Today’s Loyal Consumer

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Consumers have used loyalty programs to get rewards and perks from their favorite brands. But there are signs that the number of loyalty program members are starting to slip. It’s time for marketers to take their loyalty programs to the next level through a better understanding of what their customers want.

View the infographic below to learn about consumers who choose where to shop based on that retailer’s loyalty program.

Print your copy of the above infographic here or read the free marketers guide How Deep Consumer Insights Improve Loyalty Program Performance. 

Do You Know Your Customers’ “Why?” You Should

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I remember when my kids were younger, they went through the “why?” phase. Days were filled with “why?” this and “why?” that. Each of my answers was met with another adorable, “But whyyyy?” A “curious kid” asks on average 73 questions a day. (Thank goodness for Google!) What I also realized as a parent was that this was strengthening my kids’ brains and they were forming their values and belief system and what will be important to them in all aspects of their lives.

In many ways, I’m still trying to answer that question, but this time Google doesn’t have the answers. The why I now answer is for brands and organizations that need to figure out the why behind consumer decisions for the sake of growing their business. You want to know why people love your brand, why they choose a competitor over you, why they once shopped at your store but now they don’t, why they buy specific products online and others in store. The list goes on.

Getting at the why is incredibly complex. People are complicated, and they, along with the marketplace, change regularly. Brand marketers must contend with several layers of why to understand a consumer’s buying decisions. It can range from the pragmatic why, which is based on things like price and convenience, to the why inspired by political and social movements. You have generational differences that affect the why, as well as why’s that can be applied to specific industries that even get down to product and feature levels. People buy Samsung phones because of their camera, and when Apple improved its camera, the company spent millions to keep people from leaving and acquire traditional Samsung buyers.

Traditionally, the only way to get at the why was to ask consumers directly through surveys. But let’s be honest, the traditional survey approach won’t scale and it isn’t very actionable. Understanding a different layer of the person’s behavior, along with surveying them with carefully crafted questions, is the only way it works. At Resonate, we ask more U.S. consumers why than any other company on the planet. While we are asking the person to describe themselves and the many layers of why, we also understand their daily digital footprint and correlate that back to the many levels of why that make up the consumers, voters and members’ decisions. For example, this enables us to uncover not just the 3,000 people from first-party survey data who plan to switch banks because they want lower interest rates, but the exact 2 million people in the U.S. who are switching due to low interest rates and maps them to what banks they currently use and how to find those people on all channels.

So while a brand may know about their current customers inside their firewalls, they know very little about those people outside their firewalls—what makes them tick and what channels are they on? Who are the prospects I can engage with efficiently and get their “why” message into my advertisement on any of my channels to make that emotional connection, move them to conversion faster and form a lasting bond? Getting at and connecting the why at scale is the next wave of growth and efficiency for our marketing industry. The Resonate Platform provide this type of deep consumer understanding.

WHY UNDERSTAND WHY?

Consumer insights are incredibly valuable to a company. According to Forrester, insights-driven firms on average grow more than 30% annually and are on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021.

Brands that have used Resonate’s person-level insights to uncover the what that drives the why have been able to segment their audiences more strategically and deliver the right kind of messaging and creative to the right audiences.

Resonate’s easy-to-use SaaS platform provides a unified view of the consumer no matter what’s driving their why. We start by distilling the Human Element, which is a holistic understanding of a person that starts with what makes us the most human—our values and motivations.

PEELING BACK THE LAYERS

Values and motivations are just one piece of the why puzzle. Here are the different ways we drill down into the different why layers:

The Pragmatic Why

In looking at the top 5 why’s people choose to bank where they bank, it’s clear that their focus is on convenience and financial perks.

#1 Free checking

#2 Online banking

#3 Convenience of branches

#4 Interest rates on loans

#5 Good reputation

What’s at the bottom of the pragmatist’s list is loan availability, short lines and recommendations.

