Reinventing Brand Measurement: A Seven-Year Journey at Ally Financial

[Music] all right i think it's about that time let's go ahead and get this party started uh ashley since you're the only one i can see can you give me the thumbs up that you're hearing and seeing me wonderful so tech is our friend so far so good um good morning everyone and welcome to day two of the october installment of the quarantine virtual insights conference uh my name is bill mcdowell i'm ceo of accelerant research and we are your hosts for today's webinar extravaganza um thanks everybody for for tuning in if you are here for the first time um we'll give you a quick intro if you are rejoining us uh because you couldn't get enough yesterday thank you um we got some really good speakers lined up for today um so i am going to you know be the guy in the conference that gets up at the podium while everybody is filing in with their coffee and danishes um to give the quick housekeeping and overview but i'm only going to spend a quick minute doing that and get out of the way so that we can get to what everybody is here for and that's our outstanding lineup of speakers um so i'm gonna go through just a very quick you know the rules that we have been living by for for these conferences uh this is now gosh our fifth maybe installment of of this virtual conference uh it's been great you know obviously we can't be meeting in person um so we're trying to put together these these events that you know approximate the in-person conference to the best of our abilities um you know get a bunch of research geeks together to listen to other research geeks talk about their experiences and expertise that's what this is all about uh but we've got our ground rules to live by that we've been subscribing to uh number one being we are at the mercy of the tech i am in charlotte north carolina ashley is our as well our first speaker we've had some nasty storms that came through yesterday and you know some power outages that have been happening uh you know knock on wood that there are no issues but it might happen and if it does you know we'll pause and resume um but again fingers crossed that there are no issues with the tech it's been our friend so far um but we'll see again um we've got folks accessing via a lot of different uh channels right now we've got you know zoom webinar uh some folks are viewing via youtube uh some through linkedin through twitter so kind of all over the place um you know we're all sitting behind screens so we remind you to be respectful in the chat you know eliminate the trolls um this hasn't been an issue and i certainly don't anticipate it to be but just a reminder that you know just because we're not face to face you know doesn't mean that that we can you know let all of our our um kind of kindness out the door as it were um last rule is you know to the extent possible network engage interact again this is virtual so we can't shake hands with one another we can't you know talk to one another face to face or you know hang out in the buffet line together but you know we're trying our best to to approximate these things so if you're in the zoom meeting or if you're on youtube uh get in the chat and engage ask questions you know talk about your own experiences with regard to what what our speakers are sharing also on linkedin and twitter using the hashtag qvic2020 um get out there talk to one another not just the speakers but you know the attendees as well meet and greet to the extent possible that's you know we're all kind of locked down so if we can let's let's try to to virtually shake hands as it were um and that's it for me i'm gonna just let that be my spiel and then again get out of the way so our first speaker of the day is ashley spring director of marketing research at ally financial she's going to be doing a fascinating talk on reinventing brand measurement um so i'm going to disappear that ashley do her thing share her screen i'll pop back in at the end to lead q a so definitely if you're in the zoom or again if you're on youtube uh you know jot down any questions that you have either in that chat or in the q a function and we will circle back and answer them afterward all right so i'm going to stop sharing ashley and i'm going to let you do your thing all right sounds good uh so let's make sure [Music] there we go hopefully you should see my screen now excellent fantastic that's what i like to see all right well thank you so much bill uh and definitely you know love those ground rules and thank you guys so much for hosting this um this has been really a good opportunity just to hear from other researchers and i've been very excited i was able to listen in to a few yesterday and i've listened to a few in the past so really excited uh for the conversation um and appreciate the forum to have this so thought i would start out and just kind of walk through high level what we're gonna be talking about who i am so to start um really wanted to kind of ground in what we're going to be talking about today and and i will tell you i went back and forth on the title of reinventing brand measurement you're going to hear me use a couple of different words throughout um more than anything i would say this has been a journey and that really is what i'm going to be talking about today sharing with you how our brain measurement journey has gone um and how we've really involved evolved our insights frankly every day by leaning into our brand purpose at ally so there's three really big things that i want everyone to walk away with here um the first is this is not quick i have been on this journey um my team has been on this journey for seven years now um and i would say that you know we're adjusting every single day there's new tools and techniques that we find um that will fit into what we're trying to do it's not easy this took a lot of work we had great executive