A Key Ingredient To A Telecom Brand’s Advertising Success - Advertising Creative Evaluation Case Study
Echo Connect is an old-established mobile communication company that provides voice, messaging, data and converged services. They are the most affordable service provider in the market, however, their market share is slowly declining as they are not well-known among younger people, and as such their sales are starting to lag.
Echo Connect has a minimal market research budget, but the brand subscribes to a service that provides telecom panel data once every five years. This data shows the age, gender and location of adults in South Africa who subscribed to the different networks in the past six months of the research. The results showed Echo Connect losing its market share to its newer competitors, particularly the younger demographic. Echo Connects products are more affordable and reliable, making them the ideal service provider.
To understand why their brand does not resonate with the younger demographic, Matthew Stuart, Echo Connects brand manager, commissioned Ornico to conduct a competitive analysis, focusing on competitor advertising strategies.
Solution
- To help Echo Connect reach its research objectives, Ornico completed an Advertising Creative Evaluation (ACE). ACE provides an independent and unbiased qualitative view of a brand and its competitor’s advertising creatives within a given period.
- Ornico provides advertising monitoring – monitoring, collecting, archiving and analysing advertising creatives that aired across different industries, categories and subcategories. This means Ornico can provide brands with advertising data that show how, what and when consumers experienced a brand’s communication, as well as provide insights that can shape future advertising strategies.
- Ornico reviewed all Echo Connects adverts along with those of its competitors over the five years. In this review, emphasis was on deducing the different brands’ medium of choice, brand positioning, campaign lines, product benefits, primary differentiator, brand personality or tonality, branding elements and target market as portrayed in the ad creatives.
- Ornico further mapped out Echo Connect’s positioning in relation to its competitors, focusing on its advertising creative positioning, central theme, source of influence, brand appeal and target market appeal.
Findings
Mediums
- Echo Connect’s main medium of advertising is print followed by radio, whereas its competitors either have a more balanced approach with their mediums or have a greater share of voice on television and online, these being the mediums mostly consumed by the younger audience.
Central Themes
- The Central theme in Echo Connect’s ads predominantly highlights “Necessity”, creating a feeling of obligation to subscribe to the network. The ads hint at cost-saving as an added benefit that the subscriber will receive should they select Echo Connect as their service provider.
- HyperCom has a balance between “Beyond Brand” and “Desire”, their strategy is to develop a connection with the consumer. They achieve this by playing on the consumer’s ideals of what a network provider should be.
- TeleEdge successfully associates its product benefits with the consumer’s idea of what they think they need and conditions them to believe why their products are necessary.
Creative Positioning
- Echo Connect has demonstrated that they are the most reliable yet cost-effective service provider in the market, however even though this has a balance with lifestyle they have used situations and characters that appeal more to the older target market, ostracising themselves from the younger audience.
- Echo Connect’s major competitors appeal more to the younger audience. Their ad creative design and messaging demonstrate a balance between functionality, creativity and emotions.
Outcome
- Echo Connect now has an overview of the media types used by competitors, the duration of their ad creatives and where and when they choose to advertise. This data has enabled Echo Connect to develop a more competitive advertising strategy to attract a broader target market.
- Echo Connect has an in-depth analysis of the competitor’s ad creative, featuring the commonly used payoff lines, branding elements and messaging of the ads. This data allows them to break through advertising clutter, differentiate themselves in their new approach and stand out to the target audience.
- Looking at the central theme, Echo Connect’s major competitor occupies the “Beyond Brand” and “Desire” segment, that being the segment they would also like to position themselves. Assessing this in correlation with other maps, Echo Connect can achieve this while still maintaining its uniqueness through asserting “Lifestyle” and ”Emotional” segment from the creative positioning map as none of the competitors occupied the segment.
- Through these insights, Echo Connect was able to develop a strategy and create a coherent brief for its creative and PR agency as well as its digital and social media agencies.
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