UK Banking

Ultimately, without the implicit test, a design that is likely to resonate with the target audience may not have been established."

Our client, a major UK bank, needed to understand what communication messages, channels and executions are most compelling for business customers.

There were 3 different multi-channel campaigns with different messages and executions to test – our client needed to understand which messages were immediately eye-catching/ attention grabbing, which were important back-up messages that would encourage action and which, if any, put customers off.

The Challenge

The challenge was that we needed to get beyond the rational response and understand the implicit, emotional response to the communication and the messages. This would help our client understand which parts of the communications prompted customers to act now as well as how communications could be optimised in the future.

Our client identified a need to use primary customer research to understand what was working in existing creative campaigns, and where comms could be improved to then build some future creative campaigns that could be researched at a later stage.

Our approach

Savanta designed an online survey with an implicit response solution built to engage different types of business customers. This was used to bypass customers’ rational, conscious thoughts and assess their automatic attitudes and reactions to the client’s communication headlines.

Key features included:

Conjoint: for headline messages respondents were shown a combination of options and asked to select their preferred choice, within a limited time. Explicit importance and an implicit impact for each headline were extracted.

Text highlighting: communication text was shown on screen and respondents were asked to highlight positive and negative words using an easy to use text highlighting tool. Time taken was again recorded, allowing us to register the implicit impact as well as preference for certain words/phrases.

Clickable images – heat maps: images of branded direct messages and emails were shown, and respondents interacted by clicking on parts of the images that appealed to them.

The outcome

The insights delivered provided clear guidance for decisions made about future communications released by the client and was used directly in their messaging approach.

The innovative, implicit response technique was successful in providing another layer of insight with which to analyse results from the explicit survey. This meant that instinctive and emotional responses played an important role in producing the most impactful communications design.

Ultimately, without the implicit test, a design that is likely to resonate with the target audience may not have been established.