Measuring Brand Equity: Twinings

Yesterday morning I visited the Twinings HQ in Andover for a session of ‘sharing and leveraging experiences’ with various members of their International Markets team. Twinings is part of Associated British Foods (ABF) and is, at the moment, one of ABF’s star companies in terms of marketing.

As a B2C product, Twinings do a lot of promotional marketing in order to connect with consumers and ultimately change their buying behaviour. This promotional marketing includes trade shows, shop floor sampling, coupons, and competitions. Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But how can you be sure that all the money you spend on promotional activity is actually having a positive effect on your profit?

About 2 years ago Twinings decided that they needed to start measuring the return on investment of promotional activities. Comments such as ‘oh well, we’ve always done this trade show so it must bring value to the business’ were no longer cutting the mustard.

Twinings now spend an enormous amount of money on buying data and information about their different consumers and markets so that they can perform both pre and post evaluations of each promotional activity. The post evaluations include short term uplift, long term uplift and price elasticity (when price isn’t the driver of the sale – the price can be high and could continue to increase but people still buy it because of the brand equity and the relationship the consumer has with the brand). They have a dedicated promotional evaluation team and rely heavily on the feedback and sales reports from their sales teams. It really struck me how market insights and data lie at the centre of developing a more sophisticated, efficient and measurable marketing approach. I’d like to force this fact on people who believe marketing is just making a pretty advert and formatting slides!

It’s true that insights and data are vital in marketing as they can demonstrate the value of your marketing in numbers and figures (directors love this). These are the tangible measurables of marketing. With branding, and the relationship the consumer has with a product, things become much more intangible but are still important.

Intangible effects of good brand equity could be ‘I like to buy Twinings tea because it shows other people that I have good taste’ or ‘I buy Twinings because I like the look of the packaging in my cupboard’. How can you measure that?! It’s very difficult but it still impacts on sales and growth. I spoke with the Nordic Region General Manager who was actually initially employed to embed the more measured approach to the company marketing, and he is now keen for Twinings to implement a way of measuring brand equity and its effects on consumers. Good luck!

Food for thought:

Doing something is pointless if you aren’t going to measure it.

Nothing changes if nothing is measured.