The Generational Why

In looking at the two largest generations of people and why they shop where they shop, we see some pretty significant differences but also some surprising similarities.

Baby boomers and millennials similarly:

  • Value best prices and sales
  • Shop at stores with larger product selections
  • Gravitate to retailers with loyalty programs

Where they differ:

  • Baby boomers prefer stores with knowledgeable staff, easy return policies and convenient locations.
  • Millennials instead value fast and responsive staff and enjoyable/clean stores.
The Social Movement Why

Consumers are as passionate about saving money as they are about doing business with companies that align with their politics or social causes. Resonate’s insights reveal that people do align their shopping preferences with their views on social issues. Here are a few examples:

  • People who support the LGBT community and marriage equality are 12% less likely than the overall population to eat at Chick-Fil-A, which has faced criticism for its financial support of efforts to ban the legalization of same-sex marriage. Out of the 17 fast-food restaurants, we asked this audience about in our surveys, Chick-Fil-A ranked as one they frequent the least.
  • People who support companies that reduce their energy use and their packaging are more likely to shop at brands known for being environmentally friendly, such as REI, Patagonia and Timberland. This segment was 124% more likely than the overall population to purchase Patagonia products, 115% more likely to shop for Timberland products and 37% more likely to shop at REI.
The Actionable Vertical Why

The Resonate Platform can also uncover many of the actionable why’s important to specific verticals such as financial services or retail. One of the most valuable insights is knowing why people may be switching a bank or why they’re switching their insurance provider. Here are some of our latest insights:

Top 3 Why’s People Are Switching Banks:

#1 More convenient locations

#2 Better online and mobile banking services

#3 Better customer service

Top 3 Why’s People Are Switching Insurance Providers:

#1 New car or home

#2 Rate increase

#3 Seeking better service

Top 5 Why’s People Shop at Amazon:

#1 Best prices and sales

#2 Products are cost effective

#3 Products are high quality

#4 Convenient locations

#5 Larger product selection

As you can see, the why behind a consumer’s purchasing decisions can range from price to how they feel about the environment. It’s complex, and it changes constantly, but the Resonate Platform is successfully helping brands uncover the many layers of the why and shaping their strategies for solving for one why versus another why.

Want to uncover your brand’s why? Reach out to Resonate for a demo.

Resonate Releases Consumer Banking Insights Report

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New Competitors, New Technology Among Challenges Facing Financial Services Marketers

RESTON, Va., Aug. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Resonate, the leading provider of consumer intelligence and insights for marketers, today announced the release of its new report, The Bank Marketers’ Playbook: Consumer Insights to Score Lasting Connections. The report outlines the challenges facing traditional consumer banks and provides an in-depth profile of consumers who are looking to switch financial services providers.

Because technology has so fundamentally transformed the banking business, consumers now want a different banking experience than they did in the past, Resonate found. As a consequence, more than 5.6 million Americans are thinking about switching banks. Powerful tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook are all looking at ways to offer financial services and incorporate consumer banking options into their business models.

“The consumer banking landscape is changing dramatically, and financial companies that want to thrive must focus squarely on their customers and what drives them,” said Ericka McCoy, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Resonate. “The unique consumer insights provided through the Resonate Platform paint a picture of a banking customer who wants more personalized services and technology, which is why some big tech companies are looking toward the consumer banking market.”

Resonate’s report found that the largest demographic of Americans looking to switch banks are women ages 25-34 with a household income range of $25,000 to $50,000. Forty-five percent of this audience have children, and 38 percent have a college degree or higher. These consumers say they want more convenient branch locations, better customer service, and better online and mobile banking services.

Resonate’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven platform is a consumer intelligence industry first, applying science and technology toward the art of understanding the complexity of human motivations—the true why behind consumers’ decisions to buy, endorse or abandon. These deep consumer insights help drive growth and customer lifetime value through improved acquisition, expansion and retention programs. Resonate is the only insights platform that provides a continuously updated view of the consumer, as well as cross-channel engagement and ongoing analysis that helps marketers make better decisions and create unique customer experiences that drive growth.

