Changing the Marcom Mindset (part VIII) – Mindsets are Hard to Break

The advertising mindset

I can hear many ad folk say: ‘I get it. Create experiences. Make stuff people will want to watch or look at. Make ads that are more entertaining, attention-getting, and creative. Make ads more experiential.’

But they really don’t get it. Ad people equate experiences with entertainment. Visuals, sounds, and stories that is more visually stimulating or socially shocking than the next ad. They can’t get around the fact that they’re still interrupting people. And they can’t get around the fact they treat people like a passive audience: look, listen, but don’t do.

Photo by Aaronyx

Interactivity is missing in most marcom

Powerful experiences are interactive, not passive. Most agencies don’t have the mindset or skill sets to create interactive experiences. And most agencies are wed to platforms that limit interactivity.

Agencies don’t start with the thought: ‘What experience can we design for consumers?’ They start with the thought: ‘What kind of 30 second film can we create for TV?’ Or they think they’re being cutting-edge by asking: ‘what kind of film can we create for the Internet? Maybe we can get people to pass it on too!’

Pleasure and meaning is missing in most marcom

Most marketing activities don’t provide pleasure or meaning. They don’t provide a benefit, utility or a value. They’re usually quite the opposite: interruptions.

Next time: Developing Your New Mindset

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part VII) – Marcom as an Experience

I’ve touched on these ideas in previous posts:

• Brands are experiences
• Winning brands are the best experiences
• Extraordinary experiences are interactive and provide pleasure or meaning
• Brand experiences can happen on many levels beyond product use

So what do experiences have to do with marketing communications?

Marketing communications (Advertising, PR, etc.) is rarely an experience, or sometimes even a bad experience. Marketing usually interrupts what people are doing. It’s loud, condescending, or irrelevant – a barrier between us and another experience – an experience we chose.

Most marcom isn’t pleasurable or meaningful either. It provides no benefit or value to our lives, and as a result it isn’t something we choose to engage with.

Most marcom isn’t interactive. Marketers still see consumers as a passive audience, calling them readers, viewers, or listeners, and continue to see their job as creating and broadcasting commercial messages TO them.

What can marcom people learn from products and services?

Marcom folk can learn alot from the products/services they’ve advertised and promoted for decades.

Marcom needs to be more like brands: An experience. Something people choose to engage in over other experiences. This is a mindset shift of monumental proportions, especially for those who’ve spent years creating 30 second spots and print ads.

Marcom an experience? Something people do? Something people will choose to do instead of avoid?

These ideas might sound a bit strange, but the old Marcom mindset of creating and pushing commercial messages to the masses isn’t going to cut it in the future.

Next time: Mindsets are Hard to Break

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part VI) – Experiences are Broad

Brand experiences happen on many levels. Let’s use beer as an example. There is an immediate sensory aspect of the beer experience: the chill of the bottle, the color and texture of the pour, the aroma, the taste…but the brand experience doesn’t end there.

The brand experience goes beyond product/service experience

Price is also an important factor in the beer experience, but the social and environmental situations in which a beer is consumed is equally or more important. If a brand can build a strong association with pleasurable or meaningful social situations, those experiences can become part of the brand experience.

Beer marketers recognize they’re limited in how they can improve the brand experience by what they put in the bottle, so for decades they’ve used advertising and promotion to suggest an association with other experiences.

But advertising is almost always passive. A suggestion of an experience isn’t an experience, even if consumers associate a particular beer brand with certain experiences in their mind. In the future brands will need to work harder by augmenting the experiences they want to be associated with.

Next Time: Marcom as an Experience

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part V) – The Nuances of Experiences

Brand experiences typically deliver pleasure or meaning through benefits:

• Saves time or effort
• Saves money or makes money
• Provides security and peace of mind
• Boost self esteem and social status
• Provides fun or enjoyment.

Things that make experiences better

One way brands can dial up the pleasure and meaning generated by their experience is through personalization and customization, but there are other still other elements that can differentiate great brand experiences from the others. Brands that offer a sense of discovery, something new or unique, or something that is exclusive/scarce can set themselves apart from the competition.

