How poorly considered promotions can damage response

The Proposition

A specific offer or promotion can dramatically alter both the make-up of your responders, their attitude to your product and your overall ROI. The performance of a campaign can be dramatically altered and skew audience response. In this example, a well-known financial services company decided to introduce a ‘Win a Mini’ promotion for their car insurance product, offering a top-of-the range mini to fourteen lucky winners.

The competition mechanic simply required the consumer to phone for a quote to be entered into the draw; product purchase was not necessary. The problem with such an offer is that it opens up the potential to skew the audience types responding to those who need or desire the offer, rather than those who need or desire the actual product.

And the added danger is that those consumers who feel you get nothing for free - dependent on the value of the offer – can actually become cynical and ill-disposed to the product – and they might very well be your core target audience. All these different examples of consumer behaviour can influence the outcome of the campaign, regardless of historic media performance.

How it worked

By profiling the audience targeted against those who responded for both the period where the ‘Win a Mini' copy was used (Feb & Mar 07) versus the standard copy (Jun to Nov 06) previously used, we are able to assess the differences in audience types driven by the offer. The types of responders had changed considerably.

The audience types who responded were less significant within the client’s traditional ABC1 older more affluent audience, with very high car ownership. In fact, a large proportion of response came from poorer families/ single parents with very low car ownership and a high degree of price sensitivity; was their mindset to ‘Win a Mini’ rather than ‘I want to insure with X? This clearly highlights that this proposition changed the audience, reducing response and switching off a considerable proportion of the target group

When we compare the two periods we can see that the targeted areas selected within the models are consistent but the percentage of response from each group had drastically changed. In particular, Group 2 - traditionally the highest indexing group (175 index) - experienced a 45% decrease in response indexing at 95 with the ‘Win a Mini’ offer. The variations in performance impacted across all groups, but the shift is clear in that the less affluent audiences were very attracted to this offer.

The Results

The failure of this promotion to address and match the needs of the client's core target audience had huge implications on the performance of this campaign. However, what it did do was highlight the importance of:

• Structured test programme, building in a control is essential. The client’s initial perception was that the media had under performed
• Matching the message/offer to the audience – Minis have a youth driven image at odds with the core audience profile
• Focus groups – to understand who the offer would be received
• Greater consideration of the key objective – was the promotion designed to drive greater response from new audiences or from existing audiences? Was the offer for policy holders or for new respondents??
• Test and learn!