IdeaLoopz® Overview

People power produces more motivating ideas and messages.

The key advantage of the Loopz® Marketing system is its ability to develop, quantify and optimize marketing ideas and marketing communications messages before creative briefs are written and approved.

Because once the ideas and messages become imbedded in creative executions and marketing campaigns, along with a myriad of other executional elements, we’re drawn into one of marketing’s most vexing accountability issues.

Which specific marketing element(s) made the advertising, co-marketing, promotion or direct marketing program work? Was it:

• The marketing idea
• The messaging
• The marketing mix
• The channel execution
• The support budget
• All of the above

IdeaLoopz® is designed to help resolve this conundrum by building marketing ideas and marketing messaging with a two-phase process we call the “Diamond Principle”:

• New marketing ideas are created by everyone involved with the brand, including engineers, logistics, operations, merchandising, sales, wholesalers, retailers, loyal users, brand switchers, etc. Importantly, they brainstorm together anonymously, in a controlled feedback and iteration process, so the effects of egos and titles are eliminated, and the group’s experience, knowledge and honesty is optimized.
• The most important and relevant marketing ideas, along with alternative messaging options, are then evaluated and optimized by the brand’s target audience. Importantly, these consumers/customers help produce a proprietary database of brand, product and/or service research results that become progressively ‘smarter’ though each Loopz® cycle.

The values inherent with IdeaLoopz® are analogous to those of democracy and people power. When all of the people involved with a brand get a vote, the truth about ideas and messaging becomes self-evident. Marketing ideation and messaging decisions are no longer controlled by an elite group of experts, and the facts can speak for themselves. At the same time, brand teams become better aligned and motivated to the marketing program’s goals, because they’ve participated throughout the discovery and decision-making processes.

More motivating ideas and messages produce better results.

Once an IdeaLoopz® cycle is completed, marketers have the assurance of generating the broadest possible range of important and relevant ideas, by involving people who normally don’t collaborate on marketing ideation and messaging. In addition, marketers have insurance by quantitatively optimizing ideas and messaging with their intended target audience(s). Creative briefs can become much more focused, more consumer/customer-centric and more persuasive and motivating.

Having conducted hundreds of IdeaLoopz® cycles for dozens of brands over the past five years, we’ve proven that more motivating ideas and messages can consistently produce better sales results.

A case in point

A leading global durable goods brand was experiencing increasingly ineffective national promotion results in the US. Since the brand’s promotional offers and themes were historically developed and managed by the marketing services department, there was widespread internal and channel disagreement on how to regain promotional sales momentum. Opinions were rather plentiful, and not atypically, many of them were contradictory.

IdeaLoopz® was selected to resolve the brand team’s stalemate. 150 engineering, marketing, logistics, sales, field, dealer, customer and ad agency personnel were invited by the regional president to brainstorm anonymously with 250 pre-screened consumer decision-makers in a secure extranet. Together, the group generated over 1000 ideas in four business days.

Forty of the most important and relevant promotional ideas created by the above group were selected for testing in an online experimental design study by a smaller cross-disciplinary implementation team. This study included 250 consumers. Specifically purchase decision makers, who also stated they intended to purchase the product in the next 90 days. Three weeks later, seven winners emerged, with a common “buy-get” incentive theme.

Armed with a common messaging theme, and a single-minded creative brief, the ad agency produced a fully integrated, year-long marketing campaign. This included mass media, direct marketing, online, in-store and dealer communications materials.

Importantly, all other elements in the campaign’s marketing mix and its support budget were held constant, to maximize integrity of the Loopz® Marketing test.

At the conclusion of a year-long campaign, the cumulative sales uplift for the brand’s seven promotional periods increased eleven percent. And during the same period, national sales for the brand’s category grew only three percent.

Eleven percent sales lift versus three percent market growth…indisputable evidence that in fact, more motivating ideas and messages do produce significantly better marketplace results.