The 3Cs Methodology

Hello Marketers 👋
We’re Cubery, and we live for the big, bold, brave ideas that generate disproportionate brand returns. We exist to give marketers the tools and evidence they need to swing for the fences. 

Emotion: the be-all and end-all?

Down at Cubery HQ, we’ve noticed a worrying pattern emerge in the marketing and communications world over recent years: the work of industry thought-leaders (including the likes of Daniel Kahneman, Les Binet, and Peter Field) has been misconstrued by some to sell the dangerous rhetoric that ‘emotion is all that matters’. 

This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the role emotion plays in driving marketing success. A more robust — and evidence-led — approach comes courtesy of human psychology and the behavioral sciences. It can be distilled into three, equally important areas:

Emotion

While the emotional response is critical because it aids the processing of information, this isn’t ultimately what motivates behavior — the impressions, associations, and ideas seeded in people’s minds about the brand/product are what does.

The evidence makes it clear that much human decision-making isn’t conscious and rational — it’s fast and instinctive, anchored in our System 1 beliefs, biases, and intuition. This means market research which is overly persuasion based or reliant on claimed reasons for behavior is often extremely misleading. However, ‘System 1’ is all-too-often conflated with ‘emotion’.

While emotional responses are anchored in System 1, not all System 1 thinking is emotion-based. This misconception oversimplifies and misconstrues the significance of System 1 and psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize winning work in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. From an advertising perspective, we know triggering an emotional response is important for memorability. However, unless emotions are connected to the brand in a meaningful way, consumers’ System 1 processes won’t be penetrated. Yes, the ad will be inserted into people’s ‘memory banks’, but not the part linked to the brand — reducing the likelihood it’ll come to mind when faced with choice.

Focusing on emotion alone also runs contrary to much of what the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has taught us about ‘mental availability’ in one of the most transformational marketing literatures of all time — “How Brands Grow”, penned by Professor Byron Sharp. The network of memory structures people hold about brands (in relation to buying situations) are what enables them to come easily to mind. These buying situations, or category entry points, necessitate the development of a more nuanced set of impressions, ideas, and associations — outside of emotions alone.

Validation

Okay, so the evidence makes it clear that influencing decision-making and behavior is about more than just emotion. But can research accurately measure it?

‍There’s no magic formula, set template, or proven algorithm which will guarantee marketing success. Marketing is an incredibly complex combination of art, psychology, economics, and science. But this isn’t all doom and gloom — the marketing and communications industry would be a pretty bland and uninspiring place to work otherwise! 

What this does mean, however, is that there isn’t a single market research company on the planet with a ‘validated’ methodology for predicting the impact of marketing — particularly with regard to quantifying the role of creativity.

‍While there are a handful of unscrupulous vendors who do lay claim to having this ‘holy grail’, what we’d suggest to marketers when agencies purport to have such ‘evidence’ is to scratch below the surface — extremely tenuous underpinnings will quickly reveal themselves. 

“There are no absolutes in marketing, despite what the marketing scientists, running towards you across the field in their white coats, might want you to believe.”

Mark Ritson
Marketing Professor

Evidence

Why is that? Because it’s hard. Real f**king hard.

The evidence makes it clear that most marketing delivers its biggest dividends in the long-term, by slightly increasing the odds a brand will be chosen — through making it come easily to mind and attaching positive thoughts, feelings, and associations to it. Linking the role of creativity to short-term sales effects (which is what these types of ‘validations’ do) does a disservice to the entire industry, focusing marketers’ attention on the wrong metrics for success, and ignoring the evidence around how brands really benefit from marketing investment. 

This has been the driving force behind the sharp decline in advertising effectiveness as revealed through landmark research undertaken by Les Binet and Peter Field in “The Long and the Short of It”, with the now-iconic phrase ‘short-termism’ coined by its authors to describe this alarming trend.

Even the most sophisticated econometric or market mix modelling isn’t able to disentangle the multitude of variables necessary to accurately attribute sales effects — both in the short and long-term — to individual creative assets. ‘Validations’ in the advertising space generally relate to short-term sales. Why? Because it’s much, much easier to measure. But, as any marketer who’s worth their salt would know, just because something’s easily measured doesn’t mean it’s worth measuring. 

FUTURE

Re-framing ‘testing’ as an opportunity to hear from the brand’s most important stakeholder (the consumer!) provides the industry with a better way forward.

Advertising and communications testing in particular has for too long been perceived as a pass or fail exercise, with the creative idea’s survival at the mercy of the consumer. Cubery’s reason for existence is to change this toxic paradox, and to restore advertising and product evaluation research to its rightful place as an opportunity for iterative learning. 

It’s our belief that the very least marketers can do when making high-stakes decisions is to bring the consumer into the conversation. Give them a seat at the boardroom table and hear what they have to say; another perspective to balance the potentially loud and powerful voices of other stakeholders — each with their own agenda and biases. 

‍Research by the globally renowned Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that marketers’ ability to predict the sales effects of advertising is no better than chance. Countless other research studies have highlighted the chasm which exists between the types of people working in creative agencies and those they ultimately seek to influence. 

It therefore goes without saying that inviting the consumer into the conversation isn’t just a pragmatic thing to do, but to ignore them would constitute negligence. While the consumer shouldn’t ultimately hold any more sway in decision-making than other key stakeholders, to not — at the bare minimum — hear what they have to say is akin to rolling the dice. And, when marketing is reduced to a game of chance, it becomes ignorant to the wealth of evidence at our disposal. 

Bringing the consumer into the conversation provides us, as marketers, an opportunity to step outside our bubble and to learn from people who are (often) nothing like us.