Immersion Active presents Ageless Marketing

The Relentless Myth of the Rational Customer

We’ve had it so wrong in marketing for so long that like the proverbial frog in a tub of hot water with rising temperatures we haven’t noted incremental changes as we’ve actually become even more wrong in how we think about customers and marketing.

One of the most damaging realms of marketing mythology revolves around the idea that while  everyone promotes giving messages an emotional twist the truth is that not many marketers understand this dynamic. Sorry to be so damning, but if one examines the rate of campaign failures we can obtain no other conclusion.

In the first place because of our own cultural conditioning we don’t really believe that emotions are the foundation of our decisions. We harbor the illusion that because we are rational beings we analyze our options and make decisions based on what our analysis reveals in our best interests. So we structure our marketing messages under the same assumption.

The only thing wrong with this scenario is that it’s pretty much wrong and new findings in neuropsychology are showing why.

But it’s not necessary to shove consumers through $3 million CAT scans to learn how wrong we have been and what we should be doing instead. All the greats in the golden days of advertising, e.g., Ogilvy, Bernbach, Barnett, et al) intuitively knew the right way to communicate with customer. 

A friend just emailed me a TED talk on the topic that I heartily recommend. Marketer Simon Sinek just uses a flip chart – yes, no PowerPoint – and some common sense to illuminate what he claims is the biggest flaw in conventional marketing. He is worth listening to. But don’t just listen to the Sinek: study what his words mean. This experience could (honestly) change the way you see customers, approach marketing – and view yourself.

 

An Interesting Read: In Praise of Dissent

Catch this article in Ode, a fascinating magazine devoted to "intelligent optimists." The article has nothing to do with the central theme of this blog, but everything to do with life. If you have ever read About under my signature picture with a mule named Dusty, you have a clue as to why this article appealed to me. I dedicate this posting to all of you out there who have what it takes to avoid groupthink. As we move into this next decade you may find the tests of your will against those immobilized by the status quo increasing. As I indicated several posts ago we are in for changes taking place at warp speed in directions beyond most people's imaginations a decade or so ago. So -- damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

A Back to the Future Journey in Marketing

At last! A new book that is thoroughly engaging as it tells us much of what we already know – or should know. This book is novel in that in order to experience greater marketing success in the future it turns our attention to our past. It is indeed, a back-to-the-future kind of book.  

Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran’s The Hyper-Social Organization takes us back to our roots – to times before recorded history when we became homo sapiens. It is a book about marketing in the age of so-called social media that reminds us of who we really are.

Like you probably are, I’m tired of the endless stream of books that claim to have new, breakthrough insights. Their authors typically have an idea that they think is unique but is more likely old wine in new bottles or at least not near as revolutionary as jacket copy makes out.  

While the marketing world at-large is going ga-ga over Web 2.0, Gossieaux and Ed Moran won’t let us forget that we are still Human 1.0. Technology may be vastly different from 10,000 years ago but human social organization and behavior is fundamentally as it was then. The authors remind us that our basic social needs have not changed in thousands of years.

They call to our attention the fact that despite all the friends you may have in your Facebook account and followers you have @Twitter, you are unlikely to maintain stable relationships with more than about 150 people. Guess what. On average, ancient farming villages and tribes were made up of about 150 people.

The jacket copy on The Hyper-Social Organization speaks of 5 steps to being hyper-social:

1.       Forget technology – understand the four drivers of successful communities.

2.       Forget market segments and consumers – think tribes and humans.

3.       Forget company centricity – think human centricity.

4.       Forget channels – think networks.

5.       Forget processes and hierarchies – think social messiness.

You can see from those 5 steps that Gossieaux and Ed Moran are dissing  a number of sacred cows in marketing. In doing so they present us with a refreshing view of the marketplace – not a new view, but a refreshing  view!

Gossieaux and Ed Moran remind us of how easy it is to get so swept up into technology that we forget the basics of what it has mean to be human in social terms for thousands of years. They do a good job of showing us how to use technology as a way of better meeting our ancient needs in the complex world of today.

