Leveraging Consumer Perceptions for Effective Brand Messaging with Quigley-Simpson’s Brand Momentum Tool
Eric Koehler, EVP of Research and Strategy, reflects on his extensive career in advertising and reveals how the innovative Brand Momentum tool empowers brands to better understand consumer behavior and deliver personalized messaging that resonates
Eric Koehler is the Executive Vice President of Research and Strategy for Quigley-Simpson. After a brief stint in finance, Eric started his career as an account manager at firms such as Ketchum, DDB, Campbell-Ewald, and Deutsch. In his early career, he worked for several companies that were launching new brands or in need of major repositioning. Many of those companies—including Apple, Starbucks, and Expedia—went on to become megabrands.
Eric joined Quigley-Simpson in 2010 to work on the Chase brand and moved into his current role in research and strategy in 2018. He is currently working on the launch of the agency’s Brand Momentum Tracker, which helps marketers understand perceptions of a brand and how they change as consumers move through different levels of the purchase funnel.
The Continuum sat down with Eric to discuss his career, what it was like to work with big brands in their early days, how the new Brand Momentum tool can help brands better understand consumers, and why he thinks our definition of brand has diluted over time.
We’re very excited to talk about your career trajectory and all of the brands you’ve worked with over the years, but we have to start with Quigley-Simpson’s Brand Momentum Tool. Can you tell us about it?
Our goal in developing the tool is to understand perceptions of a brand and how they change as consumers move to different levels of the purchase funnel. Existing brand health trackers and similar studies typically only include people who can name the brand when asked about a category or given a list of brand names. They ask consideration, intent, and usage without exploring brand meaning and without breaking it down by where consumers are in each of those stages of the journey. What people are thinking about a brand when they’re on the verge of buying can be very different than what they think when they are merely aware of a brand or just considering a purchase.
When we prototyped the tool against 20+ existing brands across 25 different perceptions, we saw that perceptions do indeed change among people at different stages in the purchase process. And some of those perceptions were statistically linked to whether they moved forward to the next level. In other words, those perceptions were actually drivers. If you understand this, you can create messaging customized to the people at a specific stage that tells them what they need to hear at that moment and removes the perceptual impediments to purchase.
As an example, we saw with Levi’s that people who were loyalists did not agree that they were easy to find or buy, which seemed very odd. Who would know better where to find the product than people who buy it regularly? While we were trying to get our heads around the results, an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal that talked about the company preparing itself for a digital era and how it had shut a big proportion of its brick-and-mortar stores. This helped us understand our findings and suggested that the brand should customize the message to the loyalist audience that tells them how and where to buy. With other brands, we’ve found emotional misperceptions that can be easily course-corrected with the right targeted messages.
The tool could also be applied to specific audiences or initiatives. We can study the drivers that can be used to understand why various segments are buying or not buying, clicking or not clicking, engaging or not engaging. Colleagues and clients are excited about being able to use this with brands to see specifically what Zillenials are thinking or to measure the impact of cause-related marketing throughout the purchase funnel.
“When we prototyped the tool against 20+ existing brands across 25 different perceptions, we saw that perceptions do indeed change among people at different stages in the purchase process. And some of those perceptions were statistically linked to whether they moved forward to the next level.”
You’ve been the EVP of Research and Strategy for Quigley-Simpson for a few years, but you were resistant to going into research at the beginning of your advertising career; why was that?
I started out wanting to be a doctor and was pre-med when I started college, but I hated the five-hour labs that came with no credits. I decided to switch my major to mathematics and ended up with a minor in chemistry and French, for what it’s worth.
My first job out of college was in the finance group at the National Association of Realtors in Chicago. I assumed I’d stay in finance for my career, so I took some additional accounting courses. I was in that job for a few years and realized I desperately wanted to escape cold, chilly Chicago. The weather was just too rough.
I ended up in LA, and the first finance job I found happened to be at an ad agency. A couple of years in, I realized that what the people downstairs did seemed more interesting than what I was doing.
I wanted to break into the actual advertising side of advertising. Research made the most sense for me, given my math background, but I was afraid of being pigeonholed as a researcher. Being an account person felt like a more holistic approach to learning about the business. You're the hub of the wheel. You get to touch everything. You get to learn about media, you get to learn about production, you get to watch the creative development process, and you immerse yourself in client business. I figured if I wanted to go into research, I could also do that down the road, but I started as an account person.
You worked on many brands we’ve all heard of, like Apple and Starbucks, before they became household names. Can you start by telling us about your work on Apple?
Sure. I worked with Apple in the mid-1990s when it was fighting for its survival. It had a loyal user base but not a big one. Way before we all had iPhones, there was the Newton, which was billed as a digital personal assistant. I was working on a version of the product that was meant for kids in grades K-12. It was called eMate. We were trying to figure out how to position it as computing for kids, which was pretty novel at the time. We also stressed how indestructible it was. It had no hard drive. It was purely electronic, and everything was on a SIM card. For the eMate, they took the Newton and put it in this big clamshell so kids could drop it, throw it around, or whatever, and it wouldn’t break.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he immediately discontinued the Newton division. He closed the whole thing down but took the eMate's form factor and turned it into the early MacBooks. The color clamshell laptops that everyone had in the early 2000s had actually started as the eMate product that never really had a chance to get into the market.
“The tool could also be applied to specific audiences or initiatives. We can study the drivers that can be used to understand why various segments are buying or not buying, clicking or not clicking, engaging or not engaging.”
Speaking of the early days, is it true that when you started working with Starbucks, you could buy garden tools in their stores?
