Test campaign ideas not your agency relationship

Sometimes it's hard to know if your ‘funny and interesting’ campaign idea and executions are too clever. Consumer testing with your agency partner keeps everyone aligned and relationships healthy. 

When they wanted to launch a new trail mix into snack food mad New Zealand, food company James Crisp’s brand team realised they needed a point of difference.

Trail mix can be trail mix, can be trail mix after all (extra wasabi peas anyone)?

Their Graze brand of healthy snack foods was already known for flavour and product innovation and so they had an aspirational platform for a ‘generic’ product.

To communicate this, they came up with the idea that Graze Trail Mix was, ‘The glamping of trail mixes’.

Witty, upscale but still connected to outside activities that people associate trail mix with. 

According to Kylie Tipene, Marketing Manager at James Crisp, “It felt very much like the right idea and it was fun, interesting and engaging, but would our consumers get the context or were we an experienced marketing team just talking to ourselves and making ourselves laugh and smile. Was it too clever?”

So to find out they ‘Stickybeaked it’ with general consumers and the ‘brand aware’ and happily it made sense, was differentiating and liked.

“This then formed the creative brief to the agency, but with an aspirational idea for such a basic product we were a little worried what might come back”.

“The agency came up with a number of options. We have a GREAT agency and we massively value their input, but they, by necessity, are even further removed from the consumer than we are.

“So were their ideas tapping into the key benefit and being faithful to the idea we had all agreed on?

“We had some pretty clear views on some of their executions, but we also knew that they had invested a huge amount of time and love into some that we were not at all sure of.

“So we turned to Stickybeak again and we tested their executions”.

“The process was so easy, just drag and drop the headlines and the campaign images, choose your audience and launch and the results were back within hours and in time for the creative review meeting.

“And for that meeting, things could be entirely unemotional as we were talking about consumer responses not opinions, and we could get our highly valued agency team focused on the next stage and we still all really like each other”!

Stickybeak rapid consumer testing puts your positioning, messaging, packaging, creative and content in front of consumers anywhere in the world and returns results within hours not weeks. It’s self service so you don’t need an agency and pricing starts at $350. Don’t guess.  Test!