How a fintech business grew its brand and revenue with Brainsights

Understanding the category and how brands connect with consumers

Emotional Connection has a strong impact on driving brand consideration, particularly in a highly competitive industry with relative product parity between competitors.

Evaluating the client’s brand connection (both US and Canadian communications) alongside that of it’s competitive set, Brainsights could plot the Category’s Share of Mind to understand opportunities and threats, and the relative performance of American v Canadian communications on Canadian consumers.

As this chart makes clear, in 2022 there was a strong competitor (c2) and a comparable one to the client (c1).
In 2022, American communications also performed slightly better than Canadian communications on Canadian consumers.

Understanding the contribution of individual ads in Connecting with Consumers

Decomposing brand performance into the contribution of specific ads allows us to understand the spread of ad performance across brands in the category.

This is incredibly useful in understanding the potential of a brand to connect with consumers and provides a more detailed risk and threat profile for our customer.

Furthermore, it reveals more precisely what resonates with consumers.

Such insights enabled Brainsights to pinpoint the themes, tones and narrative structures that deeply connect with Canadians, and helped our customer develop a strong brief for its agency partners.

Furthermore, we could reveal data to rationalize further investment in creative developed locally in Canada based on both individual ad performance and a clear creative territory for growth.

Tracking progress vis-à-vis the competition

Conducting a second Category Share of Mind 11 months later reveals the progress made by our customer, moving from just above average to a strong connecting brand, across even more of their advertising.

While they could not have anticipated the gift of some competitors going quiet with their advertising, it’s clear that they also could not have confidently relied on the advertising supplied by US counterparts, as this performed less well vis-à-vis the key, remaining competitor.

Which ads contributed to making gains in consumer connection?

In understanding the contribution of advertising to the brand performance, two things become clear:

The competitive threat remained real.

The approach taken by the key competitor showed polarizing results, with one ad performing very strongly, and another performing poorly.

There was a spread in performance of our customer’s advertising.

There remained risks in media investment deployment that needed to be resolved, given that both US- and Canadian-made ads were tested. Armed with the Category Share of Mind data, our customer could make the right decisions with their investment to maximize growth opportunities.

Note that not all of the ads we studied from our customer had paid media support.

Creative Optimization—Deep-diving on customer advertising to ensure impact

In addition to the Category Share of Mind Analysis, Brainsights could go deep into a second-by-second analysis to ensure both creative and media was optimized. A big portion of the campaign strategy revolved around key customer stories, whose length was suitable for select platforms, namely YouTube.

Because the media was bought in skippable placements, it was vital for Brainsights to understand the Attention, Emotion and Memory activated in the first 5s (highlighted). In each case, the key customer stories had higher ‘neural activation’ than average (and in some cases, much higher), giving our customer confidence that their messaging was optimized for this specific environment.

This bears out in the results: view through rates that were better than almost 90% of content on their YouTube channel, and 2.3X as many impressions for this content (as determined by the YouTube algorithm) versus US-created content.

The results

By understanding their competitive landscape and how the competition both approached consumers, and where and how this approach resonated, our customer could:

Rationalize, with confidence, an increase in investment to power local, custom creative.
Craft the best possible brief for their agency partners to deliver incredible growth

And by understanding the Attention impact of their Creative, our customer could:

Optimize their media investment and ensure their message was being processed meaningfully with consumers.

Together, as validated in a geographic market test and control where consumers were exposed to key Canadian messaging, our recommendations resulted in:

Regional conversion increase of +30% in exposed market (versus unexposed market)
Regional revenue increase of +25% exposed market (versus unexposed market)
2.3x more impressions than non-local creative
Video view through rate of +87% above channel benchmark

Driving Brand and Business Performance by Deepening Emotional Connection with Consumers