Learning From Winners

How the ARF Ogilvy Award Winners Use Market Research to Create Advertising Success

Raymond Pettit

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780805856538
• eBook ISBN: 9781136676765
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

This book demonstrates how the best companies use the creative application of research, done up front, to produce the big ideas with significant impact on the market and on the people, employees, partners, retailers and customers. Readers of this book will experience how brand managers and their agencies use the right research to drive new brand in

Part 1

The Winners

INTRODUCTION

This is not a book about advertising effectiveness, although in the process of reading this book you will learn how major advertisers achieved outstanding business results. Neither is it an academic treatise on statistical tools and techniques, although, again, you will be brought face to face with a broad array of fresh qualitative and quantitative techniques and methods used in the course of planning and delivering successful marketing campaigns. In this book, we present how market research and analytic approaches are used in planning, creating, and evaluating advertising to help improve the odds of success.

What we share with you, plainly and directly, is how marketers plan, choose, and use the tools and techniques of market research and customer measurement to better inform the numerous practical and creative decisions that must be made to successfully drive business growth. The chapters are based on real problems and objectives that marketers faced. In short, the case studies capture definitive information about how market research and customer measurement techniques directly support advertising that increases sales, improves the propensity for customers to consider and purchase, and strengthens brand equity.

The Ogilvy Award case studies we examined span 10 years, from 1994–2004, a turbulent time where businesses experienced a technology explosion,¹ the rise of a new advertising, marketing, and research channel (the Internet),² continued efforts to develop tools and methods to measure advertising's short- and long-term equity,³ and attempts to broaden the strategic use of research in advertising and marketing planning, creation, and evaluation.⁴ Against this dynamic backdrop, breakthrough ideas and approaches emerged. The Ogilvy Award case studies are a reflection of all the influences, insights, creativity, and business realities that have occurred and continue to shape how we do marketing and advertising.

When the first Ogilvy Awards were announced in 1994, the Internet bubble had yet to form (let alone burst). Substantive work on models of advertising and the measurement of its effectiveness had been done.⁵ Many tools of the trade were in place: for example, survey sampling and design, pretesting of ads, and brand equity tracking, to name a few. Running parallel to the advertiser's world (and possibly presaging the coming era of Customer Relationship Management, CRM) was a popular service quality measurement push, exemplified by the Malcolm Baldridge Awards.⁶ This phenomenon, having taken hold first in the boardroom, stimulated the acceptance of management measuring instruments, such as the Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma methods borrowed from operations research.⁷

In 1994, overall, things looked bright. But for mainstream advertising, according to Roland Rust, an esteemed academic, a strong odor of impending doom was in the air:

Mass media advertising as we know it today is on its deathbed, and its prognosis is poor. Advertising agencies are restructuring to accommodate a harsher advertising climate, agency income is flat, agency employees are being laid off, direct marketing is stealing business from traditional advertising, and the growth of sales promotion and integrated marketing communications both come at the expense of traditional advertising. The reason for advertising's impending demise is the advent of new technologies that have resulted in the fragmentation of media and markets, and the empowerment of consumers. In the place of traditional mass media advertising, a new communications environment is developing around an evolving network of new media, which is high capacity, interactive, and multimedia. The result is a new era of producer–consumer interaction…. The new paradigm of 21st Century Marketing and advertising will be dominant by 2010….⁸

While we wait to see if Rust and Oliver's prediction will come true, it is clear that in 2006 the whole advertising, media, and communications industry is grappling with change and is in transition.⁹ And, as with any formidable change that presents itself, resistance is inevitable.

THE OGILVY WINNERS: A BELLWETHER FOR CHANGE

Where can the industry turn for guidance? Experts abound, yet little changes. Perhaps we need to look beyond the comfortable and familiar oracles we regularly seek. In point of fact, we suggest, encourage, and support the notion that there are examples of extraordinary performance happening right now that we can study and learn, and they are contained in the chapters that follow.

