And the Oscar for ROI Goes to . . .

The Academy Awards, aka “The Super Bowl for Women,” often comes in as the second-most viewed annual TV event. Last year the Oscars bounced back up to 41.3 million viewers, the largest audience they had seen for 5 years, and we’re predicting an even bigger jump this year. But these days if you’re looking for winners, it’s better to bet on engagement than it is on the number of eyeballs watching.

ABC has sold out their 30-second ad spots for a reported $1.7 million each. But while we wait for the numbers to come in, we’d like to point out that the investment of millions of dollars doesn’t have to be done in a vacuum. Engagement metrics can advise advertisers whether they’re making good or bad investments, can be done for any brand, for any media, and—most importantly—can be done before you spend your money.

Bob Hope, the once-perennial host of the Academy Awards, quipped, “At the Academy Award dinners all the actors and actresses in Hollywood gather around to see what someone else thinks about their acting besides their press agents!”

For us that “someone else” is the consumer, via our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. Last year we offered up some odds on who would win the based on the same loyalty and engagement assessments that correlate so highly with positive consumer behavior and sales. They managed to predict – with 90% accuracy – the recipients of the various Oscars, so here are the odds we came up with for the “big” categories for this Sunday’s event. These calculations are provided for entertainment value only. If you’re making real bets on the outcomes, you’re on your own, much as advertisers without engagement metrics!

BEST PICTURE

127 Hours: 100/1

Black Swan: 40/1

Inception: 50/1

The Fighter: 40/1

The Kids Are All Right: 200/1

The King’s Speech: 2/9

The Social Network: 7/2

Toy Story 3: 150/1

True Grit: 40/1

Winter’s Bone: 150/1

BEST ACTOR

Javier Bardem: 10/1

Jeff Bridges: 25/1

Jesse Eisenberg: 24/1
Colin Firth: 1/33

James Franco: 18/1

BEST ACTRESS

Annette Bening: 13/2

Nicole Kidman: 66/1

Jennifer Lawrence: 28/1

Natalie Portman: 1/12

Michelle Williams: 66/1

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Christian Bale: 1/7

John Hawkes: 66/1

Jeremy Renner: 80/1

Mark Ruffalo: 66/1

Geoffrey Rush: 4/1

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams: 33/1

Helena Bonham Carter: 13/2

Melissa Leo: 40/1

Hailee Steinfeld: 3/1

Jacki Weaver: 40/1

BEST DIRECTOR

Danny Boyle: 18/1

Joel & Ethan Coen: 40/1

David Fincher: 5/8

David O. Russell: 66/1

Tom Hooper: 13/10

We wish all the nominees and advertisers “good luck.” Actor/Director Clint Eastwood, a 10-time nominee himself noted, “There's a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven't. You just do the best you can.”

With engagement assessments, advertisers can do better than that.

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Social Lives of Consumers

A colleague and I were talking about a brand the other day. That’s not surprising. We do that professionally every day. And which brand it was isn’t important. What is important though is how impressed we were with one particular commercial that had been recently introduced for the brand.

The thing was that we hadn’t actually seen the ad – not in the traditional sense of the word “seeing,” if the first image that entered your head when you thought about seeing a commercial is sitting in front of an HDTV watching a commercial break. How we saw this ad was completely personal: my colleague’s daughter had tweeted her a note to check a posting she’d made on her Facebook wall for a link to the YouTube-located commercial that she’d had been alerted to by a co-worker on LinkedIn.

BTW, it was a great ad!

And if that seems a bit round-about, there are two things you ought to know: first, the entire interaction from start to finish took less than 4 minutes, and that included the commercial being watched twice (once by the daughter and once by us) and an additional comment being posted by my colleague who alerted her son in another city in another time zone. Second, more and more this is how real brand communication and engagement is taking place – at the speed of the consumer.

Social media marketing and the various connecting tools currently available to brands can be extraordinarily useful in opening channels of communications between brands and customers. The story just told about my colleague and the commercial features, in a starring role, engagement with various platforms to get to a brand message. But let us be clear about the distinction that must be made: that is engagement with social media and consumer-generated content forums. It should not be mistaken for brand engagement--even if engagement with those platforms did result in the delivery of an entertaining brand message.

One can easily see the attraction – and potential velocity – of using tools like social media when it comes to branding efforts, and some have more loyal “friends” than others. According to the Brand Keys 2011 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, here’s how Social Networking Sites rank, when it comes to loyalty:

1. Facebook

2. MySpace

3. LinkedIn

4. Flickr

5. Twitter

But these tools should never be mistaken for the end product. Like any great conversation, it can be a part of growing a relationship, but it's the relationship itself that matters. And that means not stopping at engagement with platforms and programs. It means engagement with the brand – and maximizing those platforms based on what really drives engagement with the brand.

