Solutions

Brand Tracking

Manage, track, and grow your brand with always-on, actionable insights.

Marketing Mix Modelling

Monitor and optimise the long and short-term effects of your marketing efforts.

Campaign Evaluation

Measure and track your campaign’s performance before, after, and as it happens.

Our Company
Thinking
Investors
Explore more
Log In
Contact us
Home / Karen Chandler
Blog Posts
Back

Get to know your customers with brand health tracking

January 20, 2021

brand health tracking helps you know your customers

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

Brand health tracking is a key tool for marketers who wants to understand and really get to know both existing and potential customers.

Setting ambitious goals and launching big marketing campaigns without knowing the health of your brand can be detrimental moving forward. But keeping track of how your customers perceive your brand 24/7 is a full time job. Not only do you have to understand how your target groups feel about your brand, you also have to keep track of what your competitors are doing. This is why a continuous tracking of your brand is such an important tool.

Brand tracking works! Just have a look at the top global companies. To stay one step ahead of the competition and to drive sales they let brand tracking steer their marketing activities.

READ ALSO: Benefits of Path to Purchase Analysis

Brand health tracking is a direct connection to your audience

When brand health tracking is done right you will have a continuous feed of insights into your marketing organisation enabling you to plan, execute and reach marketing goals.

Easy to read dashboards, custom reporting and integration to existing BI systems is essential to make the most of brand health tracking. When planning marketing activities, like a product campaign, metrics from your updated dashboard will reveal your audience desires. These insights ensure that you and your colleagues can make timely strategic and tactical decisions with context and confidence.

So, before you waste any more money on marketing campaigns that might work let brand tracking show you what actually will work. By continuously measuring your audience you will always be ready to launch your next campaign.

Use brand health tracking to optimize campaigns

Although brand health tracking takes a larger scope on your overall brand health, you get the best results when combining brand tracking with campaign tracking.

Campaign tracking looks at how your campaigns perform, but doesn’t tell you how it ties into the overall perception customers have of your brand. Ignoring the bigger picture means you run the risk of missing crucial information regarding what your customers want or need from you.

READ ALSO: Brand research: What is it & why is it important?

Understand your brand before you move on

Brand health tracking ensures you have the correct insights before you set your goals and that you get relevant input before and during your marketing activities. Finally, it lets you evaluate the results of your marketing efforts. Without this information, you are basically in the dark.

To sum up, brand tracking is a measurement that gives you the insights you need to truly understand your brand to drive sales.

If you want to know more about brand health tracking and get the insights you need to optimize your marketing, make sure to contact our brand experts and they’ll tell you all about it.

Blog Posts
Back

About Customer Experience

November 17, 2020

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon

Understanding what makes customers happy is vital to drive good brand health. If you create a great customer experience then you will:

  1. Boost customer loyalty and advocacy. Your customers become your most powerful marketing tool.
  2. Drive revenue and lifetime value. A satisfied customer will come back and buy more and won’t be as easily swayed by the competition.
  3. Build brand equity. Satisfied customers who prefer a brand to others and exhibit loyalty to the brand over time contribute to brand equity.
  4. Change with the times by listening to the voice of the customer and will understand changes in customer behavior faster than the competition.
  5. Reduce costs by investing in what matters most to your customers’ needs.

CX is the game changer
If CX is the game changer then what is CX? Well, here at Nepa we define CX, or Customer Experience, as the experiences that matters the most to your customers. By placing a continuous focus on your customers experiences, no matter where or how, you will ensure that the very lifeline of your business is on track. Also, if your business is on track you will have both time and resources to optimize for market growth.

The Nepa approach
Nepa’s approach to customer experience is to provide you with actionable insights on how to create the right environment for happy customers. We take a three-pronged approach to CX:

  1. Nepa Customer Insights. Research and advanced analytics to create actionable insights about your customers, including:
    a. Customer journey mapping
    b. Customer segmentation
    c. Customer community
    d. Driver analysis
  2. Nepa Advisory Services. Advisory services bespoke to our client’s current needs and business goals, including:
    a. Identifying CX differentiators
    b. CX roadmap creation
    c. KPI selection
  3. Nepa CX Feedback Platform. Nepa’s proprietary CX Feedback Platform collects, integrates, and analyzes data for the insights that matter most and distributes action items to the right stakeholder so they can grow your business.
    a. Real Time Dashboard
    b. Closed Loop Feedback
    c. Live Feed of Customer Feedback
    d. Text Analysis using Machine Learning

Our approach allows us to build you a tailored CX program stretching from strategic to operational insights, connecting the CX program to your business data, ongoing to ad hoc measurements creating sustainable customer growth.

