What’s special about MESH, the Experience Agency?

The post below is the result of a discussion between Ray Poynter from NewMR and Fiona Blades, President and Chief Experience Officer at MESH.

Q: Can you describe MESH for me in 140 characters?

A: Brand growth is driven by all experiences people have with brands, yet half or more typically go unmeasured. MESH uniquely addresses this gap.

Q: What sort of brand experiences are going unmeasured?

A: Three that come to mind are:

• Retailer advertising, advertising by retailers such as Best Buy, Tesco, or Walmart. We have seen many cases where being featured in retailer advertising has had major impacts on brands, but it is not usually picked up by traditional Share of Voice measures.
• Peer observation, seeing other people use a product, e.g. a mobile phone, impacts brand consideration, but is rarely measured by most brands. We have seen cases where ‘Seen others using it’ was actually the lead driver of purchase.
• Experiential touchpoints, for example for Gatorade in Mexico this meant understanding how people interacted with the brand and its messages in gyms, fitness centres, and parks. People experiencing these touchpoints were twice as likely to endorse the brand.

Q: Why do you think so many brand experiences are not being measured?”

A: The first reason is that most marketers do not know how important these experiences are. Once they do know, they want to measure them as KPIs. The second problem relates to silos, many of the experiences that impact brands are not the responsibility of the people making the research decisions. But perhaps most importantly, most measurement approaches are based on what companies are doing, they are not based on the customer’s perspective.

 

Q: So, how do MESH measure these experiences?

A: We capture people’s experiences with brands using their own mobile phones. We ask participants in our studies to tell us every time they come into contact with a client’s brand and its competitors. Normally we find out the brand, the touchpoint and very importantly how the experience made the person feel ‘in the moment’. In combination with other data sources (like media spend) and survey questions (e.g. Consideration), we can use this Real-time Experience Tracking (RET) data to understand the efficiency and impact the different brand experiences are having on brand perception and sales.

Q: What is next for MESH?

A: Now we have a Real-time Experience database collected over 9 years, we have millions of experiences to analyse. We have created an Experience Intelligence Unit composed of data experts and statisticians to combine other data sources with RET data. This is helping us to discover the predictive value of real-time experiences and to validate new metrics, such as Share of Experience, which is a much better metric than Share of Voice at predicting future Consideration and Market Share.

If you’d like to find out more about MESH, visit meshexperience.com.