To learn more and read the full report, click here.

About Resonate

Resonate is a pioneer in Consumer Intelligence Marketing, delivering deep understanding, dynamic insights, cross-channel engagement and analysis in a single, simple-to-use SaaS platform. The Resonate Consumer Graph encompasses 9,000 attributes, including values, motivations and other psychographics, describing more than 175 million U.S. consumers. Hundreds of companies have used Resonate to reveal and engage “The Human Element,” a deeper understanding of their target audience that extends beyond traditional demographics, psychographics and behavioral data to uncover the why—the values and motivations that drive consumer decisions to buy or support certain brands, products or causes. Empowered by this unparalleled understanding, leading brands, agencies and organizations identify, engage and continuously analyze these audiences, achieving unbreakable relationships that drive growth and increase customer lifetime value.

Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Resonate is privately held and backed by Argentum Capital Partners, Revolution Growth, Greycroft Partners and iNovia Capital. For more information, please visit www.resonate.com.

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As reported on GLOBE NEWSWIRE on 8.23.18: Resonate Releases Consumer Banking Insights Report

Infographic: Who’s Switching Banks and Why

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Banks have traditionally led innovation in their industry, offering consumers a lot of new ways to manage their money. But with 5.6 million consumers planning to switch banks in the next year, it’s clear banks need even more innovation and better ways to connect with current and future customers.

View the infographic below to learn the reasons why consumers are switching and what exactly they’re looking for.

Print your copy of the above infographic here and continue reading with The Bank Marketer’s Playbook to gain deeper insights into your consumers and your competitors’ consumers. 

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Consumer Intelligence: The CMO’s Sledgehammer For Breaking Down Silos

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Most of today’s CMOs understand the importance of breaking down organizational silos in the quest to build a modern marketing organization, one that can keep pace with the ever-evolving consumer. But knowing where to start is another matter altogether. Marketing departments, particularly at large legacy brands, are often established entities with their own systems, cultures and KPIs. These can be difficult elements to unite across functions.

Historically, marketing data has also fallen victim of the marketing silo epidemic. This applies to both the customer intelligence that drives strategy, as well as the metrics that feed back into optimization and deeper learnings.

Today’s CMO has an opportunity to harness the power of an organization’s consumers insights and leverage that data as a key tool in uniting the marketing organization’s disparate teams and processes. This data-driven approach to breaking down silos establishes a shared understanding of a company’s target consumers—the true humans behind the data—as well as a unified system from which to draw and feed back needed insights.

Start with the Consumer

A united marketing organization starts with a deep, unified understanding of a company’s customers and prospects. These kinds of insights aren’t easily drawn from a company’s CRM database or other management platforms. Marketing teams have vast stores of data across many channels. This data does provide a lot of information: customer demographics, purchase histories, exposure to past media campaign, etc. But it lacks the fundamental depth required to unite a marketing organization’s disparate departments and channels.

As Simon Sinek famously pontificated, CMOs need to “start with why.” Why do customers make the purchases that they do? Why are they loyal to certain brands and abandon others? Why do they choose to purchase online vs. in person—or vice versa or both? The best intelligence into customer drivers is derived by both asking people about their values and motivations, as well as observing and understanding their real-life actions via online behavior. CMOs should keep the following key points in mind when laying a foundation for organizational success with consumer intelligence:

Put consumer intelligence at the center of your data platform. A deep, shared understanding of the consumer across departments must be reflected in a company’s data management strategy. The importance of unifying marketing research, data, measurement and analytics within a single, intuitive platform cannot be understated. By onboarding all departments to a single system that presents a consistent view of customers and prospects, silos begin to naturally fall away, and KPIs can be better aligned and tracked.

