B2B Inspired
B2B Inspired, the podcast by BlueOcean - The B2B Agency, is all about exploring the ins, outs, ups and downs of B2B Marketing here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. We'll uncover emerging trends and thinking while sharing inspiring real-world stories from B2B Marketers here in New Zealand. With the goal of supporting New Zealand’s B2B Marketing community in becoming one of the best and brightest anywhere in the world, let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
B2B Inspired
Marketing Effectiveness with Carolyn Schofield
What does marketing effectiveness really mean—and why does it matter? In the latest episode of B2B Inspired, we speak with Carolyn Schofield, Founder of Food Marketing NZ and Brand Science NZ, about what makes marketing work.
Carolyn challenges the obsession with short-term results and explains why the most powerful marketing happens over time. She shares how emotional storytelling builds brand equity, and why marketers need to be more strategic about what they measure.
From shifting internal perceptions of marketing to leading change with evidence, Carolyn offers clear, practical insights for marketers under pressure to prove value and drive growth.
For more B2B insights, ideas and opportunities, head to www.blueoceanagency.co.nz
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Let’s roll up our sleeves and take on tomorrow together.
Yolda and welcome back to B2B Inspired, podcast by Blue Ocean where we unpick the ins, outs, ups and downs of all things business to business here in Altero and New Zealand. From emerging trends and thinking to the inspiring real-world stories and experiences of smart, good people from within our ecosystem. We're here to help the New Zealand B2B community to become one of the best, boldest, and brightest anywhere in the world. Now, if like me you live and breathe all things business to business and you're looking for a place to connect, learn and be inspired, you have come to the right place. Let's join Frey Spaven over in the studio.
SPEAKER_03:Welcome back to Beauty Be Inspired. Today I have the immense pleasure of talking to Caroline Schofield. Caroline is the creative force behind some of New Zealand's most loved advertising, including the Four Legs Good Trust Power Ad, the story of a man and his dog that captured the nation's heart, and won awards. Even more impressive, it was just her and a creative director crafting high-production TV commercials that beat the bigger budget competitors. Caroline now runs two food ventures, Food Marketing NZ and Brand Science NZ. And Caroline is a champion of emotional storytelling and marketing effectiveness. And that's what I'm really keen to dive into today. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me first. That was such a pleasure. Now I've come to hear you talk twice now, once at the Moped Awards and then once at our local uh Daybreak Festival here in Tauronga. And I purposefully made a point of coming to see you because every time I have a conversation with you, I feel like I get a masterclass in marketing. So if you get the opportunity, please, please go and see Caroline speak, especially on the topic of marketing effectiveness. What is marketing effectiveness and how would you define it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's a big question to start off with. Okay, I think I think we need to take a step back, possibly, from that question and go a few steps back into what the role of marketing actually is within an organization and how that's changed, and how perhaps the perception of marketing is not what it should be in a lot of organizations. Marketing fundamentally should be your key business driver. Marketing should be all about driving whatever the overall business or organizational objectives are. But over the years, and particularly in the climate we're in at the moment, where everyone's looking very short-term and things, in a lot of organizations, I think there's still a fundamental misunderstanding about what marketing's role is. And that's where we come up against this cliche of marketing being referred to as the colouring in team. So in a lot of people who don't really understand marketing, you've still got that perception that marketing is about is about doing the ads, you know, and about about the actual communications side. Whereas it isn't. Marketing should be at the at the heart of the business and should be driving all of the business objectives. So fundamentally, marketing effectiveness is about achieving business objectives.
SPEAKER_03:Right, excellent. So it's a profit engine and not a cost sensor.
SPEAKER_01:It is a profit engine. It absolutely should be viewed as a as a profit engine. And it should be viewed, I believe, um, as you know, a fundamental business overhead in the same way that your your finance department are and your and your IT department are.
SPEAKER_03:And what do you think is driving that? And how do you think marketers have got ourselves into this corner?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I think there's a there's like everything in life, there's a there's a complex interplay effect, is there? Um, first of all, there's um a lot of, well, more and more, it seems to be be getting better, not worse, that the the um short-termism in businesses and the need to see immediate results. And this has been going on over the last 10, 15 years, and very much actually since digital channels have been have been so important a part of our marketing mix, where um businesses have been putting pressure on on their marketing teams, on their on their retail teams, whatever, um, to achieve results in shorter and shorter timescales. So it used to be that maybe your effect, your your the results of what you were doing were being measured over maybe six months or a year. Now it's not, week on week, some people are being measured. So that is changing in a lot of organizations. It means they're so focused on the short term that they're not looking at the long term. And the most powerful effects of marketing or effective marketing happen over the long term. So we've a lot of organizations have lost sight of that in their in their constant scrabble to achieve next week's results or next month's results. Um, I also think not to not to be critical of my fellow marketers, you know, we're we're in a very hard position a lot of the time. But I think there are a lot of people, well, just again to take a step back, marketing is one of those roles that everyone thinks they can do. We've all been there in a company or an organization where other parts of the business believe they can do marketing's job just as well as the marketers can. Because hey, it's just common sense, isn't it? Well, it isn't just common sense. Um, but as a result of that attitude, you do have a lot of people in marketing who've learnt on the job, and that's brilliant. There's nothing that beats um, you know, learning on the on the job. But at the same time, there is a lot um of work, of research, of big brains around the world who have been analyzing the root of what makes you know marketing effective. Um, and as a result, I think that there are still quite a lot of people in quite senior marketing roles who perhaps aren't aware of all of the work. It's becoming better known, it's becoming more widespread over the over over time. Um, but there's a lot of people in marketing roles who themselves perhaps are either you know behind the times in their knowledge or are unaware that there are now rules of marketing and it's it's a profession, and you need to learn it, just like your you know, CFO or your chief engineer or your head of IT does. Um, it's not actually just a skill that you can just assimilate. You you need to be trained in it. Um, and I think in some ways, marketers have done ourselves a disservice and have and have helped to sort of almost reinforce those views that, hey, you know, anyone can do it. And all of these things together have led to led to marketing perhaps being in a bit of a difficult position in in in many organizations. Not all, of course, but in many organizations.
