Research Demystifies Decision Making For Advertisers
Sue Elms, managing director of Carat Insight, has unveiled research outlining consumers’ decision making processes at this year’s MRG conference in Madrid, potentially enabling advertisers to capitalise on personality traits in their marketing strategies.
Delivering a speech to delegates at the conference, Elms expressed frustration with the advertising industry’s typical marketing strategies, explaining that consumers have individual purchasing patterns and cannot always be targeted by ploughing the “common furrows” of marketing.
She said: “I am not saying these models are wrong, but there is a third way. We did a lot of in depth interviews and we found that each consumer has their own decision making modus operandi, or MO. When you know a person’s MO you know how to make their decision making more comfortable and that has to be in your favour.”
Elms outlined the categories into which consumers’ purchasing habits could be categorised, stating that a person’s restraint, independence, deliberation and projection were instrumental in defining how to best target each consumer. The results could then be collated to give broad strategies for targeting different groups of consumers.
For example, Elms stated that, in general, male consumers are more self-orientated, while women tend to be more considerate of other opinions and require a brand to appear trustworthy. The agency boss also stated that, for women, word of mouth marketing and recommendations from friends are very important.
Citing two television commercials for Barclays and First Direct, Elms demonstrated how different sales techniques could be used to target either men or women, with Barclays’ campaign featuring Samuel L. Jackson proving to be very male-orientated while First Direct favoured an altogether more female-centric approach.
“What we are doing is making the brand more useful,” Elms explained. “Hopefully using these strategies will result in better campaigns. Both men and women are very planned in their decision, men will go and find information, whereas women will rely on recommendations and word of mouth.”
Earler this week at the MRG conference, Kevin Dundas, chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, argued that advertisers need to work harder at building emotional elements into their campaigns in order to succeed against rivals. He claimed that “brands are over”, pointing to the increased quality of today’s products making advertising on a particular strength less powerful than ever (see Dundas Spreads The Love At MRG Conference).
MRG: www.mrg.org.uk
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