buy which i think really helped us as we move forward um but again there was refinement across the board you know we tried something if it didn't work okay let's move on from that but the third thing i would say is that more than anything it was rewarding and when you're able to get there it's just so fantastic the support from our leadership and frankly the full integration we have with our marketing team really takes our work from being research to true insights and opportunities for the company so with that a bit of an introduction for you because i think these are always really fun and like bill said a bit of a networking opportunity so who am i uh i thought it would be good to go with some of these little facts uh so first of all i moved around a lot growing up so as bill mentioned i'm here in charlotte right now i actually was born in georgia lived in tennessee i know you don't believe it with the southern accent no longer there but i have lived just about everywhere in the southeast as well but we ended up in ohio um when i was a sophomore in high school and at that point i had been to four different high schools in four different states and that was the first four semesters of high school so i kindly asked my father to just pause and let me graduate there um my dad is still in cincinnati ohio i have since moved uh but it worked out really well uh while i was you know moving around one of the things that i really found out is that i'm really good at math it was something that i enjoyed um i was really good at it and so that's actually where i took my degree um so my degree and background is in mathematics um i always find it very interesting in these conversations i've heard quite a few people recently in some of these similar virtual conferences talking about oh backgrounds in sociology and psychology which i think is amazing and that's how they got into research i was the one that was really excited about the statistics side of things um so that's how i got here looking specifically into research um graduated college went straight into research uh i spent seven years on the vendor side and i've now spent about 14 years on the client side so good balance of you know understanding from a vendor side how we get that data really getting down and dirty in there and starting to understand how to um really take that data and start to build the story and then from the client side really has been beneficial of the idea of taking the data from all of our partners and taking that story and actually integrating it into how we go about our business every single day i mentioned obviously 14 years at clients i joined ally in 2013 so as i talked about early this has been a seven year journey basically the journey we've been on since i joined ally and it's been just really fantastic here i'm super excited about where we've been and where we're going uh probably as you can tell by the fun hair color that matches a lot of the presentation i enjoy our colors and really um i think we have a great opportunity here with ally personally um i like to think of myself as a funty so a fun auntie i have a wonderful niece and nephew that i love spending time with especially since i don't personally have children of my own but i am a mom to two very precocious cats um one of whom is currently sunbathing in the windowsill uh in the room that i'm in right now uh we are looking at hopefully getting a doggie to join us soon so hopefully we can get a rescue to come in and join our family another thing here with ally i am a co-chair of our charlotte pride ally erg which is one of those things with ally that i just love about our company we have these groups that allow us whether we're allies with a group or participants in the group um they give us these chances to really connect with co-workers about things that we're passionate about the things that we identify with um in groups that we may not connect with otherwise it's folks outside of our day-to-day working atmosphere and i think it's just a great opportunity to learn engage and really just be a part of the community so i was really excited to be a part of the charlotte pride ally erg through our co-chair and then last but not least my happy places um unfortunately with everything going on with um covid and all that wonderful stuff um don't get to do them a lot but disney and concerts are my happy places i won't lie to you disney plus has kind of gotten me through a lot of this but that's what uh has been really beneficial so with that i will say i don't think you're gonna be surprised but as we go into my research background um that the personal brand research journey starts here um this is me about 2006 along with my sister-in-law my niece and some random princess um you know again kind of going to my background in brand research at this point in 2006 i had been working in brain research for a couple of years on the vendor side and we were leveraging um kevin keller's customer-based uh brand triangle brand equity model on global brand measurement for some of the billion dollar brands in png like tied pampers always um i joke around that once you talk about stains bms and flow in a board room you can talk about anything the research we were conducting provided really core metrics for these brands and we were using massive surveys that were going out daily quarterly or yearly depending on the needs uh we would analyze the category needs the brand performance for png as well as their competitors and opportunities for growth um i don't think anybody is going to be surprised when i say the reports would be hundreds of pages long and we'd provide you know summaries of each section along with a summary of the findings at the beginning of the deck you know we would spend two plus hours with executives quarterly or yearly going through as much as we could of the reports you know occasionally as part of the