Creativity as a Driver of Spillover Effects and Growth
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Kim Notz
30. March 2022
For marketers, targeting and automation still rank high in almost every decision-making process. But on their own, they don’t play nearly as big a role in driving sales as many believe. Without creativity — which, by the way, is often underestimated by marketing leaders — the effect of technological tools fizzles out. Yet when creativity joins forces with reach, the two together can account for around 70% of advertising effectiveness.
I didn’t make that number up, of course — it comes from a Nielsen study on advertising effectiveness. The study dates back to 2017, but no more recent figures exist, and in my experience, despite technological progress, these fundamentals haven’t changed significantly.
Influencing the Customer Journey Early
Still, many marketing decision-makers today consider targeting more important than creativity. This rests on the belief that if you reach the “right” people, they will eventually buy. But who exactly are the “right” people? Are they really just those currently searching on Google and similar platforms for products in the advertiser’s category? At that stage, potential customers are already quite far down the funnel of the customer journey.
The more decisive question is: what happens at the top of the funnel? And how does earlier involvement with a brand influence the decision further down the journey?
Brand Awareness Drives Preference
The early stages of the customer journey are crucial for the later ones — because this is where brand awareness shapes future preference.
Why? Research, most prominently by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, has shown that brands which come to mind more quickly and easily are far more likely to be chosen. They already feel familiar. And this holds true even in something as simple as a Google search: at the moment of scanning the results, aided recall kicks in. People prefer the brands they recognize, the ones they’ve heard of before.
And brand awareness is built through creative advertising. That brings the circle full circle. Creative communication tends to be more memorable, quite literally more “remarkable.” It stands out from the flood of daily advertising messages. Campaigns succeed when they stage a brand or product in a creative way that resonates with a large audience — including people who may not even be part of the target group, or who have no immediate purchase intent. It’s worth remembering: at the time of any campaign, the vast majority of the target audience is not “in market.”
Creativity, then, serves two purposes: reinforcing awareness among existing customers, and building awareness among non-customers. Which is why the term waste coverage is misleading — because there is no such thing. We should rather speak of spillover gains.
In other words, the goal at the start of the customer journey is memorability. And memorability works best through distinctiveness. Creativity is what makes a brand unmistakable. When creativity is combined with reach, we arrive at the magic formula for making brands successful. It may sound simple, but the reasoning behind it is anything but.
Turning Competitors’ Customers into Your Own
Contrary to what countless target group analyses suggest, a brand’s own customers are not all that different from those of its competitors. On average, only one in ten consumers perceives their brand as truly unique. And that is very good news — because it means that competitors’ customers can quite easily become your customers.
The path is straightforward: marketers need to make their brand more present than the competition. The quicker a brand comes to mind, the higher the likelihood of being chosen. Of course, you can achieve this by increasing media spend and creating more presence that way. But higher media investments are costly and can erode ROI. A stronger Excess Share of Voice (ESOV), however, can clearly be achieved through creativity — as demonstrated in research by Orlando Wood of System1.
Successful brands are not successful because of narrow targeting or marketing automation. They succeed because they use creativity and reach to achieve greater mental availability among more people — not just within specific target segments, but across all potential customers. That’s where the true lever for growth lies: in the spillover gains.
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