SPEAKER_03:I think the last year has seen marketing teams get a little bit smaller as well. So tight resources. Absolutely. So we've all got to make our budget stretch, right? I think there's many people who are in um a situation where the, you know, every dollar counts. Yes. Um, and that's why marketing effectiveness just becomes so important. And like you say, the rules of marketing and the principles of marketing. Um, then I'm hoping to talk to you a little bit today about in the context of the Trust Power advert that um that was so favorable in 2022, it won the nation's favorite ad. Yeah. And many people will recognize, recognize it, I think. Um, can you tell me a little bit about that journey and how that started?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, we always I've I was at Trust Power for, you know, um 10 years nearly. Um, and if we go back to the beginning of my time at Trust Power, I joined Trust Power at a time when Trust Power as an organization was was undergoing some radical changes. It had been, or it had very big ambitions. So Trust Power had come out of what had been the regional power board at the time of deregulation of the industry. And it was still, when I came on board, it had been, you know, there as the major retailer in, you know, this area of New Zealand, Tonango and the Bay of Plenty for many years. Um, not really operating in the big cities, um, or not really known as a retailer in the big cities, but kind of going along doing its thing and doing its thing, doing its thing well. Um when I joined, there was actually a lot of ambition in the company because a few years previous to me joining, um, the company had decided to get into telecommunications as well as electricity. Um, some very smart people at the company had had identified this opportunity for bringing together multiple services. Um, interestingly, it had been tried um by various people across the world, and quite a few big companies had failed in trying to do it. Um, but we were at a particular point in time in New Zealand where the fiber rollout was happening. Um, and so a lot of people were going to be reviewing their telecoms providers and having changes in that. And some, and as I said, there were some very smart people at the company who recognized this. So I came in when the company was looking to change, was looking to reposition the brand completely, um, and was looking to grow significantly. Um, was going to start marketing again, trying to acquire customers in the metros in Auckland and Wellington in particular. Um, so it was a really pivotal time in the company's growth. Um, but we still had no budgets, you know. We had big ambitions um to grow and to become a serious player, both in the telco market as well as well as the electricity market. Um, but we still kind of had the regional electricity provider budget. So we had to be smart about about what we were going to do because we were going to be competing with, you know, Vodafone and well, it was still telecom 10 years ago, but Vodafone and Spark, and their, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising spend. Um, we were going to be competing for the same customers as them. So we were in a position where we were going to be forced to be smart about what we did because we couldn't rely on spend alone to get us to where we wanted to be. Um, so kind of that meant that we always were we were looking for insight, we were looking for data constantly to guide us in what we were doing. Um, and we were looking to make decisions very much based on based on insight in everything we did. And I mean the first stage, I mean I've gone a long way back here.
SPEAKER_03:It's context setting, and it's really important, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um but one of those, one of the principles that we used, and there were lots of others along the way in terms of positioning, in terms of our use of research, um, all of that. But when it actually came to advertising, there was there is a lot of evidence out there, as you as you referred to um in what you said at the beginning, Frere, a lot of evidence that emotional advertising is far more effective than rational advertising. And this all comes back down to the way the brain works. Um, you know, we are emotional creatures. We have these two pathways of thinking in our brains, the the system one brain and the system two brain. And one of which is really emotional and wants to make decisions, you know, spontaneously and quickly, and um, the the other, which is our logical brain. But our brains don't like using the logical brain. It's hard work thinking things through logically. So our brains will always, when they can, revert to system one decision making. And system one decision making is driven by emotion. So there's there's all there's there's so much evidence now that when you look at all of the people who are looking at creative effectiveness and analyzing creative effectiveness, it's it's when you tap into those deep human needs and that deep understanding of how the human brain works, what humans respond to, they respond to stories. We've told stories for millennia, for as long as there have been humans, we've told stories. So the brain is wired to respond to stories and it's wired to respond to emotion. Um, and if we can bring that storytelling and that emotion into what we're doing, even when we're selling, you know, a boring product like electricity or some industrial widget or whatever it is, if we can find a way to bring stories and emotion in, that's what people remember. That's what gets salience, that's what gets your brain, your brand front of mind in people's brains. Um, and that is why though that type of advertising, certainly at a brand level, of course, there's a rule, there's a place for logical um advertising too, to do a different function, but at the brand level, um, it's those emotional stories that that really, really work. So we always had a history from right back when I joined Trust Power. Um, we we actually did eight or nine like full production TVCs during my time there. We we we we did a lot of creative work um when I was there. And going right back to the beginning, we'd always used emotional stories. Um, so people probably won't remember, but the very first TV art I did when I joined Trust Power was the story of one of our um customer service staff. The main character was one of the customer service staff, and it was called Drive to Work, and it was her story of her driving to work one day, um, including things like rescuing ducklings from the road and things on her way, um, which was all about the service, trust my service. We then went through a whole series, well, we did three, a series of three ads that some people might remember, um, with two characters, um, Captain Energy and Broadband Girl. So it was the story of two cosplayers who met at a cosplay convention, whose character was Captain Energy, hers was broadband girl. And it was their love story over over over three different ads.
