Households as Agents - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBlogger

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In marketing research, some data collection is household-centric and some is people-centric. When it comes out of creative committee work, the latest incarnation of the ARF Model will undoubtedly include an integration of these two parallel universes.

What might that look like?

If Disney or Pixar were in charge, it would look like synapses firing along neurons in a rotating brain, zooming back out to see the human who is watching a TV commercial, trucking back to show other family members, fast-forwarding through the many interactions among the family members in the days thereafter relating to the brand, with one of them finally purchasing it and bringing it home, followed by more interactions among the family and the brand, leading to -- success! A repurchase event.

The three dimensions relevant to targeting some individual in the household are: (1) who uses it; (2) who is a purchase influencer (probably the users plus maybe others); and (3) who is the shopping agent.

In some categories, the shopping agent will not buy for another household member due to some past infraction, e.g. fear of buying the wrong sub-brand of beer.

But in general, there appears to be an overall consistency and predictability of action at the household level, hence it has become the primary data collection means from the beginning. Today the hard scanner in the supermarket still measures at the household level - and since those are the money measures, they rule.

The people level today dominates in TV and radio buying, and I had a hand in that; household metrics ran TV when I first got into the business.

People data allows you to be sure that you are not only selling to the right households but to the right people in those households.

As an industry we probably do not do enough research into (a) who first brought a brand into a home; (b) who in the home tried the brand; and (c) how the members interacted with each other over the brand, and with the brand itself. If we did we would probably reduce the present viewer targeting from a set of a few sex/age groups to an even smaller set of adults, teens and children, each subdivided by gender – six groups in all.

Knowing the household's value as a purchasing agent (the members work together toward an outcome so the phenomenon can be studied with the household as agent), plus knowing which family member(s) to target - based on the usage, purchase influence, and going to the store – leads to a media selection process in which:

1. Households are weighted to reflect the degree to which that household is likely to respond to the ad by increased purchasing as measured in dollars (this is the part of the equation that TRA provides);

2. Programs are selected based on cost, the household's purchasing value (item 1), and the degree to which the right household member(s) are viewing – the last bit being the part that Nielsen Media Research contributes.

This is the equation that MediaVest is pioneering in the marketplace right now, meshing TRA, NMR and cost to make the best decisions for its clients.

Interestingly, the variation in the presence of the right household members (the part that NMR measures) is in a tighter range than the variation in the household's likelihood to sales-respond (the part that TRA measures).

Determining the right household member to target is somewhat moot. We could say that it makes the most sense to focus on being sure that the woman is present because she does most of the shopping – except that stereotype is becoming less true every day.

For now, it is probably most prudent to stick with the tried and true sex/age targeting merged with TRA household purchasing patterns. For the future, we need to do more research into how the members of a household interact, in order to be sure our traditional assumptions about sex/age targeting are still true today.

While people measurement is the coin of the realm, at the end of the day the key is whether someone in the household bought the product after someone else in the household saw the advertisement.

Bill Harvey has spent over 35 years leading the way in the area of media research with special emphasis on the New Media. Bill can be contacted at bill@traglobal.com.

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