Jack Myers, a marketing and advertising expert has written an interesting set of articles on the, “irreversible progression of advertising messaging away from the 100-year tradition of mass reach and building awareness and toward an emphasis on achieving and maintaining consumer trust and passion.” While my company Edison Group is not engaged in Advertising, the themes are very relevant to what Edison tries to do for our clients. I think these themes should be referenced in our marketing and underlie much of our work.
The following is the meat of the article:
Rather than position these as self-contained and differentiated approaches to advertising value, it is more appropriate to consider established and emerging principles as redundant and overlapping.
Awareness = Relevance
Consumers must judge an advertised product or service to be relevant in order for that product/service to register in their conscious, aka awareness -- a measure that researchers have defined through old-fashioned recall research.
Interest Requires Differentiation
For consumers to become actively interested in purchasing or even learning more about a product/service, its messaging will need to clearly differentiate it from its competitors. Whether that differentiation is based on price, quality, geography or other considerations, advertising will need to clearly communicate a differentiated positioning strategy.
Retention Requires that Consumers Clearly Perceive the Product/Service
Retention has also been measured in old-fashioned ways: how long do consumers remember a message after it has been communicated – and how recently does the message need to be repeated for it to have a meaningful impact. In the future, new measures will focus, as explained by BBDO president Andrew Robertson, on whether consumers can perceive the product or services fitting into the patterns and rituals they maintain throughout their lives.
Trust is Essential to Convince Wary Consumers
Once advertising establishes the unique points of differentiation and the relevance of the product/service to the lives of target consumers, a wary public will consider whether or not the advertiser can be trusted and if they can safely make a purchase decision with confidence the promise of the advertising will be fulfilled. Convincing and persuading consumers requires that consumer trust be established; continued purchase requires that trust be maintained.
The Ultimate Goal for Marketing is Passion and Active Evangelism
A brand is defined by differentiation, relevance, effectively communicated messages and fulfilled expectations. Brand equity is lost when there is a loss of trust. But the final goal of advertising – which in the past has been solely based on the actual purchase – now has an even more fully evolved goal. Consumer advocacy – the desire to be a public proponent and evangelist for a product or service – is defined by the passion consumers have for products and services. Passion goes beyond actual purchase decisions and reflects a proactive decision to seek to convince others to consumer the product as well.
Marketers, creative agencies and all those involved in the creative process across all media and entertainment must begin thinking beyond traditional research metrics and traditional measures of success. They must begin evolving their strategies to move beyond reach and even beyond direct consumer actions – whether those actions be clicks or purchases. The next generation of communications will focus on passion – defined by word-of-mouth, blogs, evangelism, conversational marketing, and other forms of advocacy.
While it should be obvious, I’ll illustrate how each of these principles apply to our work and how we bring value to our customers.
Relevance – this is key to matching a technology product to real end user needs. Not only must the products themselves be useful to our clients’ customers, but the work we do should be relevant to those customers' real needs. For example, our work on management ease is not only a TCO issue, even though that’s how we’re presenting the concept. Ease of use is also relevant to many readers who are used to struggling with products that are just too complex or hard to use. The relevance comes from that personal connection and the comfort a user feels when a product is truly easy to use. Another example: Apple
Differentiation – this is precisely what we do. I generally call it validation of positioning: providing demonstrable proof that differentiating factors for our clients products are true within the product’s own context and versus competitors. By providing validation, we not only support the assertions of our clients, but enhance our demonstrations of relevance to the customer’s needs and perceptions.
Clear Perception Enables Retention – by providing a relevant, clear and validated differentiation of our clients’ products we provide conceptual hooks by which customers can retain the impressions we’ve imparted by our work product. Whether it’s the belief that HP EVA is easy to use that’s current in the customer base —something supported by our work and remembered as such by customers — or a silver bullet in a sales guide that is relevant to a sales person’s daily effort — she made the sale because of something we wrote and she remembers that we wrote it — the best outcomes from our projects come from our clear writing style and approach to our work.
Trust – is a core value we bring to the table. Not only trust in our research, but also by extension, in our client’s products. A reader won’t retain what we’ve produced if they don’t think what we’ve written is true. They won’t believe the differentiations if they don’t trust our methodologies and independence and they can’t perceive relevance if they don’t trust that we understand their issues.
Passion and Active Evangelism – these are even more critical for our customer base. The enterprise technology products we write about are boring: they rarely inspire passion in their users other than hatred when the products don’t work as advertised. Overcoming negative passions and inspiring word of mouth endorsements can go a long way in helping our clients sell more. Helping end user advocates close their internal sell for these expensive solutions is an important goal for most of our public documents. Our white papers don’t necessarily change the reader’s mind: instead the reader uses what they have learned to prove to their boss the efficacy of the solutions we’re supporting.
