Brand Engagement
Laurence Bird, head of research at IAB UK, explains how the company’s recent Brand Engagement Study revealed that the medium of online can bring a brand to life without the need to force it upon the consumer…
It would be difficult for any of us working in the advertising industry to ignore the sea change in media consumption, consumer behaviour and the relationships people have with brands. Media savvy consumers are far more discerning when it comes to accepting or declining the intrusion of brand communications in their already busy lives.
‘Washes whiter’ advertising now quite often falls short of consumers’ expectations and consequently the needs of brand owners. This has hailed a shift of focus from the media industry and the advertisers it serves from interruption to the far more noble pursuit of engagement. The influence of the internet and particularly broadband in bringing about this change cannot be overestimated. Digital media empowers the user to view what they want on their terms, and advertisers have to see this as an opportunity to engage their consumers.
But what does engagement mean? Spending time with a brand? Clicking through to a website? Telling a friend? Writing a blog about it? It’s a complex and somewhat nebulous concept, but if, as I have noticed, companies are looking to fill positions like ‘director of brand engagement’ then it surely must be something that can be measured and harnessed. Isn’t it?
We know we can evaluate the standard brand metrics of awareness, consideration, message association and purchase intent through online research like that conducted by Metrixlab, Dynamic Logic and Tango Zebra to name but a few. But the IAB has gone a step further than this with our recently completed Brand Engagement Study.
The original thinking behind the project was that, if one of online’s key strengths is its ability to engage consumers, then there must be a way to quantify and communicate this for the benefit of the industry. After all, TV’s great strength is its ability to drive awareness and a very good job has been done at highlighting this.
However, engagement is a far more complex and subjective concept. One of the reasons why its nature has been so widely debated is that it manifests itself in different ways depending on the product category and the audience being communicated to.
The IAB appointed Carat Insight to examine the effectiveness of online at driving brand engagement alongside other media, as well as wider influences like ownership, reading reviews or recommendations from friends. The small car sector was identified as an appropriate subject for the study, which set out to determine people’s attitudes towards the products, and how these attitudes inter-relate to deliver brand engagement. It was decided that women with children would be a relevant audience for brands in this sector as well as being of interest to other advertisers due to their influence over household spending.
After several months of qualitative and quantitative fieldwork, the findings were even better than anticipated. The cross-media research shows that online has a greater effect on brand engagement than any other medium. This is great news for the IAB of course, but also for all the advertisers who have already invested in online, even when they had largely anecdotal evidence that it was a brand building medium.
According to the model identified by Carat Insight, numerous brand contacts – such as advertising, reviews and word of mouth – contribute to consumer attitudes that in turn impact upon their level of engagement with a brand.
Overall the study showed that a brand’s own cross-media advertising contributed 15% of this effect on brand engagement. When dissecting this 15% to identify the contribution of each individual medium, the study found that the internet had a greater influence than any other (39.8%). Press advertising had the second biggest impact (36.7%), followed by TV (17.6%) and Outdoor (4.1%).
The full findings are too extensive to do them justice here but the important lesson is that online can bring a brand to life without the need to force it upon the consumer. Of course, the IAB understands that there are many contributing factors to the degree with which advertisers can engage consumers, and all media play their part in this. However this study has demonstrated that online is extremely effective at driving engagement and we plan to offer further proof of this with additional studies in other markets and for different audiences.