A Marketer’s Guide to Advertising Research

Life happens in the narratives we tell one another, and that is a critical component of advertising research. Great advertising can persuade people, but it might not inspire them to act; to do that, you need to wrap your vision in a story that fires the imagination and stirs the soul.

Storytelling is at the heart of advertising, whether we are talking about the classic 30 second TVC, a print or billboard ad, or a digital narrative on social media, such as using GIFs to connect with hay fever sufferers. Whether it be a story of joy, hope, excitement, sadness, or fear, stories create emotions within the viewer and that’s exactly what makes it so powerful.

When thinking about your advertising research and what you wish to achieve you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• Have I used research to understand the key insights or tensions that my brand is solving, and how I want to portray that through my communications?
• What are the stories that consumers will tell each other (if any) based on your advertising?
• What will be on the lips, or more likely the social media ‘shares’ of consumers today?
• Are we reaching the right people on through the right media at the right time?

Ad campaign development and testing can help you to:

• Understand the archetype for your brand, your experience or your context. Archetypes are the basis of all great stories and strong brands align to archetypal stories.
• Define your core brand archetype alongside consumer insights and why this is important, which will help you when briefing ad agencies.
• Provide clarity on words, images and need states so that your agency has a useful toolkit to unpack in developing your creative.

We also use a variety of research approaches to test territories, story ideas, and animatics of finished ads, including neuro testing to understand implicit brand connection, engagement and motivations, that consumers can’t tell us about.

By using specialty focus group techniques such as “pyramid groups” or “conflict groups” we can understand how consumers comprehend your message and the clarity of your message.  We also understand how they tell stories about your brand to each other. We also use emotional quantitative techniques, which are rising in popularity to get beyond the rational response.  This can help to ensure we get a storytelling aspect to numbers when we are trying to quantify the connection, strength and cut-through of your advertising.

The greatest lesson from years of advertising research, is that great outcomes rely on great insight and great stimulus.  You need to get the research agency in early to help guide the advertising agency with insight on tensions to solve for and formats to hero in advertising.  Importantly the research agency can help consult on best formats, wording and imagery for research.   The research agency can also produce specialty stimulus that can help guide the creative earlier in the process – especially helpful with consumer language, or how to portray the nuances of need states such as ‘discernment’ ‘security’ or ‘control’ which are often misrepresented or understood in the context of the target consumer or consumer occasion.

The research agency plays a critical role in ensuring you get the best from your research budget and your advertising budget.  Bring them in early and often.