Ensure your intelligence evolves with your consumer. Avoid static snapshots into customer preferences and motivations. The relationship between a brand and its consumers evolves over time. Silos often spring up or are strengthened when a single department realizes the need for new consumer intelligence inputs and endeavors to obtain them in a vacuum to drive short-term results in a given channel. By investing in an always-on window into consumer motivations, and enabling all departments to tap into those insights on a regular basis, CMOs can avoid the splintering of departmental understandings and objectives down the road.

Plan for frequent cross-departmental conversations. When developing a plan to gather consumer intelligence, a CMO must simultaneously be building a plan to derive value from those unique consumer insights across all marketing functions. From acquisition to expansion to loyalty to retention, all teams benefit when operating from a unified consumer understanding. Hold regular check-ins with department heads to discuss consumer insights and ensure everyone is aligned on how such knowledge will be uniquely leveraged across channels.

Without a doubt, today’s CMO faces a formidable challenge when it comes to breaking down departmental walls and aligning teams within the marketing organization. When consumer insights are placed at the heart of this process, the marketing organization’s data will cease to be a victim of marketing silos, and instead become a sledgehammer in breaking down the walls.

This article was originally published on MediaPost – 8.3.2018

Read Forrester’s Future of Marketing Insights report to learn about how Innovative CMOs are building strategies to understand the “why” behind the consumer.

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Have a Plan for Adding New Services? We’ve Got One For You

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There’s been a steady drumbeat of technology IPOs this year, with staggering valuations of software stocks. Recent IPOs are up an average of 28% in the last month alone versus the entire software market that’s up 13% in the same period, according to Investor’s Business Daily.

If you’re an advertising agency, you’ve contributed to the success of these software stocks by recommending various products to your clients or investing in multiple SaaS solutions. But how many of those solutions are making money for you? Agencies shouldn’t put money toward more tools that could potentially have zero ROI. You really need to invest in technology that easily allows you to add new services so that you can be more competitive and profitable. These new services should benefit your clients so much so that they can be billed directly, helping you cover the tech investment.

CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO

It’s already an incredibly challenging market for all ad agencies. For small to mid-size agencies, you’re facing competition from large shops that have tremendous scale, service providers like Google and Facebook are trying to cut you out of media planning, vendor solutions are going brand direct, and consulting firms like Deloitte are building competitive practices. You’re also dealing with having to choose from a growing number of tech solutions for executing digital and mobile strategies.

But what we’ve noticed over the last few years is a disconnect in how agencies standardize their practices for clients. You’re limited by the technology you’ve already invested in and by the ability of that technology to create multiple avenues of excellence.

Traditionally, if you wanted a programmatic solution, you used a DSP. If you wanted a way to access third-party data, you or your client licensed a DMP. If you wanted to understand the people visiting your client’s site, you leveraged another combination of three letter acronyms, from TMS to GTM to CDP.  We need to break the cycle of disconnected technology and data if agencies are going to succeed.

MAKE DATA YOUR KING

You should be making the transformation to the agency of the future by weaving deep consumer insights into all aspects of what you do. Data-aware and data conversant are table stakes. There’s a recurring theme around how customer data will keep transforming marketing, according to AdAge. Brands will need a data strategy and the right technology to allow them to analyze and draw insights from data to better inform their overall marketing strategy and drive more effective engagement through activation or other channels.

Agencies have the ability to adapt.  We’ve seen smaller and independent shops successfully taking business from larger firms as clients want faster innovation and more focus on one-to-one marketing and less focus on massive scale media plans that have looked the same for the last five years. This is good news but you still need to deliver value.

Agencies need to rethink the way they’re using technology to help clients as brands demand more data-driven solutions for their advertising and messaging. You should be investing in technology that isn’t just a SaaS product that checks off a box, but actually gives you a way to offer something new to your clients like “outcomes as a service,” “persona development as a service,” “audience insights and reporting as a service.”

