Research: $9.99 a Pound

There is more afoot these days in the world of marketing and brands than the tsunami that’s blowing back our collective hair. The triad of the bionic consumer demanding to be engaged; the fragmentation of media touch points; and more brands than ever largely indistinguishable by consumers, has led, understandably so, to a cry for more data. In science this is called a secondary effect. In C-suites everywhere it’s called asphyxiation by the numbers.

The ability to collect data at lower cost and faster speeds than ever before in the history of marketing has not necessarily led to the delivery of greater insight. Like a trust-fund baby reaching 21 and suddenly seeing stuff to have everywhere he goes, it is tempting on both the marketing and the research sides to collect more and more information that tell you less and less about how your customer is really feeling about you , your competitors, and your category.

The next time you are faced with the opportunity to spend research dollars ask yourself just two things:

1. Will the data be specific enough to inform action? Findings on the consumer at large offer little to craft into a strategy when your brand is fighting for its life in the category.
2. Are the measures proven to some effect? Knowing that your rating on “broad product selection” has improved tells you nothing about how important that really is to your customer.

Perhaps our most critical job as researchers in today’s brand ecology is as translators, taking all that can be known and speaking what should be known—what must be known for brands to evolve, and to prosper. The best research functions are somewhat analogous to poetry. It takes the complex and rich world and distills it into what really matters.

For that to happen we all must break ourselves of the habit of buying, and selling, research by the pound.

Timing Is Everything

We spilled the proverbial coffee beans last year when we announced that Starbucks had slipped to #2 in our Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. This year they’re # 3. Behind Dunkin’ and McDonald’s.

The reason for this? The chain, once famous for its European coffee house environment and handcrafted beverages, has lately become famous for its vacuum-packed, pre-ground coffee, automatic machines and hit-or-miss quality of its products. Oh, and also a decline in profitability. What’s a brand to do?

And the answer is. . . (wait for it). . . close all 7,100 stores nationwide for three hours tonight to retrain 135,000 in-store employees and teach baristas how to pull the perfect shot, not burn coffee, and how to correctly steam your milk or soy.

Is this a good move? It's certainly a symbol that the company cares about quality. And profits. On the other hand, competitors have decided to capitalize upon the 3-hour window to offer free coffee to those Starbucks customers who are in need of a caffeine fix. Does it strike anyone else that pushing your customers into the arms of other coffee providers seems a questionable strategy?

One would have thought that Starbucks would have been better off re-training in the dark of night and then opening up next morning with baristas doing the excellent job that they did in the past. Today’s tactic calls attention to the fact that they've not been pulling shots and consumers have been paying more for less.

Improving your brand and creating operation effectiveness and profits seems a smart thing. But one can only question, who was in the room when this shot was, uh, pulled?

Kaleidoscope Media Planning

For those of you who might find yourself in London on the 27^th in the vicinity of the Sofitel St. James, we’d love if you’d come and hear the Brand Keys presentation at the World Advertising Research Center’s Media Research 2008 Conference. We’ll be addressing some complex issues.

Media planning was once a fairly straightforward, linear, and demographically-based, business-as-usual planning process. Now it has turned into brand and media planning inside a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place. Familiar contexts, targets, and archetypes stand each moment in a new relation to each other. The slightest change – in the consumers, the brand, or the media touch points – and all patterns alter. Planning inside a kaleidoscope is awkward, problematic, and inopportune.

But if science has taught us nothing else, it has shown us the elegance that emerges when complex patterns are understood. We have studied this; we have watched chaos and complexity organize through one brilliant lens: consumer-generated measures of brand loyalty.

We will be talking about “The Science of Synergy.” Yes, it’s axiomatic that running campaigns in more than one medium, should lead to better results. But which combinations of media will produce the best multiplying effects? Which will engage the viewer, reader, or surfer, when they may be three different consumers in your target audience – or only just one, consuming various media? There are many areas of which the industry is unsure, and we hope our insights provide a forum for discussion, debate, and right decisions.

First Among Equals

The 2008 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index was posted on our website yesterday.

This year there are more ‘ties’ in terms of loyalty brand rankings than there have been in the past 10 years of the Index. The best you can say about that is it’s a sign of category standardization, but, more likely, the curtain has been pulled back from brands, exposing products and services that have lost their ‘brandness’ and are turning into Category Placeholders.