 

 

 

 

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated (Part 4 of a Series)

Avoiding conflict between online and offline expression of the brand

An exercise I sometimes put before people in a marketing meeting is asking each person to write down the personality type that best describes the brand we are meeting about. It certainly is not an original exercise, but it never loses its value. If there are eight people in the meeting a good likelihood exists that no more than two or three will see the brand the same way.

Consistency has always been an issue in marketing. It can arise when the agency of record makes a significant team change. Consistency commonly becomes an issue when a client changes agencies. And consistency is an inevitable challenge when a company retains multiple agencies on a specialty basis such as having one for offline marketing and another for online marketing.

A brand can be compromised by inconsistencies in a number of ways. Style differences in communications are one way. This applies to both visual and semantic style differences. Major brands typically devote considerable effort to achieve consistency in visual styles. Typically a brand style book describes how a logo is to be reproduced and used or not used. The style book also carries specifications for colors and fonts to be used in communications.

One thing rarely addressed in style books is a brand’s semiotic profile. Semiotics is the study of symbols and symbol systems. A logo is the semiotic heart of a brand, but a strong brand depends on a well-managed system of symbols.

Take McDonald’s.  It is one of the best managed brands on the planet. First, it knows who it is and generally acts with well-disciplined consistency to express itself. Like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s is an example of the archetypal Innocent. Its golden arches are its primary logo, but its iconic clown Ronald McDonald plays a crucial role in defining the brand as the Innocent.

Were McDonald’s to create a new character to represent a different archetype, say one that conformed to the archetypal Joker such as Burger King’s silly King mask does – it could harm the brand. Seeing an old friend sporting a new personality is unnerving. This is the most important reason for establishing and maintaining a brand style book.

It takes a long time to position a brand in the mind of the market, but a single ill-conceived campaign can destroy years of investment in brand equity-building. New Coke is a classic example of an ill-conceived campaign that Coke was fortunate to survive, but Oldsmobile never survived the infamous ”This isn’t your father’s Oldsmobile.” Clearly, the creative director on that campaign  did not understand how people cognitively and emotionally process brands.

A brand’s semiotic profile should be described in detail in the brand style book.  The discussion should be supported by research. Inevitably, a new agency, a new creative director or a new CMO will appear on the scene with his or her ideas about how to make the brand really sing to the market and end up off key.

Importantly, semiotics is not just about visual symbols. It extends into a brand’s narrative. The Hallmark brand understands this. The brand’s lexical executions are tightly managed to reflect the Lover archetype it represents.

A brand’s narrative is a crucial factor in how consumers process a brand. The narrative voice must be consistent with the brand’s archetypal personality. When Coke tried a slapstick comedic approach several years ago, like Pepsi does very well, it bombed. Innocents don’t do slapstick.

I want to close this post with a question to companies that have a brand to develop and protect: Do you have a brand style book? If the answer is “No” I suggest that developing one should be top priority in these times when consumers rely more than ever on brands they deem trustworthy.

These are challenging times for brands. On one hand every product recall, every news article about corporate ethics and every aggravating customer experience makes consumers more skeptical and less trusting of brands and companies behind brands. On the other hand, once they feel they can trust a brand they breathe a sigh of relief and get on with their lives. But inconsistency in brand messaging is a major challenge not to be underestimated.

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated (Part 3 of a Series)

On conflicts between online and offline brand management

Many companies today have two primary communications agencies. One handles marketing in the real world and is often designated as the agency of record. The other has lead responsibility in the virtual world of the Internet.

Some companies go with a single agency that purports to have superior capabilities in both worlds. But can a company deliver to a client with equal competence in both worlds?

I’m reminded of someone who once told me that buildings designed by architects sometimes fall down while buildings designed by engineers are ugly. His point was that the culture of an organization almost inevitably  projects the values of the founding discipline.

Certainly, over the years I have seen important qualitative differences between integrative agencies and direct response agencies. Integrative agencies tend to have a broader range of expression than direct response agencies. In fact the term “direct response” implies expression limited by qualitative analysis of marketplace response.

I expect that important strategic differences tend to exist between online and offline department within traditional agencies, and certainly  between independent offline and online agencies. 