Yes, when we started with them, they were trying to sell too many things in their stores. You could indeed buy garden tools in a Starbucks. What we did was set up a position for them, which was “Our Passion is Your Coffee.” We looked at it as concentric circles, with coffee as the innermost circle. Then, the next circle out was things that go with coffee. And then the next one was tea and things that go with tea. But as you get too far away from coffee—such as garden tools— you start to dilute the brand and its attribute around coffee expertise.
One of the things we talked about in those early days was African statues, which were also in the stores. They seemed to think it made sense because Africa grows coffee, but these weren’t statues made by coffee growers. It didn’t make sense for them to sell things you could find in Cost Plus. We got them to focus on their core business.
It was also an interesting time because they were growing like crazy. This was around 1998, and the goal was to have 2,000 stores nationwide by the year 2000. Today, they have over 15,000 in the United States and almost 40,000 worldwide. At the time, though, many people hated them because of the rapid expansion. There were lots of comedians making jokes. Janeane Garofalo joked that they’d opened a Starbucks in her living room, and Dennis Miller said they’d opened a Starbucks inside another Starbucks.
I get the jokes. At one point, there was a Starbucks on a busy, pedestrian corner in Vancouver. They had to close that store to renovate it. So, they opened a Starbucks diagonally across the street. That one stayed open after the reno was done, so there were literally two Starbucks on the corner. They left them both open because the demand was so high that they could support both stores. Why would they shut one down when they had lines out the door of both? It made sense, but it created the perception that they were trying to put the mom-and-pops out of business.
Interestingly, they did research about this. They found that business at a well-run coffee shop increased when Starbucks came in, but coffee shops that were badly run or made bad coffee would be closed. Essentially, this raised coffee awareness in the area.
“I think people bandy about the word brand without really thinking about what it means. Even our own field has started to use the word brand interchangeably with the word company. Its meaning has become increasingly diluted.”
Expedia was one of the other big-name brands you worked on as it was getting off the ground. It’s hard to remember a world where we all used travel agents. What were the early days of online travel agencies like?
There were three online travel agencies back then. There was Preview Travel, which was part of AOL, Travelocity, and then there was Expedia, which was created and spun by Microsoft. When I first started, Expedia was worried about a new company about to launch called Orbitz, which was a consortium between five airlines—United, American, Continental, Delta, and Northwest—that came together to sell their product directly without having to pay agent fees. They were also worried about Travelocity, which had become a strong competitor. Funny thing: today, Expedia owns both Orbitz and Travelocity.
What Expedia did was called the merchant hotel model. They bought a company that had started in Vegas that would go to hotels and offer a contract for inventory at a guaranteed lower rate. They didn’t own the inventory, but if it was available they got to sell it for a special rate. This means they weren’t ever on the hook for rooms that didn’t sell. It also means that Expedia tends to do well when the economy isn’t because there’s more inventory that’s gone unsold.
When I started, our unaided brand awareness was about 12% or 13%. Six years later, it was well over 50%, and our aided awareness was over 90%. I think we can attribute the rise to a couple of things. First, we spent tons of money on advertising. It started at $12 or $15 million a year and kept increasing. At one point, it was a 130-million-dollar ad budget.
The other thing was broadband penetration. When I started, only 30% of the U.S. had broadband access. Some people weren’t online, and the rest were still on dial-up. The audience grew so our budget grew, and they were a company that believed in investment media spending and were fortunate to have the resources to do it. We were spending more because our audience was expanding rapidly, which meant we had to maintain reach and frequency with that larger group to drive awareness.
All of this travel experience was probably very helpful when you went to Quigley-Simpson to work on Chase, which offers many different rewards programs for people who like to travel. A few years ago, though, you jumped from the account side to research after all. What made you decide to do that?
After years in account management, I was looking for something new. I loved working with clients and being a bridge between them and creatives. Sometimes, though, you realize that you’ve spent your whole day negotiating a fight about what color the buttons should be on an actor’s shirt. Don’t get me wrong, the creative process is important, and many significant decisions are made daily. But sometimes, people get lost in the weeds.
When you’re doing research, there’s an opportunity to uncover information that can be directly applied and improve the client’s business. I was ready to make that change.
Chase does a lot of their own internal research. A lot of the studies they do are called design target studies. I take their information and figure out the ideal target based on their quantitative research, and then help the media team use that information to define the target in MRI. We work on a lot of different Chase credit cards that offer a variety of rewards to consumers, so very specific targeting is important.
I also work extensively with our growth team to better understand potential clients. We recently pitched a large non-profit. Before we went in, we conducted primary research on why people donated to the organization, what made some donors stop giving, and what could be done to increase repeat donations.
“If your sole expectation is the clicking of people who are ready to buy rather than creating meaning for a larger audience, you will get only the people who are already looking for you.”
Quigley-Simpson is famous for talking about the importance of both brand and demand. You’ve said we’re really talking about brand wrong these days. Can you explain?
I think people bandy about the word brand without really thinking about what it means. Even our own field has started to use the word brand interchangeably with the word company. Its meaning has become increasingly diluted. At the same time, our digital world has made marketers more impatient in terms of getting results.
Before you could measure movement in real-time, you almost had to look at things over the longer term. Now, people look at a week’s worth or a month’s worth of data and say something isn’t working because the clicks aren’t there right off the bat. If your sole expectation is the clicking of people who are ready to buy rather than creating meaning for a larger audience, you will get only the people who are already looking for you.
December 5, 2024
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