For the first time, we've decided to address the most critical questions we come across regarding marketing attribution. We wanted to shed light on how brands are interpreting data in order to extract valuable insights.
The digitization of our industries has brought with it new challenges and opportunities. Adding more touchpoints between a customer and a website, app, platform, or mobile payment system has increased the amount of valuable data available—if analyzed properly. With the primary goal of leveraging big data to improve performance, brands have made significant investments in digital tools to improve data insights and extract more accurate conclusions. Of more than 94% of brands focused on data analysis, 52% encounter challenges when trying to draw actionable insights. Moreover, the remaining 48% are still trying to find the right tools to get data insights. Therefore, it's no longer a question of “if” brands should be analyzing data, but how.
According to research by Epsilon and GBH, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. This means customers have to be front of mind when making any strategic decisions. Additionally, the impatient, modern-day consumer prefers a dynamic experience when interacting with brands online, an area where 80% have increased investment post-pandemic. To be truly customer-centric, brands must start with data. Without key information, it's impossible to create and deliver tailored experiences. However, the solution relies on controlling and understanding the brand's data through tools that are easily accessible to gain insights into their audience.
In partnership with Publicis Sapient, we are happy to present our first report on The State of Measurement in Fashion, Luxury & Beauty 2022, a report based on interviews with over 1,100 industry professionals from all over the world—including China. This report confirms that many marketers are concerned about the lack of a unified metric system to support them when measuring the effectiveness of their data strategies. After reading, you'll understand the true meaning behind big data and accurate measurement points and how this allows brands to stay relevant in the current competitive landscape, improve their ROI, enhance their brand performance, and achieve increased efficiency.
I invite you to amplify your vision with Publicis Sapient who, through years of experience, has helped thousands of organizations unlock value through technology and data. You will hear from professionals who are facing the main challenges brands encounter when measuring marketing impact—crucial for assessing your marketing attribution efficiently. There's also a dedicated China focus, where you'll learn the main challenges brands encounter setting marketing budgets in the region. As we prepare to shift our marketing strategies for the customer of tomorrow, I hope this report will give you some reflection on how you focus the direction of your strategies for the years to come.
Michael Jaïs
CEO, Launchmetrics
Measurement is a double-edged sword because it can inform decision-making and strengthen brand equity while also overwhelming a brand with data and leading marketers down the wrong path with the wrong KPIs. However, measurement doesn’t need to be this way.
We’ve surveyed over 1,100 experts across the globe to understand the way they view measurement and the challenges they are facing. In this report, you will learn about the structural and strategic challenges paralyzing marketers, ways marketers are adapting to the consumer trends shaping the ever-evolving role of social media in commerce, and the lessons marketers have learned about the dangers of digital marketing.
Marketers are struggling to identify the right KPI, extract actionable insights from their data, and create a cross-channel view of their data. These obstacles are preventing teams from making data-driven decisions about their brand and business. In order to address these issues, brands need to establish a strong, connected measurement infrastructure that provides marketers with clear insights and data without third-party bias. 60% of marketers and 70% of data scientists in advertising believe a unified view of marketing performance needs to be a top priority for businesses. Brands need to work to upskill marketers, strengthen data fluency, and close the knowledge gap so that capital is directed to useful tools that lead to meaningful analysis.
It is no longer enough for marketers to view social media as solely an awareness-driving channel. In order to remain competitive, brands need to begin discussing the social strategy implications of business objectives and conversion. Our research shows that 80% of marketers are using economic measures to gauge influencer performance, or trying to identify proxies, like site traffic with referral links, to try to attribute sales to campaigns. When developing an omnichannel platform, take a holistic approach to social strategy that leverages measurement and attribution to hold influencers accountable for sales and optimizes investment based on the full spectrum of social tactics, from livestreaming to shoppable ads.
40% of our respondents identified benchmarking as their primary challenge. 31% of our respondents stated that identifying the right competitor benchmark tool to use was a significant obstacle during marketing planning. Leveraging a tailored benchmarking software tool can help marketing executives understand where their company sits in the market and how it is performing against their competitors within their niche. From gauging influencer success to campaign success, passing by identifying the different touchpoints in the buying journey, the concept of competitive benchmarking is an essential tool that all brands should use to assess performance and optimize for better results.
