consumer from 20% to 47%, according to the report.
The framework still ‘recognises that reach and scale are necessary,’ says Thomaz, but it shows that ‘the choices you make in how you build up that reach at a category level have a material effect on how you create priming bias and how you convert in the active stage.’
Main image by Thomas T on Unsplash