One area in which differences may have critical consequences is in brand husbandry – managing the meaning of marketing messages so that the customer seamlessly experiences the brand as she moves back and forth through the invisible membrane dividing the online and offline worlds.

I say invisible membrane because in the deeper levels of the  brain, we do not sharply demark a property line between the 3-D world we live in and the world of 0’s and 1’s we now spend a goodly portion of our time in. This is brilliantly illustrated in a 7-year old book whose perspective is as fresh today as it was when I first read it. It’s called The Media Equation by Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass. Anyone involved in online marketing is missing out on some pretty big ideas if they have not read this amazingly insightful book.

Back to the brand question – what Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson insightfully call “meaning management.”

Meaning management or brand husbandry is generally a more intimate and more dynamic activity online than it is offline in any other setting  except in face-to-face selling.  Understanding this begins with Reeves and Nass’s research which shows that viscerally  interact with broadcast and online media using many of the same social rules they use in human-to-human exchanges.

For example, Reeves and Nass assembled a group of self-styled tech nerds who denied thinking of their computers as human. “Just tools, they said. They then were each positioned in front of a computer to carry out a learning exercise. Midway through the exercise the computer queried the nerds about how clear its instruction were. They  “No problem” they in essence responded. In the second half of the experiment, midway through another learning exercise, the subjects were instructed to take up a position in front of another computer. Then the second computer asked them how well the first computer was doing in getting its instructions across. “Not so well” the essence of the second round of responses.

Think of how you would likely respond to someone how asked you, “How am I doing in getting my instructions across to you?”  Most of us would be inclined to give a response similar to the one given by the nerds to the first computer, but just as likely to tell another person who asked how clear the instructions were that they could stand some improvement.

The bilateral communications possible on the Internet have complicated the management of a brand’s meaning. From the marketer’s side of the “media equation” it’s not hard to get off track and frustrate those on the consumer side. Just recall, for example, how often you get a voice recognition avatar when you call a bank or airline or whatever and get angry because the damned thing is not paying attention to what you’re saying. Score meaning management 0

. Such episodes erode customer loyalty. People simply don’t like being in relationships in which other parties don’t appear to be listening to you. While a print ad or television commercial is generating  positive feelings about a brand the customers’ online experience can erode all the good will created by the print and broadcast messaging.

NEXT IN THIS SERIES: Avoiding conflict between online and offline expression of the brand.

 

 

 

 

How We Decide

I recently highlighted a new book about the brain: The Master and His Emissary by British neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. Having read dozens of books about the brain over the years, I’m comfortable saying in my claim that this is one of the most important books ever written about the brain for general audiences.

But now comes another book about the brain:  How We Decide, by science writer Jonah Lehrer whose writing is highly accessible. We’re on the cusp of major changes in how we view the human brain and mind. This book does as better job than any I know about in introducing some of these changes to lay readers.   

The revealing lights of contemporary brain science have shown that our traditional views of what goes on between our ears is grossly out of whack with reality. New insights into the workings of the mind will influence every major field in which human behavior is a telling factor. From my perspective as a marketer, I foresee huge changes in how we shape our messages.

For instance, marketers need to learn more about how to get the attention of the right hemisphere of the brain. That is where most customer decisions originate and are concluded.

But how do you talk to the right brain?  The left side of the brain is the language side. The right brain has only primitive language abilities. A message that tells customers about the superior virtues of a product generally gets a yawn from the right brain. The right brain is deaf and blind to rational entreaties.

A message has to produce an emotional response to get the right brain’s attention. And because the right brain serves as a gateway to the left brain, no emotional response to a message by the right brain likely means no rational attention by the left brain.

The idea of so-called neuromarketing is getting a lot of attention these days. The term generally refers to consumer research using brain scanning tools. Researchers watch a consumer’s brain while she reacts to a word, image or other marketing-related stimulus. However, not many marketing firms can afford a $3 million fMRI scanner. So, the next best thing – no, the far better thing is for people involved in creating and approving marketing messages to learn something about how brains and minds work. In fact, save time and don’t pay any attention to reports of what great things await us in marketing as fMRI scanning technology gets better. As Jonah Lehrer wrote recently in his blog The Frontal Cortex

Functional MRI has been used to study all sorts of sexy psychological properties. You've probably seen the headlines: "Scientists Discover Love in the Brain!" and "This Is Your Brain on God!" Such claims are often accompanied by a pretty silhouette of a skull, highlighted with splotches of primary color. It's like staring at a portrait of the soul. It's also false. In reality, huge swaths of the cortex are involved in every aspect of cognition. The mind is a knot of interconnections, so interpreting the scan depends on leaving lots of stuff out, sifting through noise for the signal. We make sense of the data by deleting what we don't understand.