conversations we'd hear some discussion of the implications but you know we were on the vendor side it wasn't really kind of where we were fitting in we were there presenting the facts of the report not really the broader implications or strategies i then moved to the client side research and after a few years in sports came over to ally so for those of you that don't know ally um as you can see in our mission we are all about being for all things money we want to be the ally people deserve by providing digital products technology and services to help everyone achieve their best future uh our brand launched in 2009 at a time when the world didn't need another bank it needed a better bank and you may have seen our ads over the years and they have changed you know we started out with kids moved into skeptics and we actually just launched our new crisp and crumple dollar bill campaigns but our brand purpose has remained the same it's all about being a relentless ally that always does right and that idea is actually how we view our marketing research here so that includes our brand we really feel like we're a relentless ally for our marketing partners that always does right and part of that is really engaging with our marketing partners throughout and you're gonna see that as we start to think about how we've gone through that brand journey um and you know again top part of this conversation is you know how we've reinvented brand research here at li so i'm going to start well with where we were in 2013 as a brand so you may know about this but when i came to ally we had really two lines of business bank and auto and at the time those were two very different brands with two very different brand tracking surveys that were happening um but i don't think you'd be surprised to see the model that we were leveraging was pretty much the same thing that we had been using when i was on the vendor side and it had already been you know five ten years at that point since i had been on the vendor side and you know it's still the same brand model design that we had used but it's not a bad thing the model itself was working but it didn't take into account that only the bank brand was consumer facing the auto brand was dealer facing um but we were measuring the auto brand among consumers the same way we measured bank additionally these two brand surveys were the bulk of the research we conducted for the businesses each year so even though they were long surveys we kept either adding questions or trying to analyze the data to answer a business question that frankly the survey wasn't set up to answer and i mean it's as simple as this is 2013 what new fintech competitors would mean for our brand versus the current competitor list we were evaluating finally the reason why these surveys were the bulk of our research we conducted was frankly because of the cost we were spending over a million dollars a year on two surveys and again in p g days that probably would have been rally a little bit more scrappy um so that really just doesn't work for what we were trying to do so with that i thought it would be good so we talked about 2013. this actually gets us into how we started this evolution how we started to really reinvent all of this so looking at 2014 and 2015 we started out really small it was little changes that allowed us to start to really broaden our brand measurement so we worked with our partners to expand who we were including in the survey it was broadening our sample it was as simple as you know when we first built these surveys we were looking at our target audience only we weren't looking at the broad audience so all of a sudden it went from oh we don't want to look at 35 plus we want to look at 18 plus small change it opened things up though it started to give us a more realistic picture we also began adding in new products including vehicle service contracts and auto and credit card and bank and this was because our brand was starting to change so where we only had two lines of business when i first joined we were starting to expand we also adjusted our brand list so again back to that question of how are fintech competitors gonna be coming in and changing things up we really wanted to take out brands that weren't a primary focus and start adding in those new competitors that we needed to know how consumers were thinking about them lastly in that kind of 2014-2015 phase we adjust the filters in the survey and this was something that you know digging deep into the data itself from the brand research and doing some qualitative research we really found we were requiring consumers to have this high level of familiarity to answer any of our brand questions and the more we looked the more we found they could have a good connection with our brand with or without high levels of familiarity so we started to really open the survey up and no longer require all of these elements of the brand pyramid that i think we all became very accustomed to of you must be aware you then must be familiar then must consider to then do all of these other things as consumers are evolving that model just wasn't working as effectively as we started to move into 2016 um that's when the ally brand was really transitioning into a goal of one ally that's when our ceo jb came on board and his focus really was kind of reuniting this so it wasn't just the the bank brand and the auto brand we were one ally and that included moving into one marketing team and that meant that we needed to reflect that in our brand research so frankly at that point we had to move from two brand surveys to one master brand survey and that then made us focus in on a few key competitors and a broader product list that then included investments and changing the category description from bank to financial institution as we started to really expand our list of the products we were going to be offering we