Decoding Decisions PH | Google Ads

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Hi, I'm Detario and thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to welcome you to Think with Google presents Decoding Decisions. You know in today's world we have all sorts of information at our fingertips. But you know having more information doesn't make decision making easier. In fact, 80% of people who have difficulty making purchase decisions say it's because of too much information. People rely on trusted touch points to help them evaluate information to make decisions confidently. And in a recent survey, nine in 10 Filipino consumers said it is more important to find a trusted source of information now compared to before COVID 19. At Google, we're humbled to see millions of Filipinos trusting Google search to help them make sense of the world around them. For example, last year we saw a 195% increase in search interest in which one is better. As Filipinos try to learn more about brands available to them, brands and businesses can play an important role in helping consumers make more confident decisions. This means understanding their priorities, preferences, and providing them with helpful and trustworthy information. In today's show, we'll take you on a journey to help you decode how consumers have changed the way they make decision and how you can apply them for your business. I hope that you will find the session informative and insightful. Enjoy the rest of the event. [Music] Do you remember a time when the only way to find out what was happening in the world was through the evening news? Or if you wanted to find out the distance between the sun and the earth, you had to ask a teacher or look it up in the library. Liked a song but didn't know its name? Well, you had to just sit by the radio and hope that it would be announced by the DJ. Today, we carry the vastness of human knowledge in our pockets. facts, perspectives, opinions, all accessible by the touch of a button. With so much information out there and so many resources to navigate them, it can be difficult to make sense of it. My name is Christina Moravar. I'm a social entrepreneur, author, and human rights advocate. I'm also a marketing professional. Not long ago, I got thinking about how much the way we access and consume information has changed dramatically in recent years. So, how has this access to information changed our collective psyche and how has it impacted our basic human need to make sense of it all? And how can brands benefit and thrive from helping us along this complex journey? And so, I set out to gather insights from experts in the field. Malcolm Gladwell is a world-renowned journalist, author, and public speaker. He's written for the New Yorker for more than 25 years and published seven books, five of which have charted on the New York Times bestseller list. You know, through most of our history as human beings, problems were caused by a lack of information. They were puzzles. And you solve a puzzle by going and finding new data that resolves the problem on the table. In an information scarce world, that's what decision-m looks like. It's puzzle solving. Well, we're no longer in an information scarce world. We're now in the opposite. We're in a world where we're inundated with information. So, we're no longer really dealing with puzzles. Uh we're dealing uh with mysteries. You have a big mound of data in front of you. And now your job is to sift through that data, make sense of it, prioritize it, throw out what isn't important. zero in on what is important. It's a task of understanding and a task of analysis. Um, in the digital age, the problems that we're faced with are overwhelmingly mysteries. Sapna Chada is Google's vice president of marketing for India, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Sapna's experience as a business and marketing leader gives her a unique perspective on the ways consumer behavior is changing here and now. In 2020, the onset of the pandemic pushed millions of people in Southeast Asia and India to begin using digital in ways we hadn't before. Without a choice, we had to embrace this behavioral change. And the amazing thing is these new behaviors have now become habitual. People have made the most of this hybrid life. Taking the best of physical and digital solutions where it's most convenient. They now use digital to do things that used to be strictly in-person activities. Whether it's attending a yoga class, catching up with friends, or even streaming a wedding to loved ones across the world. People are even buying cars online. Now, what happened to test driving? The physical and digital worlds have become seamless extensions of one another. The modern consumer embraces this variety of choice. Consumers want offerings that feel personal to them, that meet their needs, and mirror their values. But this plethora of choices is a double-edged sword. One of the things that uh human beings intuitively have difficulty doing is prioritizing information. So I say to you, what are you looking for in a car? and you say, "Well, I want something that's roomy, that gets good gas mileage, that looks good, uh, that goes really fast, and is really convenient to service, right? That's a typical response a consumer might give." But in fact, that's not really the way that's not really what you want in a car. Because if you if I were to sit with you and interrogate those decisions, I would discover that some of those factors matter far more to you than others. What really matters to you is that it goes really fast. What really matters to you is that it's roomy enough that you can fit your two kids seats in the back and have room for all your luggage and everything else doesn't matter as much. That kind of ability to look at a whole series of data points and appropriately rank them is one of the hardest and most valuable things we can do to assist people in making sense of of complicated decisions. It makes sense that with large amounts of unstructured information, people become confused, even paralyzed in their decision-m. Hi, it's Christine. you have the information, right? And this results in a breakdown in trust as people feel the need to be continually discerning and skeptical about which sources they engage