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Examples of RET in action

RET can be used to assess how consumers perceive brands in different markets; for example, Unilever 

could not understand why a campaign for Axe body spray wasn’t working in Italy when it was performing 

well in Poland. In both countries, TV advertising was positively received. But whereas in Poland the ads 

were followed by  high‑  street touchpoints such as the ‘Axe Police’ – attractive women who would ‘arrest’ 

young men and spray them with Axe – such reminders close to potential purchase moments were missing 

in Italy. RET can also diagnose how attitudes lead to the next step in the chain, as one major international 

charity discovered. The charity, which relies on a large network of stores selling both  second‑  hand and 

new goods to raise both revenue and awareness, recently applied RET in an effort to understand why 

direct donations (as opposed to store profits) to the charity were falling. The RET project revealed that 

the in‑store experience of customers was rather mixed; quite a few people felt that the stores were poorly 

organised and deduced from this that the charity probably wasn’t very good at helping its beneficiaries 

either.

RET can also help highlight the relative influence of channels, including those that are less easy to 

track than online channels. In another example, PepsiCo used RET to  fine‑  tune its re‑launch of Gatorade 

in Mexico, repositioning the brand around sports nutrition. They soon found that experiences in gyms and 

parks (seeing posters or seeing other people drinking Gatorade, for instance) were twice as effective in shift‑

ing brand attitudes as similar encounters elsewhere. They were able to quickly shift more ad and distribution 

resources into these touchpoints and pass on what they learnt as Gatorade was re‑launched in other Latin 

American countries.

Source: MacDonald et al. (2012).

Using  real‑  time experience tracking (RET) to assess the impact 

of omnichannel communications on customer touchpoints

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