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Wiemer is the editor of the book ‘Eat Your Greens’. The book is a collection of papers from marketing’s
leading thinkers: Mark Ritson, Richard Shotton, Phil Barden and Byron Sharp to name a few. The scale of
collaboration involved to amass contributions from some of marketing’s foremost – and one would assume
busiest – practitioners, is an achievement in and of itself.
‘Eat your greens’ is an English idiom which encourages people to eat vegetables. Eating vegetables
promotes long term health, growth and reduces the risk of illness. Here, Wiemer and his fellow contributors
promote evidence-based thinking as a diet that grows brands and improves commercial performance.
And then there’s the difference between facts and evidence, which isn’t just semantic. Wiemer summarises
the difference:“You can measure the life out of anything. And that will certainly generate a lot of data. But
without correct interpretation in context that data will be of little value. The value lies in facts which fit
replicable patterns.”
Wiemer’s statement couldn’t be more pertinent. Marketers now operate in a time where more than ever,
everything is measurable but this change is centred on the web where we measure lots of activity and
connections but still aren’t very clear about the connection to business or communications performance. But
what’s the point in measuring likes, shares, click-through-rates etc. if they can’t be linked to commercial
performance? Measures that aren’t linked to commercial performance can be harmful for instance draining
the attention of time-poor decision makers in irrelevant data to, at worst, giving inaccurate estimates
regarding a brand’s growth.
Let me explain.
The example below demonstrates that a brand’s customer base is mostly made up of light buyers. For
instance, in many CPG categories most of a brand’s customers buy it only once per year, or even much less
frequently. Conversely, brands have very few frequent buyers. For many brands, often may be once a month
or less. The resultant banana-shaped distribution this creates is a Negative Binomial Distribution (NBD), so
called for the inverse relationship between the number of buyers and their frequency or weight of purchase.
This pattern is seen in high frequency categories like packaged food, beverages, household and personal
care. In categories such as financial services or durables, where purchase cycles are longer, one needs to
allow for more time to uncover this pattern. The NBD is one of the fundamentals of brand growth and was
first identified by Andrew Ehrenberg in 1957 and found time and again everywhere. Wiemer simply uses the
banana analogy to make that finding more memorable.
However, despite the evidence that NBD exists nearly everywhere, researchers and marketers are fixated
with identifying and targeting unique, influential or highly loyal buyers because they were told to in their
marketing text-books which are filled more with case studies than fact-based evidence. This is despite such
buyer groups being a small proportion of a brand’s customer base. As Wiemer bluntly states: “It doesn’t
make sense to put all your money and effort into targeting a group of people that will always remain a very
small group of people.”
It doesn’t make sense to put all your money and effort into targeting a group of people
that will always remain a very small group of people.
This is supported by recent research too. At Cannes in June 2019, WARC released a report entitled Anatomy
of Effectiveness. This report supports Ehrenberg’s finding and Wiemer’s efforts to publicise it. WARC place
reach as being at the heart of advertising effectiveness. This infers that the greater advertising’s reach, the
more light buyers it can influence. The more light buyers advertising can influence, the greater volume of
selling opportunities it can create.
The ‘correct things’ to measure are metrics that are linked to buying behaviour and therefore, linked to
commercial growth. Wiemer identifies three questions researchers should ask to ensure research measures
are ‘correct’:
2. Is there a pattern?
To create context for looking at data, Wiemer strongly advocates using norms. Norms allow you to
understand if what data is showing should be expected or not. We can therefore understand if data is truly
delivering ‘new news’. Researchers and marketers’ obsession with ‘new news’ draws words of warning from
Wiemer: “Everyone is obsessed with finding things that change or move. And as humans we like novelty
and excitement. This means people often exaggerate the importance of small changes in metrics. However,
when the little changes people see were tested against norms, we’d see many of these changes as being
expected or within expectable sample variation. But because norms are under-used, people can draw the
wrong conclusions.”
But businesses are impatient and largely manage to short horizons whereas consumer behaviour changes
slowly or not at all, which is why brand tracking can often take several years to show changes in
fundamentals of choice that affect the brand.
Peter Field provides a lovely analogy in Eat Your Greens when he discusses how the number of campaigns
with short-term objectives are increasing at an industrial scale, and are killing effectiveness. Like fireworks,
these campaigns produce a lot of fire and noise, but fail to leave a lasting impression. Wiemer adds: “And
leaving a lasting impression is of course crucial for those who buy you (very) infrequently. But these people
truly are marketing’s Forgotten Majority.”
Much like Wiemer advocates the laws of business fundamentals in gathering evidence, he suggests some
basic rules to simplify communicating research and evidence:
Get your audience to focus on a small number of simple things that the business needs to know
In explaining this, Wiemer summarises the need for succinctness: “Deliver on the drivers”.
I’ve eaten my greens and can testify that they’re intellectually delicious. The thousands who have also
picked up the book will likely concur. Now there’s evidence; it’s a worthwhile read. I suggest you pay the
vegetable aisle a visit, you will surely benefit from it.
Jack Miles
Research World Editor, United Kingdom
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