Marketers need to take responsibility for every brand encounter, not only those that they control, says a leading industry figure who advocates share of experience as a more useful metric than the traditional share of voice.
Writing in the current issue of Admap (topic: brand experience), Fiona Blades, president and chief experience officer at MESH Experience, notes that while marketers ought to know where they are spending their money, “few can draw a pie chart of how people are experiencing their brand”.
And how they are experiencing it varies with the individual and the particular context. Thus the same creative can generate a positive reaction when seen in a cinema where people have time to pay attention and immerse themselves in the narrative, but a negative one if, say, it’s caught in the background on TV when preparing dinner.
In All experiences are not equal: How to build positive experiences for brand growth, Blades also highlights the importance of peer observation and how “often only 30% of experiences are through paid media”.
And though share of voice only measures paid media, it may not even pick up all of that, as brands featured in retailer ads find this can actually work better for them than their own efforts.
“We have found a much stronger correlation between share of experience and market share than share of voice and market share, which isn’t surprising, particularly when some of the owned and earned touchpoints have more influence than paid,” Blades states.
MESH’s own real-time experience tracking (RET) combined with brand consideration data shows that “across many categories … if someone has a positive experience it has three times the impact on brand consideration of a neutral one. And if someone has a very positive experience or is in the path to purchase this can be considerably higher”.
In the banking category, for example, call centres and apps and even SMS deliver more positive and persuasive brand experiences than any form of traditional media.
And in the same category, Blades adds: “neutral is the new negative … neutral paid experiences negatively impact on brand consideration and neutral owned and earned experiences do nothing to create consideration.”
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This article first appeared in www.warc.com
