Changemakers 2024 - Marketing effectiveness goes mainstream

Last week, I headed through to Edinburgh for The Marketing Society Scotland ’s Changemakers conference. It was as professionally put on as ever and featured the highest quality line-up of speakers I’ve seen in some time.

I’m not going to try to duplicate the great reviews that have already popped up, but the day did leave me with one strong realisation.

As a geeky strategist, I’ve spent a good chunk of time with my nose buried in marketing effectiveness research. It’s always felt like there’s been a bit of a disconnect. On the one hand, more research than ever was being published, debated, refined and replicated. But on the other, only a few agencies and brands were actually putting them into practice.

At Changemakers, it hit home that there’s been a pretty substantial shift even in just the last year. All this understanding has - quite suddenly - firmly hit the mainstream.

Best practice is now broadly understood - and brands are putting it into action. If you’re not actively applying effectiveness principles, you’re falling behind.

I guess what I’m saying is of course you know all this already, but Changemakers highlighted a couple of the most important principles for marketing success that are worth repeating.

Mascots, mascots everywhere

Andrew Tindall of System1 and Jacob Wright , former CSO of BBH Singapore, both preached about the power of ‘distinctive assets’. One which has been repeatedly proven to boost recognition is a character or mascot (think Snap, Crackle and Pop).

Enter Rebecca Dibb-Simkin , CMO at Octopus Energy , who spent the first 5 minutes of her talk chucking miniature soft toy octopuses into the crowd. She was only half joking when she advised attendees to give out branded fluffy toys if ever they can. Is a brand mascot more important than award-winning customer service? Maybe not. But there’s a reason Octopus invest in both.

Rebecca’s talk was followed by Deliveroo , another company who are killing it and just happen to have a charterer at the heart of their brand.

Consistency is key, but it doesn’t mean you have to be boring

The crux of Andrew’s talk was taking us through the mountain of evidence that System1 have collected about the commercial value of brand consistency. Their report is free to download , but in short, brands who are more consistent gain higher sales, better quality creative and lower price sensitivity.

Jacob Wright’s earlier talk essentially gave us a how to guide to Andrew’s why. He spoke on the TikTok aesthetic trend and how it’s nothing new – humans have had aesthetics for as long as we can trace. The thing about an aesthetic is we can recognise one even when we can’t easily describe them. They have coherency, without having to directly replicate assets. There’s no reason, Jacob argued, that this can’t apply to brands, too.

And as if we needed further persuading, Kevin Lynch of The Wrong Agency then spoke about his time working on ‘nonsense briefs’ at Oatly and painting up every one of the Singapore American School’s 167 buses with a different design based on a story from the school’s history. His work proves that you can build brand consistency whilst still keeping things fresh.

It's time to stop getting caught up in absolutes

Two sessions in the talked some of the most talked-about topics in marketing – Gen Z and AI.

For me, the takeaway was it’s time we stop getting ourselves wrapped up in absolutes and starting getting into the nuances and implications of these kinds of discussions.

Mark Fawcett took us through learnings from We Are Futures ’s work with young people all over the UK. He spoke about the changes that Gen Z are bringing to markets and culture, cautioning above all not to see them as soft snowflakes. This generation are motivated, principled, resourceful and influential. We underestimate them at our peril.

Over lunch, I asked Mark what he thought about the counter argument that our industry overly focus on Gen Z when actually it’s the over 50s that have all the money. His response was that when we compare this generation to how millennials and Gen X were at their age we see that they influence the perceptions and preferences of their seniors far more than any generation before them. Some of that is direct – through parents and colleagues – but some of it is also the influence they hold over social algorithms. This in turn drives what the rest of us see and, if we’re honest, our preferences too.

And for AI, an expert panel went beyond the usual chat of either seeing AI as the panacea of creativity, or claiming it will steal all our jobs. Instead, they dug into the varied opportunities for working with AI and the very real questions around privacy and intellectual property that its use poses.

Chuck in some political analysis, leadership coaching and panels on B Corp and unlocking diverse talent, Changemakers was just the tonic for injecting some optimism about where we’re going as an industry.

Guttingly though, I didn’t manage to nab a wee octopus.

Ross Macdonald , Senior Creative Strategist Frame