Adapting Brand Messaging for a New Audience
Background
A prominent personal care brand was gearing up to launch a groundbreaking product. However, their existing messaging, tailored to a younger demographic, clashed with their broader portfolio positioning. This posed a critical challenge: How could they connect with a new, older Millennial male audience in a cluttered market? Moreover, the Canadian market demanded custom, tailored messaging, so lifting assets from the US was not a viable option.
Approach
Consumer motivation analysis
Collaborating with their agency, and consultants at Brainsights, the brand curated a mood reel of content to test various hypotheses as they mapped out their creative territory. This included understanding relative engagement between conversational and statement tones, between black and white and colour imagery, and exploring various musical genres.
The brand also included their past ads to understand which themes and tones resonated, and ensure an authentic evolution for this more sophisticated positioning. Over 300 Millennials were recruited, with their unconscious responses recorded to the mood reel, and then segmented based on variables of interest to the brand in order to understand any nuances in engagement or any risks to pursuing one creative territory versus another.
From this analysis, a creative territory briefing document was produced, and the creative agency got to work on generating a series of films for the target audience.
Creative optimizations
Once the films were near completion, rough cuts of each were screened within a clutter reel for a subset of the initial audience, while their brain wave activity was once again recorded.
Analyzing the response of consumers to each film revealed opportunities for creative optimizations prior to market release, to ensure the most impactful creative advertising was being released. This included, for example, optimizing the opening moments to grab attention most effectively, and streamlining the end sequence of brand platform and brand reveal to maximize product consideration potential.
Results
The two-part engagement helped the brand to better understand and authentically address the target audience in an optimal way, resulting in:
Considerable New Product Innovation Risk Management.
Strong lifts in trial: The campaign drove a +13% lift in trial over the brand’s projections, a resounding success.
Conclusion
This case illuminates the value of deeply understanding consumers based on their unstated needs, which can be uniquely revealed using neuroscience data and insights. Furthermore, it underlines the value of managing narrative and executional risk in creative development and delivery, and how the careful crafting of messaging that connects deeply with consumers can act as both a powerful risk management strategy, and a fuel for outsized growth.
