How market research powered creative planning for Impulse

Following a Cream Consulting audience strategy project for Unilever’s Impulse brand, we were tasked with the UK campaign launch ‘Fragrances for Every You’.

Aimed at inspiring women to embrace every side of their personality through fragrance (however contradictory those personalities might sometimes be) we needed to make sure the creative strategy & placement was as effective as possible.

Ahead of launching the campaign across a multichannel media plan, we worked with YouGov to conduct a creative study to assess potential imagery. The survey set out to determine whether the new creative direction resonated with our core audience and which specific creative route was the strongest.

We surveyed 2,000 34-54 aged women, asking what their current interaction with Impulse was and which creatives they felt resonated best with them. We were able to determine a clear best performing creative, alongside trends around brand familiarity, age and creative preference.

The campaign results reflected our learnings from the testing phase and performance metrics on social were overwhelmingly stronger for the best performing (and therefore upweighted) creative in the survey. On Meta in particular, CTR was 147% higher and Engagement Rate was 55% higher than the other creatives.

Our campaign analysis was obviously fundamental to optimisation decisions and campaign performance overall but the creative testing carried out may well have been the most important analysis with the greatest overall impact.  Creative testing is something we continue to strongly recommend as a cost effective way of guiding significant campaign decisions.