Digital marketing has only exacerbated issues with advertising congestion. Every marketer knows their brand needs to cut through the noise to build a sustainable and permanent relationship with their customer. While digital marketing has unlocked new channels and improved a marketer’s access to their channels, it has also led to an aggressive increase in message saturation and look-alike content. By enabling real-time personalization with effective measurement and attribution, marketers can cut through the chaff, address cognitive biases that stop the sale, and tailor experiences to maximize brand relevance. We’ve heard from consumers that not only are they more likely to purchase when an experience is personalized, but 52% of consumers are likely to 'cancel communications' when they aren’t personalized. Personalization at scale is the path to profitable growth. Companies leveraging personalization at scale see an average 2x to 3x faster growth rate in their revenue. Going into times of economic uncertainty, personalization has never been more important.
Celia Friedman, Managing Director, PUBLICIS SAPIENT:
“The founding promise of Digital Marketing was targeting and efficiency. Digital was supposed to deliver the right message, to the right person at the right time. Advertisers were supposed to find an optimal balance between Digital and Traditional Media.
After decades of drifting marketing spending, that breakeven point has finally been reached in 2021 with Digital and Traditional media spending finally almost at par in 2021. In the meantime, the focus of Digital Media moved further down the sales funnel from Awareness towards Conversion. And if performance measurement was already a significant challenge in such a scattered and ever-evolving media ecosystem, conversion attribution added an extra layer of complexity for marketers to address.”
In the ever-evolving digital world, it has become essential for professionals in the fashion, luxury, and beauty sectors to address the challenges brands face so they can maximize the impact of their activations and increase ROI. One way to do so is by measuring a brand’s performance and benchmarking initiatives against industry standards—leading to conversions being attributed to the correct marketing channel.
Even in 2022, most fashion and apparel companies have not fully transformed their digital businesses. Many brands have improved their digital presence and optimized their channel strategy, but building a digital strategy and transforming the business requires a full spectrum approach that looks at process, people, and product. In shaping the fashion space of tomorrow, marketers are still driven primarily by creativity rather than data. The FLB sector needs to balance on the tightrope between creativity and data-driven decisions. With the wealth of information at its fingertips, it’s impossible to ignore analytics in driving the business forward.
Moreover, the pandemic forced the world to rapidly adapt to the digital landscape, pushing executives to think strategically about how best to apply the necessary changes. As a result, CMOs list analytics and data as a top priority for their marketing organizations. Today’s customer is more demanding than ever before, thus there is a growing shift within marketing departments to bring functionality in-house and allow for greater consumer centricity.
Darren Howells, Brand Engagement Director, Browns:
"The industry has drastically changed in the last two years and keeps evolving. As a result, we always need to be on top of what’s happening in the industry, in order to successfully plan our future communication strategies. A big part of that relies on knowledge and experience but the most important one relies on data.
Thanks to data, we’re able to analyze and deeply understand the performance of past collections based on our customers and professionals’ behaviors. Data has helped us get better clarity of our target audience and so the more insight you have, the better and more strategic decisions you can make for the future."
As the customer’s pathway to purchase has been dynamically altered as a result of social media, marketers are increasingly utilizing one of the most effective tools for brands to scale their audience reach, engagement, and ultimately sales across all industries today—Influencer Marketing.
According to our data survey, the best performing Voice for brands to drive awareness is Owned Media, representing 39%, followed by Influencers at 22%. Influencer Marketing has evolved considerably with new technologies enabling brands to more accurately understand how influencers are driving actual sales—making it much easier for them to understand ROI. As a result, the focus has shifted from measuring awareness and engagement to measuring consumer conversion.
Marketers are increasingly expecting influencers to outline their unit economics, from their cost compared to other channels to their direct impact on sales. Driving awareness and engagement is no longer enough. Our data supports this shift in focus with 80% of marketers using economic measures to gauge the efficacy of influencers and only 24% who prioritize reach and views.
The reach and return on influencers remain undisputed; however, marketers need to select the right tools to analyze the data (based on what channel, purpose of tracking, and needs of the team viewing the report) as without the right tools, marketers can’t produce the right analysis. Brands identified this as a challenge, with 34% of CMOs and 51% of CTOs believing marketing data is unreliable, as relying on partners to self-report generates incentive to misrepresent or manipulate performance. As a result, we found there is a lack of tools.