Don’t forget utility

There’s one last thing I want to touch on before moving on. Many brands, if not all brands, offer an element of utility. Keep this in mind when we move on to a discussion of why most marketing communications provide no utility for consumers.

Next time: Experiences are Broad

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part IV) – Pleasure and Meaning

The second requirement of an extraordinary experience is the intensity of pleasure and meaning it provides. Pleasure is a state that is more about a sensation or feeling – something that is usually short-lived. Meaning is more about intellect and understanding – something that’s long lasting.

The lists below contain examples of both. The ‘meaning list’ is mostly borrowed from a presentation by Shedroff.

Intensity matters

Extraordinary experiences provide a high intensity of pleasure, meaning, or both. Brands need to think about what kind of pleasure or meaning they’re trying to evoke and find ways to dial up their intensity.

Next time: The Nuances of Experiences

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part III) – Experiences and Interactivity

So if brands are experiences, shouldn’t we understand the basic things that determine whether an experience is good or not?

What experiences are made of

Extraordinary experiences usually have two qualities: 1) they’re interactive and 2) they provide pleasure or meaning.

Almost every brand I can think of offers some element of interactivity. Consumers USE most products and services, so it stands to reason brands are interactive. The quality of the interactive experience is also important.

Most products and services also have a sensorial element. You can see them, taste them, smell them, touch them, or hear them. Interactivity that involves more than one of our senses can be very powerful.

What is interactivity?

In the mid ‘90s Nathan Shedroff diagrammed an interactivity continuum. It does a great job of illustrating the factors that make something interactive. This continuum can be used to analyze different types of media, but also evaluate almost any human activity. High levels of interactivity plotted on the right and low levels on the left.

You can even use this scale to analyze how one brand stacks up against another. In almost every case, brands that provide higher levels of interactivity are more successful than their counterparts.

Some brands can even create interactivity that results in a flow experience, such as video games, adventure vacations, and toys.

Next time: Meaning, Pleasure, and Intensity

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part II) – Understanding Brands

Before discussing how marketing communications needs to change, we need a better understanding what brands are, and why people buy one brand over another.

There are two concepts marketers need to grasp in order to change their current marcom mindset.

1. All brands are experiences.

I don’t care if you’re a toothpaste or bakery shop, every brand is an experience. Until marketers and agencies realize brands are experiences, their mindset will be a barrier to creating marcom activities that can change how people think or feel about their brand.

Fortunately, most large brands, particularly consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers already understand they’re selling experiences. Some brands even hire people with titles like Experience Designer. The important thing is to understand is every touch-point with the consumer is part of the brand experience, and the brand experience goes far beyond the time a consumer spends using a product or service.

2. Brands that create the best experiences win in the marketplace.

Think about it. The best brands in every category are the brands that create the best experiences. Southwest Airlines, Apple, Zappos, etc. When you start to think about brands as experiences, you really begin to understand why certain brands are winners, and others are losers.

A choice of experiences

Brands also compete with experiences that may not be in their category. A bag of chips competes with a milkshake, concerts compete with books, a great dinner competes with a new pair of jeans, and a new car competes with a kitchen remodel.

People are constantly seeking and buying experiences that provide the most pleasure and meaning in their lives.

How we find and choose experiences

Traditionally, brands attract new consumers by promising their experience is more pleasurable or meaningful than alternative experiences. Marketers use one-to-many channels like TV, radio, and print to communicate these promises, to paint a picture for consumers: ‘you could be part of this experience’.

Today, we learn more about products and services, ‘good experiences’ if you will, from friends, family and acquaintances. We also rely on the opinions of complete strangers, from the celebrities we admire to online reviewers. I point this out to tease a subsequent post – the experience of finding an experience also matters. Consumers now have better tools, better experiences to find better experiences.

Next time: Experiences and Interactivity

Changing the Marcom Mindset (part I)

The marketing communications industry is ending a long decade of anxiety and bewilderment, mostly stemming from the increased importance of digital platforms, consumer control, media fragmentation, “free” content, and the waning confidence in the ability of traditional advertising to influence sales.