SPEAKER_03:Amazing. Um yeah, I'm not from New Zealand originally, so I'd like you to hear these stories is just wonderful.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'll have to go and look them up. So I can send you links. You won't find them online because Trustboro's a company doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. So it's quite hard to find, but I can send them to you if you're interested. Um, but yeah, the idea of selling electricity and telcos services through a couple of Cospec play characters um was, you know, it was all about finding a device to use to tell stories. And also bringing in there's the there's there's effectiveness work that shows that um that using characters and repeat characters, which a lot of people are now using when we look at the most successful advertising, the most well-known advertising in New Zealand, um, this idea that characters, brand characters, can make your advertising more effective is is is now being well understood by by a lot of advertisers in New Zealand, as you'll see, like um with some of the banks who've got their, you know, their their recurring stories of their characters, even some of the other electricity companies now are using that recurring character device. So we used codification. Well, it's part of codification, yeah. They become part of your brand code. They become that recognizable part of your brand. Um, and so we used, yes, we used our characters for a while, and then and that, but then again, we had data saying that that they'd reached the end of their natural life. Um, so we didn't just spontaneously make the decision to stop using them because we were bored of them, you know. We had data from our research which was saying they've served a very important purpose, they've done well, but now there's something new that people want to hear, and a slightly new creative direction might be required in order to shift to the next place that the brand needs to be. Um so we then um came into the into the sort of the last phase of trust power where we were using, you know, the meant to be together concept, which was still about the idea of bundling power and broadband. Um, but we were finding stories, we were looking for stories of people, things that were meant to be together. So the first one we didn't was um was the story of um a couple, well, they'd been childhood sweethearts, um, and then meet again, you know, in later on in life, and and we're always meant to be together and don't quite ride off into the into the sunset, but that kind of that kind of thing. So we did that, and that that went down very well. Um, and then the one that the the the the dog ad was our second in using that idea and meant to be together. So we decided, okay, we've done the boy-girl relationship. What what what can we use next to tell a meant to be together story?
SPEAKER_03:And it was just yourself and a creative director. You didn't have a big creative team working.
SPEAKER_01:We didn't have big creative teams. The way we worked at TrustPower, the whole of my time at TrustPower, we didn't work with big agencies in any of my time at Trust Power. We basically worked with um one creative director and then the art director who works with him, and that was it. So no big agency, no big teams of planners, suits, strategists, whatever, no, you know, ECDs, CDs, multiple creative teams. It was really, it was really just just one creative director, Daniel. Um, and then we'd work, yeah, we'd work really closely, and and but we could work really efficiently as well. And so the whole way we worked, um, you know, when we were looking at a new TVC, it might be that at the beginning of the process, Daniel would come up with 20 different ideas, and they may have been no more than, you know, one line, which was a scenario. But then the way we worked, we could go through all of those and go, yeah, there's something in there, there's something in there, and then start, and then start to explore it. So it's a collaborative creator process. It was a collaborative creator process, and where again, where we were slightly different to the sort of more standard structured way of working, is we tended to bring in the director quite early on in the process as well. So very often, if you're working in a traditional manner with a large agency, you know, when you actually get the production company on board, the director will be presented with a finalized script, you know, storyboards that have been signed off, everything set in stone, and it's purely the director's job to create what's already been determined and signed off. We'd also bring that bring our director in quite early in the process to be able to talk about, you know, is this going to work? How could we do this? How could we do this within budget? You know. So it was quite a collaborative process with myself and the and the creative that I worked with, and then sort of the producer and director as well.