Blog Posts
Back

CX’s second act – Value Creation

June 18, 2019

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

If you want to know where the CX industry is headed, there is no place better than Forrester’s CX conference! #CXNYC was no exception. It was great to learn from CX practitioners and heartening to see everyone talking about, and getting ready for, CX’s second act. Here are three themes that really stood out for me from all the engaging conversations I had at #CXNYC.

1. Tech alone is not enough

Technology is a great tool that has helped us launch faster, bolder and bigger CX programs, but we must remember that it is a tool, not a strategy. Technology enables CX initiatives that in turn help us connect with our customers’ feedback. But technology alone doesn’t solve problems, you do! Measuring and understanding Customer Experience (CX) is as much of an art as a science, something lost with a “tech-only” approach. For more on tech’s role in CX, read this blog post. 

2. CX data is happier when it has company

CX programs by themselves only go so far. They allow you to talk to your current customers and solve their problems. They allow you to identify opportunities to deliver better on customers’ expectations. But they offer little or no insight into the company’s potential customers and their movement along the customer journey. CX data is most effective when combined with other business data – integrating Business and Brand data with CX feedback creates powerful strategic insights that help create business value.

3. Make your CX program yours

Your CX journey is uniquely yours. Make sure your CX program is tailored for your business and for your individual CX journey. The design and delivery of your CX programs can make or break your CX initiatives – but you don’t have to do it alone. Work with experts who will help you design a CX program that works for you.

Blog Posts
Back

Modelling marketing strategy to sell more pizza

October 30, 2017

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

The time when “trust your gut” was a decisive factor in developing marketing plans is over. With 30 consecutive months of growth and sales up by 18% on a YTM basis, the Finnish pizza franchise Kotipizza has proved that recurrent and detailed review of marketing efforts and media investments provides clear answers to what creates continued success in sales.

New marketing opportunities within MMM

Marketing mix modelling or MMM is a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of marketing programs. MMM addresses key issues within your media mix, such as offline, digital and social media, as well as price, promotions and other factors. MMM also examines external influences including competitive actions, seasonality, economic conditions and brand awareness in order to understand how these factors impact your sales performance.

“In an MMM analysis, you get continuous recommendations on changes to a marketing plan. This way you can better meet business goals of improved revenue, sales and profit, and even brand building. We can also forecast and monitor the impact of newly executed marketing plans so as to assess progress and continually improve revenue and ROI”, says Martin Ekenbäck, Product Director at Nepa.

Recipe for success in continued marketing ROI

Often companies don’t know which analytics are available and how granular data can be obtained and analyzed. Without this knowledge, it’s easy to just adjust last year’s strategy and budget a bit, and hope for the best. Even though you might get positive sales ROI, you don’t know why you succeeded. Kotipizza didn’t want to risk leaving money on the table that they didn’t have to.

“Just like everywhere else in our company, in marketing we have to substantiate our budgets and show evidence of success. That’s the main reason why we have incorporated MMM into our decision-making. Although we already exceeded the average growth in the Finnish fast food market, we wanted to make sure that our media mix and campaign structure were effective and provided us with the analytics for continued growth”, says Johanna Kuosmanen, Strategist at Kotipizza.

Look at the relevant sales drivers

Marketing mix modelling combines data from sales and historical marketing to measure ROI on sales. The analysis aims to explain, and in some cases also predict, sales volume and market share depending on inputs from marketing. It’s also important to look at other sales drivers such as competition, seasonality, brand awareness and brand loyalty to get the complete picture.