As modern marketing strategies rely on working with many providers, partners, and influencers, the need for a single source of insights and analytics capabilities is important to ensure data is credible and reliable.
Today, marketers need to establish a rigorous and standardized framework for data collection, analysis, and archiving that outlines a clear process for planning measurement and marketing actions based on business objectives and value drivers. 28% of CMOs in the United States are investing in advanced measurement and analytics to bring more rigor to their marketing data and tracking capabilities. It has become clear that in 2022, investment in forward-looking capabilities and predictive analytics to make marketing data more actionable has become a priority for category leaders.
When it comes to Influencer marketing, for example, 40% of marketers globally count on influencers to self-report their data since brands may not have the tools to track them themselves—opening the door to potential misrepresentation and manipulation. Consequently, brands should invest in the tools that will allow for better visibility of the success of influencers’ campaigns rather than relying on self-reporting.
The methods used by brands to track Influencer mentions:
Furthermore, centralizing data and insights reduces redundant workflows and can be a good strategy for budget cuts, creating leaner teams, and being more strategic with decision making. Implementing data governance has a direct impact on the efficiency of a marketing organization and its ability to utilize the data collected.
Over 50% of CMOs say data accessibility and providing clear visibility of marketing performance to leadership is a driver of marketing success. Therefore, creating a clear governance model and system for tracking, reporting, and leveraging marketing data is a key contributor to a team’s internal alignment and success.
According to our research, 51.36% of marketers are finding that reading data to extract actionable insights is an issue at all levels, making it difficult to identify where Fashion, Beauty, and Luxury executives should invest.
The introduction of new technologies such as Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented Reality allows brands to present products in new ways that will attract a new generation of consumers. Thus, the customer journey of today is increasing in complexity and marketers need to ensure they are gathering and aggregating complete data to create a holistic customer profile. Marketing tools used by most companies are a great way to extract performance data and results. In fact, from the smallest startups to conglomerates, most companies use between 2 and 4 marketing tools.
The main challenge brands face when measuring marketing impact & attribution:
However, with a variety of marketing tools existing for different use cases, it can be overwhelming to choose the right ones considering the varying needs of the team. In the Fashion, Beauty, and Luxury industries specifically, the marketing team, representing 36% of the people who replied to the survey, say they are responsible for pulling data, putting reports together, and extracting conclusions. And due to limited resources within those teams, entry-level employees or trainees are often left to extract insights from data sets and put together reports, without having the necessary data training. Moreover, upper management and C-level profiles are also unfamiliar in using more technical marketing tools efficiently. As a result, without the right tools and right skills, marketers cannot produce prescriptive analysis that can help build more effective strategies.
Nicki Capstick, Marketing Director, PRETTYLITTLETHING:
"Here are the main challenges I have encountered when measuring marketing impact and attribution for my company.
Cross-device: In some of our major markets the majority of our revenue comes through our app, yet we struggle to accurately track performance from app marketing, and therefore can’t get an accurate, de-duplicated, cross-device view of performance at a marketing channel level.
Attribution: We can build a picture of attribution, through last-click data and in-platform data, but we struggle to connect the two together and understand cross-channel attribution. With a better understanding of attribution, we could better distribute our marketing $ throughout the marketing funnel, resulting in greater results.
Incrementality: We struggle to get a strong grasp on the incrementality of a lot of our marketing activity. Increased / decreased spend (overall and at a marketing channel level) doesn’t necessarily correlate to overall sales, leading us to question the incrementality of our marketing mix."
With 3 trillion new textile and garment companies entering the market daily, the fashion industry is one of the biggest industries in the world. However, 97% of economic profits for the entire industry are earned by just 20 companies, leaving emerging and up-and-coming designers behind. With this in mind, understanding the competitive landscape is key for brands to understand how they are performing in order to attract the interest of new consumers, and the only way to do so is through data.
