Thursday July 31st 2008

Leaders in marketing effectiveness have recognized that the best way to make progress is to demote to the second tier the well established practice of using small panels of consumer behaviour - media exposure, brand purchase et all, and work intensively with the new premier league of consumer behaviour audits.

Interesting that the biggest, current marketing effectiveness news is about the probable acquisition of TNS by either GFK or WPP. It should be about getting control of Dunn Humby, the majority Tesco owned company who with their creation and development of Tesco Club Card (and now live with Kroger in the US) are the company which knows more about consumer behaviour in store than TNS & GFK & WPP combined

Interesting too that the biggest media effectiveness challenge, in both UK & USA, is about BARB & Nielsen's measurement of in home and out of home TV audiences, when in reality Rupert Murdoch and his Sky digital TV & on line services know more about the reality of channel switching and viewing behaviour than any subscriber to  Nielsen, BARB and the rest of the media panels

The new reality is transaction based consumer studies and audits of millions of viewing behaviours and the relationship of the two. Its hard behaviour we are monitoring not soft samples of high variability.

We started years ago with face to face interviews. We moved then to telephone interviewing. We then moved to internet panels. The latest rapid research comes from live mobile communication. Now in 2008 we experience behaviour auditing for fast action, fast results, fast reaction.

In an earlier "July 21st #15 of 25 Things..." we noted how embedded rather than tacked on research was bringing new opportunities to measure marketing effectiveness. To that we now add the use of behaviour auditing, bringing further new insights that break conventional moulds of marketing effectiveness operations.

If you are not yet on board, there's still time. But don't delay. The ship is sailing 

For a range of commentary on advertising, media & marketing issues, John Billett's personal "Blogit with Billett" is at www.johnbillett.com (& click on "Blog" on the Home Page) or go direct to http://blog.johnbillett.com.