Take your business model into account

Kotipizza’s marketing mix modelling has revealed that it’s possible to increase budget and still remain within positive ROI, which is not always the case. Kotipizza has a fixed marketing budget that is determined by how the franchising business is doing (certain % of sales). The only way to get a bigger marketing budget is to make the franchisees’ business grow, increasing their total sales. To manage market conditions and get full impact in their marketing, Kotipizza adjusts the marketing budget on a monthly basis. This way the company always stays in control and rarely suffers from any big surprises.

When Kotipizza realized what MMM really meant for their decision-making, they implemented concrete changes in strategy:

New campaign tactics and timing. Before, TV campaigns were designed to cover one weekend and more weekdays. Now, they cover two weekends. Pizza sells best on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, not Mondays.

  1. Coupon campaigns were added. More and shorter coupon campaigns work better than fewer and heavier coupon campaigns per year. Individual coupon campaign effects generated an increase up to +30%.
  2. TV and digital became primary media as the MMM had proven ROI capabilities in both. You can use both online and offline marketing to drive attitudes and actions. Online advertising is very effective in lifting quantity metrics, yet television ads boost engagement metrics of page views and positive social media conversations.
  3. Increase in marketing budget will still achieve positive ROI, even though the franchising business model doesn’t budge on this.

Kotipizza now boasts 30 consecutive months of growth and their sales are up by 18% in a YTM period. As the marketing budget has grown following increased sales, the company’s seen the impact of “more marketing spend, more sales” tactic: a positive ROI.

5 proven steps to strengthen your marketing ROI

As a method, MMM will substantially improve your marketing decisions and the return on marketing investments. Handled correctly, it provides scientific means of understanding what drives sales and how much ROI each component of the marketing mix generates. It will also offer smart guidance in developing and refining your marketing plans and budgets.

Here’s what Johanna Kuosmanen recommends you do if you’re not satisfied with your marketing results:

  1. Build a data-driven marketing ecosystem inhouse.
  2. Define clear and relevant business KPIs – what can we influence with our marketing and media strategy?
  3. Analyze results per media, both online and offline.
  4. Analyze and decide the right metrics related to the relevant KPIs. Remember that marketing investments should translate into both sales and brand awareness.
  5. Use MMM analysis to find an optimal media mix for planning purposes. This will also help you to figure out which media deals suit you.

Milla Westerlund
Account Manager, Nepa Finland

Blog Posts
Back

Optimising value growth by leveraging your Path to Purchase

February 21, 2017

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

Profitable growth is ever more challenging

Market conditions, increased competition from new channels and providers coupled with changing consumer and shopper expectations and demands makes growth harder than ever to generate.

However, those that are winning are doing so by creating a new understanding of their business and what’s important through combining multiple data sources and aligning their organisation to execute against these “superior” insights across all touchpoints and channels.

The business challenge on the path to purchase

Most consumer focused companies currently understand how their customers are behaving across touch points. However, this understanding often does not link the online world to the offline world. Nor does it join up data sources to identify how consumers, shoppers and customers are interacting and behaving across all channels and touch points, across the entire Path to Purchase.

Many organisations have already established programs/teams/data insights for separate parts of the journey. However, these insights are often created in silos within the business. To truly optimize revenue, we need to understand the end-to-end journey. We also need to understand how this differs for your different target customers, shoppers and consumers.

READ ALSO: Benefits of Path to Purchase analysis

How?

The key is to track all of their engagements, across your business, to understand the entire Path to Purchase. For example:

  • What drives the purchase, spend or engagement decisions?
  • Which are the priority touch points and why – across all channels and including the online and offline worlds?
  • Which ones influence awareness, consideration and actual purchase or sign up?
  • How does this differ by need and occasion/mission?
  • What is the impact on value growth, bottom line and your KPIs?

To clearly evaluate the financial impact to KPIs of each touchpoint, a true “through the line” perspective of key touch points must be a requirement.

Ultimately, the question to be answered is:

Where should you focus your media, marketing and sales investment along the Path to Purchase to optimize growth?

Nepa combines technology and proven methodologies to create an end to end “single source view” of the Path to Purchase. Specifically, we combine attitudinal and behavioral data. Hence, this helps us to understand what customers are doing, thinking, feeling and experiencing at each stage of the journey.

