Conventional market research can be expensive. In the current business climate it is difficult to justify except for long-term market and brand tracking. Online is better assuming people fill it in and it actually tells us something useful. Ad hoc customer or campaign insights are particularly difficult to justify on a Return on Investment basis. The link between the application of qualitative insights and the actual results can be tenuous.

ESP believes the application of customer or campaign insight should be direct and highly measurable.

Essentially, any interaction between your audience and your marketing is a matter of Rapport.

Usually when we think about Rapport, it is direct face to face interaction. We have rapport with people and we are more likely to accept them, trust them, believe them, and even buy from them. And we know from our own experiences (backed up by extensive research) that our physiology and tonality have a huge effect on our ability to communicate, persuade and influence people with the content of what we say.

In the same way, your audience are unconsciously comparing your indirect interactions such as advertising, direct mail, online and of course the Brand itself with the ‘rapport model’ they have for that context. Your marketing has a physiology, tonality and content and your audience use the same neurology to unconsciously assess whether there is Rapport.

Matching your marketing with their ‘rapport model’ means more engagement, more awareness, more consideration, more reach and more response.

So it follows that the successful campaign with the elusive ‘magic element’ is almost certainly experiencing good rapport with some people. The campaign that sank without trace is probably not.

The key question is; what are the structural and contextual characteristics of that rapport?

And imagine how much more effective all your marketing would be if it had more rapport with more people more of the time.

So how do you measure that rapport? What are the significant elements? How do you structure a ‘rapport model’ of your audience? And how do you assess the rapport potential of your marketing? Conventional research is not designed to identify and analyse these audience preferences and it does not provide a process for directly guiding marketing to match those preferences.

Now, with the ESP process, you can model the motivational and structural preferences of an entire audience, a specific segment or even an individual. Adapted from established behavioural psychology models this unique process interviews samples of people in a relevant context and analyses their language to identify and quantify their preferences.

Not only are the charts generated ideal as planning and briefing tools, they also support a simple process that objectively guides the development of marketing materials by assessing their ability to gain rapport with the audience and suggesting ways to enhance that rapport.

Where you engage with audiences online, you can identify the ‘rapport model’ of individuals. So your interactions can adjust to ensure optimum rapport.

Also, everything is so objective and clear; it speeds up development and reduces changes and disagreements based on subjectivity. So your process becomes more productive as well as your marketing being more effective. Where it's been possible to measure, the system has always produced improvements, quite dramatic in many cases.