Beauty Brand Leverages Implicit Measurement Of Non-Concious Drivers Ahead Of New Ad Campaign

A global Beauty Brand that was a market leader for over a decade was seeing share erosion to new category entrants that were leveraging their agility to build awareness, interest, and penetration. The VP of Marketing wanted to better understand whether the team was focused on building and reinforcing the right memory structures and how to consistently and coherently communicate their strategy across different regions and ad executions.

Approach

Hotspex conducted non-conscious research using implicit psychometrics to inform the creative brief process by examining two historical campaigns that reinforced different memory structures for the brand. Hotspex leveraged its globally validated IP, the Hotspex Emotional Measurement Platform, to determine what memory structures Beauty Brand needed to reinforce, which memory structures it should remove, and what new memory structures to create.

Core to this process was the Hotspex Map, which was developed by leading Behavioral Science PhD’s, is based on over 1,000,000 interviews, and is predictive of consumer behavior.

If you’d like to get a free emotional map of your brand so that it can help guide your upcoming advertising campaign, innovation launch, or packaging refresh, let us know.

Outcomes

Of the two historical campaigns analyzed, Campaign #2 demonstrated it was overcoming apathy by activating uplifting associations. It also had an unintended positive effect, increasing self confidence and respect in a believable way. Further dissection of the copy allowed Hotspex to understand how the various implicit and explicit elements were helping move the story forward or holding it back.

Impact

An easy to follow playbook was developed to help communications and design agencies identify new memory structures to grow in its upcoming campaigns to propel the brand forward. A positive unexpected outcome from this research was that the Beauty Brand actually relaunched Campaign #2 but incorporated the insights from the research to iterate the creative to reflect a more realistic story and changed the talent to further build believability.

Our consumer marketing knowledge leader was recently promoted because of her work on this campaign relaunch.

Behind The Scenes

The Hotspex marketing sciences team recognized how important it was for the client lead to empower and engage the organization, and therefore helped facilitate company-wide workshops on how to effectively bring the insights from this work to life. Exercises included evaluating many elements across the brand’s identity, identifying distinctive memory cues and brand assets that would maximize mental availability, build brand, improve tracking results and drive profits.