START SEEING INCREMENTAL DOLLARS

Based on this “as a service” model, we’ve been urging our agency clients to treat the Resonate consumer intelligence platform as a client-funded initiative. We’re leaving it up to you to build the price points for these “as a service” offerings. This allows you to sell outside your current scope of work for incremental dollars.

Did you catch that? Incremental dollars? You can add value to the work you do for your clients by offering deeper, richer analytics and insights while seeing the ROI of your tech investment much faster.

Want to learn more about how Resonate can help you grow revenue? Reach out and we’ll tell you!

 

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CDPs: Yet Another Acronym That Lets Marketers Down

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CDPs, or customer data platforms, are the latest venture capital darling. Unfortunately, they’re not going to help marketers connect more meaningfully with consumers. Andy Hunn, Chief Operating Officer, Resonate tell us why 

The newest acronym taking our industry by storm is CDP. And unfortunately, this one isn’t going to help marketers connect more meaningfully with consumers either.

CDPs, or customer data platforms, are the latest venture capital darling. Their big promise, the one that sounds so sweet on paper, is a single view of customers across multiple devices, largely built around a brand’s first-party data. New players are coming out of the woodwork, and existing acronym players are rebranding as CDPs as fast as their marketing teams can revamp their web copy.

For marketers who are seeing the “CDPs Are Our Industry Savior” headlines and struggling to understand where they fit within the current industry acronym soup, let’s have a history lesson.

The Evolution of the Acronyms

CRM. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems represented the first major investment wave focused on better knowing and understanding customers. CRMs represented a huge step forward in customer data management. However, these systems typically connected only to a company’s direct marketing and transactional data.

TMS. Then there was the tag management system (TMS). Tag management systems took a step forward by enabling marketers to easily deploy tags on their websites. Some tags were for measuring things like performance, and other tags were for anonymously identifying a user across the digital web. In short, observed tag audiences represent first-party data sets of anonymous groups of people that engaged with a brand, and could hopefully be re-engaged — with targeted advertising, for example. Google decimated this market with a free offering, forcing a transition among the companies in this space. This gave way too…

DMP. Being able to target groups of people who engaged with a company directly was nice, but marketers also wanted to be able to combine those first-party groups with third-party data that is known about those individuals. Enter the data management platforms (DMPs), which were created to meld two main sources of data for marketing purposes: CRM data of known customers and observed tag audiences who visit a brand’s website or interact with its messaging in some way (just like the TMS before them). DMPs anonymize CRM data into digital IDs that can be used to reach those customers online and enable marketers to advertise to other observed segments defined in the DMP as well. That’s it. DMPs were built to deliver ads to anonymous IDs that are relevant to a brand. DMPs didn’t care about anything happening offline because that’s not why they were built. They were built to retarget online ads to customers and people who visit a company’s website. Which also left marketers wanting. So now…

CDP. Here come the CDPs. They say they’re different because they unify the CRM customer data (the PII — such as name, address, email — of the customer) with the anonymous digital ID world. And they observe first-party (i.e., the brand’s own) customer transactions in both the digital and offline worlds. That’s nice. But a game changer? No.

When you strip all the nonsensical nuances away from these companies — the CRMs, the TMSs, the DMPs, the CDPs — they’re all one simple thing at their cores: identity companies. Yes, they leverage different IDs, but at the end of the day, they are simply IDs that represent a person and their devices. Now, is scaled identity useful to marketers? Absolutely. But let’s be honest: It’s all just plumbing. Plumbing is a necessary evil, but it is only a means to an end — identifying a customer — and it shouldn’t be sold as anything more than that.