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Discounting Brand Equity

Super Bowl ads are always good for a tweet or two—or thousands, it turns out, if you are Groupon and it’s your very first time at the grown-up’s table. Perhaps somebody should have told Groupon that what you pay all that money for when it comes to Super Bowl advertising is a guarantee of attention, and that you really don’t have to go out of your way to denigrate an entire culture in order to get it.

This year’s Super Bowl was a $3 million opportunity to move people closer to the Groupon brand. Whoops! Perhaps they needed one of those reverse-beeping systems that are on garbage trucks to warn corporate headquarters that some folks might want to back up at the offensiveness of highlighting the heart-wrenching plight of the Tibetans and then assuring everyone that it is okay because we’re still able to get those nice Tibetans to make us an amazing fish curry, and get it at a cheap price.

It is hard to imagine that this advertising went through any serious testing before being aired, not only because of its obvious insensitivity—so overwhelming that Groupon has pulled the ads and issued a CEO apology—but because they come out of an agency that has gone on the record for being against the quantitative testing of advertising. It seems there were even more of these ads made, making light of the rainforest devastation and whale hunting. Clearly there simply wasn’t enough time to respond with one to demonstrate the hilarious connection between the terrors in Bahrain and half-price Baba Ghanoush.

Our own research before the Super Bowl on the potential lift in engagement that the Super Bowl would most offer for the brands advertising, showed Groupon with the most to gain, in the number one spot tied with Skechers—if the ad they ran had been tested and shown to be a fundamentally good ad: not according to agency creatives, but to the people who actually give Groupon employees a reason to get up in the morning.

As researchers that specialize in helping pinpoint the places for agencies to work their creative magic to get the most benefit for the brands that pay them, we hope that Groupon has learned it’s actually not just about getting your name in the paper. In today’s consumer-in-charge market place, where the character of a brand counts at every-increasing levels in the buying decision, there is always another discount group to join. Remember, in this brand-consumer game, the team that always wins is the consumer.

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The Late Borders Bookstore

It’s been said that a good book has no ending. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about bookstores themselves.

Borders, the bookstore chain that helped pioneer book-superstores that up put many local bookshops out of business, announced it plans to close about 200 superstores over the next few weeks and filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday, indicating that they did not “have the capital resources it needs to be a viable competitor.”

Once thought to be the future of bookselling, Borders has struggled as volumes of competitors – from Barnes & Noble to Wal-Mart – have taken away share-of-market and customers. The need for bankruptcy protection was not helped by the fact that Borders was late: late acknowledging the impending decline in bookstore sales of music and DVDs, late to the Web, and late bringing e-tailing into their marketing mix. Compounding all that, a decade ago Borders contracted out their e-commerce business to Amazon.com, and a decade later were late acknowledging the inertia of electronic books.

There was a time when we tracked Bookstores in our Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. We modified that to acknowledge the migration of consumers to On-line Booksellers, which, in order to recognize the more recent changes in consumer behavior and category dynamics, now appears as “E-Readers.”

Currently, according to the 2011 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, e-readers rank as follows:

1. Kindle
2. Nook
3. Sony
4. Kobo
5. iPad

Amazon, the creator of the #1 ranked Kindle, reported that this month that for every 10 physical books sold, they sell six of the same titles for the Kindle.

A prompt Borders restructuring might help win new financing and might be able to delay insolvency, so there may be some hope for the brand. After all, wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who wrote, “nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending?”

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Delight Can Come In Small Packages

There was a critical finding coming out of an examination of emotional shifts in consumers’ Ideals of the 79 categories in this year’s Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. The incontrovertible fact is that consumers know brands, know what the brands do, and know what they’re willing to pay for the brands—and, they want to be delighted. This finding rang a bell when it was announced that Apple – amid growing competition and wanting to accelerate sales of its smartphones – is working on a delightful new line of smaller iPhones, about half the size of the current iPhone 4.

Even though category competition has gotten bigger, Apple is still rated #1 in the smartphone category, with this year’s also-rans looking like this:

2. Samsung

3. Blackberry

4. LG

5. Nokia

6. Motorola

7. Palm

Rumor has it that the new design will also be half the price of the current model. This will allow carriers to subsidize most of the retail price, thus placing the iPhone smack in the middle of mass-market price range of rival cellphones, which would help migrate users from cell to smart. That category looks like this:

1. Samsung

2. LG

3. Sony Ericsson

4. Nokia

5. Motorola

6. Sanyo

7. Panasonic

Size, we are reminded, is not everything. That title goes to the creation of consumer loyalty, which, when it plays out in the marketplace, only comes in one size: extra large.

