Interrupting people and shouting at them is a very unnatural form of human communication. So why is this still the main operating principle of marketing?
Please read and comment on today’s newsletter, Advertising is the worst kind of marketing.
“So, what are your scarce maketing resources?” I have asked many people.
“Time, money and people,” are the most likely answers.
True.
But there is a fourth scarce resource: Customer attention.
You need to view customer attention as a finite resource. It is a rationed good, and you must use it frugally and wisely.
In the old days of brute force branding, it made sense to focus on exposing your customer to your marketing messages as many times as possible. After all, the working paradigms were “cut through the clutter” and “capture eyeballs.”
Now, things are different. If you waste your scarce ration of customer attention on merely invading your customer’s field of vision or sound, you will quickly wear out your welcome, and the customer will elect to ignore you. (“Capturing eyeballs” is so old-school) On the other hand, if you focus not on just invading your customer’s senses as often as possible but on fewer, richer interactions, your customer will appreciate you, notice you and, more likely, be moved by your message.
Your customer’s attention is as valuable to him as your time, money and people are to you. Use this fourth scarce resource wisely.
This week’s Time Magazine reviews Geoffrey Miller’s book Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior. The book makes the case that much of our behavior can be traced to self-advertisement in the pursuit of mates. One quoted section in the review caught my attention. The reviewer titled this paragraph, “On the futility of consumer capitalism:
“We take wondrously adaptive capacities for human self-display — language, intelligence, kindness, creativity, and beauty — and then forget how to use them in making friends, attracting mates and gaining prestige. Instead, we rely on goods and services acquired through education, work and consumption to advertise our personal traits to others. These costly signals are mostly redundant or misleading, so others usually ignore them. They prefer to judge us through natural face-to-face interaction. We think our gilding dazzles them, though we ignore their own gilding when choosing our friends and mates.”
Although Miller is writing about general human behavior, many companies make the same mistakes with marketing. They “forget” how to use basic human skills for attracting customers, relying instead on manufactured, unnatural, flashy means of communication, such as advertising, which are ignored most of the time. Customers, instead, prefer to judge companies through natural face-to-face interactions. Parallel to what Miller says, advertisers think their gilding dazzles customers, though the advertising professionals that produce this gilded communication make their own personal purchase decisions in the same way non-marketing professionals do: not by evaluating advertising, but by evaluating the constellation of more relevant interactions that happen through the normal course of doing business with a company.
Human communication is not about what you present, it is about how you are understood. Why is so much money and effort spent communicating companies’ messages in ways that are so inconsistent with the way we live our non-marketing lives?
Today I’ve been thinking a lot about recalibrating the approach to customer interactions.
The day started off with a meeting with a client about a potential project. Our discussion explored how this very successful company can develop more business from current customers, especially in these tough times where it is harder to find new customers.
As we talked, it became clear that the best answers lie not in more lucrative promotions, better offers or a new loyalty program. It’s much more fundamental than that. Interacting with customers during this time of economic uncertainty and turmoil requires, more than ever, an approach based on the customer interaction principles that have obsessed me for years.
How much better would your business be if your organization, with the talent of virtuosos, adhered to these principles?
The great fallacy of marketing is that it can be delegated to a few people in your company and to inanimate objects, such as ads, brochures and web sites.
The most effective marketing is human to human; everything else is a compromise.
Advertising should be the last thing you consider in your marketing plan.
Think Brand Harmony, not brute force.
(This isn’t my opinion. It’s your customers’ opinion. It’s how they evaluate you.)
Recalibrate your approach to marketing.
This video is a great satire on the world of brute force branding. It’s from Geert Desager of bringtheloveback.com.
After years of proudly saying, “I’m am not addicted to any TV shows,” I must humbly admit that I am now hooked on a show. Yes, it’s Mad Men.
Besides the great writing, always-developing characters, and nostalgia for the years I was in diapers, I’ll admit to a warm feeling of schadenfreude watching ad agency execs make asses of themselves. Stupid Super Bowl ads in 2008 can trace their genealogy back to the ill-conceived, liquor-lubricated advertising guess-work of 1960 portrayed on Mad Men.