Where All the Acronyms Fail

CDP is just the next acronym for LMD: Letting Marketers Down. Despite all the grandiose claims that have been made about how these acronyms will change a marketer’s world, they all fundamentally fail on three key fronts:

Identity isn’t everything. Knowing the identity of a person is not the same as knowing that person. Yes, it’s useful to be able to identify a consumer consistently and across their various devices. You can retarget ads to them until they die or buy your product. But the core questions marketers today want to understand are, “Why is this person interacting with me? What is it about my brand, my product, my offer, or anything else that caused them to engage?” The fact that a browser-based cookie and mobile phone ID are connected does not answer those pressing questions.

Brands don’t have a complete understanding of their customers. The various acronymed solutions assume that a brand has a perfect understanding of who its customers are, and if it could just tie that understanding to identity, all problems would be solved. But based on 10 years of speaking with CMOs, I can tell you that they don’t have a perfect understanding of their customers. Far from it. And slapping a CDP into place doesn’t solve that problem. Sure, brands have some CRM data on their customers — PII, demographic attributes. Hell, maybe they’ve even unified that information with past product purchase history. That’s great. But the reality is that marketers have used and exhausted the value within this data. They’ve squeezed every drop of blood from that stone. They’re yearning for real, substantive additions to their understandings of their customers.

Behaviors without motivations teach us nothing.  Marketers have been asked to do the impossible. They are asked to look at observed actions and touchpoints and to derive meaning about the person behind those actions. Someone clicks on an ad. Or browses the watches section of a website and then browses the jewelry section. Look, just like identity, knowing these actions is better than nothing. But marketers want to know why people are taking those actions, why they’re traversing the website at all, why they’re engaging with the brand. These are not the kind of questions the acronym soup answers.

To complicate things further, a marketer’s need for understanding goes beyond their existing customers. Marketers also need to understand the motivations and values that are driving the prospective customers who are showing up every day on their websites. Furthermore, they need to deeply understand their competitors’ customers in order to best identify their most fertile conquesting ground.

None of the acronyms get marketers any closer to this understanding. This is why DMPs are languishing in the Trough of Disillusionment right now and why CDPs will eventually suffer the same fate.

To date, our industry has been focused on building tools that capitalize on the infinite observability and targetability of people online. It’s driven immense gains in efficiency and ROI for performance marketing. But that’s no longer enough.

Our industry’s legacy approach doesn’t solve the most essential challenge that marketers face: understanding the person behind the unified device identities, and why that person is engaging. The good news is that the tools now exist to develop this deep customer understanding — above the level of individual marketing execution channels and above the level of the plumbing. Our vast access to consumer data and data science can now be used to make marketers smarter.

Once marketers have a deeper understanding of consumer motivations, all these acronyms and the plumbing they represent can be put to good use by delivering on a marketing strategy that is informed by a richer understanding of the “why” behind the consumer. But until then, the CDP is just three more letters in the same acronym soup.

This article was originally published on Martech Advisor – 7.19.20

Read Forrester’s Future of Marketing Insights report to learn about how Innovative CMOs are building strategies to understand the “why” behind the consumer.

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Life After Facebook Partner Categories: How to Achieve Efficient, Effective Targeting

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There’s no doubt that the current privacy-sensitive environment is creating enormous challenges for marketers universally. Threatening, bad players, have caused increased scrutiny of all third-party data providers and marketers are reeling from round after round of changes from Google, YouTube and Facebook. The recently announced removal of Facebook’s Partner Categories, the social platform’s third-party data exchange, is yet another blow to marketers as we struggle to ensure we’re engaging with the right audiences in the right way.

Facebook will still allow you to target your campaign’s first-party audiences via a CRM upload, but let’s face it, using third-party data is arguably the bread and butter for advertising, especially for new customer acquisition.

But getting third-party data into Facebook has become cumbersome. Generally, a marketer can request an audience segment to be built and activated by their data provider into Facebook via an onboarding partner. This process can take up to two weeks, stalling the launch of your campaign while also diminishing the match rates of your audience. After being spoiled with the ease of creating audiences using Partner Categories in seconds, this new process is far from ideal.