Among the 57 categories and 382 brands measured in 2008, the product and service brands that customers ranked 1^st in terms of meeting and exceeding their expectations for the category were:

Airlines: JetBlue and Southwest

Allergy Medicine (OTC): Benadryl and Tylenol

Allergy Medicine (Rx): Clarinex and Zyrtec

Athletic Footwear: Air Jordan and New Balance

Automotive: Toyota

Banks: Wachovia and Washington Mutual

Beer (Light): Coors Light

Beer (regular): Sam Adams

Bottled Water: Aquafina and Fiji

Car Insurance: Geico

Car Rental (Airport Locations): Hertz

Car Rental (AO Locations): Avis

Casual Dining: Olive Garden

Cell Phones: Samsung

Clothing Catalogues: L.L.Bean

Coffee: Dunkin’ Donuts

Computers: Apple

Cosmetics (Luxury): Estee Lauder

Cosmetics (Mass Merchandiser): Maybelline

Credit Cards: Discover Card

Diapers: Playskool and Wal-Mart White Cloud

DVD Players: Samsung

Energy Provider: PSE&G

Evening News Show: ABC

Gasoline: BP and Sunoco

HDTV (LCD): Samsung

HDTV (Plasma): Panasonic and Pioneer

Hotels (Luxury): W Hotels

Hotels (Upscale): Embassy Suites and Hyatt

Hotels (Midscale): Comfort Inn

Hotels (Economy): Day’s Inn

Insurance Company: NY Life

Laundry Detergent: Tide

Long Distance Provider: AT&T and Verizon

Major League Sports: National Football League

Morning News Shows: Good Morning America (ABC) and The Today Show (NBC)

Mutual Funds: T. Rowe Price

MFP Office Copier: Konica Minolta

On-line Books & Music: Amazon.com

On-line Brokerage: Scottrade.com

On-line Travel Sites: Expedia.com and Orbitz.com

OTC Pain Reliever: Tylenol

Parcel Delivery: UPS

Pizza: Domino’s and Papa John’s

Quick-Serve Restaurants: McDonald’s and Subway

Retail Stores (Apparel): Victoria’s Secret

Retail Stores (Discount): Wal-Mart

Retail Stores (Department): Macy’s

Retail Stores (Electronics): Best Buy

Retail Stores (Office Supply): Staples

Retail Stores (Home Improvement): Lowe’s and True Value

Satellite Radio: XM

Search Engines: Google

Soft Drinks (Diet): Diet Pepsi

Soft Dinks (Regular): Pepsi

Toothpaste: Crest

Wireless Phone Service: AT&T and Verizon

At a time when most brands continue to struggle to differentiate themselves from their competition and engage their customers in order to remain profitable, these rankings serve as both an opportunity and warning. The brands that answer this warning with a truly consumer-centric view of their category, based on predictive loyalty metrics, will gain the most, and establish themselves as 21^st century brands and not commodities. If not. . . well, if you think engaging consumers is hard now, wait till you try to do it when your brand turns into a well-known commodity.

But I Dream Things That Never Were; And I Say. "Why Not?"

As part of our annual Valentine’s Day survey, everyone was asked, “next to your very own sweetheart, whom would you like to celebrate Valentine’s Day with?”

Fantasies included the following:

Women	Men
1. George Clooney	1. Rebecca Romjin-Stamos
2. Patrick Dempsey	2. Charlize Theron
3. Jake Gyllenhaal	3. Eva Longoria
4. Clive Owen	4. Nicole Kidman
5. Johnny Depp	5. Angelina Jolie
6. Brad Pitt	6. Halle Berry
7. Daniel Craig	7. Giselle Bundchen
8. Will Smith	8. Heidi Klum
9. Paul Newman	9. Cameron Diaz
10. Sean Connery	10. Scarlett Johansson

If you didn’t make the list take some solace in the advice from Oscar Wilde: “Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance."

A Brand Keys View of Valentine's Day

Legend says it started with a letter from a prisoner – Valentine – to his beloved, his jailer’s daughter. And now, every February 14^th gifts and cards are exchanged between sweethearts.

More and more, however, gifts are being exchanged between friends and family – all in the name of St. Valentine, and that’s turned Valentine’s Day into a major retail holiday. This year we’re seeing consumers report higher after-Christmas redemption rates of gifts cards, a large majority of which are going for purchases for the closest major holiday – Valentine’s Day, with the average price placed on love is $128.00, although the anticipated increase is about half of what it was in 2006.

As part of their bi-annual Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, Brand Keys asked 1,200 men and 1,200 women (18-60 years of age) drawn from the 9 Census regions of the United States what they were going to do, what they were going to buy and how they were going to celebrate Valentine’s Day this year.