READ ALSO: Optimise your marketing budget with Marketing Mix Modeling

So, our multiple methodologies can be combined to create the most relevant and tailored solution to your specific business requirements. These methodologies enable us to create an understanding of customers in a broad spectrum. This includes the where, when, why and how customers, consumers and shoppers are engaging for ALL online touch points.

Most importantly, we identify which touch points are the priority ones for driving:

  • Awareness
  • Consideration
  • Purchase
  • Re Purchase (Retention and Reactivation) and which ones most impact your bottom line financials.

If you want to find out more about how Nepa can help your business, please get in touch.

Lindsay Cowan
Managing Director of Nepa UK

Blog Posts
Back

Customers Decide What Goes – Building Towards Customer-centric Growth

February 15, 2017

Karen Chandler

Share this article:

Being customer-centric is vital

in an increasingly competitive and fast paced business environment. Most companies understand this and do their best to listen to – and understand – consumers and customers. But how do you get it to work all the way to tangible profitability at the point of action and transaction in your business?

Companies gather vast amounts of disparate data – purchase behaviour, survey results, not to mention all those digital footprints. No wonder big data has been the buzzword for quite some time now, and will continue to be so.

Frustrated by the ever increasing amount of data?

Massive databases are filled with potential knowledge about how to increase sales or how to develop and transform a business. The keyword here being “potential” and not so much “knowledge”.

The data in itself is quite useless unless you extract meaning from it and take appropriate action based on insights. The ongoing digitalization has exponentially increased the amount of data available to companies but making data-driven decisions is lagging behind. For companies, it is difficult to extract meaningful insights from the vast amount of data generated from multiple sources.

“Companies become more customer-centric by using their loyalty club as co-creation engines – fuelled by big data.”

Companies are frustrated because big data holds a lot of promise but simply gathering the data doesn’t lead to customer-centricity. Instead of starting with and focusing on the vast amounts of data at hand, business leaders must take a step back and evaluate what business issues they aim to solve.

The voice of the customer is a very strong voice

Yet it´s more of a sniper rifle than a shotgun. Customer opinions and behavior are totally dependent on context and is taken into account when designing a solution. Specifically, a solution that aims to inject the voice of the customer into company processes and operations is vital for success.

READ ALSO: Brand research: What is it & why is it important?

Let’s explore how a large grocery chain in the Nordics, improved their retail store operations and became more customer centric by utilizing a forgotten asset – their loyalty club. The company suffered declining market shares at a steady rate over several years. The average consumer’s view of the company was that it was badly managed (although good natured and considerate) grocery retailer compared to competitors. Consumer associations to the company brand included old fashioned, expensive and even uninspiring.

“The consumer insight department was staffed entirely with people from outside the organisation and had a fairly free role.”

How to unlock the power of the customers’ engagement

A number of re-organisation initiatives and re-engineering projects were undertaken over the years without changing the negative trend. In a drastic attempt to make the company more market oriented and customer-centric, they formed a new business unit. The new unit was set up as an independent entity within the company. It also included old functions such as brand, communication and CRM, as well as a few new functions. One such new team was the consumer insight department. The department was staffed entirely with people from outside the organisation and had a fairly free role.

The new team began exploring the consumer’s perspective on the company and what assets the company had for insight generation. They found two things:

  1. The amount of data the company had about customers and transactions was endless and despite the downward trend,
  2. the company had not lost the engagement of their core customers.

The company asked Nepa – the Consumer Science company – to help them try to harness those two assets. The overall objective given to Nepa was clear: unlock the power of the customers’ engagement and their data in order to involve them in the re-design of the company into a modern retailer.

Nepa did not make the mistake of focusing on data rather than key business issues. Instead, Nepa and the company agreed that the first business problem was to improve the store operations.

READ ALSO: Benefits of Path to Purchase analysis

The first 3 vital steps

As the consumers found the company somewhat old fashioned and uninspiring we decided to:

  1. Get more actionable insights from customers about possible improvements in the store environments and operations.
  2. Gather relevant data and make it actionable for over 650 stores.
  3. Deploy its solution for trigger based research by utilizing the Nepa Consumer Science platform®.