with. In fact, 87% of people say trustworthy information is more important now than before the start of the pandemic. And 84% say they would purchase from brands that provide trustworthy information. There is no denying it. Trust is a big issue in the modern digital world and it's something we as humans struggle with on our own. I think we can all agree that in this day and age, trust has to be earned. You cannot just show up online with a great offer or idea and expect people to take you at face value. As marketers, we already know that decision-m for consumers is a complex, emotional process. And in an era of information overload, we've discovered that people tend to be even more distrustful online, further adding to the emotional strain of decision-m. We recently conducted in-depth research across India and Southeast Asia to explore how people make purchase decisions. And we found that when people are exposed to a purchase trigger such as a digital ad, a billboard, or even a conversation with a friend, they begin a process of exploration and using evaluation using a wide range of online sources to review their options and further refine their decisions. We call this the messy middle, a complex space between triggers and purchase where customers are one and lost. At its core, this messy middle is fueled by emotional tensions that are looking to be resolved and is unique to every single person. For example, I recently switched from a cosmetics brand that I've used for a long time to a number of new brands that I had never tried before. It all started with me searching for professional look for women. I bounced around between reviews, news articles, and landed on a video of a public figure who was talking about her personal style and her makeup routine. I watched this video, which was super informative. But rather than making my decision easier, it just opened up so many more questions for me. She was talking about different brands, contouring, skin tone, when and why she wears red lipstick. So after watching that video, I then spent hours and probably days going through countless searches to get answers to all of those questions that were now in my head. And gradually, piece by piece, I was able to figure out what would work best for me and which products would fulfill my needs. And I think that's also a really important thing to remember. There is rarely a right or wrong answer in these instances. What's right is different for every person. Septa's story is one that is no doubt familiar to people all over the world. That question of what's the best choice for me often leads us straight into the messy middle. A lot of people find navigating the messy middle extremely difficult. In fact, research proves that information overload is a leading cause of difficulty in making purchasing decisions. So what skills do people need in order to make good decisions? We think of decision good decision-m as being a function of intelligence and expertise and we overlook how much it's fundamentally a question of character. There's some wonderful research that um uh that characterizes decision makers into two groups. foxes who know uh a little bit about a whole great number of things and hedgehogs who know a lot about a little and intuitively I think that we believe hedgehogs are the ones who in their area of expertise make the best decisions. Turns out empirically that's not the case. The fox has a tremendous advantage over the hedgehog because if you know a little bit about a lot of things, it's probably easier for you to exercise humility in your decision-m. You're never blinded by your own expertise. You're always aware of your own limitations going into any kind of of complex decision. And for this, people turn to search. In a world where decision-m is more difficult than ever before, people are continuously searching for answers. That's why we are humbled that billions of consumers turn to Google to search for answers every single day. And this pushes us to continuously improve to provide people with the most relevant and helpful information from the most trustworthy and authoritative sources to help them make better decisions. Throughout the messy middle, Google search is the trusted place consumers keep coming back to. In fact, 73% of people say Google search is their number one touch point when looking for relevant information across all categories. People come to search to gain clarity and confidence when making a decision. This is because we fundamentally designed search to identify information that people are likely to find useful and reliable. Additionally, we've developed a number of search features that not only help you make sense of the information you're seeing online, but that also ranks this information based on how helpful it will be and provides direct access to important sources like health organizations and government entities. By doing this, search has removed some of the complexity people have to contend with when they make decisions. Google search's standing as a trusted information source and a platform that people come back to time and time again comes down to a willingness to continually evolve with a user's everchanging needs and serve the best to users and that evolution is constant. The search algorithm changes on average six times per day. As I discovered, this is something that drives Google's search team on their mission to continually provide a more useful service. One of our latest innovations that is powering our search technology is the multitask unified model or what we call mum which is an AI powered tool that can simultaneously understand information across a wide range of formats such as text, images, and video. MUM is not just able to process information, but it's able to make implicit connections across all these different sources all at the same time. People across Southeast Asia and India, they've continued to deepen their relationships with digital with growing searches related to online shopping and internet connectivity. We've collated all of these trends into our year and search report which is available for you to read on our think with Google site. [Music] It's clear that Google search is now integral with people's decision-making processes. And this presents an incredible