A few weeks ago, we started a study for a brand that wanted to understand how people go from discovering its products to buying them. The first interviews came in, and one thing kept coming up that wasn’t in the brief.
This brand is lucky: it can count on a solid network of professionals who recommend its products, and consumers listen to them. But when they then look the product up on the brand’s website, the product page puts forward other things than the ones the professional talked about. People notice straight away, and that small gap is enough to make them hesitate. If the expert and the brand don’t say the same thing, who do you believe?
That isn’t the question our client asked us. But reading those interviews, I had a strong feeling of déjà vu.
I’ve sat on the other side of that table
Before Verso, I spent several years as an insights manager on the client side. I sat in a lot of meetings where every team came with its own objectives, and good ones. E-commerce wanted the product page to convert. The team working with professionals wanted to train and support its network. The brand team had a campaign to launch. Everyone was doing their job well, and nobody was looking at the whole path the way a consumer walks it.
Problems like this one always looked obvious afterwards. Of course a brand should tell the same story everywhere; put it on a slide and nobody disagrees. But I never saw it fixed by a memo. What worked was getting the teams around the same table with a consumer study in the middle. That’s usually when someone said: “Hang on, that’s not what we tell them on our side.”
To be fair to the teams, professionals shouldn’t sound like a product page. People go to them for their expertise and their own arguments, and the arguments can change from one touchpoint to another. What has to stay the same is the promise they defend. In our study, the two end up defending different promises, and that’s what consumers pick up on.
One brand, seen from the outside
That’s what I’ve come to love about insights. A study tells you about consumers, of course. It also does something to the company that commissioned it. The consumer is the only person who goes through every touchpoint in a row. They don’t see departments, they see one brand, and they can tell when it doesn’t hold together. A study lends that view to every team at once and puts something on the table that belongs to nobody, which makes it much easier to agree on.
It counts even more now. On social media, a brand that isn’t clear isn’t relevant, and a brand that isn’t relevant doesn’t get shared.
I’d be curious to hear from people on the brand side: what finding got your teams back around the same table?