Imagine that your organisation has
a specific concern: that it could lose market share to a rival.

To combat this you want to engage more with your most loyal customers. You have briefed the agency to provide two different creative approaches. Several stakeholders are involved in the sign-off and as they always seem to have differing opinions on creative, you fear this may be a long and difficult process. So, you have decided to add some science and objectivity to the evaluation process.

ESP have interviewed a sample of your most loyal customers and you now have their rapport model. The ESP Benchmark Instrument has produced a dashboard (right) which shows the top-line audience rapport model in terms of preferred style, tone of voice, decision-making, propensity for loyalty and their motivations to purchase.

You can now share that rapport model with the stakeholders. Although it is identifying and quantifying some very complex structural characteristics, you can all recognise the intrinsic ‘personality’ of your customers within those charts and relate them to the sample verbatims. You have also had the new creative approaches analysed prior to the creative presentation. Within 48 hours you were able to access the results online and compare the communication rapport profiles with the audience rapport model (roll over the images below for the demonstration).

Now, the characteristics within the creative’s copy, visuals and layout that are significant in terms of creating rapport are identifiable. What is more, the correlation between those characteristics and the audience’s rapport model have been identified, analysed and can now be discussed easily and objectively. You can see why one of the creative approaches will engage, connect and convince the audience better than the other; the stakeholders can see it too and last but not least, the agency team can appreciate why you are favouring one over the other. Where there is disagreement (and this process doesn’t claim or indeed seek to eradicate it) there is a basis for more objective and more constructive debate and decision making. And the presence of empirical data seems to suppress the need for endless creative changes based on personal preferences.

Typically ESP clients have found that supporting the development and assessment of creative work in this way reduces the sign-off process by 40% with corresponding time and cost savings.