Here’s how Resonate can help

Resonateʻs platform is different. Using this consumer intelligence platform with home grown data allows Resonate clients to create segments, export the segment into a list of mobile IDs and upload them to Facebook as a custom audience in just one hour or less!

Resonate helps you comply with Facebook’s new Custom Audience Permissioning Policy by combining our massive double opt-in survey with digital and physical footprints. This generates a deep understanding of the consumer with a high-quality dataset of over 9,000 consumer attributes in an anonymous, centrally sourced and consumer-friendly manner. Resonate data is developed with the highest standards of quality and in adherence to the DAA’s self-regulatory principles. Our clients can execute with confidence with Resonate’s farm-to-table approach to data.

The most unique feature of our platform that doesn’t exist anywhere else is our proprietary deep consumer understanding, The Human Element, which begins with a person’s values and motivations.  Partner Categories offered limited data – demographic and behavioral data such as lifestyle traits, interests, purchase behaviors. The Resonate Platform goes beyond that to uncover the why behind consumers’ purchase behaviors.  It helps you understand the values and motivations that drive an audience to make a decision, resulting in higher conversions and stronger engagement.

With personalization and customer experience being so vital in today’s market, understanding the values and motivations of consumers in a deeper, more meaningful way will increase engagement and ultimately increase revenue.

Learn how marketers can tap into first-party and third-party data for behavioral and action-based insights and more effectively measure marketing efforts that drive conversions in Forrester’s Future of Marketing Insights.

Interested in learning more about Resonate’s data solution? Contact us today.

 

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Is it time for an agency uprising?

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The answer is yes. Advertising and media agencies have been taking a beating. Ad Age and AdWeek are filled with stories about competition from completely new players, outdated agency models, a lack of talent and creativity and big firms losing their sway to smaller players.

Sounds like it’s time for agencies to wake up and start leading the disruption the industry so badly needs. Agencies need to stand out in a creative way and provide more insightful and long-term client solutions. Those ready to embrace the future need consumer insights to give new life to how they communicate with existing and potential clients’ consumers.

How the agency competition has changed

We all know that many brands are ditching their big agencies for smaller teams that can offer something a little more creative and targeted. One recent example was Popchips, which had been using Palisades, a $350M media agency. It moved to PK4 Media, a 10-person firm because, like many other companies, Popchips is more interested in who they are reaching rather than just reaching large masses of people. Popchips CEO Marc Seguin told Digiday that the discount rates on impressions Popchips used to get from the large agencies didn’t help the company fulfill its goals. Now the snack company is trying to make an emotional connection with its target audience of health-conscious women. So, who is reached is more important than the number of platforms used, or the total number of impressions achieved.

And we all know the threat from consulting firms like Deloitte and Accenture now offering agency services is very real. Accenture Interactive grew 35% in 2017 and reached $6.5 billion in revenue, making it the biggest digital agency in the world. Expect that to continue as the percentage of marketers who say they would hire one of these consulting firms for agency work has almost doubled from 44% in 2016 to 77% in 2017, according to Forrester.

The new way to compete

Agencies need to compete on their ability to be data aware, data conversant and data relevant. This is where consumer insights are essential. But only if those consumer insights provide the why behind a consumer’s buying decisions. We call this the Human Element, which is a deep understanding of the consumer through the lens of their core values and motivations. In other words, it’s getting to the “what” that drives the emotional “why.” With several thousand attributes in our platform, describing more than 175 million US consumers, Resonate’s intelligence distills the Human Element.

Imagine the cut-throat competition among coffee shops out there. They’re all trying to understand the lure of one coffee place over another for caffeine-craving consumers. We can help develop in-depth personas of coffee consumers across the US. For example, Resonate’s insights show that people who get their coffee at Caribou Coffee, Pete’s and Starbucks are 81% more likely than the average consumer to volunteer for a cause.

