Vivien Marles/Derek Morris – ‘Viewing Together, Targetting Clever’

Vivien Marles, head of research, Laser

Derek Morris, joint media director, BMP DDB

The following paper won the IPA/David Aitchison Award for best research paper

Until now, the family’s power in influencing the purchase of goods and services has not been researched much outside the states.

Where such eminent luminaries as: Qualls, Eggebeen, Belch, Blood and Wolfe (and I’m not even going to try and pronounce the other one) have been at it for years.

Inspired by them and work carried out in France by TFI and Sofres, BMP approached Laser with the idea of working together to understand more about the complexities of purchase decision-making and the role of joint viewing.

Across the Atlantic, researchers have tended to constructed horrible looking formulae to try and understand the minutiae of “Family relationships and how they affect purchase decision-making activity”.

You will be relieved to know that our approach has been much simpler and hopefully more practical.

No matter how the research is done – there is one very clear message.

That “Women often act as the purchasing agent – interpreting the needs and wants of other family members. Marketing activity should therefore be directed towards enlisting the power of family relationships.”

BUT Isn’t the family a thing of the past? Don’t most people live in single person households these days, and lead independent lives? Well yes, single person households are on the increase – but for now at least the family remains the key consumer unit in the UK.

Despite what you may think almost three quarters of UK households are family units and three in ten UK households contain dependent children.

And they account for the vast majority of consumer expenditure. The family unit accounts for 87% of all UK Consumer Spend and 85% of grocery expenditure. So family remains an incredibly powerful spending unit. And all the members within it influence expenditure to some extent or other.

According to TGI and other sources, the extent to which household members influence the purchase of goods and services varies – not surprisingly – by product category.

There are still the predominantly male preserve products like garden sheds, camping equipment and tools at one end of the spectrum – and those items which remain predominantly female territory like clothes, cosmetics and things for the children.

But most of the things we buy for family consumption, both small and large ticket items, like cars, financial products and food are subject to a complex web of inter-relationships.

Our research has concentrated on the influence of family members in the construction of the grocery shopping basket, and the effect of family member influence on brand choice and spend.

We have been able to identify the types of groceries where children and partners exert influence and we are able to show that family influence is a key determinant in brand choice and levels of family expenditure.

We set out to understand more about: how brand repertories are constructed, by exploring the influence of individual preferences, usage and flights of fancy; learn about the product categories which are subject to dictator or influencer choice; how robust brand preference is in store; finally, the role of TV advertising in communicating with family members and how advertisers can target relevant family influence groups when they are watching television together.

One of our early objectives was to develop a television planning tool for the effective targeting of family members when they are watching together. But as most of you will know, S P Consultancy have developed their systems to analyse group viewing. This is a very useful planning tool and I am anticipating a large drink for plugging it here today.

What we did, was integrate continuous panel data BARB and TN AGB Superpanel with a number of propriety ad-hoc studies. This approach has enabled us to examine the issues and draw conclusions at a level from which you can generalise and will also allow individual advertisers to examine “influence effects” at the brand level. Certainly BMP and Laser will be carrying out market and brand level analyses on behalf of our clients.

Our continouous panel data were supplemented with:

• a Brand Specifier Study, a Qualitative exercise carried out by Leapfrog Research. This comprised a combination of in home audits and accompanied shopping trips and it is from this exercise that we have been able to generate hypotheses about the value of joint viewing scenarios.

• A purchase influence study amongst TN AGB’s superpanel which enabled us to measure influence of household members on the main shopper, and the incidence of their shopping and viewing together.

• And a qualitative exercise amongst BMP’s housewife panel to examine family viewing dynamics.

On then to our main results.

In the construction of brand repertoires, three key factors emerged.

• The first was that the “influence exerted” by a product’s end user is crucial in the purchase decision.

• The second was where the influence takes place – is the shopper influenced at the point of purchase, or it does mostly happen pre-purchase?

• And thirdly the importance of “Golden Brands” in determining brand choice. These are “the nothing else will do brands” those that become a generic for the category – Kelloggs, Heinz, Nescafe. They depend upon unanimous endorsement and are reinforced by shared advertising exposure.

The spheres of family influence fall differentially, according to who “owns” the category or brand and how powerful their influence over the purchaser is. Children come up against the problem of conflicting ideas about what they should have or can have – the Coco Pops vs Weetabix scenarios. When she is being “responsible”, no amount ‘pestering’ will make mum cave in and buy the sugary / unhealthy / additive loaded things the child wants. However, giving in to the occasional request is often a cheap / simple way to keep the child happy. Research suggests that joint viewing is extremely powerful in this scenario since it provides the trigger for the request, it helps build positive brand associations for the housewife, and it re-endorses purchase decisions.

The housewife partner relationship is much more about subtle “influence”. The categories involved are often premium brands – shared indulgences or ones that reflect shared tastes.

Where older kids are involved – particularly with the Dad as purchaser – it’s very much about treats and indulgences.

And where influence intersects in the family, a consensus of opinion on the favoured brand can make a product “irreplacable”. No instore promotion or offer will knock brands like these off the shopping list. They are true Golden Brands.

