Simply, Better Communicating Your Brand Purpose Why you should not believe everything people say

Ipsos Connect | April 2015

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Jon Harper T: +44 (0) 7977 196172 E: jon.harper@ipsos.com

Marcus Reidy T: +44 (0) 7977 196172 E: marcus.reidy@ipsos.com

Many of the world’s largest companies have embraced the concept of Brand Purpose and are orientating their brands around it. We would define Brand Purpose as a more fundamental ‘reason for being’ beyond product benefits, brand positioning and profit. Having a clear, and compelling purpose that focuses on the wider world, will enhance a brand in the mind of consumers and act as a rallying call for the organisation to get behind.

The role of communications should be to amplify and publicise this higher purpose, to as wide an audience as possible, to benefit the brand. As the communications experts at Ipsos, we can help our clients achieve this goal and measure the added value purposeful communications can bring.

Stated reactions to purposeful communications are highly socialised

In order to better understand response to purposeful communications, we showed three different families campaigns for brands like Coca Cola, Innocent and McDonalds. We then reviewed the group responses as they watched, as well as their contemplative reactions yielded in discussions afterwards.

It became apparent that stated reactions to purposeful communications are highly socialised and carefully considered. Some people were agreeing that the cause is good and that they feel better about the brand as a result. But we could not be sure that they

were just doing that because they felt that they really ought to, as they wanted people to think they are ‘right on’, caring types. Alternatively, some family members were expressing deep cynicism about a brand’s actions. But we had to consider whether they were just saying that because they did not want to appear ‘suckers’ for a brand telling them that they were all about doing good in the world.

Communicating Brand Purpose You can’t just accept what people say

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This was what Daniel Kahneman describes as the ‘system 2’ response. People were making a great effort to try and decode the communications and carefully considering their articulated response.

Saying the ‘right’ thing does not always mean you will do the ‘right’ thing.

We knew that when evaluating communications about Brand Purpose, we would have to work harder to get behind the socialised response we observed, to get to the true impact of this sort of advertising. We have to understand if people are genuinely on board with the communicated endeavours - making them feel good using or encouraging them to choose the brand in question.

Our simple hypothesis was that it is only when you overlay what Kahneman described as the unconstrained, visceral and intuitive ‘system 1’ response, that we would gather true understanding about what someone really believes. Then we would need to understand whether those beliefs will lead them to favour choosing the product/service as result of the campaign.

We chose to evaluate Coffee vs. Gangs from Kenco to test our hypothesis - a great example of a brand eschewing category conventions and trying to connect with people through purpose.

So what is the project all about?

Honduras is the world’s 7th largest coffee producer

Honduras also has one of the world’s worst homicide rates

For Honduran teenagers, gang violence, relentless poverty and lack of opportunity are the status quo, leaving boys in particular with little choice but gang life. Kenco’s initiative offers 20 vulnerable young people training and support, aimed at helping them to build a better life for themselves and their families. It is part of a wider programme from Mondelez called ‘Coffee Made Happy’, which will invest $200 million in coffee farming entrepreneurs by the year 2020.

The campaign launched with an engaging spot, telling the story of a young man drawn toward gangs and violence, who chooses a better future as a coffee farmer. The campaign is real-life marketing as opposed to real-time, with a digital hub communicating updates on the progress of participants.

We selected a campaign with purpose to test

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Could it really impact the brand relationship and be a driving force for Kenco?

We designed a ground-breaking approach to measure impact

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Reflecting our view that we need to work even harder to get to the underlying truth, we decided to experiment with a ground breaking approach combining three key elements:

Test vs. Control design

At Ipsos Connect, one of our guiding principles is that you can’t rely only on direct questions when it comes to understanding brand and behavioural responses to communications. People cannot tell you what they don’t reliably know, and they certainly don’t know if they are more likely to buy a product as a result of seeing some advertising! Instead, we have a different philosophy - derive response to advertising using test versus control designs. We select two matched groups, one is exposed to the creative (test cell) and the other is not (control cell). The difference that manifests itself is the potential impact of the advertising on the brand.

A radical survey design and experience

We designed a survey to understand responses without asking direct questions. Instead participants would:

Build a personalised narrative to play back their own view on the message of the campaign

Give diagnostic responses using techniques derived from game playing

Match brands with universal symbols of warmth, profit and egalitarianism

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See the campaign: www.coffeevsgangs.com

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Here’s what we found5

The campaign massively reinforces and builds on Kenco’s credentials as a brand doing good

We presented participants with a choice.

Including Neuroscience techniques

We selected various neuro marketing research approaches that allowed us to focus on the ‘system 1’ response. Using these techniques helped us get to the instinctive and underlying responses to the campaign.

At the core we used Implicit Reaction Time (IRT). The technique allows us to understand not only whether an individual associates something with a brand at all, but also how fast they make the connection, so we can get to the unconscious strength of association. The faster the response, the stronger the connection and the more deeply held the belief is about the brand.