needed to change that name of who we are we were no longer just this bank we were a broader financial institution and all of this brought us frankly some significant savings it really opened up the opportunity to broaden our vendor set the brands we were no longer tracking in our master brand that we felt like they're good to know about we don't need to track it every single day we can actually start to evaluate those through other partnerships that measure hundreds of brands each month that then transitioned us into 2017 and i think here is where we really entered a test and learn phase including some new brand deep dive surveys and launching work to understand emotional connection to our brand that cost savings that we found in 16 again just further opened it up allowed us to really go deeper and this helped us to understand how our individual businesses were working with our brand um and we also kicked off with that new line of business survey um getting that deeper understanding so now that we had master brand we could start to look into that line of business survey and understand how that was really connecting with the master brand we also were able to identify some new attributes to focus in on in some of our ongoing tracking so this this transition in 2017 again it really was test to learn this worked this didn't work moved this here really was a great opportunity as we go into 2018 um this is where we really moved into refinement so we pulled back from the brand deep dive it was a great opportunity to really go and understand our brand and a point of transition but we did adjust our emotional attachment work and what we really found was um we focused in on taking those learnings to refine our master brand and our line of business work and we really honed in on those two being our source of truth here but still learning and refining and leveraging other tools that would allow us to further evolve we brought on a new ad testing partner as well in 2018 and this was something that really did allow us to measure our ally ads but also see ad performance for other competitors along with best practices and what works it really gave us key insights um to take back not just to our marketing partners but to our agencies as we were planning out campaigns and media buys you know historically we wouldn't test our ads as we were building them what we've been able to do now is to leverage these insights as we go and launch new ads and apply them to our next campaign so we're not having to do tests and iterations of the campaigns themselves we're learning each and every time we launch a new ad campaign we also brought on a new polling partner uh in 2018 and this really opened us up to new ways to measure campaign impact uh the breadth and frankly the continuity of the polling allowed us to start to look at channel users and target audiences during a specific time giving us that consistent metric for measuring brand impact of campaigns both at a holistic level and by channels and target audiences we actually had a great conversation just this morning talking about oh well you know we have this partnership with time and it's going to be on youtube well we want to know how that time partnership is actually impacting our brand and leveraging this polling partner has been a huge opportunity to get to go deeper into some of those areas where we just may not have been able to get those insights previously 2019 which seems uh at this point to have been five years ago not just last year um but we brought on a new partner to help us measure our brand value and this was something that our cmo andrea brenner had a great passion around and really has proven to be an invaluable insight for the company we were just sending out a report today from the team looking at you know how do we name our brand versus sub brands and how do we think about that and leveraging this brand value work as well as again that master brand um and other brand work that we have we were able to pull together this report to say to our partners here's how we think about it and here's what the opportunities are and here's how you could go forward with it we also began last year adjustments on emotional attachment so we were leveraging an existing relationship to put the ally brand up against not just our financial services competitors but now against the breadth of non-fi competitors including tech brands and this was really critical as a digital financial services company that is tech and digital led that we understand not just how we're doing up against fis but in that tech space and and that transition really has been a huge benefit to us additionally last year we worked with our master brand research partner to get further access to new time frames of data so while we were fielding daily historically we were only receiving monthly rollups so the new daily and weekly updates brought us new data cuts it gave us these additional analyses to understand again how our campaigns are performing and tying in with that new polling partner we brought on board in 2018 to really provide that full picture view of campaign performance which has been just really critical for our marketing partners and just more broadly to understand how we're performing and last but not least coming into 2020 um again we were continuing that refinement so not big changes like we saw those kind of first three years but moving into small things moving from quarterly point in time fielding of our line of business survey to now daily fielding and frankly it was fortuitous that we did this in 2020 um we actually ended up testing side by side the quarterly and the always-on uh early this year and it worked out that we you know found during that side-by-side that if we had just relied on the quarterly tracking based upon when you know kind of point in time when we had been fielding it we never would have seen how the