What's disappointing here isn't just that these early fMRI studies are overhyped or miss important facts. It's that this mistake is all too familiar. Time and time again, an experimental gadget gets introduced -- it doesn't matter if it's a supercollider or a gene chip or an fMRI machine -- and we're told it will allow us to glimpse the underlying logic of everything. But the tool always disappoints, doesn't it? We soon realize that those pretty pictures are incomplete and that we can't reduce our complex subject to a few colorful spots. So here's a pitch: Scientists should learn to expect this cycle -- to anticipate that the universe is always more networked and complicated than reductionist approaches can reveal.

So, buy a copy of How We Decide to take to the beach or off into the mountains with you on your summer vacation. But if you choose not to learn more about how the customer’s brain and mind work, maybe it’s time to consider changing your career. The only problem is I have a hard time thinking of a career that will not be changed by new insights into the workings of the intelligent mass of tissue between our ears.

 

Motivation: The subject of Daniel Pink's Latest

If you would like to get a great synopsis of Daniel Pink's new best seller about workplace motivations go to this mind map-illustrated 11-minute presentation by Pink. His book is called Drive:The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated (Part 2 of a Series)

Brands as Archetypal Personalities

Brands are metaphors that represent products, companies and other organizations ranging from symphony orchestras to sports teams.

Usually consisting of a single term or symbol, marketers try to pack as much meaning into a brand as they can. Margret Mark and Carol Pearson, authors of The Hero and the Outlaw call the art of branding “meaning management.”

The Hero and the Outlaw, one of the best books on meaning management ever written in my view, is based on a study of over 1,110 brands. Mark and Pearson maintain that brands fall into one of 12 archetypes:

The Innocent: e.g., Coke, Disney, Pillsbury Doughboy

The Explorer: Starbucks, Jeep, Amazon

The Sage: Oprah, Discovery Channel, Mayo Clinic

The Hero: U.S. Army, FedEx, Nike

The Outlaw:  Harley-Davidson, MTV, Apple

The Magician: Master Card, Energizer, Dannon

The Regular Guy/Gal: Perdue, Wrangler Jeans, Subway

The Lover:  Hallmark, Godiva, Jaguar

The Jester: Pepsi, Bud Light, M&Ms

The Caregiver: Nordstrom, Campbell Soup, Marriott

The Creator: Sesame Street, Martha Stewart, Home Depot

The Ruler: Microsoft, Cadillac, Hertz

An archetype is a model of a person-type, personality or behavior style that projects meanings which are universally present in human life. If you were asked to Coke in terms of a personality type you might not invoke the word “innocent” but odds are that the words and images you summoned would be consistent with what “innocent” stands for. And the same would likely hold true for the other eleven archetypes in Mark and Pearson’s typology.

 And that would be the case around the world in every culture, for that is what an archetype is all about.

Despite the universality of archetypal meanings, they are generally poorly understood in marketing. For example, after a brand has become associated with an archetypal image in the mind of the market, getting the market to go along with a personality change is a rare accomplishment. Nevertheless, marketers often attempt to change a brand’s archetypal personality. The story of the New Coke marketing disaster is a case in point. The much-ridiculed “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign is another. Anecdotal evidence of the generally poor understanding of how brands work in consumers’ psyches appears every day in media.

A few years back Coke ran several commercials that so sharply deviated from its Innocent archetype that it was inundated with complaints. One commercial depicted a 101-year old at a party knocking stuff over with her electric wheelchair after being told that there was no Coke in the house. Another showed a soldier returning from boot camp storming out of a party in his honor after also being told Coke was not available. Substitute Pepsi the Jester, for Coke the Innocent and the ads would have worked.