According to our data, marketers identified benchmarking as their primary challenge while 36% of our respondents stated that identifying the right competitor benchmark tool to use was also a leading obstacle. However, the development of tailored benchmarking software tools is helping marketing executives fill the capability gap. The new technology assists in understanding where their company sits in the market and how it is performing against their competitors within their niche. From gauging influencer success to campaign success, passing by identifying the different touchpoints in the buying journey, the concept of competitive benchmarking is an essential tool that all brands should use to assess performance and optimize for visibility in true ROI/ROA.
Stefanie Wiesneth, Senior Director, Global Digital Marketing & CRM at PVH:
"We need to understand how the consumer interacts with our brand, what drives their consideration, purchase behavior, and in turn harness this knowledge to influence future behavior.
This then allows us to better serve and deliver on their increasing expectations of us as a brand."
For a decade, social media has been about impressions, reach, and awareness. However, the customer journey is evolving as brands look to integrate shoppability throughout their social strategy. Based on our research, there is an online component in 70% of fashion purchases. In 2021, 35% of consumers made at least one purchase through social media. By 2025, we expect a 26% increase in social commerce purchases. Shoppable social activations have become so prominent in fashion that according to our data, Instagram generated $330M in MIV® in luxury B2C in Q4 2021. Social media is playing a larger role in the lives of consumers, and as a result, a larger role in luxury and fashion commerce.
For brands, being able to create a connected online-to-offline journey will be a key driver of experience differentiation in 2022 and beyond. With that said, only 13% of marketers are currently tracking brick-and-mortar traffic and connecting it back to the digital journey. In order to win in a connected world, marketers need to prioritize mapping the spectrum of touchpoints the customer uses because going forward, brands need to take an active role in guiding the customer from search to purchase rather than relying solely on consumer-led discovery.
Consumers are increasingly turning to their brands to help them find, learn, and discover what they want and need. Our respondents have told us that owned media has quickly become one of the best performing Voices for the brand, outperforming both celebrities and brand partners by a wide margin. While this may be a significant switch for most marketers, we view this as an important opportunity for brands to take back control of the journey and improve the overall seamlessness of the path to purchase. 67% of businesses leverage their owned media communities to gather insights on their buying persona in order to improve marketing strategies and brand messaging. Additionally, 49% of brands with a strong community report cost savings of 25% annually due to more reliance on organic growth. Placing more emphasis on curating an ownable community will help brands reach a level of authenticity that they will need to achieve in order to attain sustainable growth.
Chinese consumers will account for 40% of the world’s luxury spending by 2025. Over the past ten years, China’s mainland fashion market has grown four-fold and will keep on growing into the next decade—leading to the fashion industry becoming one of China’s most lucrative industries.
There is an extensive amount of data available that brands can use to understand what consumers think and where the brand needs to be to stay relevant to this audience. The complication is, tracking and capturing that data is difficult in China, especially for global brands that are restricted from accessing local data.
As eCommerce and social commerce continue to evolve in China, measurement and tracking will play a crucial role in both the formation of brand-owned communities and retention of loyal followers. Leveraging the right suite of tools and implementing the right process will be an important first step during expansion throughout China.
As part of our survey, we interviewed more than 500 respondents in China to understand what difficulties they face with data measurement, where brands should invest their marketing budget and why they should consider competitive benchmarking in order to improve and grow quickly.
Like in the West, local and international brands compete ferociously to successfully enter the Chinese market. Social media has reached new heights as a channel for fashion eCommerce in 2022, driven by the adoption of social commerce by the fashion industry. eCommerce continues to play a crucial role for fashion brands in China. As Millennial and Gen Z consumers are projected to represent 65% of the urban population by 2025, this percentage represents the biggest opportunity for fashion and beauty brands to attract a new generation of consumers through social media.
According to our data, 70% of respondents from the China survey stated that using the right tool to have an overview of brand performance on social media such as WeChat, Weibo, RED, Douyin, and Bilibili represents their biggest challenge when measuring the impact and attribution of their marketing campaigns. This implies that 70% of marketers are essentially not attributing their marketing efforts to the right social media platform for their brand or rather not having a unified platform and metric to cross-compare.
Following the increase of internet users in China, KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders)—representing the spokesperson, brand ambassador, or thought leader in the East—are now the essence of any successful campaign.