large shifts in the stock market impacted our invest and bank brands but with that daily tracking we were actually able to capture the impacts and and we're starting to even leverage that going further to look into how some of the work that we're doing and thought leadership is actually impacting those individual business brands as well as the master brand and this new daily fielding also gave us the opportunity to leverage again both our master brand and our line of business surveys along with other tools we have to really understand that impact of marketing and that's including sponsorship pr email campaigns along with the traditional tv and digital and seeing how all of those have an impact on our brand so i mentioned earlier that this wasn't a quick reinvention and it wasn't easy but again it was rewarding and the impact of this journey has been remarkable first and foremost i think the most important part for any brand is we save money for the company we cut our brand research spending in half which you know nobody likes to cut budget but we were really sp and in the process we experimented with new techniques we kept some learned from others and really applied in our own frankly unique ally way we're a scrappy company if we can leverage existing data to replicate a metric that not only saves us a hundred thousand dollars in costs each year but gives us insights on hundreds more brands then that's a huge opportunity all of that experimentation i meant really brought us from using just one partner and set of surveys as i mentioned in 2013 to measure our brand to now there's six different vendors that we work with and and we partnered with these vendors very strategically we're focusing in on their expertise versus having just a couple of partners with a wide focus we found that expertise gives us the opportunity to leverage their data to understand the impact of our marketing and influence future work while still reporting consistent metrics at a holistic level so we started out with a picture of my niece and i at disney when i was in the early stages of my brand research journey so i thought it was only fitting that we start to close up in the same place so here we are this is my niece and my nephew uh from earlier this year she's 15 now and yes that is us at disney pre-covered uh we did go again that time we did have to wear masks back in september but we always had fun um you know the thing about all of this for me is we've grown and changed and i think it's so important to look back on some of these photos and see you know how much we've changed over the years but we're still the same person we're just evolving with the world around us and that really is how i think about our brand measurement strategy so where you know we started out as i came in the door we just wanted to know the awareness we still want to know the awareness but we're leveraging that similar framework and it's how we're using it and what else we're adding and knowing frankly the limitations that allow us to continue to evolve and meet the needs of marketing partners and businesses as we go forward and really starting to look at that full ecosystem of how our brand measurement can really help the team going forward so that's all i have i wanted to keep it pretty short for today because i know it's friday and everybody's excited to get on with the weekend but with that i will open it back up to any questions that we might have so i don't know bill if there were any that came in okay just pulling up now no questions yet this is what you get for being the first presenter of the day um any sneak peeks you can give us into okay you kind of recapped the evolution you know till now um what do you think about the the future of this this evolution yeah you know i think for us um we're still in that refinement phase i do foresee a little bit more of a test and in the next years um especially as you know we're a brand that wants to continue to grow our ceo is really eager to get into new product lines and really help consumers again kind of going back to our main brand positioning if we really want to be that ally for all things money so i think for us we're going to be looking into how we can continue to refine and i think we're going to just keep digging into the insights that we have i mean the data that we've really worked with our partners um has opened up this just huge new opportunity so um being able to not just look and say okay our awareness for this line of business is this and our consideration is this now we're able to go in and say oh well we have this activation going on or even frankly this conference going on how did our awareness of the brand change during that time frame really starting to evolve it and start to understand how each of these pieces and parts of our marketing are starting to add up to the bigger picture of it all okay looks like we've got a question from felicia which is what do you think about truest choosing purple as their prime color yeah listen i'll tell you um it was interesting there was obviously some buzz around the company uh when that came through uh you know historically i think banks all chose blue reds or green so you know i'm excited to see other companies kind of expanding into fun new colors i will tell you i was at truest park here in charlotte uh for an event a couple of weeks ago and it's one of those moments where i was like oh there's there's purple around here and it's not ally so it's interesting for let's sure any other questions for for ashley so i know you talked a little about uh you know the initial i guess starting of the evolution you know starting to work in you know the whole fintech invasion and and all that was going on there um i mean it seems like this category changes on a daily basis um you know i guess how often do you call time out fight the temptation to you know make changes on the fly at