As previously mentioned, the company had an amazing asset in the engagement among their core customers. And they had a lot of them – The company’s loyalty club included more than 3 million members at the time. In order to make these numbers more manageable, Nepa invited the company’s members to join a smaller co-creation engine inside the club. Members were quite eager to join and soon the number of members in the co-creation engine was over 40 000.

Analyzing and visualizing details are key factors

The key feature of the Nepa Consumer Science platform® is having one customer-ID on each panellist – allowing attribution of any type of data to each individual. This allows Nepa to combine behavioral big data with attitudinal data – enabling trigger-based research using big data.

Every time a member of the co-creation engine shopped at a company store, personalized research can be triggered. The research is based on store visits and buying behavior. The company didn’t have to ask if a customer went to the bread section of a specific store in for example Stockholm. Before asking any questions , the customers already knew exactly what baked goods had been bought, when and where.

A continuous stream of development opportunities

To date the co-creation engine has:

  1. Combined 2 billion lines of sales data with over 8 million points of direct customer feedback.
  2. Packaged the data into over 2500 automated reports during a year.
  3. Delivered the reports to over 600 stores each quarter.

“The introduction of the Nepa Consumer Science platform® tailored the feedback to each retail outlet.”

The format and delivery of these reports is key. It keeps insights actionable and not overwhelming the receiver with information and data.

Prior to the implantation of the Nepa Consumer Science platform® the company had general reports available on a regional level – regional managers where responsible for disseminating insights to individual store owners. The feedback wasn’t tailored to each retail outlet which was the problem. The introduction of the Nepa Consumer Science platform® changed this. A short 3-page report detailing key improvement areas in an importance/performance matrix, how the store was faring per department, and performance compared to local competitors and other company stores provided store managers with a clear guide as to what was working in-store and what wasn’t.

The financial impact – catching the eyes of store managers

Coupling sales data to the trigger-based research, the findings and recommended actions was translated into financial impact. For example, a certain level of satisfaction within the produce section is assigned an economic value based on the performance of the company’s stores. We can estimate the economic value of implementing changes suggested by customers and increasing the particular store’s satisfaction within that department.

This meant a greatly increased interest for the reports among store managers. The reports are hanging in the staff rooms of the company stores all over the country. This enables a localized data driven approach to store operations.

READ ALSO: Brand tracking is key to increase brand awareness

The voice of the customer is helping redesign the company

So far, a little over 180 000 customers have engaged in the initiative and have provided store managers with almost 250 000 suggestions, comments and ideas. Most of them are very specific and valuable to the local manager; some of them being complaints and comments regarding price. The average customer experience with the company has improved markedly since the start of the initiative.

In addition to evaluating store operations on a continuous basis – the co-creation engine also allows for extremely cost-effective ad-hoc research. Even though the company has very limited resources in the insight department (only 5 FTEs), they still manage to turn around over 120 ad hoc research projects per year.

The co-creation engine has been vital in redesigning the company and improving their operations. The company has harnessed the power of their engaged customers and the co-creation engine in Nepa Consumer Science platform® enjoys an extremely high response rate, over 50% with no signs of dropping.

“The company became much more customer-centric in their local operations by tapping an incredibly valuable asset – their own loyalty club.”

Beyond CRM – business growth triggered by consumers

To further leverage this quick feedback loop, Nepa built a digital live feedback tool for the company’s headquarters. Digital screens display a map of the country and populate it with customer feedback from different stores across the country – in real time. This is extremely valued by management who are already using the KPIs from the Nepa Consumer Science platform® as some of the main governing tools for the entire company.

The company became much more customer-centric in their local operations by tapping an incredibly valuable asset – their own loyalty club. Many companies today are underutilizing this asset and merely engaging in traditional CRM activities. It’s time for these companies to stop being confused by large data sets, look beyond CRM as a solution to customer-centricity and couple behavioral and survey data to build co-creation engines.

We help businesses to thrive with customer-centricity by utilizing the power of continuous consumer insights. There is no end to what you can achieve with real-time consumer insights, customer feedback and footprints. It changes the way your business engage with customers.

Please do get in touch if you’d like to find out more.

Lindsay Cowan
Managing Director of Nepa UK