Mark and Pearson got it right when they wrote,” Archetypes are the heartbeat of a brand because they convey a meaning that makes customers relate to a product as if it actually were alive in some way. They have a relationship with it. They care about it.”

That is not idle speculation or unsupported opinion. As noted in the last post in this series, brands initially are processed in the right hemisphere of the brain where only objects and conditions related to living things are processed. If a brand was not perceived as alive in some way or intimately connected to something that is alive, it would be processed in the left hemisphere.

I have heard skeptics say something like, “People don’t want relationships with their toothpaste.” But the mere fact that a person has a favorite toothpaste brand says differently. She may not experience the relationship at a fully conscious level, but her connection with her toothpaste is nevertheless grounded in emotions. They guide her as she travels down the dental care isle in her pharmacy or local grocery store.

 _____________________

I misspoke in my last post. I promised to begin making the case that the Internet has made branding more important than ever and why that is. However, as I began thinking through what I wanted to say, I realized that my arguments rest on a better understanding of branding than generally exists in marketing.  But I will bring the Internet into the discussion in a future post, after a bit more discussion of the basics of brand husbandry.

The Death of Branding Has Been Exaggerated

Mark Twain famously wrote a friend on the occasion of rumors about his well-being, “the report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Over the past two decades numerous articles have exaggerated the death of branding. Don Peppers and partner Martha Rogers, who introduced the term 1:1 marketing to us, were among the first.

The duo declared in a 1995 Marketing Tools article, “The mass marketing game (is) over.”

 Believing this makes brands largely irrelevant, they went on: “Once any marketer takes over the customer relationship, the consumer will have very little need for a mass-marketed brand name. It’s that simple.”  Peppers’ bias against branding reflected his background in direct marketing, a largely numbers-driven form of marketing  that has generally been indifferent to value of branding.

Peppers and Rogers thought that so-called customer relationship management (CRM) would deliver the coup de grace to branding. But CRM was not living up to its promise when Peppers and Rogers first announced the death of branding.  Fifteen years later CRM still hasn’t slain branding.

Peppers and Rogers explained why CRM had not worked as well as many hoped:  “The fallacy is in thinking of a ‘relationship’ as emotional. In the 1:1 future, ‘relationship’ will be increasingly synonymous with ‘convenience.”

The mavens of 1:1 marketing came up as short on understanding of human behavior as anyone could. Emotions are the glue that holds together all voluntary relationships whether with animate or inanimate objects.  Brand loyalty simply cannot exist in the absence of emotional connections with a company or brand. This is not uniformed opinion. Brain research over the past two decades has unequivocally shown that emotions are essential to bonding in any context.

No more dramatic (and tragic) demonstration of the key role of emotions in generating brand loyalty exists than among patients who’ve lost their ability to experience emotions but have retained normal reasoning ability. They are unable to draw a connection between themselves and another object such as a brand regardless of how much reasoning they put into the challenge. Though they might conclude through reasoning that a product offers superior performance and has the best value, they cannot confidently decide between that product and another.

A Duke University study found that brands, somewhat unique among proper nouns, are processed primarily in the emotional, sensuous right brain. That and other research clearly indicate that brand loyalty depends on emotional arousal.

One researcher who commented on the Duke study opined, “This is very intriguing indeed. It supports our instinctive belief that brands are a special class of word - they are like a poem all in one word in their ability to evoke and express ideas." He was describing the idea of a brand as a metaphor. Brands are abstract representations of what they stand for:  a product, a service, a company.

Cognitive scientist Mark Johnson wrote, “Metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered  experiences that we can reason about and make sense of.”  That generic description of a metaphor could apply just as well the role of a brand, albeit in a much narrower sense.

British neuropsychiatrist Iain McGilchrist observed of metaphors, “… how we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world is already revealed in the metaphors we unconsciously choose to talk about it.”

Metaphors, like archetypes are emotionally evocative. In fact, archetypes are metaphors that more deeply embedded in our psyche than the metaphors we invoke at the conscious levels of our minds.