Do various coffee brands care about the world or making money?

C Out of all the brands in the competitive set Kenco already had the strongest latent associations with ethical behaviour, thanks largely to long-term rainforest alliance certification and eco-friendly packaging. Exposure to the campaign dramatically strengthens those long-held associations, helping to push the brand into clear space beyond the competition. This in turn drives positive movements in warmth, likeability and imagery around category leadership.

Overall an impressive impact on the brand relationship

When digging deeper into this brand impact we found that prevailing attitudes to Brand Purpose play a big role in response. By segmenting people we found that around half the sample purport to be open to brands that are doing good. We called this group Open to Purpose (OTP).

OTPs are more likely to...

Recommend or choose brands that support good causes.

Want brands to do more than just provide a product or service.

Be Millennials (aged 18-30), but other age groups are also well represented

We found that the overwhelming majority (90%) of OTPs agreed that the campaign reminded them of things they care about. This is one of the highest ever recorded by Ipsos and represents a powerful response from those open to the brands doing good.

Overall, by combining these three elements, we were confident that we could understand if the campaign is impacting the brand in the unconscious (in system 1) where reactions are visceral and intuitive, or the conscious (in system 2) where reactions are more considered and effortful.

We would effectively cover all aspects to get a full view on how the campaign is working.

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Encouraging signs, but in our evaluation the Implicit Response Time (IRT) technique was always going to be key. It enables us to really affirm with confidence if the work is strengthening relationships and impacting at the ‘system 1’ level too.

We asked people to rate Kenco on attributes such as ‘Does Good’, ‘Likeable’ and ‘Honest’. We then analysed explicit responses (association %) against implicit responses (speed of reaction).

Coffee vs. Gangs genuinely shifts perceptions of Kenco.

Both ‘Honest’ and ‘Likeable’ nudge upward, whilst ‘Does Good’ leaps forward with a significant improvement on both the explicit agreement and the important implicit element. Centring their communications around the Kenco Brand Purpose clearly has the power to drive convictions that the brand is all about doing good in the world.

But do they really mean what they say?

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However, the impact was different between those Open to and Not Open to Purpose

As expected, it really hits home among OTPs, with ‘Does Good’ and ‘Likeable’ forging ahead.

Our hypothesis was proven. Overlaying neuro marketing research techniques to look at the system 1 response is the only way to identify the true effect of purposeful communications with precision.

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It’s hard to get people to change their instinctive brand choices and we represented the reality of choice in the coffee category which is cluttered, competitive and instinctive, in our innovative design. We asked people to choose which coffee brand they would buy next from a virtual shelf display. The aim being to discover if the test group will be nudged into choosing Kenco, even after just one campaign exposure in a distracted media environment.

Given the task, we weren’t surprised to see no change at an overall level between the test and control groups. But what was illuminating was the significant increase (+10%) among OTP Millennials. This group of future loyal consumers, less habitual in their coffee habits, are potentially the most open to supporting a brand that does good. They do exactly that here.

In Coffee vs. Gangs we see a campaign with great potential to deliver profit with purpose. By reinforcing latent ethical credentials it establishes that Kenco is now leading the way in the category. It shows power to connect with those orientated to purposeful brands in both ‘system 1’ and ‘system 2’ - to the point where it impacts on brand choice among Millennials.

Clearly in this case Brand Purpose works, but we needed to work hard to prove it! The use of a test vs. control design, engaging indirect questions and integrated neuro market research measures revealed the true response to the campaign.

In this case purposeful communications show great potential to drive future growth

Do you get profit with purpose?7

However, in contrast we see no uplift in implicit speed of response among the Not Open to Purpose group (NOTP), only an increase in explicit association. The NOTP group really just pay lip service to the message - leaving the response open to severe misinterpretation.

At Ipsos Connect, we believe advertising and communications research should be fertiliser,

not weedkiller, and a force for empowering creativity and building stronger brands.

Using iterative, flexible approaches, we empower our clients to find a big idea that’s universal,

and founded on human motivations.

We help brands to develop strategies that grow their business by using forward-looking measures

of brand relationships that link to real-world behaviour – measures that are simple and intuitive

and reflect that brands are heuristics for decision making.

Using neuroscientific techniques, such as Facial Coding and Biometrics, we enable our clients

to understand and strengthen the emotional response to their advertising. We derive the impact

of advertising on the brand – not by asking people how it affects them - and by revealing

underlying and subconscious brand perceptions through Implicit Reaction Time (IRT) tests.

We help brands make campaigns that become famous by evaluating the potential of their

activity to achieve virality through measures that reflect online and offline sharing behaviours,

and using online ad replacement to test campaigns in the real world, in real time.

Ultimately, we believe that simplicity of purpose, communications and service is just

as important to great research as it is to building great brands.

For more information, please contact: Jon Harper T: +44 (0) 7977 196172 E: jon.harper@ipsos.com

Marcus Reidy T: +44 (0) 7977 196172 E: marcus.reidy@ipsos.com