It is relatively standard in advertising research to compare the test ads to norms, prior results, and experience. And this is a significant limitation.
Even the very best normative databases are flawed. In fact, there’s nothing “normative” about them at all. They lack sufficient representation of all the brands in a category, tend to over-represent the supplier’s clients, may include ads that have aired as well as those that were just tested and never aired, and they become dated very quickly – to name only a few of their problems.
Maybe the biggest issue is that a normative database by nature represents the “database” itself and not the marketplace and media landscape. The same weight is given to small brands and large brands when that does not reflect competition in the real world. Comparing results to norms gives little to no indication as to what will happen in the market. It is just bad research, simple as that.
That’s why we created MSW’s Fair Share Benchmark.
Fair Share Benchmark
Using advanced modeling, we establish the REAL marketplace norm, taking into account the marketplace and media landscape at the time of the test, the number and size of competing brands and variants, brand loyalties, geographic differences, and recent changes on all dimensions. Fair Share is re-established with each test so it’s always up to date and current and there is no reliance on prior testing history.
And while getting rid of norms and using Fair Share would be a far superior approach to advertising research, we weren’t content to leave it there. Our Customer Commitment Persuasion™ with Fair Share Benchmark is independently validated to be predictive of marketplace results while other metrics are not. And while Fair Share is far superior to anything else in the market, we’ve taken another step forward. A HUGE leap forward.
Customer Acquisition Forecast™
We’ve entirely jumped the chasm between norms and even Fair Share to an actual forecast of customers. The accuracy with which our Customer Commitment Persuasion™ predicts sales and allows us to deliver a Customer Acquisition Forecast™: the actual number of customers or clients that you will gain as a result of your advertising. That includes new, lapsed, or loyal customers that increase usage/purchase frequency as the result of any specific ad unit (e.g., TV, digital, print, etc.).
Customer Acquisition Forecast™ is Rooted in MSW’s Metric Lineage:
1) MSW’s Customer Commitment Preference™, proven to equal market share and / Penetration. The Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) independently tested nearly 70 different metrics of baseline (pre-advertising) brand strength (including, unaided awareness, value, loyalty, purchase interest and more) and found that MSW’s Customer Commitment Preference™ showed a near-linear relationship to actual unit market share with a correlation of .88. Customer Commitment Preference™ showed strong relationships in all categories – not the case for any of the other measures.
2) MSW’s Customer Commitment Persuasion™ Equals changes in market share / penetration. Customer Commitment Persuasion™ establishes a brand’s market share or penetration after advertising. MSW’s pre-to-post measurement is unique in the world of advertising research and contributes to the highly predictive nature of the measure.
Using 2 pieces of client-supplied data; effective reach and market size (such as customer base, category volume, or units sold), MSW then applies our metrics of Customer Commitment Persuasion and Brand Recall to calculate your Customer Acquisition Forecast. Designing the forecast Customer Commitment Persuasion, which is independently-certified, sales validated, and U.S. patented metric gives a strong foundation for accuracy.
Customer Acquisition Forecast™ Results in Better Marketing ROI
You want more customers, right? Of course, you do! That’s why we, as marketers, come to work every day: to increase the number of individuals who purchase our goods and services. New customer acquisition (or increased penetration of existing clients) is the primary driver of brand growth. Naturally, there are costs associated with this: your total marketing costs.
The goal is to always acquire more customers while being as efficient as possible – spending less and get more in some combination that increases your ROI. But how do you do this? And more importantly, how do you know your plan will work BEFORE you spend on marketing?
You could spend less and try to be more efficient in any number of trial-and-error combinations, but only MSW’s Customer Acquisition Forecast™ tells you accurately how many customers you’ll gain BEFORE you spend the money. And that lets you adjust your marketing spend, optimize your advertising program, ramp up production, and manage inventory and distribution to handle the demand.
Can you do that with norms?
How many new customers are you gaining from your advertising? You can find out! This is the end of black-box models: we’ll walk you through our straightforward calculation. Contact MSW today to learn more about Customer Acquisition Forecast!