When making purchases, this same group of coffee lovers considers these top three psychological drivers: social and professional status, living an exciting life and getting recognition from their peers. Their top reasons for visiting these coffee shops: for a treat, it’s convenient and it’s just their usual spot to grab coffee. We can also pull from our insights that they spend 20-40 hours online per week and their top social media consumption is with Tumblr, Snapchat and Reddit.

We can now build the persona of an individual who after a morning spent working on a charitable cause heads to the local coffee shop with like-minded friends for a treat as a personal reward. Having deeper insight like this can help creatives produce more relevant messaging that truly resonates more quickly with a target audience. Rather than reaching a larger swath of people, these deep consumer insights provide better messaging to the people who matter most to the brand because we know what they care about and the media they consume.

Consumer insights change the game

Resonate’s insights come from two powerful types of data: consumer surveys and streams of online consumer activity. Resonate runs continuous waves of long-form surveys throughout the year that yield hundreds of thousands of responses from people who have double opted-in to participate. The goal of these surveys is to get not only basic demographic variables, purchasing and political preferences but also to understand why they made those decisions and the values that guide those decisions.

We then turn to online activity to complete the story at scale. Resonate analyzes tens of billions of web events each day linked to the survey respondents. These events and activities are anonymous and compliant with all consumer privacy principals. Our platform analyzes the anonymous web traffic processed through our natural language processing and looks for keywords to understand the page that the person visited. Then machine learning takes their survey responses and their web activity to create predictive models that help marketers understand and connect with their target audiences. Typically, by the time research like this gets to the marketer, it’s several months old. Our proprietary data is updated daily, so it’s the most up-to-date in the industry.

Consumer insights should also be accurate, and agencies will need to address this with their clients. We estimate that 20% of survey data is bad based on what happens when human beings sit down to take a survey. A lot can go wrong. Resonate uses a proprietary “fraud score” to find that bad data in our own surveys so we can ensure that the insights we’re providing are the closest measure of consumers. With more accuracy comes better targeting, which is top of mind for brands. Being able to deliver messages that resonate will be key for turning campaigns into CLV for agency clients.

Agencies, the uprising is upon you. Take this opportunity to give brands what they really want – creativity, personalization, innovation, accuracy and transparency. Consumer insights that show the “why” behind consumer behaviors are key. Resonate’s SaaS platform will help agency clients connect with their targets more accurately and quickly and make the job of agency creatives more efficient with better consumer insights.

Want to learn more? Let us show you how quickly and easily Resonate’s consumer insights platform will transform your work.

 

The Culture of Resonate: Driving Innovation and Recognition

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Here at Resonate, we recognize that redefining the consumer intelligence landscape requires more than just first-in-class technology and unique insights. It requires an internal culture built around rapid innovation and deep client understanding, and that’s exactly the culture we strive to foster here, day in and day out.

As a company leader, it’s one thing to say, “Workplace culture is important.” It’s quite another to know whether you’re succeeding in creating the type of workplace environment where people can thrive, both professionally and personally. That’s why it was so incredibly gratifying to learn last week that, for the third consecutive year, Resonate has been named a Top Workplace by The Washington Post.

At Resonate, our culture is defined by creativity, problem-solving, motivation, knowledge and intellectual curiosity. These are the qualities we seek out in our employees, and those are the qualities that we strive to foster in our workplace environment.

While all the qualities I mentioned are important, intellectual curiosity, to me, is perhaps the most defining characteristic of every member of our team. After all, we’re in the business of understanding humans—looking beyond demographics and clickstreams to ascertain the values and motivations that truly drive people. How can a company go about such a monumental task if its team is not inherently curious?

I’m proud of the amazing team of intelligent, curious humans that we’ve brought together here at Resonate. While this is exactly the culture we hoped to build at Resonate since Day 1, they’re the ones who have brought it to life. They’re the reason I come to work every day.

 

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