SPEAKER_03:And you had access to a lot of data because it was an energy company, so all that information is publicly available. So, what would you say to marketers who need access to data who are not able to get all of that at their fingertips? Or you know, which resources would you lean into?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's really hard. I mean, when it comes down to um, as you say, in the electricity sector, you're a bit spoiled in that certainly in terms of your market share, which is a fundamental metric that everyone really needs to know because it can drive a lot of the decisions you make about um about your effectiveness and is a fundamental metric to measure the effects of what you're doing. In the electricity company, uh in the electricity industry in New Zealand, you have market share data to two decimal points that's refreshed on a monthly basis by the electricity authority. So most marketers would kill for that kind of level of data about not just their market share, but every single competitor's market share too. Um so that was that was, you know, yeah, we were a little bit spoiled. And it wasn't just that, you know, you have you have a lot, you have a lot of data about your individual customer behaviour. Clearly, you know, we know what services they're using, how much they're using when they're using it. So you have a lot of usage data as well that other marketers, a lot of other marketers don't have. But I think the first point is it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, we had all of this data available. It's simply not realistic for a lot of companies to have that sort of data. Don't let that hold you back because sometimes people all go, it's only people, you know, naturally go, but I don't have any of that. I what can I do? Um, don't get hung up on what you don't have is the starting point. The the next best thing is to think about you know what you do have. Um, so you may not have that detailed market share data. Um if you can, if you can afford it, the um things like brand tracking data is absolutely essential, I'd say. Any I'd say any company that can possibly afford it, you can carry out your own brand, you can carry out brand tracking um data yourselves. Now, it used to be quite expensive to do continuous brand tracking. We used to sort of spend a significant amount on all of our brand tracking at Trust Power. But but now it's actually much more accessible. Um, and for a start, if you can't do continuous, can you do a snapshot once a year? Because for most of us, in most of the sectors we work in, things like brand metrics don't change that much over time. So lovely as it is to have monthly figures and maybe to be able to correlate things to specific activities you've been undertaking. For a lot of companies, actually, having a snapshot once a year is better than nothing at all. And then there are all of those providers. Um, there are there are people providing much more accessible, much more cost-effective. Am I allowed to mention other companies? People like Tracksuit. And Tracksuit have actually revolutionized and um run tracking and made it made it so accessible, so accessible for far more companies who can't spend, you know, six-figure sums on it, but can spend, you know, 15, 20,000 a year on it. Um, they've made that accessible. There are other ways as well, of you can do it yourself. If you're reasonably competent, you know, there are ways now. There are online companies where you can where one of the problems with doing any sort of research used to be access to panels. You had to go through a research agency to get access to panels. There are now companies that have built panels, including in New Zealand, um, that you can access through directly through their database and set up studies directly for them. I've I've been using one of them to do um do research for a couple of clients recently. And so uh having access to a panel like that, if you or if you've got someone in your team who is reasonably competent about structuring surveys or talking to people. I mean, that's basically what what you know qualitative research is. It's just talking to people. Um and you can do this yourself as well. For for a few thousand dollars, you can do a quantitative study, maybe to get brand metric data, or do a qualitative study talking to. I've just I've just completed a study where I've done um, you know, 20 um qualitative interviews for one of my clients, um, which would have been completely out of reach a few years ago. It would have cost tens of thousands of dollars potentially to do that. I I was able to do it for you know a very few thousand dollars through using some of the some of this technology and some of these companies that are out there, making, you know, the tracking, making other forms of research more accessible. And of course, I mean I haven't done this myself, but as uh everything comes back to AI at the moment, doesn't it? Um but one potential massive benefit of AI, I think, for marketers is this whole, and this is controversial, some people throw their hands up in horror and go, um, no, you have to talk to real people. Um, but there are all of these companies that are working on, you know, synthetic research panels where you're using AI rather than actually going out and talking to people, which again makes it much more, much more accessible. And for me as a marketer, if I can have an app that I open on my desktop that's my synthetic customer or my synthetic customer panel, who I can sit there and talk to all day and go, Do you like this ad? Do you, do you, do you like this new product offer? Do you like this? What should we do here? It may not be perfect, and it may not be perfect. But if I certainly for those marketers who can't afford to get the perfect, if I can have something that is maybe 80% of what what I could have got through tradition traditional manners um methods, for me, that still puts me way ahead of where I would have been doing nothing.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, and it's one of the tenets of uh marketing effectiveness from Mark Ritson as well, isn't it? Number one, just enough research.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, exactly. Exactly. Enough to make the decision. Enough to make the decision, and that enough is different for different people. But it's kind of yeah. So so for for all of those companies out there who perhaps don't have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars of research budgets, there our technology is actually enabling this. And fundamentally, just go and talk to people. You know, if you can't afford, um, if you're a small company, if you can't afford a research agency, just go and talk to your customers. Absolutely. You know, it doesn't have to cost lots of money, and just talking to people is is is the best thing you can do as a start. Yes, we can get terribly complicated, you know, with with with you know, massive research studies, with you know um all kinds of analysis. But if that's not right for you and your company, start in the place you you can still make a start, because still any data, any insight is going to be better than none at all. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:I 100% agree with you. And I've definitely fallen into the trap of uh too much data as well. I I love research. Um I'm like you in the terms of the, you know, want to have all of the science and all of the data.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I do. I've got a science education, so my brain goes, give me the data, give me the data on which to make my decisions. But at the end of the day, you know, it doesn't have to be perfect. You can still get some. Well, there was a few weeks ago, I was in the supermarket and I saw um a young guy pick up one of my clients' products on the shelf and have a look. And he was reading the label of it. And um so I just went up to him and I said, please don't call the police. You know, recognise, can I talk to you? You know, do you mind if I do you mind if I talk to you? And um, and he didn't think I was some kind of I always convinced him I wasn't some kind of crazy person who he needed to be saved from. Um but he was happy to talk to me. I, you know, I asked him why that product, why what are you doing? What are you looking for in the labels? What are you reading? Would you mind telling me why you're standing there looking at the looking at the packaging and reading it right now? You know, that was insight. His answers, his reasons as to what he was doing, that was insight. It didn't take a massive research study, costing lots of money, to get a data point. Okay, one data point. That's all there was, one data point. But it was still interesting and it still gave me insight into that customer's decision making.