We begin by looking at a stellar performance from IBM and their agency, Ogilvy. In this case study, IBM underwent a deep, research-driven self-examination and in the process wound up defining and capturing the essence of “e-business” as a critical part of its total brand image and rebirth as a dominant technology services company. IBM went on to make use of extensive research to make sure they were effectively communicating the emotional and rational elements of their brand necessary to support their transformation. This case study illustrates many of the characteristics of extraordinary winning performances we uncovered: creativity, discipline, thoroughness, and the ability to integrate communications to achieve synergistic branding power and demonstrable business results.

1

Seizing a New Business Opportunity

INTRODUCTION

IBM nearly stumbled at the precipice of the Internet Age. In the early ’90s, when the largest technology boom in history was about to take off, IBM was struggling with a host of inherited problems. IBM was then a vast global conglomerate with incompatible brand strategies, and the company's brand value was in the doldrums. In 1993, BusinessWeek magazine's Global Brands Survey valued IBM's brand at just $50 million, and Fortune magazine's cover had IBM under the headline “Dinosaurs?” Something needed to be done; IBM's brand needed to be transformed and reignited.

In this chapter, we show how IBM responded, in almost textbook fashion, to this critical challenge. Research, coupled with responsive change management, enabled IBM to answer the challenge. This is exemplified by the numerous awards IBM has garnered recently, including America's Grand Effie in 2002 for best overall advertising campaign in market performance, and two David Ogilvy Research Excellence Awards (in 2000 and 2001). Within each marketing division, there have also been unique successes.

From an overall brand perspective, the change has been nothing short of phenomenal. IBM has gone from being 282nd on BusinessWeek’s Global Brands list in 1994 to being the third most valuable brand in the world in 2002, with brand value increasing over 1000 times to $51.2 billion. From the outside, IBM's image has been transformed from being a fragmented conglomerate to a highly integrated business leader, and it's an image that it's now able to transfer to its customers to drive continued business success.

OVERVIEW OF IBM'S “E-BUSINESS” CAMPAIGN

By early 1997, it was clear to IBM that the Internet was an emerging medium with enormous growth potential. This potential market created a major opportunity for a company to capture a significant portion of the projected $330 billion Web commerce revenue in 2002 (as International Data Corporation estimated at the time) by credibly associating its brand and offerings with the Internet.

In 1997, however, IBM had virtually no association, in the minds of customers, with this category, incredible as it may seem, given their history as a leader in information technology. Yet this perception was critical for consideration by companies who were implementing Internet solutions. Although IBM was well known for reliability, quality, and trust based on its yearly IBM Global Brand Tracking Survey, these strengths were not sufficient to establish leadership as an Internet expert.

By going beyond the numbers and applying some critical thinking, IBM determined that it could leverage its position in total IT solutions and use its breadth of technology expertise as the foundation for delivering solutions in a new, as yet undefined, category of Internet-enabled business. Research led the way in helping IBM flesh out, understand, and validate powerful messaging and then create potent advertising that captured attention and linked IBM to a new business category, called “e-business.” By creating this term to represent doing business on the Internet, developing a signature red “e” mark, and then associating it strongly with their core strengths as a brand, IBM achieved almost instant recognition as a force to be reckoned with in terms of Internet business.

Developing Executions

The IBM advertising team and its agency, Ogilvy & Mather, developed a worldwide strategy for establishing the concept of e-business, and an integrated e-business campaign to launch it globally in over 27 countries. In order to develop the advertising campaign to support the new strategy, IBM, in 1997, conducted qualitative research worldwide to gauge its audience's receptivity to the term itself and the messages associated with it. The insight from this effort highlighted the most salient issues among customers, including: security on the Internet, systems reliability, systems migration to the Web, and e-commerce. A major finding was that the term e-business, although unfamiliar to many, was inherently intuitive and attractive to many of the target groups IBM was interested in attracting. In addition, IBM learned that its emotional brand imagery—reliable, trusted, and high quality—gave them immeasurable credibility with this positioning.

