The medium or the message? Too often these days, the message is given short shrift in favor of the medium, a function of both ease and the way marketing-mix modeling—commonly used by marketers as a basis for their campaigns—is set up.

For many marketers, there's just easier access to media-spend information than to message-related data or to campaign-level attributes and spend.

And, frankly, deconstructing campaigns into brand attributes and linking them to consideration and purchase behavior takes time—something most marketers don't have in abundance in these tough economic times.

But finding the time and making the effort will pay off, because the right message, even if delivered via a suboptimal media mix, can have significantly more impact on a campaign's returns than the most effective media mix delivering a suboptimal message.

The right messaging will differentiate your brand, drive stronger consideration and purchase behavior, and can be significantly more rewarding than figuring out what the most effective media are.

Leveraging Competitive Brand Attributes

Creating the most effective messages requires understanding which key brand attributes drive purchase consideration and buying behavior, and how your product or service stacks up competitively on them.

When the right messages are delivered through the most effective media, the results can be striking, as one leading communications provider found.

Its analysis uncovered "network quality" as an underleveraged brand attribute, one that was highly relevant but not differentiated by most brands. It was a significant driver of switching behavior, but not of satisfaction. Every incident that triggered a search for another provider was highly correlated with "network quality." While providers were investing significantly in improving their networks, it was an operational issue that marketers did not pay much attention to.

The company decided to use its superior "network quality" as the basis for a television ad campaign that led to significant market share gains. It also significantly improved how consumers perceived the brand on this attribute—making it an important one for driving sales and improving other brand metrics.

In this instance, traditional marketing-mix models would have recommended reducing spend on TV and shifting it to online or other emerging channels and would have made no recommendations around the optimal message itself.

Dividing to Conquer

Traditional marketing-mix models focus on incorporating syndicated data on industry spending patterns on various media into sales-response models, estimating the relative effectiveness of different media. Information around the message is not readily available externally, an issue compounded by organizational structures in which different campaigns exist in separate functional silos. A dollar spent on one message is treated the same as a dollar spent on another, despite the potentially different effectiveness of these messages.

A major computer manufacturer addressed such drawbacks by separating the type of dollars it and its competitors spent into three buckets:

1. Corporate brand advertising
2. Product category-specific brand advertising communicating a product benefit message
3. Product category-specific call-to-action advertising communicating a value for money message

Collecting that information was challenging, requiring the breakdown of its functional silos and categorization of competitive advertising.

But it was worthwhile. Analysis revealed that although corporate and product category-specific brand advertising were synergistic, the revenue impact of product category-specific ads communicating a benefit message was almost five times that of corporate brand ads.

Similarly, brand advertising was synergistic with product category-specific call-to-action advertising communicating a value-for-money message, but the ROI of call-to-action advertising surpassed brand advertising's by a three-to-one margin.

Findings led to greater collaboration between the corporate and divisional marketing teams and a stronger appreciation for the need to centrally aggregate campaign-level information—while looking at marketing effectiveness not just by media but by messages as well.

Two Paths to Optimal Messaging

Developing insights on optimal messages requires pursuing two different paths in parallel:

Path I: Understand the role of brand attributes in driving consumer behavior.

• Step 1: Track brand-attribute performance: Deconstruct your and competitors' messages into brand attributes and use brand health trackers to monitor brand-attribute performance. Among other things, doing so will enable you to identify whether your communications strategy is meeting its intended objectives. It's critical here to track attributes at a granular-enough level to ensure they are meaningful and useful in driving message strategy.
• Step 2: Derive impact of attributes on consumer behavior: What's instrumental here is to use brand-tracker data to understand which attributes in the category are key to driving consideration, purchase behavior, and recommendation. Stack that information up against how you perform against competitors on these brand attributes, and you are ready to make some informed messaging decisions.
• Step 3: Determine implications for communications strategy: Combine results from the previous step with an understanding of the messages and consumer purchase behaviors that you and your competitors have run and experienced over time. Doing so will create a fact-based dialogue enabling the selection of attributes for differentiated messages that will drive growth.

Path II: Incorporate messaging into marketing-mix models.

• Step 1: Track spending by message: Instead of tracking spend by media alone, move to incorporate message tracking for your business and competitors into the mix, a step your agency partners should be involved in.
• Step 2: Understand media elasticity by message: This requires marketing-mix models to allow for the estimation of elasticities not just by media but by both media and message. To do so, plan your campaigns with sufficient variation in the media plan over time.
• Step 3: Determine implications for optimal media mix: Results from the previous step combined with learnings from Path I provide a rich fact base from which to make decisions about both optimal messages and media.

Messaging and Media Working Together

A leading manufacturer of home-improvement products recently used its existing brand tracker and spend data from agency partners to conduct its analysis. Results showed that traditional media were delivering strong results.

Analysis also revealed that there was an opportunity to improve purchase consideration relative to competitors in a high-growth segment by focusing the message on durability and lasting value, attributes that had become more relevant to this segment during the housing downturn. That information led to a 50% increase in advertising using traditional media (television and print) accompanied by refocused messaging around durability and lasting value. That approach created stronger differentiation and drove greater customer consideration.

In addition, the team identified opportunities to conduct further tests around medium and message combinations that could potentially be promising but had not been tried before.

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Businesses are increasingly relying on marketing-mix modeling to drive budgeting decisions, and that's a good thing in a postrecessionary environment, when investments must work harder and smarter to fuel growth.

By broadening the scope of their analytics and not losing sight of the role of the message, marketers will be creating far more powerful campaigns that will push their brands and businesses forward.