October 2024 | Strategy Research

Strategy’s Starring Role:
Don’t Let The Supporting Actors Steal The Show

Messaging strategy, like any other strategy, should have a singular focus. If the recipient takes away just one key idea from your message, what should it be? High quality? Sustainably produced? World’s most comfortable pants? Guaranteed fun?

When we think about brand-building campaigns, whatever your brand’s core promise is, that’s where the messaging strategy should be focused.

Of course, messaging plays out most commonly in advertising. To maximize the likelihood that advertising is on strategy, it’s wise to conduct research with the target audience. Here are a couple of ways to engage your audience in research to optimize a campaign’s focus on the key strategic message.

• Qualitative Exploration. By sharing creative with even a relatively small number of end users and having them tell you, one by one, what the ads are saying to them, you can begin to grasp how well the key message is being communicated. Conducting one-on-one, in-depth interviews (IDIs) is the best way to get clean, honest feedback and avoid the bias that can come with focus groups when one person announces their interpretation of the ad that the moderator just shared with the group. IDIs can be tremendously helpful, especially with early-stage executions, to ensure the creative is on target with the communication goals. If you uncover opportunities for improvement, as we frequently do, there is still time to make those changes and get the campaign back on track with the strategic focus.
• Copy Testing. Quantitative pre-testing is another valuable tool, often used at mid or later stages of creative development. A survey is conducted among a relatively large number of target-audience members, again to ensure the ads are communicating as intended. Through a variety of question types, the research can help both predict an ad’s potential for success and identify ways to improve the creative’s effectiveness through various diagnostic measures. Many good copy testing tools exist, including Decision Analyst’s suite of testing systems.

What about A/B testing? Great question. Especially with digital advertising, A/B testing is often used to determine which ad drives more traffic (if that’s the goal), and that’s great. But it won’t tell you whether or not the key strategy elements were communicated as planned. For this deeper understanding, message pre-testing is important, even for digital content that is easy to A/B test.

Sticking to the strategy as the star of the show and letting the secondary messages play their supporting roles can be difficult. Boldly committing to this approach will pay off in the form of better communications through clarity of messaging.

Felicia Rogers

Corporate Executive Vice President

Email Felicia

Felicia Rogers is a dynamic insights consultant who leverages decades of business and consumer research experience. She is passionate about brand strategy and improving brand health, new product development, and driving positive customer experiences. During her career, she has consulted with companies across an array of categories to tackle many important strategic issues.

Decision Analyst's Brand Strategy Resources

• Brand Strategy (prerecorded webinar)
• Key Elements to Drive Effective Advertising
• Not Wasting Words: Identifying the Right Sustainability Message
• Secondary Meaning: The Measure of Brand Strategy
• Marketing Strategy Services