For the e-business launch in the United States in October, 1997, Ogilvy & Mather developed an eight-page impact unit to run in the Wall Street Journal to introduce the concept of “e-business” to the marketplace. This insert showcased the core topics identified in the research, and introduced case studies of IBM customers who had already adopted an e-business platform. Television advertising was developed to make the message come alive with real-life Internet business situations. These executions touched on each of the hot topic issues identified in the research by using a combination of humorous storylines and dramatic plots.

In order to obtain reactions to the campaign prior to launch, worldwide qualitative creative testing and research were conducted in 13 countries in which these concepts were shown. The results confirmed that the new campaign resonated worldwide: the television commercial spoke to the target groups in an engaging way, while making IBM seem fresh and modern. After multiple revisions, based on the research, the advertising campaign was able to demonstrate a worldwide consistency in message and tone, while still allowing for adaptation to international markets for local relevance.

As soon as the campaign was launched worldwide (in late 1997 and early 1998), the association of e-business with IBM had taken hold and the company was becoming more and more associated with a vision for the Internet. Soon thereafter, a complementary print campaign called “e-culture” was developed by Ogilvy & Mather to accelerate the perception of IBM as a relevant and approachable Internet solution provider with specific solutions designed for all types and sizes of companies. Qualitative in-depth interviews on advertising concepts in multiple domestic and international markets in May 1998 indicated that this new campaign extension resonated very well with target audiences. Based on the research, the copy of the print campaign was refined to even better highlight tangible proof that IBM was a major enabler of e-business and an approachable partner to its customers.

Pretesting

From the time IBM launched the e-business campaign, new advertising evaluation techniques were adopted to provide quantitative feedback in the U.S. and internationally on creative executions in their prelaunch and early launch phases. As a result of testing 21 IBM e-business television commercials in the U.S. and applying these findings to the development of commercials over the next two years, IBM tracked significantly increased performance on core measures of attention (awareness) and brand linkage.

Print pretesting also provided research findings that IBM used to strengthen the performance of the ads in the market. Specifically, the IBM print ads that prominently featured the issues of security and scalability outperformed the competition on critical measures of awareness and motivation. Using a unique diagnostic technique used to track respondents’ eye movements as they viewed an ad, IBM learned that primary visual attention was drawn to the area opposite from where the red “e” mark was located. As a result, IBM moved this symbol into a more central position to focus attention and increase awareness dimensions.

Demonstrating Success

From IBM's advertising evaluation research, there was clear evidence that IBM owned e-business. First, the key objective of creating a target level of awareness for the term e-business was achieved quickly, as awareness doubled from the time of launch in the fourth quarter of 1997 to the second quarter of 1999. Second, the association of the term “e-business” with IBM became unmistakable. Among target audiences who became aware of e-business, five times as many associated IBM with providing “e-business solutions” than the nearest competitor. Third, preference to do business with IBM increased 45% among IBM's target audiences over the same time period cited above. The IBM brand continues to gain strength on vital e-business and Internet-specific attributes.

The next phases of IBM's e-business efforts have involved extensions of IBM's original initiatives. Having defined and popularized the notion of e-business on demand, IBM is focusing its product and consulting businesses on enabling customers to transform themselves into on-demand organizations. On-demand organizations are nimble, fast, and responsive to employees and customers and able to exchange information smoothly across organizational boundaries. They support quick responses to changing market conditions and enable the organization to rapidly form, revise, and reinvent relationships with external partners and customers. Finally, they serve their own employees more efficiently by focusing them on business goals and customer value.

CASE STUDY: IBM'S “E-BUSINESS” CAMPAIGN

Shaping Strategy

By early 1997, it was clear to IBM that the Internet was an emerging medium with enormous growth potential. The research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) had projected the number of World Wide Web users to grow to 399 million by 2002, and for Web commerce revenue to increase 40 times ($8 billion to $333 billion by 2002). The data for this projection was gathered during an annual IDC survey conducted in 14 countries and involving 1200 co...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• A Word from Joe Plummer, The Advertising Research Foundation
• Preface
• About the Author
• Introduction
• PART 1 THE WINNERS
• PART 2 GREAT RESEARCH IS A HIDDEN ASSET
• Endnotes
• Appendix
• Index