Therefore, marketers, representing 49% according to our data, are investing in social commerce marketing strategies in 2022 working with KOLs. However, more than 38% of respondents stated that they are using the data provided by KOLs themselves, pulled from the social platform, to track results following a campaign, introducing bias in the accuracy of the data for the brand.
Olivier Abtan, Senior Managing Director, PUBLICIS SAPIENT:
"Every marketer is turning an eye to the metaverse as the next frontier for commerce. From limited edition, asset-backed NFTs to interactive pop-up shops, marketers are leveraging Web 3.0 to create new experiences and drive brand relevance. But, as with other channels, brands are flooding the virtual world with content, activations, and influencer engagements, creating a congestion and noise that is diluting the novelty that existed only a year ago.
Going forward, brands will need to create truly authentic, engaging experiences that are grounded in human insight to mitigate brand risk and strengthen brand equity. Measurement and attribution play a crucial role in this process, and brands need to shift from a model of purchasing to a process of owning their data. To own the metaverse, brands need to return to a focus on empathy rather than an over-emphasis on efficiency, and for fashion, luxury, and beauty brands, this means returning to a focus on consumer and community rather than emphasizing the headline and the buzz."
We view personalization as the end game for digital marketers because relationship building is fundamental to brand building, and personalization is the best tool we have to build relationships in a digital world.
Brands leveraging real-time personalization for their brand campaigns see an average increase of 15% in sales, as well as a two to three times faster growth rate in revenue compared to competitors. Additionally, more than 80% of consumers say they are more likely to purchase when brands personalize the experience, and over 50% of consumers say they will cancel contact with a brand when it isn’t personalized. Based on consumer feedback, it is clear that brands need to treat the consumer as an individual if they expect to cultivate a sense of community and trust.
The issue is, without proper measurement, attribution, and infrastructure, marketers can’t enable the level of personalization they need effectively. However, many marketers don’t seem to be ready to enable true personalization.
Personalization allows brands the possibility to tailor their messages to consumers and by doing so, controlling the touchpoints of the customer’s path to purchase. However, according to our data, 40% of respondents rely on either manual collection and collation of data, or manually inputting performance data from a third-party after the activation has finished.
To personalize an experience, marketers need to be able to make real-time optimizations to the journey across touchpoints. Executing personalization at scale is important as brands are looking to own their data which will lead to strengthening their brand equity through brand relevance in the market.
Personalization can speed up the sale cycle by reducing the touch points on the consumer’s journey, create more returning buyers by building a loyal audience, and increase your ROI. Consequently, marketers need to shift to a model where they own their own data and implement an infrastructure to ingest it in real-time because marketers need to own their customer journey and optimize it in real-time.
According to our data, whether the company has 1-50 or 1,001-2,000 employees, most of them struggle to understand their brand performance. Today, brand perception is becoming the most essential purchase driver for consumers. As consumers become increasingly concerned about a brand’s core values, the brand itself represents almost half of a company’s overall value. Thus, brand performance should drive strategic decision-making, based on data-driven insights.
Understanding brand performance relies on considering all strategic channels and voices used in campaigns across different markets. Examining from a cross-Voice, cross-channel, and cross-activation approach will allow for a better understanding of what is working and identify what opportunities brands are missing out on. The content performance, the creation of impactful experiences and the competitive benchmarking are the three Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that influence customer buying decisions and will put brands on the road to success.
As a result, measuring and analyzing the brand’s performance not only improves the overall strategy but builds brand equity. In a growing and increasingly competitive landscape, brands need the right insights and industry understanding to gain the upper hand over their competitors.
Following the pandemic, brands put innovation at the forefront of their strategies. In China, brands have embraced the change with new approaches when it comes to e-commerce, brick and mortar and of course, social commerce—which brings in more interaction and revenue for the brand. In China, local and international brands are competing ferociously to gain an advantage, and as a result, the importance of eCommerce in the fashion industry has significantly increased.
Millennial and Gen Z consumers view social media as their default channel for discovery, and in turn, their default channel when engaging brands. 52% of our respondents are declaring that live streaming is one of the top investments for marketers today, stating that Owned Social livestreams perform better than partner livestreams, representing 48% and 43% respectively.
