Creating a research tech-friendly corporate culture must start from the ground up. Learn how the Royal Bank of Canada was able to improve upon marketing campaigns with the implementation of research technology.
First published on Greenbook.
Challenge
Royal Bank of Canada is one of Canada’s biggest banks, serving more than 12 million customers and operating in 40 countries. To improve awareness of their services and product offerings, RBC’s marketing team wanted to create more timely and relevant marketing experiences, including new in-branch creative content that could support their employees while also informing their clients.
Yet in order to stay fresh and relevant to their clients, the marketing team knew the creatives needed to be changed frequently. So they began by developing bi-monthly themes based on prior research but quickly encountered delays at each stage of the creative review process. This was due to the many stakeholders involved in providing feedback, each with their own subjective opinions, making it difficult to move forward in a timely manner. What they needed was to find a faster, more efficient and fact-based approach for managing its creative content.
Solution
RBC engaged Delvinia to develop a solution that would help them expedite the creative process while maintaining the integrity of the data collected and reported. Off the bat, Delvinia identified a common industry problem: a logjam of research requests and a limited number of in-house market researchers to manage those requests. Once the problem was identified they established a solution: creating the automated market research platform, Methodify.
Delvinia’s client success team worked closely with RBC to understand the impact Methodify can have on their daily operations, specifically explaining:
- How automation frees up time for researchers to focus on the insights rather than on operational matters.
- The ability to engage their customer throughout product and marketing development
- How it’s scalable, controls for bias unintentionally built into typical DIY surveys, and delivers results quickly, accelerating the creative development process.
With the explicit support of the bank’s CMO, who mandated that his department adopt agile by testing all marketing efforts, Delvinia conducted numerous workshops and tutorials with RBC staff in marketing, research and insights roles to inform how insights can be gathered to inform more of their business decisions.
Outcome
Since the very first concept test was conducted, where the marketing team was able to take one look at the results and unequivocally discern the winning concept, every creative test subsequently has allowed customers to choose the bank’s theme. With these clear results delivered quickly, RBC could now apply this method to all of the bank’s marketing, not just the in-branch collateral. In 2018, for example, the bank’s advertising agency had proposed a creative concept aimed at a younger target audience. This led to a debate among the older executives at the boardroom table who believed no one would understand the joke referenced in the ad. A quick survey was launched on Methodify and within 24 hours the executives were proven wrong.
They then used Methodify to test the talent options for the ad, eventually landing on a prominent actor and comedian, who ranked highest in key categories among the target group. This helped ensure they invested wisely in the right celebrity endorsement. As a result of testing things they otherwise would never have, Methodify has helped limit subjectivity in decision making and taught senior executives that they are often too close to the business to make judgments. This culture change would not have been possible without measurable proof.