AMC TV is now running a “You Could Be On Mad Men” contest. The wonderful irony is that a television show about the origins of one-way, brute-force, mass-market advertising is using an up-to-date Web 2.0 forum to engage Mad Men fans in a community of obsession. Viewers have submitted videos of themselves doing one-minute monologues from six of the show’s characters. With tons of creative videos and hundreds of comments on these entries, I suddenly have a window into what other fans are thinking about the show. These demonstrations of admiration from other “customers” beat any ads for the show that the crew at Sterling Cooper could ever come up with.
The entrants didn’t stop at gender boundaries, with men portraying women and vice-versa. This is also ironic, since the show highlights the anachronism of office sexism so vividly. Here’s a creative example of a woman playing the male lead, Don Draper and another of a man playing Don’s wife Betty.
What is the biggest change you need make in your marketing? Embrace new media? Embrace social media? Switch spending from traditional media advertising to other options? Yes, most companies need to do those things, but these changes are secondary to the one really big change you should make, if you haven’t made it already.
The biggest change you need to make in your marketing is to abandon the mindset of “brute force” that has ruled marketing since the mid-20th century. Brute force is the belief that the key to winning customers is to interrupt them as frequently as possible with messages that are as powerful as possible. The brute force philosophy implies that customers are easily swayed, and they are eagerly waiting to receive your communications after which, lemming-like, they will change their behavior.
Listen in on most marketing planning meetings, and you will hear the religion of brute force being preached. “We need a more powerful message to cut through the clutter,” or “we’ll need to increase spending to reach our audience more effectively.” Sales people, also, have been sucked into the brute force vortex. They can be regularly be overheard talking about “getting at bats with a customer” or “giving a pitch.”
Guess what? The days of brute force are waning. The main reason: Customers are not as impressionable as they used to be. They don’t buy your product just because you interrupted them more effectively than another company. The second reason brute force doesn’t work well anymore: Unless you work for Annheuser-Busch or McDonald’s, you don’t have a big enough budget to shout louder than everyone else who is also shouting at your customers.
As Tom Peters once said, “Learning is easy, but unlearning is difficult.” Do your best to unlearn what you’ve been taught about brute force as a marketing strategy. Focus, instead, on what really works: Creating a powerful sense of brand harmony for your customers that helps them hear a clear, compelling story as they interact with your company. Brute force falls on deaf ears, but brand harmony is the first step to creating motivating brand impressions in the minds of your customers.
If you are a typical American, you will be exposed to something like 5000 marketing messages today. These will cover the spectrum from logos on shirts and ketchup bottles to impassioned pleas for your business.
Throughout the day today, notice how many of these messages actually have an impact on you. Even if they don’t encourage you to buy something, do they at least stick with you after the exposure?
You will probably notice that very few of these messages make a difference for you, let alone even get noticed by you.
Now, think about your customer, who will also be bombarded with 5000 messages today, in addition to an avalanche of emails, text messages, memos and voicemails. What happens if you send message number 5001? Will she be happy to see it? Will she notice it? Will it move her?
You can not shout your way into your customer’s life. A bigger marketing budget and more brute force is rarely the answer. Focus on creating an experience of brand harmony for your customer, where all interactions with you blend to tell one, cumulative story. And focus on relationship-building encounters, instead of impersonal transactions.
What can you do – today – to rise above the noise of your customer’s life? (Hint: It’s not a direct mail campaign)
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In addition to writing, I spend most of my work time helping companies unleash their potential by creating better connections with their customers. This happens through my speaking events and through Yastrow & Company consulting engagements, where my team and I help companies figure out who they intend to be in the future, and then engage the entire company in creating that future through strong "We" customer relationships.
Before starting Yastrow & Company in the mid-90s I was vice-president of resort marketing for Hyatt Hotels. My experiences in the hotel business showed me clearly that most marketing doesn’t happen in the marketing department. Customers are paying attention to all interactions with a company, not just the promises made in traditional "marketing communications."
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