Return of engagement’s a seductive little phrase, isn’t it? It holds the promise of customers and public alike interacting with – and caring about – your brand. As such, it’s far more engaging in itself than classic terms like consideration or preference.
The first time we heard it used was by Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts, who threw down the challenge: how does sponsorship move beyond media exposure to demonstrate emotional connectivity and predict involvement?
And now IEG has picked up on the phrase for this year’s global industry rallying cry, their Chicago blockbuster. But although engagement feels intuitively like a more sensible destination than mere consideration, or even preference – it’s apples and pears. Both the appeal and the challenge of engagement is that it carries no specific meaning.
Traditional measurement has always focussed on the purchase funnel, which usually begins with awareness, and tiptoes through consideration, familiarity, preference and loyalty to advocacy (addiction anybody?). There are as many purchase funnel models as there are marketing agencies, and the internet has spawned hundreds more.
Although nobody in their right mind would deny the ability of the web to influence purchasing decisions, and provide new ways for consumers to engage with brands and products, the terms of the purchase funnel retain the benefit of semantic consistency, applicable to the stages of a relationship.
The critical stage of course is pre-purchase: once a consumer has entered into a purchasing relationship with the brand, there is at least one hard metric to define the transition from preference to loyalty. But the pre-purchase phase, consideration – according to the purchase funnel – is a cloudy mix of intention and emotion, will and want.
The major criticism of the purchase funnel model is not that it has been superseded by the internet: its weakness has always been that it failed to consider the uniqueness of the customer journey by brand and category. Consideration for automotive is entirely different from insurance, or flight purchase, or carrots – and the journey to purchase for each is equally different.
Where most sponsorship evaluation ends up, consideration is often covered off by the question ‘How likely would you be to consider [Insert brand] product or services in the future?’ And if the response to this question is your main index of success, you’re on shaky ground.
Given the context and the structure of the question, most respondents can be expected to answer favourably: for a respondent to say they’re ‘Somewhat’ or ‘Extremely’ unlikely to consider you, you need to have offended them in a major way.
Questions like this also assume – for the answer to have value – that respondents have not only considered your brand, but consider it relevant to their lives at that point in time. If they’re not in a phase of ‘active’ consideration, that is, considering your brand in the context of direct need or impending purchase, the question is an entirely academic exercise.
Questions like this only survive because they’re based on the old-fashioned concept of sponsorship delivering up a fan-base for whom there is a direct link between sponsorship and consideration. In reality, nobody considers a brand simply because it sponsors an event. Purchase drivers, like journey to purchase, vary by consumer, by brand and by category.
So there are two possible reasons why you’re on shaky ground.
For starters, if this is what evaluation looks like for you, it suggests that sponsorship strategy and campaign planning need to relate more closely to the unique journey consumers undertake to consider your brand – it’s not enough to be likeable, fun and interactive. This is reliant on an understanding of purchase drivers – what messages or situations are proven to result in sales, and how can sponsorship be used to generate these situations or communicate these messages. With this understanding you have something meaningful to evaluate. This approach replaces passive with active consideration and gets you immediately closer to true customer engagement.
The other alternative: your evaluation agency sucks.