The top-10 gifts for 2008 include:

	Total	Men	Women
Cards	85%	90%	80%
Dinner/Entertainment Events	58%	80%	35%
Gift Cards	58%	61%	55%
Flowers	48%	85%	10%
Candy	40%	40%	40%
Jewelry	28%	45%	10%
Stuffed Animals/Balloons	13%	15%	10%
Perfume/Cologne	13%	10%	15%
Lingerie/Clothes	13%	25%	1%
Books	10%	10%	10%

Top-4 Valentine’s Day activities include:

	Total	Men	Women
Dinner	55%	55%	55%
Movie	35%	35%	35%
Sex	28%	25%	30%
Stay at home	4%	4%	4%

Interesting numbers, huh? Anticipated lingerie purchases and sex at half that of jewelry and dinner. Although there is the saying that any piece of clothing can be sexy with a quietly passionate woman inside it!

Have a Happy Valentine’s day, however you celebrate!

Counting Your Chickens Before They're Broiled

KFC parent company, Yum Brands, announced that they’re looking to make some really significant changes to, what can only charitably be called, a fairly inert, aging quick-serve, chicken offering. The company says that the changes are an acknowledgment that KFC businesses are in need of rejuvenation to meet changing consumer tastes and to fend off competitors.

Well, mature stores and category competition is one thing, and consumers are another.

Category drivers – and the attributes, benefits, and values they consist of – are critically important to understanding brand engagement and getting it right when dealing with today’s ‘bionic’ consumers. The reason becomes clear when you realize that these are not measures created by researchers, but are, in fact, measures created by consumers themselves.

It’s the consumer, not the category at the wheel in terms of stating what matters, how important is it, and how much it contributes to the purchase decision in a category. In a time where the phrase “consumer-centric” gets more play than “Britney’s court hearing” this is a true indicator, which may be why it’s so highly correlated to in-market performance. If you’re keeping score by counting your sales and profits and not merely awareness levels, this stuff matters. So what should really matter most is that consumer-created quick-serve restaurant drivers like “Variety” and “Healthy Choice” have taken on greater importance this year.

Anyway, the restaurant giant is looking at makeovers of its mature fast-food outlets, and one of the big options is restructuring KFC sometime next year, using what Yum calls a "non-fried chicken platform," which, informed marketers and consumers can only assume means “broiled,” and informed marketers and consumers can infer that it meets the most basic requirements of providing additional variety and the appearance of healthy eating.

Can a company named “Kentucky ‘Fried’ Chicken” get away with serving broiled chicken? Based on the Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, the answers would seem to be . . . probably!

The other thing that consumers control is that wily value called “believability.” KFC and Yum Brands saying it is one thing, Doing it, is another. Consumers believing it? That takes more than advertising and cheap protein to guarantee that!

Meet Amy Shea

Brand Keys, Inc. is pleased to announce the appointment of Amy Shea as Executive Vice President, Global Director of its Brand Development Practice.

This expansion reflects both the extended reach of our brand intelligence and the increasing demand for insights about how to operationalize predictive loyalty/engagement metrics in brand marketing and communications. In addition, because clients are continuing to discover that what worked 10 years ago is insufficient to read the complex, 21^st century marketplace – and even more complex, “bionic” consumers, the addition of the Global Brand Development Practice allows clients to take Brand Keys metrics to the logical next level.

Amy’s unique background in brand communications, creative development, and brand research made her the perfect person for the job! Her early work in branded entertainment is considered by many to be the gold standard of the category. Her work on the ARF/AAAA’s Committee to Study Emotional Response in Advertising, established her as a key contributor to the growing body of knowledge on engagement. In 2003 (as VP, Research at Ameritest) her team’s efforts were recognized with the David Ogilvy Excellence Award for its work with IBM, taking both the Grand Ogilvy and First in Category.

She has wide client experience — ranging from CPG, to financial services, to retail giants — as well as across media — researching television advertising and programming, newspaper, magazine, direct mail, promotions, and packaging, and experience in media sales, media buying, and media creation, as well as a deep background in marketing research.

Shea, a native New Yorker, divides her time between our Albuquerque and New York City offices. She’s a graduate of the University of Georgia’s Marketing Research Program, and her academic background also includes an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing earned by the University of New Hampshire, with joint studies at Harvard University, along with various writing fellowships. She is a sought-after presenter who brings a direct and creative-based perspective to the conference stage.

If you haven’t already guessed, we are extraordinarily proud to have her as the latest member of the Brand Keys team. She can be reached at Amys@brandkeys.com or at 505-242-2126.