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Let Us Tell You a Story: What Consumers Have to Say through their Loyalty Picks of the Top Brands of 2011

What can a look at the brands consumers hold close in their hearts as we begin 2011 tell us about what will matter in the coming year?

Tomorrow, Wednesday February 16^th at 12:00 PM EST, Amy Shea, Brand Keys, Global Director, will share the story found in the results of the 15^th annual Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index, our national study of 79 categories and 528 brands that examines what is driving loyalty and engagement, according to the emotional and rational point-of-view of the consumer.

Amy’s webcast guests will include brand and advertising leaders from two of the winning brands who’ll add their stories to the one the consumer has to tell about what really creates the brand engagement that creates winners in the marketplace

Please join Amy as she interviews Larisa Drake, VP Brand Communications for Discover Financial Services and Kevin Ragland, VP Creative Director from The Martin Agency, about the brilliant “Peggy” campaign and James Crolley, Director of Advertising for Progressive Insurance and David Register, Creative Director from Arnold Advertising, who’ll address the continuing success of Flo, now one of the most recognizable and well-liked brand spokespeople in the country

This webcast is being hosted by the Advertising Research Foundation, and is free—simply go to www.thearf.org and click on Events and then the Let Us Tell You A Story webcast, and sign up under My ARF, even if you are not a member. Space is limited so don’t delay. A complete listing of the 79 category rankings can be found at www.brandkeys.com/awards

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear directly from these top brand-advertising teams on the story behind the strategic storytelling of these great campaigns!

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Change Is the Essence of Life. Loyalty and Profitability, Too.

There's a Russian proverb that goes, "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change." It's a good business axiom too, especially if you specialize in measuring customer loyalty and engagement.

We try and look at the world and the marketplace the way consumers really look at the world and marketplace. So we shun reliance exclusively on direct Q&A and rely instead upon our validated, emotional, below-the-radar psychological assessments to identify precisely how consumers’ views of categories, brands and marketplaces change. And because the way it looks to them changes more quickly than you might think, you’ll notice that in this year’s Customer Loyalty Engagement Index – our 15^th year – we’ve actually eliminated some categories.

According to consumers, some have gone the way of the dodo, like Long Distance Phone Services. And we’ve removed categories that have shrunk to only one or two national brands, like Electronic Retail Stores. We ended up reassigning some categories. On-line Books and Music, for example, is being aggregated into a single On-line Retailers category, all to better reflect the way consumers look at the marketplace.

But markets change too, and so to account for some alterations there, we’ve added nine new categories this year, including Conditioners, Drug Stores, E-Readers, Movie Rentals, On-line Retailers, Shampoos, Social Networking Sites, Tequila, and Tooth Whiteners. And because they’re new we thought that the brands with the most-loyal customers—the ones that were seen to best meet category expectations, the ones that are delighting their customers—deserved a shout-out of their own. So here they are:

Conditioners: Aveda

Drug Stores: Walgreens

E-Readers: Kindle

Movie Rentals: Netflix

On-line Retailers

Shampoos: Suave

Social Networking Sites: Facebook

Tequila: Patron

Tooth Whiteners: Crest Whitestrips

Peter Drucker, wisely noted, “if you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.” So welcome to the new 2011 Customer Loyalty Engagement Index. For your convenience, a complete listing of the 79 categories rankings of this year’s 528 brands can be found here.

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Customer Loyalty Index Announces The “Decade Of Delight”

The "Decade of Delight" describes the key expectation of today's consumers and the critical finding of our 15th annual Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index^® (CLEI).

Across the 528 brands in 79 categories tracked in this year’s CLEI, values relating to “experience” and “authentic innovation” were found to exert the strongest impact on customer decision-making, category-expectations, and brand engagement. And while expectation levels for delight will naturally vary by category, brands that were among the top-10 best at creating customer delight were:

1. Netflix
2. Apple
3. Walgreens
4. Discover
5. Hyundai
6. Mary Kay
7. McDonald’s
8. J. Crew
9. Samsung
10. Nikon

This evolution from satisfaction to delight has been accelerating for some time. Brand value has increasingly been defined not through the narrow lens of price, but in terms of the total experience of consumer-brand interaction. This year’s results demonstrate that concept has truly taken hold, with virtually every category showing its greatest increase in expectations in the purchase drivers centered on attributes that most strongly impact the customers’ overall experience.

The CLEI data is predictive of shifts in the consumer marketplace – 12 to 18 months before it shows up in traditional research. And given the levels of commoditization in product and service delivery and pricing and promotional strategies, it’s no surprise consumers are looking for brands to make a real difference in their lives. Consumers know the brands, know what they do, and know what they’re willing to pay for them. Now they’re looking for delight.

Satisfaction has never been more cost-of-entry; delight is the new differentiator.

A complete listing of the 79 category rankings can be found at www.brandkeys.com/awards

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