And while marketers find it increasingly difficult to generate awareness, trial, or loyalty through traditional marcom methods, they’re also struggling with a whole new array of tools.

It’s the mindset, stupid.

The biggest obstacle we’re facing is one of mindset – a one-to-many mindset, where most marketers and ad agencies still believe their job is to deliver commercial messages to large groups of consumers. Because of this mindset, our industry has been slow to adapt or embrace a new mindset, where marcom is something consumers seek out versus avoids.

Can we change?

This is the first in a series of post where I’ll outline my thoughts on where marketing communications is going…or where it should go. My guess is only those who change their mindset now will prosper in the next decade.

Next time: Understanding Brands

The Price For Attention…Going Up?

Out of the hundreds of RFPs and briefs I’ve read over the past several years, the majority of them say creating ‘increased attention’ for a particular brand (product or service) is their primary goal.

Our industry doesn’t have a reliably accurate awareness metric like Cost-Per-Attention. Sure, we can commission recall studies, or extrapolate neuromarketing results to ad exposures, but no one can truly measure the cost for generating attention or recall, let alone attribute those costs to a specific marketing activity. But if we could…

Will marketers pay more or less to generate attention in the future?

My sense is marketers are an optimistic bunch. They see technology as a cost-cutter, providing advances in media mix modeling, behavioral targeting, and results attribution – things that should lead to greater efficiency. They also see developments in digital media and what has been touted as Web 2.0 as an effective, low cost method of engaging consumers and generating awareness via word of mouth.

On the flip side, we’re seeing an avalanche of content, media, and activities competing for attention. Media costs aren’t getting cheaper and consumers are increasingly successful in avoiding advertising. We’re also seeng more SKUs and services than ever, all competing for our attention.

Add to that the cost of agency services. Margins are falling as brand marketers adopted a cattle-call/jumpball approach to selecting agencies. What brand marketers don’t seem to understand is they’re paying bloated rate cards to offset the increasing cost of prospecting and pitching. Every time a brand manager does an agency search, or sends out an RFP to a dozen agencies, they’re burning tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars in agency costs. Those costs need to be made up somewhere, and in the end, they’re paid in hidden fees by the agency’s customers – the brand.

My guess is price for attention is going to increase over the coming years, but unfortunately nobody will be measuring it.

Does A Media Mix Mindset Limit Marcom Effectiveness?

Should media allocation strategies continue to play a preeminent role in marcom planning decisions?

To answer this question, let’s begin with an analogy:  how investors make decisions.

Investors typically hold one of two basic philosophies: top down or bottom up. Top down investors analyze the markets, determine which asset classes (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.) offer the best risk/reward opportunities, and allocate accordingly. Once the basic allocation mix is decided, these investors will allocate further within each asset class. For example, stocks have several characteristics: growth vs. value, large vs. small, emerging vs. developed countries. And within these characteristics lie various sectors: financials, healthcare, telecommunications, etc. The resulting portfolio of investments will ideally reflect this series of macro to micro decisions.

Bottom up investors see a market of stocks, not a ’stock market’. They start their decision making process by analyzing a wide array of investments, and their portfolios are the result of picking individual securities – a bottom up process. Warren Buffet is a well-known bottom up investor.

When it comes to marketing communication decisions, most brand marketers adhere to a top down philosophy, relying on techniques such as media mix modeling to provide a framework for budgets and strategy. This philosophy makes a lot of sense when your marcom universe consists solely of one-to-many channels (TV, radio, print), where commercial messages are directed at a passive audience.

But does the top down philosophy break down when the importance of one-to-one marketing communications grows in importance, where the consumer is viewed as a participant instead of an audience? Do media mix models adequately weigh conversational marketing activities such as experiential marketing, social media, customer service, and sale training?

And what does a bottom up approach look like? Do we begin by imagining possible consumer experiences first and let the media mix chips fall where they may? Or do we create better media allocation models? Or simply continue using the current models while acknowledging their limitations?

I would hope marketers recognize the pitfalls of following an exclusive top down approach. We shouldn’t limit the potential of more interactive marketing communication channels by following a philosophy devised in a one-to-many media world.