The BlokeVote Six Pack Process
From years of working with companies like Diageo and global advertising agencies, we’ve developed the BlokeVote Six Pack Process around the 5 I’s of brand planning. This means not only do we know how to dig deeper with Blokes to understand what makes them tick, but we can also help you read between the lines to develop actionable insights. Want proof? Have you ever heard of the Smirnoff Double Black, the BBQ Wipe, or wondered why Pork Belly became so popular all of a sudden? All of these ideas and more have come from this approach. Keep reading to understand how it works so you can start creating insight lead impactful advertising.
Issue: Identify the Business Issue
Define the specific question or questions that need to be answered to solve the business issue. This is the MOST important part of the Six Pack Process because if you don’t understand which problem you’re trying to solve then the resulting campaign is likely to miss the mark. Every impactful, memorable and successful campaign started by identifying the problem to be solved. The problem to be solved is usually a business problem, where measuring and achieving success is easier if the problem is more defined. For example, KFC’s business problem in 2018 was “How do we turn around the negative brand effects of running out of chicken and closing 900 stores in the UK after a processing error?” The Result…
“A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It’s not ideal. Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out of their way to find we were closed. And endless thanks to our KFC team members and our franchise partners for working tirelessly to improve the situation. It’s been a hell of a week, but we’re making progress, and every day more and more fresh chicken is being delivered to our restaurants. Thank you for bearing with us.”
In Short, the campaign not only won a myriad of advertising awards but also improved the brand perception score by 10 points from the start of the shortage (Huge!). Identifying the issue you’re trying to solve is the first and arguably most important part of the Six Pack Process.
2. Information: What Information do we need to solve the issue?
This is where we shine. Blokes are an enigmatic bunch so the research to understand how we can solve the issue must be tailored to meet Blokes where they’re at. There’s no point asking a bunch of airy-fairy questions, because blokes can see through the bs. Often the best way to get to the heart of the issue is to create a hybrid design where both qualitative (In-situ, Smoke’o sessions etc) and quantitative (surveys etc) provide a holistic and detailed view of what Blokes think. It’s out of these face-to-face sessions where we find the inspiration for golden ideas like BBQ Wipes and the Double Black.
3. Insight: What is the insight we can leverage to solve the issue?
From here we run an insight generation workshop to uncover the penetrating discovery from the information gathered in the research. The insight is key to the success of everything that comes after this step. You can identify the problem and uncover truths in the research, but if the insight isn't right then you’ll find everything that comes after probably isn’t quite right. This is evident in most campaigns where you’re left thinking, “what the hell were they thinking?!” Let's look at two examples, one where they got the insight right, and one where they got it very wrong.
Let’s start with a campaign that gets the insight right, Selleys BBQ Wipes (we might have been involved here). Our research helped identify the insight that people found cleaning the BBQ a “grudge task” with a million and one different cleaning methods, from lemon to newspaper and even oven cleaner. That’s why we helped Selleys develop the BBQ Wipe! Fast forward ten or so years and the outdoor cleaning segment has spawned from the original BBQ Wipe and grown to be worth more than $20 Million per year.
Now let’s look at how the wrong insight can have devastating effects on a brand. Remember “New Coke” if not I’ll explain. Back in the ’80s, the rise of Pepsi in the cola market spurred CocaCola to do some research to understand why people were buying Pepsi over Coke. One part of the research found that on a blind taste test most people preferred Pepsi over Coca-Cola because Pepsi is sweeter. So Coca-Cola developed “New Coke” which was sweeter than Pepsi and outperformed Pepsi on the blind tests. Soon after the release of New Coke, the results were catastrophic forcing them to bring back normal Coke.
Ironically, their position strengthened compared to Pepsi once they brought back the original flavour. A great example of Rory Sutherland’s idea is that the success of an idea does not need to be logical, but the key to its success is often psycho-logical.
If you’re interested in understanding how you can generate better insights, get in touch about our Insight generation workshops.
4. Implication: What are all the potential strategies, plans and benefits that will drive growth as a result of this Insight?
So we’ve done the research and come up with an amazing insight, now we need to work out how to take that insight and develop something that’ll leverage the insight to solve the business issue. This is where we identify the right channels, tactics and campaigns needed to reach the right people and work out what we need to do to change their behaviour. In the examples used above for the BBQ Wipes and New Coke, New Product Development (NPD) was a key implication of the insight. In the case of KFC’s FCK campaign, it was selecting the right channel and the use of humour to ensure trustworthiness and reach. Each issue and insight is going to come with its own set of implications.
5. Implementation: How will the plans be executed in the market?
This is where the creatives step in. One of the keys to the success of the FCK campaign is the strength of the creative delivered by Mother London. The delivery is often the focus of an ad’s success but is built on everything that has come before it. Very rarely do ads with amazing creative and poor insights have good results. But when good research helps inform clever insights, to inspire strong creative you’re all but guaranteed success. “You’re not you when you’re hungry”, “Share a Coke” and “Tonight I’ll be eating” are all perfect examples of when the first 5 parts of the BlokeVote Six Pack Process work in perfect sync.
The “Share A Coke” campaign is an interesting example of how keeping things simple is often a great way to deliver results. The key business issue attempting to be solved by this campaign was that research showed a large percentage of millennials had never tried, or rarely drank Coke. The creative implementation of placing the names on the packaging was about appealing to the millennial’s inherent sense of self-importance and the novelty created by your own name being on a can of Coke. Sometimes the best insights are those universally accepted but not acknowledged truths.
6. Impact: Measure and Evaluate the Impact of the Implementation to determine success.
Finally, the last step is to evaluate the impact of the campaign. It’s vital to include independent impact analysis of campaigns to determine their success, and broader effect. This is particularly important when the business issue being solved is focused on brand perception and attitude change where the results might not necessarily be directly evident in the bottom-line, like in the case of the FCK Campaign example used above. This goes beyond measuring the hard metrics like sales data, traffic etc. We focus on the soft metrics like brand perceptions and positioning, campaign effectiveness, NPD-concept development.
Extremely successful campaigns often have a broader cultural effect outside the bounds of solving the initial business issue and independent research can help to mitigate the fallout of success. This is especially true for betting, alcohol and fast food companies where there is an underlying social issue at the heart of the behavioural change.
The real beauty of our Six Pack Process is that it ensures your campaign is extremely concise around each of these areas, setting the campaign up for success. If you’d like to find out more about how the Six Pack Process can help solve your business problems, get in touch via the form below.