Celebrity or the Test Drive?

Pradeep Saxena, Sr Vice President, TNS Automotive

Ashish the brand manager in an automobile company is in a quandary, whether to sign the famous film star as suggested by the ad agency or to use the same budget in organizing test drives, designing brochures and training sales persons at the dealerships as desired by the Director Sales. What will lead to the success of his brand?

 
How does one define the success of a brand? When enough people desire it or when enough people buy it? The debate is probably as old as the origin of brands. Brand champions believe that as long as the consumers continue to desire the brand, it is successful whereas business heads and sales people count the success in terms of the revenue it generates. In fact, to be termed successful a brand needs both - the consumer's heart as well as his wallet. There is really no point in having one without the other.

Therefore, two essential components for the success of a brand are its:

a)	Power in the mind; and
b)	Power in the market.

 
Power in the mind refers to the quantum of positive disposition towards the brand, which brings it into active consideration at the time of purchase. It is a reflection of the commitment, loyalty or love for the brand. Power in the market refers to those elements of marketing mix, which are responsible for converting the disposition into transaction. These refer to availability of the desired product configuration at an acceptable price at a convenient location and such other factors. To be successful, a brand needs to have both - the power in the mind and the power in the market. In a way, they are multiplicative. If one is zero, the overall sales of the brand is zero.

For example, till two years ago BMW existed in the minds of luxury car buyers in India and had sufficient Mind Power, but there was no Market Power in terms of distribution; hence the result was zero sale. Conversely, there are car brands, which have great market power in terms of distribution, a distinct product advantage such as a Diesel Engine, competitive pricing and still sell low volumes because they have very little Mind Power.

 
Since Mind Power and Market Power are multiplicative, one can leverage the other. Brands having high Market Power can succeed with low Mind Power, because they can beat the competition by sheer availability, pricing or additional / unique features. Skoda Octavia's initial success (when it was a relatively unknown brand with low mind power) in India can be attributed to its Market Power by virtue of its diesel option vis-à-vis the competitive models of Honda and Toyota.

Similarly brands with High Mind Power can succeed with limited Market Power, because the brand in itself is so desirable that people seek it despite limited distribution and buy even at high prices. One of the recent examples of this nature is iPhone. Even before its launch in India, it was purchased by the Indian consumers thru friends and relatives in US.

To build Mind Power, brands need to build relationships with existing and the potential consumers. Relationships are built thru Brand Encounters that people have with brands. In a competitive world, all brands are trying to build relationships with all consumers by creating encounters. To be successful in this endeavour, the Brand Encounters need to be:

▪	Relevant;
▪	Differentiating; and
▪	Impactful.

 
Such brand encounters need to be repeated again and again to build the relationship.

Brand Encounters are nothing but messages (content) transmitted by brands to their target consumers through various touch points / media. For simplicity we will call these touch points as Contacts.

As we can, see there are two parts to building the Brand Relationship. These are:

Content which is relevant, differentiating and impactful i.e. 'Quality of message';

Frequency with which it is delivered i.e. 'Quantity of message'.

Techniques to measure the 'Quality of message' have been prevalent in the market. These are largely the Brand Tracks, which use measures such as 'Execution Cut Thru', 'Brand Cut Thru' and 'Advertising message recall'. However, a need to measure the quantity has been felt for a long time.

 
At present, the 'quantity' is measured thru intermediate measures such as GRPs for TV. In reality, GRPs are just an input to the consumer, by no means are they a resultant variable signifying the consumer's take home from the spend incurred by the marketer. In fact TRPs are a resultant, but they are for the TV program and not for the advertisement. The problem is compounded further because marketers use a, huge number of contact points these days. Some examples in case of cars are:

▪	TV Advertisements
▪	Newspaper advertisements
▪	Dealer promotion ads in newspapers
▪	Ads in magazines
▪	Manufacturer's website
▪	Internet ads.

 
In addition, there are contacts intrinsic to the buying process. These are:

▪	Dealer Sales Person
▪	Dealer Showroom etc.

 
Then there are those contacts, which are very important but are available without any direct cost, such as –

▪	Opinion of relatives and friends
▪	Cars on the road

 
and so on....

It is important to measure the quantum of Brand Experience created by all of these, because different brands create different levels of brand experience. Successful brands are able to do this better than the 'not so successful brands'.

The issue is that there is no common currency, which can be used across contacts. For example, we all know TV viewership is measured in TRPs, whereas press is measured in terms of readership. Obviously, it is not possible to add TRPs to Readership. The issue compounds when we have multiple contact points including Outdoor, Radio, Internet, Press and TV reviews, etc. Obviously, if we can't do it for the paid contacts, what is the hope of doing for the intrinsic and unpaid contacts such as dealer sales person and word of mouth.

Integration - a company owned by ex-media and advertising professionals has developed just such a measure called Brand Experience Point or BEP. It measures the quantity of Brand Experience created by brands across individual contacts used by them. This is a common unit, which can be used across all contacts and is amenable to all arithmetic operations. For example the BEPs of TV and Press can be added to calculate the Brand Experience generated by the two mediums in total.

Using MCA, a marketer can decide:

a)	Which Contact Points are relevant for the Product Category in terms of their influencing power?
b)	Which contacts are working optimally or sub-optimally for the brand?
c)	In case of sub-optimal contacts, how much investment is required to bring them to an optimal level?
d)	Is the brand leveraging the Brand Experience to achieve market success by deploying sufficient market power?
e)	Is the brand under-leveraging the high market power by creating poor Brand Experience?

 
In a study conducted by TNS Automotive among intending buyers and current users of cars, it has been discovered that Word of Mouth, Test drive and cars on the road are among the five most influential contacts apart from TV and Newspaper ads. However, the cars on the roads generate the maximum brand experience. It is almost intuitive because automobile is probably the only product category where a potential buyer is constantly exposed to all brands without having to make any real effort. He can actually touch and feel the product almost at will in his own time and without incurring any cost or obligation. It is also quite easy for him to identify the users of various brands and, therefore, he can easily solicit their advice.

Almost one fourth (23%) of the total Brand Experience generated by the category (sum total of the Brand Experience generated by individual brands across all contacts) is done by just three contacts viz 'cars seen on the road', TV advertisements and 'manufacturers' advertisements in newspapers. Next eight contacts generate 29% of the total Brand Experience, whereas less than half the total brand experience is contributed by 24 contacts.

If we club various contacts into groups, we realize that the maximum Brand Experience is created by mass media contacts followed by indirect contacts. This is simply because the Indian car industry uses at least 10 mass media contacts, whereas there are only seven indirect contacts such as cars on the road, opinion of friends and car displayed in public places. Among the top 10 contacts in terms of Brand Experience, six are mass media, two are indirect and two are Point of Sale. The key learning is that even when industry's thrust is on mass media in reality the ranking of four out of these six contacts in terms of influence is rather low. This essentially means that the spend on these contacts is likely to bring low returns.

It is possible to calculate the share of Brand experience, which a brand enjoys in the category. It has been observed across markets and product categories that the correlation between Brand Experience Share and Market Share is as high as 80% most of the time. In the current study also, it is close to 80%. If we look at the share of individual brands within each contact, it is observed that correlation with market share goes as high as 90% in case of Test Drives. At another level, the correlation drops to 66% in case of celebrity endorsement. Clearly celebrities don't work for all brands whereas Test Drives work for all. Now at least, we the marketers can decide where to put the money and where to save.