Here's How Brands Put Creativity into Marketing Campaigns

Aaditya Jain | 9910029327 | The 15 A Chronicles'Desk

Marketing is putting creativity to use based on facts. The key to collecting these facts is doing an extensive research. Research holds the capability to make a Marketing campaign successful, or a complete failure. In Marketing, the primary focus of research should not be to improve the product, its pricing or placement. Instead, it should be to understand the pain point or need of the consumer, and to address it using the ways mentioned above. Revenue increase should be secondary, and is indeed sure to follow the customer-centric research.

For example, Mc Donald’s conducted a research to improve the sales of its milk shakes. It interviewed its consumers to gain insights on which flavour and what texture do most people prefer. The primary aim of this research was to improve the product. However, the research failed to achieve the results.

Post this failure, Mc Donald’s deployed a research team on the ground, to capture information such as at what time do most of the people purchase milk shakes, what do they wear, and what do they purchase along with it. The insight that the team gained was that most of the people purchase milk shakes before 8:30am so that they have something to accompany them during the long early morning traffic hours.

Following this, McD simply increased the thickness of the milk shakes further so that they last longer. Also, it shifted the milk shake counter to the front of the stores so that people could avoid the long drive-thru queues. Following this customer centric research, McD was able to achieve its planned feat, and increased the sales of milk shakes multi-fold.

According to the Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christenses, each year more than 30,000 new products are launched, and 80% of them fail. To exemplify this, one study found that out of the 9000 new products that were distributed to a national retailer, 60% did not sell for whole three years. On the contrary, research has shown that customer centric businesses are 60% more profitable than their counterparts.

The double-clicked approaches to carry out a customer centric research are root-cause analysis, and the rule of 5 “Whys”. Also, as per the Ansoff matrix, research should not only be limited to market penetration or market development, but should also look forward to new product development (horizontal and vertical integrations) and diversification.

This phenomenon was adopted by Starbucks, wherein it heeded to the demands of its loyal customer base for a chilled and sweet coffee. It introduced Mazagran, an aerated chilled beverage, in partnership with Pepsi. However, the famous coffee chain failed in its effort for horizontal integration. Consumers did not ask for an aerated drink, but rather only a simple chilled sweet coffee. Hence the introduction of Frappuccino by Starbucks, which covered for the losses that Mazagran brought.

Hence, it is ostensible that a good customer centric research paves way for greater odds of product success, and alleviates the odds of market rollbacks.