The power of digital is in engaging consumers: how interaction drives greater brand favourability and ultimately purchase intent!

This is a story about how one little moment flipped my life upside down.....oh no only joking it's about a campaign we ran for P&G for their Gillette brand, which attempted to change existing Mach 3 user’s behaviour and get them to trade up to the new Fusion razor.

The strategy had been to try and ‘engage’ this uninspired audience by going to where they hang out online and deliver an relevant and exciting ‘experience’ which demonstrated the benefit of the new improved technology. All nice and simple, the client loved the creative execution right form the off (indeed please feel free to have a go yourself and let me know your thoughts).

The problem arose when the media agency started to get involved. Driven by their ever present fascination with reach and frequency they started to kick-up a fuss – “how can we buy these rich media formats” “we were going to buy standard formats on network buy” went their screams and cries.

All valid points if awareness if your objective, but here we were talking about changing the behaviour of a disaffected group of individuals. As the digital agency, we knew that interaction (i.e. playing a game) would help the consumer become more involved, and therefore start to feel more favourably towards the brand (which we believed would ultimately result in purchase intent; not the use of a mass awareness tactic).

The theoretical arguments went bounding across the ‘table’ with no side refusing to back down. Just as the client was starting to lose confidence in the resulting battle the result of the concept testing started to roll in. And there it was, plain as day, indeed the added functionality of being able to be involved, did indeed result in much higher levels of favourability towards the brand, much higher levels of the key product messaging and more significantly much higher levels of purchase intent.

So the moral of the story? Well firstly, always back yourself when you believe in your ideas (waiting for the result was one of the nervous times of my career and the most exhilarating). More significantly for us all is that a little bit of interaction really can help a brand engage with their audience to the point of changing behaviour; and to a degree which is vastly superior to any awareness driven approach as so often dictated and espoused by media agencies.

With a lot more involvement, (you can get) a lot more love (Brand), that's the real power of using digital!

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