Influence tends not to take place at the point of purchase. Housewives say that they avoid shopping with the family, it’s a chore they want to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Shared TV advertising exposure therefore plays a key role in generating requests and encouraging the housewife to accept, recognise and trial new products.

Golden Brands are usually those that are on public display and immediately tangible, such as ready to eat or finished foods, squashes / juices, fizzy drinks, cereals. They are high interest categories and are seen to be worth paying more for.

These strong brands tend to gain their status from unanimous family endorsement; heavy, public and famous advertising.

The way through to shared recognition, agreement on brand values and family consensus is to advertise to both end of the chain at once. Mother / child joint viewing raises awareness and endorsement of the child brands and prompts “wish fulfilment”. Viewing with partner links the emotional appeal with the rational benefits and re-affirms common tastes.

Family viewing endorses brand status and can help create those “must have brands”.

This research suggests that the categories most likely to benefit from joint viewing scenarios were

• Foods eaten as they are such as biscuits, confectionery, ready meals
• Visible, high profile foods such as alcohol, carbonates, cereals, hot beverages And
• Treats and luxury purchases

So, our qualitative research supports the notion that family member influence is crucial in determining brand choice, which is robust at the point of purchase. And it is the shared television viewing experience which shapes peoples’ views about products and brands.

BUT – Does it all stack up when you look at the numbers?

Well, quite simply “Yes”. I am now going to show you some top-line results from our Purchase Influence Study, come from questions administered to TN AGB’s superpanel housewives.

In our view, a surprisingly high proportion of these housewives said they were influenced in their choice of what to buy by their children and partners.

6 in 10 housewives said that the choice of which brands buy across the 16 markets in our study were influenced by their children, and almost as many said they were influence by their partners.

All of the data had been controlled for household size composition, and I am assured by the clever folk at AGB that we are observing real effects.

These are the Top 6 markets where Influence by Children is particularly important. They pester for particular brands of breakfast cereal, only certain brands of biscuits and snacks will do. In many of these types of markets – mother, left to her own devices will buy responsible, healthy brands and even, Private Label if she thinks she’ll get away with it. But she won’t. And she is much more likely to be convinced of the merits of buying the sought-after brand if she has shared the advertising experience with her child.

In the written paper, all the 16 categories are detailed by the extent to which particular brands are pestered for. In case you’re wondering, children show very little interest in stock cubes and petfood.

Markets where the partner has the greatest influence tend to be repertoire markets, and those where the partner is a key consumer. Shared advertising exposure in these markets is more likely to ensure that a particular brand ends up at home.

Hot beverages is one of these markets that we have analysed in more detail and it shows that partner influence is more likely to result in the purchase of premium brands and new brands. Without her partner’s expressed preferences the housewife will tend more towards own label and cheaper brands.

Influence affects expenditure. Our analysis shows that those who are influenced by their children spend 14% more , and its also higher for those influenced by their partners

Not only does influence result in higher expenditure, it also re-enforces brands. We’ve indexed private label and brand expenditure on a few of the categories most subject to influence and you can see that where family members are exerting influence, expenditure on brands is greater. Left to her own devices the housewife is more likely to opt for own label.

Supporting our qualititative findings and stacks of anecdotal evidence about shopping with partners and children our survey points to the fact that, influence at the point of purchase is becoming less important as relatively few mums go shopping with their partners and children. Only a quarter of the participating housewives said they shopped regularly with their partners and relatively few claimed to shop regularly with their children.

But what they do together, is watch television and talk about it. We, in ITV, have been monitoring the importance of television in peoples’ lives since 1980 in our Television Output Monitor. And throughout that time, television has remained the most discussed topic with family and friends. Topics such as bringing up children and the family’s health tend to trail well behind.

Even in this era of fragmentation, that is almost certainly because a very high proportion of television viewing is accompanied. The new SPC system to which I referred earlier enables us to analyse the times of day, programmes and channels that people are watching together. The data on this chart refers to November 1996 and shows that BBC1 and ITV are pretty neck and neck in attracting family viewing – with Channel 4 and BBC2 some way behind. The differences are even greater if you just take Peak Time.

You can now analyse in great detail when different combinations of people are watching together.

For those with young children, joint viewing most obviously happens in the classic Children’s TV segment 4 – 5.15pm. And Saturday and Sundays from 9.00 – 1pm is another key place to catch housewives and often fathers viewing with young children.

The teenage group are perhaps the hardest to catch in a family viewing environment. Nevertheless there are some programmes that appeal across the family, and some dayparts where communal activity places them in front of the TV with their parents. Most notably this takes place in early peak – the segment of soaps news and eating your dinner in front of a gameshow; late peak also shows some convergence between housewife and teenage viewing. Early Saturday evenings are also good as families watch Gladiators, Blind Date together.

Viewing with partners is a particular feature of late peak. Sitting down at the end of the day / after doing the round of household chores. There is high incidence of specially chosen programming, and this is seen as “quality time”.

These very broad patterns certainly won’t surprise anyone in this room. But if we have been able to convince you of the value of enlisting the power of the family through television then these principles can be applied specifically in the planning process.