The chances of your performance marketing managing to change a consumer’s mind is vanishingly small, according to new research from WPP Media, which finds 84% of purchases are made by people already biased towards a brand.
New research paper ‘How Humans Decide’ looks into the psychological effect WPP dubs a “brand priming bias”, which is the cumulative effect of consumers’ brand experiences over time – even experiences he consumer is completely unaware of – via owned, shared or paid media. Or even something as tacit as seeing a product on the shelf and barely registering it.
The chances of your performance marketing managing to change a consumer’s mind is vanishingly small, according to new research from WPP Media, which finds 84% of purchases are made by people already biased towards a brand.
New research paper ‘How Humans Decide’ looks into the psychological effect WPP dubs a “brand priming bias”, which is the cumulative effect of consumers’ brand experiences over time – even experiences he consumer is completely unaware of – via owned, shared or paid media. Or even something as tacit as seeing a product on the shelf and barely registering it.
This means that when the consumer shifts from the priming stage to the “active stage” in the customer journey, they already know the brands they are going to consider for that purchase.
The pattern holds true across all categories, from infrequent, high-value purchases like a car to a more routine purchase like a toothpaste. According to the research, the proportion of “primed shoppers” in each category never drops below 70%.
This means most brand’s performance marketing ends up converting the 84% who are already primed to buy your product, rather than changing the minds of the 16% who buy a brand without a bias.
Disconnect between marketers’ description of strategy and budget reality, study findsFor James Boardman, global growth strategy lead at WPP Media, the research shows the power priming effects can have on the consumer journey.
“Brand priming can happen anywhere and it can happen through any touchpoint, in any environment, even if marketers like to think that it’s a performance or it’s a retail touchpoint,” he says.
What Boardman hopes is the research will move the conversation around brand and performance investment away from an “arbitrary dividing line” and focus marketers’ minds on the greater whole.
“It’s thinking about how your packaging builds brand. How your store window builds brand. How your website and your app builds brand every time you open your mobile phone and look at it,” he says. “It’s a conversation that is much richer than just an arbitrary paid media investment.”
Global head of strategy Stuart Sullivan-Martin worked alongside Boardman on the research and agrees the potential to steer marketers towards a rethink of the customer journey is the most exciting element.
“It stops us talking about investment down and helps us think about consumer journey, consumer decision making up,” he explains. “It’s framed around humans rather than framed around budgets.”
‘Playing the long game’: How marketers can remove the barriers to brand investmentThe research also looks at how receptive consumers are likely to be to marketing communications. The data found 23% of category buyers can be described as “unreceptive” to marketing comms, both in the priming stage and the active stage.
Rather than these people being ignored, however, they can prove to be money well spent as once you have them they are “more sticky” and will be loyal to your brand.
“How you get those audiences, because they’re really valuable if you can seize them or steal them from your competitors, is a really interesting question, but it’s likely not to start with paid media as the answer,” says Boardman. “What tends to work with those audiences is your owned, earned and shared touchpoints.”
The converse of this is the 10% of customers who are particularly receptive to marketing communications – which is a positive insofar as it being easier to convert them – but comes with the negative that they are less loyal and more likely to switch. Sullivan-Martin believes the industry has slightly over indexed in chasing this consumer.
“Many performance tracking metrics, such as click-through rates and view rates, are likely to be finding and measuring highly receptive audiences,” he says. “One of the watchouts of this data is if you’re spending a big proportion of your marketing time and effort trying to optimise in the active stage only, then if you’re not careful your whole system might be geared to optimising towards those audiences.”
This creates a “vicious cycle” where brands are optimising their media strategies based on those who are most likely to “churn” and therefore missing out on consumers who are less receptive to paid media tactics.
Brand building must adapt to the age of creative fragmentationWhich ties into the final section of the research, which looks at the effectiveness of individual touchpoints and reveals the power of OSE (owned, shared, earned) touchpoints in driving consumer decision making.
WPP Media found OSE touchpoints are nearly three times more powerful than paid media alone in converting a customer from bias to purchase. Word of mouth, for example, is 48% more likely to influence a buying decision compared to outdoor ads, which sits around 12%.
However, this can vary depending on audience, category and situation, something Sullivan-Martin believes has been “oversimplified” in recent years.
“To the media planning world, the idea that touchpoints perform differently in different situations to different audiences at different times, is second nature,” he says. “But the industry’s done a good job to try and oversimplify that in recent years, and if you’re not careful you can get to some reductive rules, which feel like they’re useful but are actually flattening what is quite a complex picture.”
Boardman hopes the research will help marketers have a deeper understanding of the consumer across a wide range of categories – all in the pursuit of growth.
“Understanding your category’s touchpoint map and how that lands with different types of consumers, not based on who they are, not based on their demographics or their ages, but based on their receptivity to advertising in your category allows us to get really specific,” he says. “Once you do that, you’re going to find new ways to grow your brand.”