🍣 3 lessons from Binet & Field to help you bust social feeds

Hey friend – Rob here.

I'm a sucker for blending modern social thinking with classic effectiveness thinking.

The first go at this was on how Byron Sharp can help pump your social strategies.

Today, chapter 2 of this definitely-not-a-book endeavour.

That's right kids, we're going with Binet & Field.

And how they can help you bust your social feeds more effectively.

Or, at the very least, help justify why feeds need busting in the first place.

Let's get into it.

First up, the reason i write this?

Simple.

It's shocking to me that we don't spend enough time connecting the worlds of effectiveness and experimentation.

(And social is pretty much on the experimentation camp, or at least at its best it should be.)

Which is to say social pros should perhaps read more Jenni Romaniuk than Gary Vaynerchuk.

I said it, i meant it.

Anyway, below are some notes i took when i read Effectiveness In Context for my IPA Effectiveness Test.

The problem with social pros not spending time with this stuff is that it makes their jobs harder in that they struggle to justify the importance of social, entertainment-driven comms and generating online fame, back to the business.

My hope is that by the end of this you will at least be able to reference some evidence-based stuff in order to get people to stop thinking social is about short term sales (though it can be), and recognise it's much wider potential.

Let's get into it, shall we?

1. Invest more in the thing that is harder to do

One of the things that blew my mind in Effectiveness In Context is the relationship between something being easy to do, vs how much you should invest in doing it.

When they looked at the IPA Databank, Binet & Field worked out that brand building was easier in some sectors than others, but the conclusion is counter-intuitive: when brand building is more difficult, then it's precisely where you should allocate more budget, and when activation is harder, then you need to double down on investing in that.

The reason for this is because yes, you may want to capture low hanging fruit, but the problem is your competitors will be thinking about the exact same thing, so if activation is easier, everyone goes after it and saturates the market.

Instead, if you focus on brand building while everyone else is focusing on activation, you get a double whammy, as evidence shows brand building can also grow shorter-term results, while the opposite isn't really true.

What this might mean for social pros is that you need to recognise what type of category you're in, and specifically whether it's a high or low interest category, with a level of high or low emotional purchases, to make your case.

Which leads to point number two...

2. Best practices are only as effective as the category you're in

One of my problems with best practices is they are completely devoid of category nuance, which means you end up not only defaulting to the average of your category, but you sometimes even default to the average of all categories.

We need to be more intentional about this stuff.

Smart marketers and social pros understand the wider context they're operating in, before knowing which best practices to adopt, and which are less important, at least in theory, which helps them focus their resources.

In the world of marketing effectiveness, there is a known adage around brand building and sales activation needing to be split around a 60:40 ratio, but when you read Effectiveness In Context, it shows importance category nuances.

So, if we're investing in brand building when it's precisely harder to achieve this, the next logical question is:

"When is it harder to do brand building, so i can justify this to my boss or board?"

You could evaluate this by answering two questions:

Is it a high or low consideration purchase?
Is it a high or low emotional purchase?

And based on that, you end up with different scenarios.

High consideration, high emotional purchase:

Brand building is extremely important.
Examples include luxury cars, engagement rings, and art pieces.
Here, brand building helps create strong emotional connections and trust, which are crucial for high-value, emotionally-driven decisions, essentially helping justify pricing power (vs just aim for volume), which is probably why even brands like Porsche publish on TikTok in a way that reinforces their sense of prestige.

High consideration, low emotional purchase:

Brand building is still important, but may focus more on reliability and trust.
An example is buying a house, mortgage products, or other bank services.
Here, brand building should emphasise factors like reputation, expertise, and long-term value, which is why a brand like Monzo comes across as approachable on social, it shows they're experts while being trustworthy.

Low consideration, high emotional purchase:

Brand building is important to create quick emotional appeal.
Examples include gourmet chocolates, trendy fashion accessories, and perfumes.
Here, brand building should focus on creating strong, positive associations and emotional connections that can influence impulse purchases, which is why perhaps the best possible social strategy for a gourmet chocolate brand isn't to entertain you, but to dazzle you with ASMR style long-form TikToks (if you have examples of brands doing this well, i'd love to know!).