SPEAKER_03:And I bet you it wasn't features and benefits that uh that drew him in, right?
SPEAKER_01:No, it wasn't. There were some specific things he was looking for.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think so many marketers might fall into that trap as well, especially in B2B. It's so easy to fall back onto the features and benefits and talking about those primarily. You know, coming back to your earlier point around our rational decision-making brains and our emotive decision-making brain. And we always like to say um Blue Ocean that it's not a business that signs a check, it's a person that signs a check. Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's very easy for um, especially when we feel like we're selling to a very technical audience, like CTOs or people who we assume will be making very rational decisions. And that's fundamentally incorrect, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, it is. And it all comes back to um, again, where does good marketing start, regardless of what sector we're talking about, regardless of whether you're selling you know, bread or IT components, where does it start? It should always start from understanding your customers. And again, we we invested a lot of in um uh trust power in our customers, in understanding our customers, in really understanding our customer needs, and then building a brand positioning and you know, brand attributes that always referred back to what those core customer needs were. It's the same regardless of what you're selling. Understand those customer needs and make that your starting point. And very often, whether it's in the consumer market or the business market, there will be needs that are actually quite emotional because, as you say, these people, they're people. They're not automata. They're not AI humanoids, they are people still at the moment, making these decisions. And very often they will have there will be practical needs. Yes, of course there are practical needs, particularly maybe in technical sectors. But those practical needs may, if you go to a deeper level, there may be emotional needs, sort of a layer beneath those practical needs. So maybe you have a practical need for reliability for whatever widget it is that you're producing. But the next layer of needs is that you don't want your staff constantly being stressed because there are problems with something that's not reliable.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, yes. And we call that um moving up the benefit ladder, don't we? Absolutely. So you can start with your pain points and then you can even map it out quite quite quickly and quite relatively easily by thinking of it in terms of a ladder.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So starting with what are those practical benefits? Yeah, so what are those product benefits? And then moving up into, okay, so those are those are those are the actual functional benefits. Well, the functional features. So the first starting point is those more functional features. Then, okay, so what are the functional functional benefits? And then you can start looking, regardless of what you're talking about, what you're selling, you can then start going, okay, so what emotional benefits do those functional benefits lead to? And they'll still be there, even as you say in B2B, and uh even in a very technical sector. They they they they'll be there. Um, and as you say, people are people, they are people running these businesses. Um, and for every you know, multi national or massive corporate, there's there's a that we know there's far more businesses at a much lower level which are still owner-operated, um, where people are personally invested in it. And and certainly that whole you know, owner-operator layer, which I work with a lot, their businesses are everything because business and and and personal are all mixed in one because their businesses are their lives, and there is no separation really between the business and the person. So everything comes back to to the people involved, not just the function, functional attributes of what it is you're trying to, your, your, you're marketing.
SPEAKER_03:So, what would you say are the core tenets of a of an effective marketing campaign if you were to list a couple? How would you run it through a filter? You know, if you you're a marketer and you've created a campaign, um, what would be a checklist for you?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, well, the starting point is is this based on customer need? Do I understand like what my customer needs are? And is whatever I'm doing here speaking to meeting those customer needs? That that is so much at the heart of everything, everything that you're doing. Um, and there's there's that phrase, you know, you are not your customers. A lot of people think they understand their customers, a lot of businesses think they understand their customers, but take that step back always and go, is this coming from me? Is this coming from my colleague? Is this coming from the CEO? Or is this actually coming from what are what we know about our customers? Um, so that that's so fundamental. And I find that a lot in the work I'm doing. I work with quite a lot of um, you know, owner-operator food businesses at the moment, um, a lot of them that have been that have been startups, and they've been started up by by lovely, lovely people who have started them because they're passionate about a particular type of food and they want to share a particular type of food with with the world. And there's a whole there's a whole raft of stories behind that. They've all got there different differently, but they're passionate about what they do. But that passion can can blink at them because they have their reasons why they're passionate about that. But the the reason why customers are actually buying their product might be something completely different to what they think. So so, and that can come as quite a surprise to them at times. Yeah, need to get out of the office and they need to get out of the office and and and understand those, understand your actual everyday buyers, not just you and your friends and family who probably think the same way that you do. So that is fundamental. That customer insight, understanding customer needs is is crucial to anything to any to any marketing campaign. Um there are then, you then sort of get into the more um, you know, some of some of the the amazing research that's been done over the last 10 or 15 years. Another principle that that that I'm absolutely that we absolutely used uh to trust power all along is that need to invest in brand. Yes. So there's the whole um lot of data and research, particularly the best well-known is the Binnetton Fields research, which goes back, which if you haven't read anyone who's in marketing should be aware of all the research they've done over the last nearly 15 years since since the long and the short of it was first first produced. They um they clearly established this need to invest in at the brand level as well as at the short-term sales level. So at the beginning, we were talking a bit about you know marketing becoming short-term and more and more short-term. That that that