Objectives of knowledge management

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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