Nearly everyone in marketing knows how Pepsi holds its own and often out performs Coke in taste tests. But Coke far outperforms Pepsi in terms of its emotional connection to consumers. Said another way, Coke’s emotional connections to consumers has stronger archetypal rooting.  Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson describes Coke’s archetypal image as “The Innocent,” a powerful archetype that invokes images of “God, Flag, Motherhood, Grandma’s apple pie and virtually every baby who automatically brings a smile to your face.”

In a recent study in which subjects’ responses in a Coke vs. Pepsi blind taste test were tracked by fMRI technology, brain responses indicated a somewhat even split in beverage preference. However, matters changed dramatically when researchers told people which cola they were drinking. Coke was preferred by 75% to 25%.

Most consumers seem to process Coke with greater emotional animation in regions of the brain associated with archetypal imagery than Pepsi does. Pepsi will probably never resolve this gap regardless of money spent in marketing or the creative talents of marketing creatives behind a campaign. Coke long ago took possession of the deeper recesses of most cola drinkers’ brains, and the odds of being booted out are virtually nil.

This post inaugurates a new series on the subject of branding. The ensuing discussions will be tilted toward branding in the age of the Internet. I will make a case that rather than the art of branding losing importance, it has become more important since the advent of online marketing. Why that is will be described in the next post in this series. But here is a clue: meaningful online engagement. It’s deeper and often more emotionally charged engagement than consumers generally experience in non-interactive media.

 

Engagement Clusters: Where Conversations with Customers Begin

Most of us in marketing associate the term “cluster” with a demographic or psychographic segment of consumers. But there is another kind of cluster that gets little discussed even though it can be much more determinative of a marketing effort’s success: engagement clusters.

Marketing doesn’t really revolve around demographic or psychographic clusters despite the considerable sums that companies spend to figure them out. They would likely get a better ROI from making larger investments in engagement cluster research.

So what is an information exchange cluster? It’s a micro environment within a total marketing program where providers and consumers engage in product-related communications.

The term “engagement” signifies what engagement clusters are all about. The first step in the marketplace for marketing to succeed is to secure the conscious, active engagement of customers – prospective and otherwise – in the product information stream. No sale is possible without this first step.   

Information exchanges in engagement clusters take place at three information transfer points or nodes:  people, places and things:

• ·         People

• ·         Places

• ·         Things (or means)

People.  Information exchanges in engagement clusters occur between consumers, between consumers and product providers and between agencies of both consumers and companies. Consumer agencies include direct representatives of a consumer, such as an attorney, financial planner or concerned family member. Also, governmental regulatory bodies and news organizations function as agencies of consumers.

Places. Like Einstein’s special theory of relativity, engagement clusters have time-space elements that need to be taken into account. Places can be in three-dimensional reality, such as a point-of-sale environment in a commercial setting like a mall or in a person’s home. Places can also be virtual in the sense that they have no corporeal substance. Websites, blogs, social networking sites and forums are examples of virtual places that can exist within an engagement cluster.

The timing of invitations to consumers to participate in an engagement cluster can be critical. To express this idea in caricature, it certainly makes no sense to run an ad for Christmas just as Easter is just over the time horizon, or to have characters in a summertime ad in wintry dress.

Time also needs to be considered in the abstract. For example, in marketing housing and care services to seniors, any sense on the part of consumers that they have a need for such typically lies dormant until they experience a health set-back.

Things. These nodes facilitate or catalyze information exchanges. They include advertisements, news articles, and consumer rating systems such as Amazon’s product reviews by consumers. They also include technological artifacts as simple as a “FORWARD” command on an email client or a hot link to a website.

Marketing has traditionally been mostly executed in the format of a monologue which renders consumers as passive participants in the information exchange process. In fact, most marketing still remains a unidirectional information delivery process despite consumers’ growing perceptions that one-way marketing communications reflect marketers’ desires to manipulate consumers’ minds.

The need to accommodate consumers’ growing resistance to the unidirectional information streams of traditional marketing has magnified the importance of giving attention to engagement clusters because this is where buying decisions are conceived, gestate and are born.

In the next post I will give attention to what you can do to increase the intensity of the dialogue that takes place within engagement clusters that form around your product.