still is happening, but but the Binettonfield research shows very clearly that's completely the wrong thing to do, and that you will be more effective over the long term by investing in brand as well as having your short-term activations. And we all need this, we all need the sales today and tomorrow, as well as the sales in a year's time. Um, otherwise, you know, our businesses will fail if we if we all sit there twiddling our thumbs, going, just wait for my long-term stuff to work. It'll work in a year's time. You know, if there's going to be no sales in the next year, we're all gonna be out of jobs because the company's not gonna still be there to work for. So we have to have that short-term stuff to drive the immediate sales happening as well. But you have to be investing at the brand level as well. And that's where the emotional advertising that we were talking about really comes in. Because what it does, it creates those memory structures, it creates salience, it keeps your brand front of mind so that when people are in the buying situation, your brand is front of mind, which is actually even more important in a business-to-business context in some ways than in a consumer context. Because we know for many business-to-business products, you do have a very long buying cycle. It's not like going into the supermarket and going, Oh, I'll pick up a bar of chocolate as a spontaneous purchase. We we understand, you know, businesses do have long buying cycles. They may have complex groups of people, decision makers involved. And there's that statistic that you know, Blue Ocean will know very, very well about that in the B2B world, only 5% of your potential market is actually at a point of making a purchase or looking into making a purchase at any one time. You need to be marketing as much as that 95% as well as that 5%, so that when one of that 95% does move to be one of those 5% that's in the buying situation, your brand is the first one that they pick up the phone to talk to.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely. And we see it a lot with companies that have been around um, you know, 60, 100 years. Yes. Um, and now we're kind of that they may have had a very, very good long run of things, and now the economy is is a little bit shaky. There are new competitors entering the market, there are new challenges that businesses uh have to face. Yes. Um, and marketing can help to overcome some of those challenges.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Yeah. So um, so make sure you're structuring your whole approach to marketing with the right balance of brand work, which will work in the long term. Although it's actually been shown as well that brand marketing is effective in the short term, but short-term activation marketing isn't effective in the long term. So it will help to produce short-term results as well. But it'll amplify the effectiveness of what you're doing to drive those sales today, as well as building up potential sales in the future. So that's another core, core thing. And be clear what your objectives are, is another core thing. You know, it's amazing how often, you know, marketing teams are off doing things and they actually have never defined what the objective really is of what they're doing. Now, marketing should always be referring back to what are the business objectives. And if you can't show the link between what you're doing and business objectives, maybe think again about why you're doing what you're doing. I think at Trust Power we had, as I said, we didn't have massive budgets. So we had to be very focused on why we were doing things and how what we were doing would help to lead, help to achieve those, those overall business objectives. So marketing should always be absolutely linked into those business objectives. And if you can't work down from okay, well, our business objectives are this revenue growth, this customer number growth, this profitability growth, then think about how you're actually approaching your marketing planning. So that's that's really, really essential. Um, and and sometimes it's it's hard. And as we've been talking about the particularly when it comes to justifying what you're doing more at a brand level, um, you cannot go to your CFO and say, give me the budget to do this brand level advertising campaign, and I will, I can guarantee that I will get a market share rise of 3% in the next six months. You know, maybe some of your digital advertising, you can say, okay, we will do this. It will, I project that we will get X number of sales directly from this activity. The brand level stuff, you can't do that. So you do need to have the trust of your team in-house that that that what you're doing, you you may not be able to say. This I never once at Trust Power could say, this TV budget is actually going to give this dollar return, specifically, because it doesn't work that way anyway, everything interplays. Um, but they they understood the people, the teams I was working with understood that everything I was doing was then making the results of what we were doing short term better. And so overall, having that, we we actually took quite a holistic view to measuring the effectiveness. And so we were looking at, you know, market share growth, customer number customer number growth, growth of services because we were a multi-service provider, um, MPV, customer MPV, um, so customer profitability metrics. But we were looking at them quite holistically as a result of all of our marketing activities, rather than trying to go, you know, well, this sales-focused campaign has produced these results, this TV ad has produced these results, these these radio ads have produced these results. We didn't look at it this way. We looked at it overall because there was that understanding that everything links together and everything compounds. Yes. And so it's those overall results you need to be looking at. Um, so yeah, you need you need those clear objectives. And then you need to understand what actually, going back to you know, talking about effective marketing, you need to understand about um media and creative. So what uh because I guess at any point you can fail. That's the thing. You know, we were talking a minute ago about um Bini Field's work and this idea you need to invest in brand and activation. And they have this this basic rule of thumb that a lot of people will be aware of that you should have 60% of your budget in brand and 40% in activation. Now that varies for different companies and different times, different types of companies, it that it's much more sophisticated than that. But that's the basic rule of thumb. You can't just take your advertising budget and do 60-40 and go, okay, I'm done. If your product isn't good, if your pricing's wrong, if your creative is poor, you still won't get anywhere. So you have to, if you make the wrong media choices, so you still need to have those, those, those, those good old skills of understanding media or working with people who do, and understanding creative effectiveness or working people with do with people who do. Because you have to have everything to get the best results, you need everything, all those different links in the chain to come together.