opportunity for brands. Consider the messy emotional paths to purchase that consumers are treading and figure out how to help them on their way. Today, people have more access to information than at any other time in history. And it's our job to make sure they're connecting with the highest quality, most authoritative, most relevant information for them and that they're able to access the information that makes a difference in their lives. This is our core value and we feel deeply responsible to our users to make this happen. [Music] Hearing from Malcolm and Sapna really opened my eyes to how people make decisions in the modern world and how search can help them do this. But it's time to dig a little deeper into the second part of my original question. I want to know what role search plays for brands and how they can use it more effectively to support their growth. To get the insights that matter, I approached some of the top minds in global marketing who can give me valuable perspectives and hard data to guide my understanding. First up on my list was Byron Sharp. He's a professor of marketing from the Eron Bass Institute. It's the world's largest center for research into marketing. I'm really excited. Hi Byron. It's really a pleasure to meet you. One of the key topics that you talk a lot about is obviously physical and mental availability of brands. Could you talk a little bit about that and tell us exactly what you mean by that? In my book, How Brands Grow, I talk about all the empirical research over decades across lots of different categories that shows particular laws, patterns in the way that buyers buy and the way that brands perform. And the the theory that sort of fits with all those laws that wind together is what we would call availability theory. That in the long run, brands when they're competing for market share uh do so by building mental and physical availability. Of all the millions of brands in the world that I could buy, I tend to keep going back to the ones that are in my head, right? The ones that I recognize when I see them on shelf that I know what they do. Right? This is the mental availability. And then the physical availability is that that that I can actually easily buy them, that they will take my credit card, that they will deliver, that I know where to park, that I've got the app on my phone. All of these things make it possible for me to buy. And when a consumer has over overlapping mental and physical availability, those are the brands that they're going to be buying. So are lines blurred between online and offline? How does a brand build mental networks in this omni channel world? How should brands consider search? For example, the internet now is a very mature me medium and you know people are very used to being in the physical world and the virtual world and bouncing between them all the time. So yes, they are incredibly linked. And where does search advertising fit into this? Search is huge. And search is like, well, I liken it to it's physical availability. I mean, it's it's digital virtual, but it's different from advertising because advertising hits us when we're not largely where we're actually not in the buying situation. You know, search advertising is where someone they are they're looking for something. So, that's very much like they they're they're walking down the high street and they go, "Ah, well, I I need some shoes. This is a shoe shop. I'm going in here." and I'm going to look around. It's very hard work for the sales team to gain availability in physical bricks and mortar stores. Search is a is another way of doing that. Allowing consumers to be able to purchase your product, putting it in front of them when they're in a category buying moment. And actually, as a brand, when a consumer is searching for something at that moment, they're paying attention. So there is an opportunity for marketers when consumers are in that state when they're really looking for something specific on the search to speak to them. It's the opportunity if you make it and like physical availability, if you're not there, then you don't get the sale. Every day there are sales. If you're not there, you will lose that day's sales. So what would you say about the brand's media strategies? How does that contribute to that availability? The important thing is to get the the things overlapping both before and after purchase. I mean, so often, particularly when we buy a new brand, we don't we don't really register what that brand was. And it's only when we see the ad, oh, that's that's that's the one that I just bought. And that's enormously useful in laying down the mental structures for future purchases. You'd think something would be very effective. I mean, you give consumers free product and if it's a good product, they should adopt that into their repertoires, but so often it doesn't because it doesn't lay down the mental structures. The advertising uh needs to overlap with that physical availability both before and after purchase. Would you say then that the brand recognition on top of that physical and mental availability and I suppose that recognition builds on brand loyalty in the future? We are very loyal. We we of all the millions of brands we could buy, we keep going back to a few. We're not passionately in love with those brands, but we we love being loyal because it makes our lives easy. But for me to be loyal to a brand, the marketers need to a make it physically available to me. But they have to remind me that's that that's one of my brands. It's not so much we have to fight for loyalty, but we it's it's naturally there, but we have to uh encourage it, make it easy. Byron's perspective on search fulfilling physical availability in the digital world while also being a great place to build share of mine is something I hadn't considered before. But I still want to know how brands can use search more effectively within their media mix. How could it be more effectively used with other channels to achieve a range of business goals? So I'm looking to connect with an expert in marketing measurement and optimization. Paul Sinkinson is the managing director of Analytic Partners and has conducted extensive research into media mix effectiveness and how media channels can be synergized for optimal