As marketers, we have been ingrained with the message “more is better”….the technical term is ‘marketing saturation’. The more exposure a brand has, the more it comes top of mind to consumers when they have a need for the particular product or service that brand offers.
At PortMA, we currently have a client who has taken the saturation strategy to experiential. They have activated in two markets on a daily basis over the past six weeks getting their client’s name out. When the data came in, the PortMA team was excited to see the home run stats that were going to prove again that “more is better.”
Imagine our joy when one of the markets (we will call it Market A) told us exactly what we wanted to hear: MORE IS BETTER and non-customers were reporting an intent to switch! Now imagine our joy quickly turning to puzzlement when we saw the other market (Market B) telling us the exact opposite: More was in fact NOT better and non-customers would not be switching……hmmmmm, what can you do with that?
Instead of throwing the data away and saying “Welp, it was a nice try” we decided to dig deeper into what was going on in Market B by bringing in an industry expert. He was able to take a look at a couple of resources and tell us quite quickly “Consumers in Market B have no money to make switches right now, and to be quite honest, complaints against the brand in Market B have seen a slight increase in the past year, so people aren’t as happy with the brand as they were in the past.”
The joy quickly came back to our faces: We could now tell our client that saturated messaging in Market B did not work and WHY!!!!!
It doesn’t get more actionable then that!
Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wrote/1439671814/