Low consideration, low emotional purchase:

Brand building is less critical but still relevant.
An example is an iPhone charger, or any tech accessories, or shopping at your local retailer.
Here, brand building should focus on factors like reliability, convenience, and value for money, which is interesting because you'd think value is hard to do brand building around, except Tesco delivered a masterclass on this a few years ago by getting people to have fun with their self checkout machines on TikTok (is there anything less sexy than an automatic purchase mechanism? And yet they did it).

What about online brands?

You'd think brands that are heavily purchased online don't need to build a brand, since people will search for them.

Here's the problem with that.

They won't search for these brands, they will search for category keywords.

Which means you're not competing on price, which erodes your margins, so you might "win" and still go broke.

Dramatic much?

Instead, brands like eBay or Direct Line have demonstrated that investing in brand building means they can increase demand for brand specific searches, which means they have more chances of being in a buyer's consideration set, which in some cases (like Direct Line) means they can afford to not be in price comparison websites altogether.

But even if a brand is in a price comparison website, what happens is people go there, see all these options of cheaper providers, and end up considering a few cheaper ones but also the ones they recognise, because of mental availability, whereby a brand that is easier to think about has greater chances of getting considered and bought.

(I will soon write a piece about mental availability as well, as i'm almost done with Jenni Romaniuk's book on it.)

3. Your job is to make the price feel worthwhile

One of the most financially sound arguments i've seen for brand building is that while yes, it's harder to immediately demonstrate short term results (though there's plenty of evidence that it does that, but perhaps it takes a few months of sustained investment for the commercial impact to kick in), when a sale does happen you get to sell for more.

In many cases, brand building is nothing but a mechanism through which you can get people to feel ok enough with the fact you're more worth the bet than the average competitor.

This may be because you're more familiar, likable or exciting, which sounds woo woo, but it matters a huge deal.

You see, all of these are psychological tricks to effectively get people outside of a pure cost-benefit rational mode.

There is indeed evidence out there that if we like a brand, we tend to believe the positive information we come across when researching it, and often this determines our selective attention when choosing what to buy next.

Put simply, people are willing to pay more for brands they like or even love.

(Though statistically speaking most people don't love brands, they might find them merely likable, and this is ok).

Which gives validity to all the social work you're doing, whether organic or paid, due to its entertainment value.

By being entertaining, you maximise the chances of leaving a positive impression with people who see you.

But there's another problem that emerges with this.

Making the connection between brand fame online (reach, shares, maybe comments), and actual brand likability.

In a way that is comparable with other activities, and statistically significant (so no, 17 user comments won't cut it).

This is how you get non social pros to take social work more seriously, by creating shared language between the two.

To do this, we need to be smarter about how we measure social in what i call "more grown up ways".

Michael "Ex-Ryanair" Corcoran famously talks about how Ryanair combined earned reach with brand surveys.

To which i say hell yes, this is how you do it, and there's plenty of other methodologies you can deploy here as well.

A topic for a future post as well, as there's good companies out there doing the lord's social measurement work.

Aaaaaand let's stop there for now.

There's tons more but i don't want to overload you, or me, or the Kit content system, who knows how much it can handle when it comes to evidence based truth bombs to make us more effective communicators, social or otherwise.

But the point is, you should lean on these foundational studies to help you and your team make a stronger case for why social, in its weird and wonderful ways, is actually mostly governed by the same rules as most marketing.

You're still playing with the same market and psychological dynamics that affect all of us... except in a social setting.

It ain't more complicated than that.

And look, there are no guarantees right, people might still not care if you have evidence for why your social work is designed to bust feeds, not just somehow guarantee sales by tomorrow, but strategy is nothing but a game of odds, whereby by arming yourself with the right bits of evidence and arguments, your chances of buy-in are much greater.

So, hope the above is useful at helping you become a more effective social pro, or someone who can now talk about social in a way that feels cohesive with what the rest of the effectiveness literature says, because let's be honest: social is different, yes, but deep down it also isn't, so the more integrated we are with our thinking, the better.

And if all of the above left you feeling more confused, that's cool, just shoot me an email at rob@salmonlabs.co and i'd love to talk to you or your team about it, because in case you haven't noticed, i am a bit of a nerd about this stuff.

Keep swimming,

Rob