effectiveness for brands. Hi Paul, thanks for joining me. With the messy middle getting even messier, how can brands ensure they show up where they need to be? The journey of exploration and evaluation that consumers go on today is much more messy and emotional. With more eyeballs on screens and more decisions being re-examined, the combination of more access to information and general re-evaluation has put more brands back on the table. With brand loyalty under threat, now is the prime time for brands to be present as consumers reassess and look for solutions to overcome the tensions and uncertainties. So, the key question is, is your brand present at the right time in the right place when consumers need it most? Okay, so we know that integrated multi- channelannel campaigns deliver. How does search play a role? So now we know that the journey is not linear and indeed it's a little bit messy. It reinforces what we've been saying at Analytic Partners for some time. Brands need to be present on more than one touch point at a time. Now there's a couple of reasons for this. One, with more touch points, you're likely to get more reach, but you've got a greater chance for that to be more incremental reach. And secondly, the magic of synergy. Think of somebody seeing your billboard the day after seeing your TV ad. It's that magic that drives a great result. And we see that result across multiple channels. In fact, we see as you add touch points to a campaign, as long as it's integrated, you're going to increase ROI for each one added. That's more bang for buck with exactly the same spend just by unlocking the magic of Synergy. Synergy is the unheralded hero of marketing effectiveness. It's the very real time that 1 plus 1 equals more than two. However, those channels that are going to drive that synergy for you are often different. It depends upon what you're doing. So, the search to find the right channel is key. We see in the AP pack region that TV and search tends to have a synergy of 24%. That's 24% more ROI just by getting the magic of synergy together. Exactly the same budget. We see it with search and other online video with a 13% bump just by unlocking that synergy. So, how can brands maximize this synergistic lift? To maximize this synergistic lift, make sure that you've got search going across the full marketing funnel. Have it at the top with the likes of brand and awareness, but also bottomfunnel activities trying to drive conversion. It might make sense to focus on the short-term sales impact, particularly with the pressure that we're all under to drive an urgent business performance. However, this comes at the expense of your always on topfunnel activity. It can impact your long-term growth. Going dark for just a few months can destroy years of investment. Brand associations that you've held for a long time can be stolen by a competitor. Brand equity and brand health can be destroyed. Losing share of voice or in this case share of search can cost you a tremendous amount of budget and effort just to get back to the same point when you want to return to the market. Therefore, allocate out your investment for the future as well as for the current. Don't just focus on the next 3 months, focus on the next 3 years and make sure that we have funds allocated out for today and tomorrow. Paul's research convinced me that search should not just be seen as a standalone channel, but rather as an integral piece of any multi-channel campaign. Search's value is not only in its unique position within the decision-making journey, but in its incredible ability to deliver incremental benefits across a number of campaign goals, channels, and executions. Having spoken with Paul and Byron, there is one more piece of the puzzle that I need. What are the concrete actions that brands can take straight away to begin realizing the full potential of search in their campaigns? So, I turned to Shafali Nathan, director of large customer marketing and events at Google AP pack. Hi, Shafali. Wonderful to have you with me. So, I've gotten some good insight on why search works so well. The big question that's left for me is how can brands get the most from it? What's the secret to making search work for marketers? Well, there is something pretty close to a secret that I can share. But maybe let's start with an example first. Last year, my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary and I wanted to throw them this huge party. But obviously, we couldn't travel. So, I had to do all the searching from Singapore to find the best baker in Delhi, the best venue and the best DJ and all these little details. Now, most of the ads that I saw in searches were working from the last flick. I searched for catering in Delhi. I get ads for catering in Delhi and that can work really well. But what if a brand started thinking beyond the last click connecting the dots between the last search and previous searches? Then I'd be seeing ads for people just like me looking for catering for not just any party but an anniversary party in Delhi in the heat of July. That feels so much more personal. And that is the secret to search. The secret is understanding the customer's journey and helping them along that journey with ads that feel like they were written just for them. It does feel like a completely different paradigm from the last click approach. It really is. I think it's easy for us as marketeers to get too focused on the details, the ad copy, every single keyword. And those are important, no doubt. But the story of search is about so much more than that. It really is a journey. And the smart brands are using that journey to anticipate what customers will need even before the customer realizes it. So I'm guessing that this way of thinking will appeal to a lot of viewers. But it also sounds very complex because you're working on two fronts, right? Trying to make things personal and trying to do that across billions of searches. How do you do both? I know that it sounds complex, but in fact, it's very simple. It's the combination of what we call the math and the magic. I'll start where I think every brand should start and that's with the magic. The magic is the connection, the the meaningful connection that we make with customers. And the way to get that