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The 3Cs Framework

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 needed to swing for the fences, with our foundations built on decades of learning from the behavioral sciences and psychology. The 3Cs distill this knowledge into a simple and practical framework, enabling better decision making and more profitable marketing.

A behavioral-led approach to predicting success

1. Emotion

The be-all and end-all?

Widespread confusion exists around the role of emotion in driving marketing success, with the work of industry thought leaders often misconstrued to sell the dangerous rhetoric that ‘emotion is all that matters’.

Put simply, eliciting an emotional response is a prerequisite for marketing success; it’s what triggers people to sit up and take notice, it enhances the depth of mental processing, and it strengthens memory encoding. However, the emotional response isn’t what's responsible for motivating behavior.

2. Motivation

A behavioral science perspective

‘Jobs to be Done’ theory tells us that people ‘hire’ brands to get underlying ‘jobs’ done, to achieve their desired ‘goals’, and to fulfill needs/desires. These behavioral outcomes can be functional, social, emotional, or psychological in nature.

The behavioral sciences therefore make clear that motivation to do something is goal-driven: decision making and choice is determined by a brand’s perceived effectiveness for helping people accomplish their goals.

3. Emotivation (Emotion + Motivation)

The 3Cs framework

We’ve taken the empirical evidence and established learnings from the behavioral sciences and distilled it into a simple, intuitive, and robust framework for predicting marketing success: The 3Cs (Captivate + Connect + Compel).

At its core, emotion and motivation play an equally important role. Wrapping up a motivating message/impression in an emotionally engaging (and brand-centric) way, is the pathway to commercial effectiveness and profitable growth.

3Cs Framework - Cubery Market Research

Invite your most important stakeholder into the conversation

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.

Our 3-step process for ensuring research delivers commercial impact.

Leverage the empirical evidence at our disposal to disentangle how marketing shapes and influences decision making and choice. Distill this into a simple, intuitive, and robust framework for predicting marketing success (the 3Cs!).
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Pair this with a team of branding and communications specialists — not generalist market researchers. Data, in and of itself, answers very little; what marketers really need is less data but more people who know what to do with it.
Leverage the power of technology and automation to not only reduce costs and increase speed, but more importantly to ensure knowledge is captured and a culture of cumulative learning is cultivated over time.