all times versus you know keeping things steady from from a tracking and trending stance yeah yeah i mean listen that's one of the the biggest aspects of this is where do you draw a line in the sand and say okay we have to make this change because of x y and z um i think for us we've tried to be very strategic about it um we when we start to see new brands and companies coming in that we want to monitor we're going to go to one of our partners that's just out testing brands every single day we will get a benchmark there so that we're not changing our tracking work but we at least start to get right we start to understand who they are how consumers are reacting to them how customers are reacting to them and how they compare to ally just at a very holistic level as we evaluate it um we will take the time and if it makes sense we'll add it into our brand tracking um but i think for us it's much more of how can we leverage our tools to start to give us that almost heads up of how these brands are performing so that we're not having to go in and make large changes to our brand tracker we really save those changes for when it's really critical because of changes in the marketplace i mean i've heard a lot of people talking about um the fact that they went and wholesale changed their brand tracking during covid makes sense but for us because we're no longer reliant on that that one survey really being our source of truth and all insights we actually were able to leverage all these other tools and techniques to answer some of those questions that were coming up around covid that i think others may have leaned into their brand tracking for and again it's what works best for your company our our team really has taken on much more of a of a role of being very connected to the marketing team so i i jokingly say i don't even know if i do research anymore i feel like i'm just a marketing partner um that happens to dig into the insights and kind of help the team there but you know we were so deep into what's happening with the consumers and how are things changing for them that realistically we didn't go into our brand tracker so much as what else going on that's changing their media habits that we then could infer from what we're seeing in our brand tracking so it's almost taking all the other information that we see from um various research to help inform how we analyze that data to tell the bigger story okay and a couple of questions come in let's see did you incorporate diy tools in bringing down your overall budget that you mentioned surprisingly not really um we we actually lean pretty heavily into some full-service companies um now i will tell you we have an amazing person on our team that is a fantastic statistician and he can take what our full service teams are doing with research um and analyze the data in new and innovative ways that would have really probably added some cost there um but primarily we're really leaning into companies that um are going out and doing the full service research for us um or buying syndicated research and then analyzing it and leveraging the different pieces and parts again to kind of tell that bigger story but we did look into diy we continue to have those conversations i don't shut it down we just really haven't found that it was enough of a cost savings to really validate going and changing over work actually work with our vendors to restructure how we were reporting it was as simple as do we need to have big quarterly reports or maybe could we cut it down to just a monthly scorecard and then we start to dig into the data so it's it's those types of refinements that allowed us to continue really strong relationships um but still get some of those cost savings that we needed to find that then allowed us to do other things and really expand the system okay so not so much a platform based diy approach but at least you know bringing some of the announcements and analysis yeah we've definitely brought some of the analysis back in house yep and michelle asks how do you measure brand health and what daily metrics do you review yeah so brand health i actually we look at it across a couple of key uh brand metrics so um obviously awareness and consideration are gonna be our top two um because we're still a relatively new brand i you know we just celebrated 10 years as ally um so we're still in that brand building phase um so awareness really is critical um but then we start to look into how emotionally attached are consumers and customers to our brand um are we making noise are are people talking about us uh our our cmo is a big fan of making sure that people are having those conversations we're getting that buzz and then we lean into the brand value and those really are kind of some of the big metrics that we continuously check to say are we on the right path with what we're doing there's other secondary metrics that we look into that really help us as we look to evaluate those core metrics but those are the things that really day in and day out we're checking just to make sure how are we doing are things changing um and then you know again bigger picture we'll look at some other things but those are the core kind of four or five that we we really focus in on let's see i think that was it for questions i did have one comment early on from katherine um who so your own brand hair color was not lost on her so fantastic i you know listen i have to tell you i just really love having fun hair colors it's benefit that i work for a company that has great colors that i can put in my hair so all right well i think that does it then ashley um great presentation and thank you so much um everybody looks like we got about 15 or so minutes before the the top of the next hour so grab a cup of coffee um do a bio break and we will catch you at the top of the hour uh ashley thanks again this was great absolutely thanks guys bye-bye