We have seen a similar emphasis on brand-controlled content in the West, but while marketers in the West are focused more on driving website traffic from social channels, marketers in China are trying to drive social engagement to strengthen their social commerce strategies. Only 25% of our Chinese respondents said they prioritize traffic on-site. The majority prioritize social media engagement (65%), reads (45%) and impressions (40%), and impact on following (35%).
According to our survey, respondents in China also have a more balanced view of the best performing social media platform. Every channel was seen as an equally important voice for the brand, from RED to Weibo to Bilibili. We also note that in 2022, brands are growing their KOLs budget marketing significantly, given the massive impact on brands they have had over the past two years, due to text and photos to short videos, social commerce, and live streaming.
With that said, marketers in China seem to prefer mid-tier KOLs over mega KOLs, representing 44.70%, 43.60%, and 34.60% respectively, believing they can instill more confidence and trust in the product.
Therefore as marketers and consumers look for more interactive experiences, shoppable videos are going to rise in popularity over the years to come.
While close to 50% of Chinese respondents are using 5 or more tools to track data, 70% said they are struggling to find the right tool to track brand performance across social media, from WeChat to Douyin. Finally, 31.4% of respondents are struggling to find the right tools to get data insights on their brand performance while 31.3% are having a hard time defining the right KPIs for their brand strategy.
With this in mind, we understand that brands should use a tailored monitoring tool in order to get the right tracking needed for their brand. Being able to clearly map the customer journey and monitor brand performance will enable brands to better identify the right KPI for their audience, which will ultimately lead to better decision-making when launching new campaigns.
This report is based on a survey that was sent out between the 13th of October and the 19th of November 2021. A total of 1,145 professionals in marketing, communications and PR from the fashion, luxury and beauty industries completed the survey, of which 496 professionals were in China. Below is a breakdown of the profiles of the participants for both surveys.
Industries:
Seniority:
Area of Expertise:
Content Marketing, General Marketing, Social Media, PR & Comms, Digital Marketing, Opinion Leader Marketing
Content Marketing and General Marketing are the most common areas, followed by Social Media, PR & Comms, Digital Marketing, and then Opinion Leader Marketing.
Industries:
Seniority:
Area of Expertise:
Content Marketing, General Marketing, Social Media, PR & Comms, Digital Marketing, Opinion Leader Marketing
Content Marketing, General Marketing, Social Media, and PR & Comms are the most common areas of expertise, each approaching or slightly exceeding 30%. Digital Marketing and Opinion Leader Marketing are less common, with Opinion Leader Marketing being the least represented.
Launchmetrics’ proprietary Machine Learning algorithm, Media Impact Value™ (MIV®), allows brands to assign a monetary value to every post, interaction or article to measure its impact and identify contributions to brand performance across Voices, channels and regions. This single measurement standard lets you compare and understand which strategies create the most media impact across print, online and social by reflecting the point of view of the reader/viewer. At Launchmetrics, our methodology is built on more than 15 years of experience, working with and for Fashion, Lifestyle and Beauty (FLB) brands globally, now including China with our acquisition of PARKLU. Finely tuned with AI Machine Learning, the algorithm relies on both quantitative and qualitative attributes specific to the FLB industries (including audience engagement, industry relevance, source authority, and content quality) to ensure overall accuracy and relevance when benchmarking in the growing competitive landscape.
Launchmetrics’ Voice-Centric approach highlights the Voices creating value today to provide a holistic view of marketing performance and cross-compare the impact various activities have on the customer lifecycle. From Media, Celebrities, Creators, Partners and Owned Media, this methodology gives brands a unique framework to understand the ROI of these activities as well as the Voices that influence the customer buying journey from awareness and consideration to conversion and retention.
Key Opinion Leader, which is also known as an “influencer” in Western countries. Key opinion leaders are a spokesperson, a brand ambassador, or a thought leader. They are seen as having more importance and relevance than mass media because they are able to connect and relate to their audience.
Return On Investment (ROI): A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment. ROI tries to directly measure the amount of return on a particular investment, relative to the investment's cost.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI): A quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPIs provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions.
Launchmetrics:
Publicis Sapient:
2022
The State of Measurement
publicis sapient LAUNCH METRICS