Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

Marketing teams have become incredibly good at optimising campaigns and communications through ever-more precise data and measurement tools. But have we been pursuing precision and ROI to the point where we’ve optimised and measured ourselves into oblivion?

That’s a key question that lies at the heart of the latest Mi3 podcast episode. The second question immediately alongside it: If modern measurement tools are telling us what worked in the past, how do we find the complementary intelligence that’ll help us predict the customers and trends that might drive effective strategies for future growth?

There’s no doubt the rise of digital media and performance marketing have brought marketing teams extraordinary advances in accountability. But for the likes of Les Binet, Mark Ritson and James Hurman, such precision puts brands in danger of losing sight of how to generate future demand.

How to identify which customers are worth winning longer term is a key piece of the value intelligence puzzle, says social and behavioural scientist, Ross Honeywill – and he’s pitching his 5.5m next economic order (NEO) consumers as the predictive bellwether for early adoption as well as less price-sensitive customer mindsets.

For David Jones’s GM of marketing and retail media, Melissa Polglase, escaping a short-term view is tough in an economic climate where growth is hard to come by. “The digital world has allowed us to track ROAS conversion at a really microscopic level, and that can be quite addictive, particularly in a very choiceful economy now, where customers are really being quite prudent in how they’re spending,” she agrees.

Moreover, platforms are great at “driving an outcome to an audience within a platform”, continues Polglase. Getting past that firstly means staying true to the marketing strategy. But it also means adopting a more customer-oriented mindset, says Polglase.

For example, focusing on a more affluent customer who identifies with experiences and quality was a critical step in designing the retailer’s customer loyalty program – and such care has paid dividends, including a +40 per cent better transaction value than non-member shoppers.

“It really comes down to putting customer strategy ahead of channel optimisation and having the leadership in place to be bold, and to be able to continue driving short-term results while asking long-term questions,” Polglase says.  

OMD chief strategy officer, Rob Frost, agrees digitisation has tipped the scales too far towards optimisation. “What we were doing is taking any metrics we could get and saying this was a proxy for something else that happened,” he says. “At the same time, what we started to do is apply those metrics to any piece of activity beyond direct response as well. So we started thinking, how can we do this for our brand? Then we fell into this trap of short terms.”

One of the critical things about consumers with a NEO mindset is they choose what matters to them, explains Honeywill. Unlike traditional consumers, they’re also socially progressive, independent minded and curious about what comes next – and importantly, “are more ready to spend and spend more frequently and pay more for a difference they believe in”.

While NEOs appeal, Frost is quick to warn against “oversegmenting” for the sake of it, particularly in the upper funnel. “If we know that speaks to 95 per cent of your out-of-market customer base at any point, we should be thinking about building up that distinctive brand for the long term, however possible. But there seems to be really interesting use cases for any segmentation, especially when we start to look at that predictive element of how we do that in the mid and lower funnel,” he says.  

One of the things Omnicom is looking at is building what Frost dubbed “a brand brain”. “This would allow us to pull in real-time [customer] signals and understand not just what's happened previously in all of your campaigns through your modelling, results and metrics, but start to get an idea of how those real-time signals are starting to impact what happens in the lives of consumers or within your categories,” he says.

“If we have a way of building these brand brains and repositories of that kind of data and information, and can find smarter ways of asking the right questions and pulling from that, we can get closer to doing something different – and that hopefully better predicts a potential outcome than we ever have done before.”