Rob Wilson, RPM's Strategy Director, addresses his experience with pretesting a campaign, leading to greater and more effective consumer engagement.Pretesting is crucial for most big budget campaigns, and in order for it to be effectively qualitative, it has to be carried out with over 100 people. The real plus about pretesting is that it optimises the campaign and allows you to really focus on the value exchange between the brand and the consumer. You need to ask yourself why people participate in something and what would encourage them to participate, which all goes back to the fact that value exchange doesn’t have to be transactional; it can bring benefits that are more relational and emotional.
We did a lot of pretesting for the concepts behind our 2011 Sky Ride campaign. For those who aren't familiar, Sky Ride is a series of mass participation cycle events led by Sky and British Cycling, which encourage thousands of friends and families all over the UK to get back on their bikes and take to the traffic-free roads of their city. The pretesting for this was all about trying to find ideas and concepts that would actually trigger people’s emotional relationship with cycling. This is how we ended up going down the nostalgic route: ‘Where would your bike take you?’ The concept was all about getting people to remember that they once loved cycling and have had a connection with it since childhood.
If you sit lots of people in a room and ask how many people have played squash, you might get 20 or so, but once we'd asked how many people had ever ridden a bike, everyone had a connection with it through their childhood; thus, we took the nostalgic route. Pretesting was particularly useful with this insight.
The people we chose to do pretesting with were lapsed cyclists and people who cycle less than once a month. The process goes that we find them through research agencies (which our clients like us to use because they’re impartial), we put together the ideas, a moderator within the research group takes the people through it, and we watch them through a little glass mirror. It’s all very CSI!
What you’re looking for with pretesting is traction; so what gets people most excited, what do people have to instantly talk about and what ideas start making people open up and talk. In the case of Sky Ride, we put one idea in front of them that was less well-received, mainly because there was less instant conversation. As soon as we asked them to discuss their memories of riding a bike, however, people were engaged and eager to contribute and - voila - you have an idea with traction.
It’s important to take on board that pretesting is there for optimising ideas, not for making decisions for you. In other words, don’t make all your creative decisions based on your pretesting; use it to make your ideas better and don’t use them to rule out or discredit ideas. I say this because often ideas are harder to get until you’ve got the right execution, and you’re not testing execution at that stage. Don’t let consumers dictate what your brand should do; let them optimise ideas and work out how that idea should work for them.
At RPM, the scale of our campaigns and therefore scale of investment is going up, which means we’ll inevitably be doing more pretesting going forward. Furthermore, the nature of the work we’re doing is more digital and more and more engagement focused, which again reaffirms the benefits of pretesting.
Pretesting is ultimately about how a consumer gets involved in a campaign, and agencies should be using this to see exactly how the consumer would get involved, to what level they’d get involved, whether they would advocate your idea and whether they would take that extra crucial step and send it on to a friend.
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