In the worlds of media, entertainment and commerce, we have entered an ‘age of availability’.
The wealth of choice and information afforded to consumers means that brands now need to fight harder (and smarter) to gain share of voice and share of consumers’ wallets. Pair this with the proliferation and fragmentation of the media landscape and it means that generating awareness and driving conversion isn’t as straightforward as it once was. At times, it can feel like the messy middle is an ever-present vortex, tipping audiences into the spin cycle of choice whenever they look at a screen.
In contrast to the media world of ever-growing availability, the financial reality for many people in the UK is characterised by constraint. Low household income growth, rising inflation, elevated interest rates, and sense of national stagnation have narrowed our horizons, reducing our options to choose. Recent research by Medialab highlights that nearly 54% of UK adults have had to make ‘some’ or ‘significant’ cuts to their outgoings.
At a time when opportunities to explore and evaluate have grown, but people’s ability to choose and buy has been constrained, it’s more important than ever to find a way to be considered. To cut through meaningfully (and differently) to tip the odds in our favour.
For many marketers this can be hard. Pulled between building emotional connections with broad audiences in the upper funnel, and converting in the lower funnel, building consideration can often fall between different marketing functions. We believe that not all consumer ‘mental availability’ is made equal, and indeed it’s becoming harder for marketers to bridge the two worlds of ‘Brand’ and Performance’.
At Medialab, we pride ourselves on our ability to do just that and think that consideration is key. As an agency we have focussed on unlocking the power of this crucial metric and have developed our expertise in driving “consideration through experimentation”.
But why do we think consideration is so important? The answer is three-fold:
- Consideration pays back vs business results
- Consideration creates connection
- Consideration aids decision making
1. Consideration pays back vs business results
Building consideration can act as a powerful, strategic, unlock for brands in creating stronger connections with consumers – ultimately helping them mean more to them and in turn contribute towards significant long term business growth.
But, albeit an incredibly important brand metric with a proven impact on sales – as McKinsey report “brands who enter consumers consideration set are 3x more likely to be purchased” – it’s also an incredibly difficult one to shift (positively).
“It is not easy. An analysis of our tracking database shows that most measures move only slowly. Looking at annual shifts, movements in unaided awareness are typically only a percent or two. For consideration, typical movements are also small.”
Source: WARC ‘Understanding Brand Consideration’
CONSIDERATION THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION: CASE STUDY #1
Working with one of our clients in the D2C sector, there was a need to experiment in building consideration following consumers return to “normal” after the lockdown(s) of 2020. Product sales were in decline, and we needed to create demand, and do so via brand building, consideration driving communications.
In doing so, and combining more emotive, brand building comms with hard working acquisition activity helped to grow consideration by +9% over a 12-month period. But this approach didn’t just shift brand metrics, but also had a significant impact on the business, growing average order value amongst both new and existing customers.
2. Consideration creates connection
Consideration, however, shouldn’t be focused on in isolation (nor should any brand metric) as this metric will be significantly impacted by others. Awareness is first and foremost incredibly important, but that is also true of price, perceived quality and availability. These factors need to be considered in context of the brand or category as in some cases consideration will be easier to shift than others. For example, building consideration for an FMCG brand may be easier than for an Automotive brand, as typically the level of research and affordability of products will vary dramatically.
Alongside other brand metrics, consideration can act as a powerful means of joining the dots across the consumer (or purchase) journey. We typically think about the consumer journey as a funnel, or perhaps even a ‘loop’… and whilst funnels, loops and journeys are useful within our industry, we need to remind ourselves of the fact consumers do not think like this and definitely do not have the same level of interest in them as we do. So as marketers and communications professionals we need to better understand the way in which consumers are navigating their purchasing decisions.
“The funnel concept fails to capture all the touch points and key buying factors resulting from the explosion of product choices and digital channels, coupled with the emergence of an increasingly discerning, well-informed consumer. A more sophisticated approach is required to help marketers navigate this environment, which is less linear and more complicated than the funnel suggests.”
Source: McKinsey & Company, ‘The Consumer Decision Journey’
CONSIDERATION THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION: CASE STUDY #2
For one of our clients in the financial services sector, we created an experiment to unlock untapped audiences for growth, in doing so creating a wide-reaching media mix that leverages multiple consumer touchpoints. In doing so we navigated away from funnels and built consideration through the adoption of contextual relevance to both find and connect with new audiences following a sustained period of stagnant customer acquisition.
This experiment of driving consideration through context paid off, helping to grow consideration by +25% and importantly the customer base by 50% across a three-year period.
3. Consideration aids decision making
Understanding the consumer journey is getting harder, largely due to the widening scope of media touchpoints consumers interact. They’re more frequently dipping in and out of “market”, constantly analysing, comparing and researching their options before making a purchase decision. This is what Google call the ‘messy middle’.
“The ‘messy middle’, a space of abundant information and unlimited choice that shoppers have learned to manage using a range of cognitive shortcuts.”
Source: Google, Decoding Decisions: Making Sense of the Messy Middle
Unlocking and showing up in the messy middle can act as a powerful tool for brands and is a crucial way to help build consideration and ultimately aid consumer decision making. But we need to think about doing so through the lens of paid, owned and earned media, and the role for each in the consumer journey. More often than not we place too much emphases on the role for paid media but we need to think about consideration (+ other brand metrics) alongside owned and earned channels as well, crucially they all need to be working in harmony to convince a consumer to spend their hard earned cash with a given brand. Google’s whitepaper further emphasises this and states that “the goal isn’t to force people to exit the purchase journey quickly but provide them with the information and reassurance they need to make a decision.”
CONSIDERATION THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION: CASE STUDY #3
One experiment to drive consideration for a long-standing charity client aimed to aid consumer decision making via greater integration of efforts across paid, owned and earned comms. One key tactic involved editorial partnerships, where we borrowed equity and credibility from relevant media publications to tell compelling stories related to the charity – further supporting earned media and PR with paid for media activation to drive integration.
This consistent approach paid off, boosting consideration by +5% and importantly, driving significant business results with an increase in average fundraising value pre- and post-campaign.
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As you can tell, at Medialab, we think that building consideration and ultimately using media and communications in a way to mean more to consumers is extremely valuable, for both driving softer brand metrics, and harder business results.
This being something we have proven through our approach of building “consideration through experimentation”.
If this is an area of interest to you, we’d love to hear from you.