SPEAKER_03:Almost like you need to have so much internal buy-in as much as you have external buy-in with your product, right? So uh making sure that you have people, uh making sure that you're integrated and well socialized within the business and connected well to product and just as much to sales.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So product is part of marketing, but somehow in a lot of organizations, it seems to have got separated, I think, in a lot of organizations these days. You have the product team, and again, this comes back to marketing being positioned internally as the as the colouring in team, because things like product have perhaps sometimes been separated off into their own team that isn't actually the marketing team. But if you don't have that link between the product team and the insights, if assuming you've got you know an insights function or marketers who who are passionate about insights, then you know you've got to have that connection between product and and and insights because otherwise product might run off and do things that are brilliant at one level, but again, they're not meeting the customer needs.
SPEAKER_03:And sales too, as well, right? So connecting through from product through to marketing through to sales. What would you say about the link between sales and marketing? How should that look in uh when you're trying to create and and build effectiveness?
SPEAKER_01:Again, it's collaboration, isn't it? Like it should the uh everyone needs to work together. So marketing needs to understand, you know, what the key issues for sales are. But sales will also also kind of need need some education into into um you know marketing as well and understand maybe this link between the long and the short term. As well, sales, they're sales guys, they were they're about making the sales today, tomorrow. So that's what they want. They want you to throw your whole budget into things that are going to make their job easier. So again, there's internal education to do, um, so that everyone it everyone needs to understand why it's so much easier if everyone understands why you're doing what you're doing, and if you talk to people and explain why you're doing things. Um, so and I know a lot of companies still struggle against things being siloed, but if you can start to break out of that silo, and again, you don't need to necessarily completely restructure your company, just talk to people. You know, pop down. I used to at Trust Power very often, it wasn't every time, but when we did a new brand level TVC, I tried often that the first people who got to see it were the sales teams. So I'd often go and present it down on the sales floor, you know, they'd get off the phones for five minutes, um, and I'd go down to the sales floor. And often they were the first people who got to see things like new big brand campaigns. Because they could see it, they could, I could talk to them about it, I could explain why we were doing why I was doing this DVC with a three-legged dog in that didn't really seem to have anything about electricity in it, rather than just flashing, call us now, call us now. You know, I could explain that to them. Yes. And that got their buy-in. So it's simple tactics, right? Simple tactics. Simple communication. Simple communication, talk to people, talk to people when you meet them when you're making a cup of coffee. Oh, I'm doing this, you might like to know about it. You know, be the connector. Yeah, be the connector.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Gonna put you on the spot here. Oh no. I'm going to ask you what your favourite uh campaign is running right now in New Zealand out in the world. Um, for all of the reasons that we've just talked about, what if you could take a peek behind it? You would hazard a guess that they were being quite effective.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, um, well, there are a lot. I actually, I actually um I always get to judge some of the marketing awards, so I actually get to peek under the bonnet of some of these, some of these campaigns sometimes by reading, reading awards entries. Uh um there, you know, in terms of the it's a lot of the very well-known ones at have are very well known at the moment and have been doing well because they've been using these principles. Um so, you know, things like the Tina's from Turner, Tina from Turner's campaign has been phenomenally successful for them. Um and that's because they've applied, they've applied principles of effectiveness at at every stage of what they're doing there. They understood exactly what they were trying to achieve through it. They, they, and and they've they've um they've over time they've used the same the same approach. And that's an example, yes, it's not it's not a weepy like my three-legged dog, but it's funny, it's amusing, people love the character of Tina. Um, so that that works works over time. Um, and then you've got things like again, it's it's a cliche, but the ANZ campaign with the Shamer family, they've been using it over years and years and years now. Um, and keeping on evolving it again, they've been applying principles, certainly of creative effectiveness and brand building effectiveness to everything they do.
SPEAKER_02:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:In that. So they're two examples, and they're always up there on the and that that they they represent another principle, which is it used to be kind of if you were a marketer, marketers and agencies got bored of creative, and you know, it would be like, and you used to say, Oh, well, people can only see your ad a number of times, a certain number of times, and then it's it's done its dash and it's not effective anymore, and you need to do something new. That really came more from I think agencies A wanting to make more money by doing new creative and and marketers getting bored and wanting to do new stuff too. But again, there's there's so much evidence out there that people don't get bored of good creative. If um, if it's been, if it's telling the right stories, if it's coming from the right customer needs, if it's communicating the right things about the brand, and it's executed well, then creative does does creative wear-out is a bit of a myth. And so there's a lot, if you look at a lot of um the the advertising that's done well in New Zealand over the last few years, they've been using those principles like you know, Tina, like the Sharma family, like contact back to the electricity market with George, little George and her family. People don't the oh um Amy and Ben for ASB as well, with the with the banks. People don't get bored if it's good creative. And we saw that, I mean, if I was still, if trust power hadn't been bought by Mercury, we could still be using that ad now.
unknown:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:You know, it was it was filmed at the end of 2021, went live at the very end of 2021. Um, four years later, there's a good chance we would still be using that ad-um because people don't get bored. And certainly it ran for it it ran for about 18 months until we had the merger with with Mercury. But by the end of that, we again I was lucky in that I had research data. We would do advertising tracking data so I could monitor the performance of the ads. But it what if you if you are in a position where you can do advertising tracking, you know, one of the questions is always, are you getting bored of seeing this ad? And it was good, it it no, was the answer 18 months after it was first on air. That metric for you getting bored of this ad was no higher than it was on day one.
