Typically, marketing teams naturally assume that localised brand content should bring benefits such as building brand loyalty and integrity alongside overcoming cultural barriers. These benefits should, in turn, generate higher sales figures… but can content become too localised?
An exciting research piece that raised some eyebrows surrounded the impact of localised brand content on viewer behaviour in and out of working hours.
The research came from Kinetic, McCann and Mediacom, whereby each agency ran a campaign for the well-known Steak and Cheese sandwich at Subway. The campaigns consisted of four different marketing strategy executions: Hyper-Local (in the Walton area of Liverpool), City-Local (in Leeds), Regional-Local (in Yorkshire) and Generic.
The results the campaigns concluded were slightly unexpected. They found that measuring against both sales data and restaurant footfall, the Hyper-Local content only improved ever so slightly against the Generic content, with less than a 1% uplift in each category. However, the City-Local and Regional-Local results seemed to impact behaviour far more effectively than the Generic content, as they both achieved a 9% and 8% sales uplift, respectively. In addition, City-Local also saw a 10% footfall increase, whilst Regional-Local also saw an increase of 8%.
These results should be taken with a pinch of salt because the methodology is slightly suspect. A better overall understanding of the contributing factors and a larger sample size may yield different results. Still, there is certainly a possibility that the derived results from this study could have exciting impacts on many brands. For example, is it more sensible to use City-Local and Regional-Local content rather than Hyper-Local? It is certainly worth a further look.
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