“I have a mass product. It sells everywhere. I need to reach everyone. Why should I target? It just makes my CPMs more expensive.” This common viewpoint birthed the bottom feeder, media managers whose primary mission is to procure low cost mass media. It begs the question: Why target?
The answer comes in three parts.
1) Competition forces brand positioning. Even with ubiquitous products like toilet paper, competition introduces perceptions and each brand ends up with a piece of the market. So who is your brand’s market? Certainly not everybody. In the case of toilet paper, the brands cluster around price points – though some would argue it’s about comfort. In the case of cereal, brands cluster around health, taste, and personality. Yet if you look at purchasing of mass products from a demographic standpoint, it is typically flat. This leads marketers to simplify and not target.
The challenge to driving mass products is to find and apply the right tools to discern and execute against the different consumer groups in the category. Market structures and Attitudes & Usage segmentations are the standard tools to discern differentiating product attributes and consumer groups. However, these studies typically are stand alone analyses, lacking connectivity to marketing execution and making them difficult to use. This leads marketers back to flat demographics and to simply no target.
The purpose of targeting here is to protect, grow, or re-position the brand. Ubiquitous products cannot remain undifferentiated if they want to survive let alone thrive in a red ocean environments with aggressive competitors. The key is to map relevant differentiation, stake out your piece of the business, and then execute against it.
2) The fact is: consumers are not uniformly responsive to media. Quality marketing mix analyses will not only tell you the average effectiveness of specific media advertising, they will also tell you the areas of effectiveness within your targeting framework by highlighting the distribution of responsiveness across your target segments.
Knowing how different parts of your marketing target are responsive to different media is central to media targeting and planning. Classic media planning efficiency metrics like CPMs (cost per thousand exposures) are only relevant within the context of a target audience. Low CPMs are meaningless if they are calculated against the wrong target. Even with the right target, CPMs do not consider the impact of the medium to generate responsiveness from your target. Analysis of brand and category sales to media exposures across a category’s relevant targeting framework provides the necessary context of media impact benchmarks to qualify media exposures across a matrix of media and target segments. These media impact benchmarks differentiate the value of media exposures beyond straight CPMs by qualifying their ability to drive response in different targeting segments across media. Quality mix studies then answer “how am I doing” by posting how effective the brand was at driving response across its targeting framework in comparison to the category benchmark.
The purpose of targeting here is to drive efficiencies by managing media investments effectively. Knowing which consumers respond to which media for your category of products is the foundation of effectiveness media investment management. Media effectiveness segmentation benchmarking provides a target evaluation framework to efficiently plan media.
3) Better data analytics makes marketing targets actionable. We now know that we want to stake out a differentiated product position, even for apparently ubiquitous brands, and that the value of specific media vehicles is not uniform across marketing targets. These two reasons for targeting are only meaningful if they can be executed.
Better data analytics exist today with integrated meta-databases and their off-spring analytics. The new new is the resulting normative knowledgebases that come from these meta-database analytics. ACNielsen Consulting Services is re-founding its business in this space. Targeted media response benchmarks and related performance analyses are here.
Why target? Because brands need to be positioned in competitive environments, not all consumers respond the same way to media, and most importantly, tools exist today to take measurable action.
Comments