SPEAKER_03:I challenge you as well, anybody out there, uh, to not cry within the first two seconds of the video. I think that I uh you know, I don't usually cry at movies, but yeah, the tears are flowing about two seconds in. So just watch these adverts and and try and learn from them because you know how you're feeling, right, is probably representative of how other people feel. I mean, you you are a marketer, but you're also a person. Yeah. Um so it can be quite interesting to use these as case studies.
SPEAKER_01:It can, and we again it's we were lucky that we had the advertising tracking data, but it was, you know, that was all intentional. You know, we wanted to go one step further on with the emotional impact of that ad. And our advertising tracking, when we were looking at the performance of the ad against various metrics, it blew all of the sort of standards out of the water, you know, in terms of people's how people were reacting to it and how it was directly changing their feelings about the brands. And that's the that's the most important thing, really, at the end of the day. Those were brand ads that we had specific objectives in in the brand perception that we were we were trying to either reinforce, well, really reinforce and make stronger, and we we had the data that showed that that the ads specifically were increasing functional perceptions of well, perceptions of some of the functional attributes of the brand, even though it's an ad about an old man and a three-legged dog, and it's nothing to do with electricity, it's nothing to do with our customer service, it's nothing to do with the with the products and pricing. And yet all of those brand attributes that were functional attributes, we could show were strengthened by the advertising we were doing. So it works. It works, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Would that be the bottom line if you if you were to offer one takeaway for our audience today, who vary between um B2B marketers, B2C marketers, and then we've got some C-suite as well. Yeah. So we have a variation of uh of different job titles. Um what could the takeaway be from the marketing effect in that conversation?
SPEAKER_01:Make sure your teams understand it. If you've got a team quite often, depending on the size of the company you're working in, you may have a marketing team that's kind of evolved from people with other roles. If you have teams that that perhaps are coming from a different background into marketing, or even are established teams that have grown into the roles, have the conversations with them. If you are in the C-suite, I mean obviously not confrontationally, but get to understand their thinking, get to understand what they're applying in their work, find out where the gaps in their knowledge are and help and support them to fill in those gaps. And and for smaller companies, yes, for smaller companies you may not be able to afford, you know, a chief marketing officer or a head of marketing who's fully trained and fully up to date with all of this stuff. So talk to someone, you know, have you know, talk to people who do, maybe externally in a way that you can support in your business.
SPEAKER_03:And I will put a list of all of the resources that we've talked about today, uh, because we've talked about quite a few. Um, but if you could list a few of essential reading for anybody in marketing effectiveness so that people can go and find this research and information.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I still I still think as I said, the Binetton Field work is kind of the seminal work out there. And it's and the first piece of work is a few years old. So their first um big piece of work was the called The Long and the Short of It, which established this principle of needing to invest in long-term brand building as well as short-term, short-term effectiveness, short-term activation. Um, but they have then um released multiple um other pieces of work. So one about media, how this affects media choices, and another um called effectiveness in context, um, which took it all the stage further into looking at those principles they'd established at the beginning, and then looking at the context of different types of businesses, sizes of businesses, maturity of businesses, and how these rules can be adapted. Um, there are lots of other people out there. I mean, there's also the, you know, Byron Sharp with his How Brands Grow is another, you know, seminal piece of work. You may not agree with everything he says. A lot of people do disagree with things he says, but I think you should have read what he says at least, and then make your own minds up about whether you believe what he says. So he is part of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, which is the University of South Australia's um institute of marketing effectiveness. So it's an academic institute of marketing effectiveness. Um, there are other people looking at you know, creative effectiveness. So there are companies like System One that do a lot of advertising um evaluation. So go and look at what they do. People like Grace Kite, who again does a lot of work in um effectiveness. So there's there's a lot of people out there.
SPEAKER_03:The research is it's all there, isn't it? The research is all there.
SPEAKER_01:And once you start, once you start, then you'll find other people, you know, who are working in the same fields. Amazing stuff.
SPEAKER_03:Um and where can people find you, Caroline? You can find me on LinkedIn. Yes, LinkedIn's the best spot. LinkedIn's the best place to find me. Okay, excellent. All right, thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01:Or to food marketing. Art of food marketing. You can find the food marketing website as well.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, wonderful stuff. Thank you so much. I feel like we could have talked and talked and talked. I think there's lots and lots to lots and lots to unpack about marketing effectiveness. Maybe we could do a follow-up um conversation. I know that's cool. Yeah, it's wonderful. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me, Fred. It's a pleasure.
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