Over these past few months,we have all had too many opportunities, albeit not out of choice, to learn about viruses. Vaccines were created and manufactured at an unprecedented pace ever in human history. The testing method primarily used to evolve the effectiveness of these vaccines was the good old A/B approach (a.k.a., Randomized Control Trials). This should remind us of the dependability of this approach and leveraging A/B testing as the gold standard is not just the purview of pharma; we at Mars have actively deployed it for marketing and understanding consumer behavior. In fact, we are so confident of the versatility, reliability and precision of A/B testing, that we apply learning's in e-comm channels to predict overall sales. We are thinking “outside the screen” to learn and adapt. In the spirit of operating at the intersection of science, technology & business analytics and experimenting on the cutting-edge of what is possible we have become pretty creative with A/B testing.
As media investments drastically shift from TV to digital media, mirroring consumer viewership trends, traditional approaches requiring months of airing content and significant upfront investments on media to get results simply don’t cut it anymore. We have developed a digital A/B testing capability that then informs overall multi-media pre-campaign and in-flight investment decisions. Collaborating with some incredible colleagues and key partners in China we now have a standard tool to measure copy effectiveness that is agile, cost-efficient and allows for early assessment of copy effectiveness.
Simply put, media creative is pushed to consumers on a pre-roll basis and actual sales conversion after exposure is measured; that’s it! Implementing this means we need only 2 weeks to read results vs. the original 14 weeks. Multiple creatives are measured at the same time and creative content is matched with our media strategy. My intent is to build on our tremendous success in China and work with other partners to scale this capability globally. I aim to expand this capability to derive insights beyond media content/frequency to pricing/promotion and distribution/assortments.
Basically, my message to you is this; magic happens when you have a platform that ties stimulus to actual purchase behavior at the right level of detail, i.e., at the user level 'single-source' giving us tremendous flexibility of what we can do and accelerating our reaction time to trends. Whenever you have access, partnership or opportunity to leverage a platform like this, no matter which part of the globe, no matter how big or how small, run towards it!
Please engage with me to keep this conversation going. Agree? Disagree? Reach out if you want to chat or learn more.
Have a great day!
Vidyotham
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