The Natural History
A few years ago the husband of a colleague came to talk to the agency. He didn’t work in advertising. He was a neurosurgeon. We’d invited him in as part of a series of talks that we host at the agency that are designed to bring the ‘best of the outside world, in’. He talked about his training. About the way he approached problems and the way that mistakes were dealt with in theatre.
Unlike those assembled to listen to his presentation, he dealt with life and death situations nearly every day of his working life. His performance at work could have severe consequences for the lives of his patients. In a presentation full of useful things, one thing stood out as particularly useful and interesting for someone working in our industry.
When presented with a difficult or challenging diagnosis, he would see a patient’s natural 'fight or flight’ instinct come into play. Many patients, when faced with the prospect of painful and invasive surgery under general anesthetic might simply choose to go home and never return to his office. Leaving the underlying problem alone and hoping for the best.
To counter this, he said, he would set about explaining ‘the natural history of the disease’ to the patient before they left that day:
Right now, the symptoms of your condition are x. In 6 months, left unchecked, we would expect this to progress into x,y and z. In 12 months: a,b and c.
This explanation was designed to establish the gravity of the situation being faced by the patient. To contextualise the choice they faced and hopefully to establish that a difficult choice now may in reality be the lesser of two evils when compared to the severity of what might be coming down the line.
For the last 15 years, the Marketing Science movement (spearheaded by the EHB, Byron Sharp, Jenni Romaniuk, Peter Field and Les Binet amongst others) has provided practitioners with more knowlegde about the levers of brand growth than we’d ever had access to before. But despite this knowledge, many of the conversations agencies have with their clients and many of the conversations marketing teams will have with their own stakeholders internally (such as the CFO), revolve around getting a business to commit to these principles: To target broadly. To build distinctive assets and establish them properly. To think about activity which is creating an emotional response, not landing ‘rational’ product benefits. etc.
The principles established by Sharp et al are as close as we have to fundamental laws. Work done in the last 18 months shows how these principles effects not just FMCG, but also high involvement categories like B2B too. Despite the fact that is information is now so widely available and widely known, why do so many of the conversations had in marketing circles revolve around the adoption of these principles?
As Upton Sinclair famously quipped, it’s hard to get someone to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it. Incentives are nearly always the most important driver of behaviour in any situation. Quite often, when engaged in the conversation about committing to a longer term brand strategy, the question of the return on an investment and the time horizon over which that return will be realised, arises: What will we get for making an investment decision and when? This is a hard question to answer, especially as many advertisers aren’t sufficiently equipped with the data to answer it adequately. When faced with uncertainty, most businesses or organisations default to the status quo.
But, to use the example from our visiting neurosurgeon, could an equally effective tool in making the case for a more effective profile of brand investment be one where we show what happens when you fail to act? One which models the ‘natural history’ of the case.
Given our current position (vs. market share, profit, brand health) assuming that the ‘competition’ and the market does x, if we continue on our current course, in 6 / 12 / 18 months we would anticipate these metrics to have moved by y% points, resulting in an financial outcome of £z to the business
At a previous agency I saw an approach like this work to great effect. Following a debrief of a set of results, a client’s econometrics provider offered an approximate date at which the brand in question would overtake the category leader based on a continuation of the existing category dynamics (media spend, advertising strategy, promotional windows). Not only was this an attention grabbing moment in the meeting - giving everyone cause to sit up and listen - but crucially it gave the client in the room some of the ammunition they needed to take back to their stakeholders to continue backing the strategy in place. This prediction ultimately came to pass, too.
So much of the data we use in our building marketing strategy is static and generic, but arguably we don’t do enough with it. Across data sources such as Euromonitor, Neilsen and YouGov, most media agencies we have at least the bare-bones required to start to build models which might be able to forecast a set of potential scenarios too. These will only be improved by the inclusion of actual client data, as seen in the example above. As Arthur C Clarke said, predicting the future is a hazardous occupation. The data we have access provides no guarentee of what will happen in the future. But so often the work we do when developing communications strategy stops after diagnosis and prescription, when arguably it needs to go further and think about prognosis, too: going beyond just explaining the changes required, but starting to explain the potential consequences of our actions (or inactions) too.
