When Marketers Lose Sight of the Real World

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.

Tips for fundraisers focussing on acquisition

A study by Pearlfinders revealed last week that 68% of charities say donor acquisition is their top priority.

This is not an entirely surprising statistic. Charity fundraisers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t at the moment. Recruiting new donors has been tough for some time. Many charities are only able to get face to face and other sales techniques to work while more marketing led approaches like direct mail, banners and others are still struggling. The attrition rate challenges of these sales techniques are well documented.  In the past couple of years,  we have seen a move for fundraisers to focus on donor engagement, however, these efforts may not stem the leaky bucket. There are notable exceptions but the tendency is still to focus on the money first and donor care second. Silos exist which exacerbate the hunt for money as each “product” area tries to get a bite of the cherry. In so doing retention is not optimised. Therefore, I am not surprised that they are saying their priority is now on donor acquisition.

Recruiting new donors in the current climate presents a number of challenges.

Here are some simple rules:

1. Give prospective donors real hard-nosed reasons to give. Give £2 a month to save a child’s life.

2. Don’t forget the single minded proposition works. It is sometimes forgotten in the desire to tell the donors everything the charity does. Easier if you are a “single issue charity” but still possible if you are not.

3. Put your donor hat on and think how the donor will receive the message. What is the donor’s realm of understanding v. the organisation’s? Do they overlap? Will the message get lost in translation?

4. Test. Online research is much cheaper now and a quick and easy way to “pretest” propositions and messages.

5. Your charity does great work, show off the impact of your work in an emotional human way rather than through statistics and policy speak. People give to people – maybe a cliché but still true.

6. Stand out but in a relevant way. Being different for the sake of it, is usually a waste of money and time.

7. Know your audience. Who really are your supporters and what do they want? If I had a £1 for every time we were asked to recruit a younger donor, my pension would be in far better shape.

8. Know the media your audience consume. Grannies are online, all kinds of people watch day time TV!

9. Look after them once you have recruited them.