connection is trust. I can't stress enough how crucial this is. I tell marketers that brand trust is now their most valuable asset, even more than brand love. And that's especially true after the pandemic. By the way, last year searches for phrases like, "Is it true more than doubled in parts of AP pack?" Wow, that's incredible, right? And there are two sides to brand trust. There's the obvious one that customers need to trust your content. If you say that you're the best balloon company in Delhi, it's got to be true. And it has to feel personal. It can't be generic. But there's also this other side to trust. We want brands to respect our privacy, too. Which is why I'm really glad Google has built some impressive tools to aggregate and anonymize this data so that brands can target profiles of customers but do this in a very precise way. Trust does feel so important these days when I think about the brands that I trust the most and how much I've spent on their products over the years. Oh, me too. I think we all do. Okay, so trust creates the magic. What's the math? The math is how Google gets you that personalization at scale. If you want to be there for every single journey, you've got to really embrace automation because that's the only way to reach all your customers in the exact way they want to be helped. And because working at scale like this is so much more profitable, search can become one of your biggest growth drivers because the math and the magic make so much sense and are so good for business. I guess that's why I care so much about sharing the secret. The secret to following the journey. Exactly. The math and the magic. Such a great way of thinking about something that for a lot of brands seems to be incredibly complicated. But as Shafali said, the truth is that it's easier than many think. There are a number of brands across Asia Pacific who are already tapping into the incredible power of search to boost their businesses. [Applause] Hello everyone, I'm Shenin Arcelia. I'm the service pillar lead of the food and dairy culinary business unit at Nestle. Maggie is one of the leading brands in the Philippine culinary market. It is our mission in Maggie to enable our consumers to prepare the nutritious and delicious food that they love for their family. And so we aim to be their preferred ally in the kitchen. From our range of products that transforms their dishes from good to great to our recipe services that make homemade cooking an enjoyable experience. In 2020, we embarked on an important project to renovate our existing website. We needed to evolve and strengthen our functionality so that we can improve the recipe service and the total user experience. One of the challenges that we faced was building the first party user base that would re-engage our consumers and drive them to our website. We together with our search agency I prospect decided to partner with Google to overcome this challenge. Together we devised a plan that we hope could achieve our ambitious objectives and bring our Maggie experience to our consumers. Search was at the heart of our plan because it's an integral part of our consumers cooking journey as they plan their meals. We used crossplatform audience list to drive video viewers of the Maggie Philippines YouTube channel to the website. The results were fantastic. We found that 40% of our website visitors came from remarketing your list percentage much higher than we previously thought. And our metric showed that a cross-platform approach on re-engaging video viewers on search resulted to seven times higher click-through rate and 3.5 times higher conversion rate. Getting realtime consumer insights from our website and turning those consumer actions to marketing initiatives to drive business growth for Maggie enabled us to decode how consumers make purchasing decisions. This was pivotal to make our approach more personalized and data inspired. It's an understatement to say that we live in a time of constant flux. We're always discovering and processing new information from new sources that completely revolutionize the way we experience and view the world around us. Now that information is more democratic than ever before, the decision journey is no longer just about finding information. It's about finding information that is upto-date, relevant, and reputable. And for this, people turn to search. Search is the nucleus of many people's research journeys. It's a busy intersection of information that is visited and revisited many times as people go down their various roads to purchase. It's indispensable for people across the world. As physical availability in the real world has become less certain, search has filled that void and now occupies a unique space in people's minds and shopping journeys. For brands, positioning themselves at the core of people's information journeys presents incredible opportunities to connect with consumers at multiple stages of their purchase journeys. It allows brands to be helpful and establish trust and ultimately foster long-term connections, loyalty, and strategic growth through the nuances and everchanging factors influencing search and the Google ecosystem. There are three key elements that arise as points of priority. One, leverage the power of trust. People come to search for many different reasons and they trust search. In this day and age, the importance of trust cannot be overstated and there's an incredible opportunity for brands to show up with relevant messages to really help their consumers. Two, consider the role of search in brand growth. We heard from Byron about how brands can consider search as physical availability for their products. But brands should also consider how physical and mental availability interact and how they can use search effectively right across the full funnel. Three, synergize. Research shows that your media mix is more effective when search is included. So use that synergy to your advantage. Use search not only as a channel in its own right, but as a complimentary channel to others like online video and TV. As always, you can also reach out to your Google representative for further information, clarification, or additional questions. I am Christine Amur Lavar, and thank you for joining me on decoding decisions. [Music]