An amusing story caught my eye recently. Lurpak’s latest on-pack promotion had caused some confusion with some of its older customers. The promotion (grow your own basil seeds) had been mistaken for a biscuit with customer receiving a mouthful of mud and seeds rather than the pleasure of a biscuit. When I saw the packaging myself I could understand why someone could have made this mistake. The idea of associating Lurpak with fresh cooking was no doubt a great idea but was it executed in the right way?
This led me to think about the development of offers and whether they should follow a process more akin to new product development. The best ideas can fail if the voice of the consumer is not taken into account at some point in the development, from that initial embryonic thought to market implementation. Products are rarely developed and launched without numerous consumer feedback stages but communications, new propositions and offers are often brought to market based on internal judgement. Communications for certain organisations are business critical, as communications are the main route to market e.g. service brands, charities, direct sellers. Therefore identifying the winners from the duds is a business imperative.
Whilst not wishing to over complicate this, the development of an offer or promotion ideally requires a certain amount of pre-testing with consumers. I’m sure we’ve all had moments when an idea has been lost in translation. Consumer pre-testing gives perspectives you potentially lose sight of, being eclipsed by the excitement of the idea. Pre-testing may not be worth it in every case but for offers which are either expensive or high risk, it can be invaluable. The pre-testing methodology needs to seek out likelihood to ‘respond’ and needs to simulate live testing. At WPN we use our tool Response Insight which has been developed specifically to measure response. Which? now run all new consumer guides through Response Insight, which has delivered some impressive business results.
