Marketing consultancy Triggers might know what you’re thinking better than you do.
It sounds creepy, but as far as tech platforms go, Triggers has one of the less invasive methods of understanding how consumers think and feel about brands. It collects panel data from a wide swath of people through a process it refers to as memory elicitation.
Although the term “sounds like [something out of] Harry Potter or science fiction,” Triggers CEO Leslie Zane quipped, it’s just a fancy name for Triggers’ process of data collection. Panelists (about 300 per brand) upload their memories of a specific brand to the Triggers platform in the form of written words and photographs.
The memories can be anything from a specific event, like going to McDonald’s with your grandmother as a child and eating French fries, to word association, like “Nathan’s” to “hot dog” to “baseball.”
On Thursday, Triggers announced a new feature called the Brand Instinct Monitor (BIM), which tracks how brand associations change over time.
Listen closely
Kraft Heinz, a years-long customer of Triggers, was one of BIM’s early adopters. The new tool has given the company a better understanding of “the subconscious cues and associations that drive choice,” said Doug Healy, head of consumer insights at Kraft Heinz, which has led to more precise creative and messaging based on need states, motivations and particular occasions.
BIM has also provided Kraft Heinz with a more accurate picture of its customers’ pain points. Initially, it had “internal assumptions” about consumer concerns, based on survey responses and anecdotes heard on social and in person, said Healy, like people claiming to avoid packaged food or carb-heavy snacks. “But when we look at actual behavior,” he said, “consumers still do many of the things they say they don’t” – which is why it’s so crucial to Kraft Heinz to understand its customers’ subconscious associations, rather than just “conscious, self-reported feedback” that “can be misleading,” said Healy.
Actions speak louder than words
At the crux of Triggers is its proprietary tool, the Brand Connectome, which hosts the “cumulative memories and associations” shared by a brand’s loyalists (the respondents who have the most positive associations with the brand), said Zane.
BIM uses proprietary data science models to quantify “which associations have the greatest impact on brand growth,” Zane said, so brands can double down on those drivers in their marketing. They can then measure associations over time to see whether their efforts are landing. The results are measured against the preexisting “core” of the brand, said Zane, or the most common associations shared among panel respondents.
Triggers’ panels are built by external recruiting companies, but they target as wide of an audience as possible: “I think segmentation is a waste of time,” said Zane. People who are loyal to a brand tend to hold similar associations, regardless of their identity, she added.
“If a brand stops meaning the same thing to everybody,” she said, “it stops being a brand.”
The good old days
In addition to understanding how consumers really perceive a brand, marketers need to know how those perceptions evolve over time, Zane said, because associations and memories don’t fade overnight. For many years, for instance, dishwashing detergent brand Palmolive featured a character named Madge who worked as a nail tech and soaked her clients’ nails in the brand’s soap.
The character was retired in the 1990s, and about three years later, the brand “[fell] off a cliff,” said Zane. Traditional brand health trackers have a “lag effect,” she added, but had the brand been tracking associations, it may have realized sooner that Madge was a key reason that many Palmolive users stuck with the brand.
Kraft Heinz was able to avoid making a similar mistake thanks to results surfaced by BIM. Millennial parents reported that Lunchables felt “old-fashioned, out of date and like a relic of the past,” said Healy. However, the subconscious associations that the same demographic reported were “positive, nostalgic memories” featuring the yellow box and bubble letters.
Had Kraft Heinz only paid attention to conscious signals, Healy said, “we might have overhauled the brand and, in doing so, lost the meaningful equity.”
