The end of the second millennium saw quite a few bereavements for the citizens of the developed economies. God has apparently been on the critical list for a while, which has led people to seek solace in the material rather than the spiritual comforts of life. Communities in their traditional forms of the extended family, the neighbourhood or the village have ceased to be a major factor in many people's lives, leaving us with a deep emotional need to find substitutes or to create simulations.
Certainty has also deserted us: we were already struggling to cope without the support systems of church, family, community and welfare state when along came men with beards who threatened us with the prospects of instant death in a terrorist explosion or protracted misery as the entire planet goes into ecological meltdown. And in this century a very persuasive cast of media-friendly experts, such as Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Morgan Spurlock, have orchestrated popular cynicism about the good intentions of our political and corporate leaders.
So, No Logo notwithstanding, brands have come to hold a pretty important role in people's lives. Do you believe in Coca-Cola's 'glass half full' philosophy of life? Do you belong to the Nike community or the Adidas community? Do you trust VW to make a decent car? Have you ever thought of going to Innocent's Fruitstock? Anyone who has ever dozed through a Brand Health Tracking presentation will have noticed the amazing resilience of brands – they really do sustain a pretty constant bundle of associations in people's minds, proving resistent to all sorts of factors that one might expect to change them.
So, we may not trust the companies that make the brands, but we trust the brands themselves; and although we are very cynical and savvy about attempts by the marketing and media industries to manipulate us, we all have favourite brands. At first sight, this may seem odd, or desperately sad. But that would be a mistake, based on a number of false assumptions – about human relationships in general, about the way that people relate to brands, and about the way that marketing communications work.
HOW DO I LOVE THEE?
The classical economic model of rational consumer behaviour has been under attack for a few decades now. It doesn't describe how real people make real decisions, because it ignores the inequality of information available to them, and it overlooks the enormously important role that emotion plays in all human decision-making.
We don't need to start making special cases for brands to realise that we can all decide to enter into relationships on the basis of fairly flimsy evidence. Look around you – what on earth does she see in him? Let's be brave and take it closer to home. I love my wife to bits and have every reason to believe that the next 20 years of our marriage will be as good as the last 20 have been. But ask me to fill out a questionnaire, specifying whether she is the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most self-lessly saintly human being on the planet, and I will probably look for the 'DK' column (unless she is looking over my shoulder of course).
There is nothing shameful or sad in this. It is the 'Don Juans', the ones who can never settle down with anyone because they are always haunted by the possibility of finding someone even better, who need psychiatric help. It is entirely and wholesomely human to make commitments and stick to them, and to process our experience to fit around them, rather than the other way around. And if this is the case for the people we share our innermost thoughts and feelings with, who is to say that a deodorant needs to do more to win us over?
CUTTING THE CRAP
'Life', we are told 'is too short to stuff a mushroom.' Whatever your take on fungi, there certainly isn't enough time for exhaustive research and careful deliberation over every purchase decision we make. Marketing people often talk rather grandly about how brands provide 'reassurance' and 'certainty'. The idea behind this is sound, but the language is a bit OTT for the vast majority of buying decisions. Brands simply provide a short-cut, because whether I buy brand x or brand y really isn't a matter of life and death. So we buy on a whim, or go for the habitual choice, or look for the special offer.
This may help to explain why 'rational messages' have turned out to play such a relatively unimportant part in marketing effectiveness. Many marketing gurus,1,2 have argued persuasively for the primacy of emotion in marketing communications. Most recently, the IPA's own analysis3 of what worked and why across its database of 880 Effectiveness Awards case studies, provides a rigorously supported and compelling argument. This is unsurprising, given the importance of emotion in all decision-making, but we shouldn't get too carried away with this word 'emotion'. It can refer to great, earth-shattering, life-changing passions or simply to a mild feeling of preference. In most cases of brand choice, the latter is quite enough, because we simply don't care that much. If we did, all those poor qualitative researchers wouldn't face such an uphill struggle to 'get the group warmed up' when they are being asked to debate the relative merits of brands a, b and c.
So, in many cases, the marketer's job is not to 'deliver the message' or to 'persuade' consumers, nor even to make them care, or (in any true sense of the word) to 'build a relationship' with them. It is simply to associate the brand with ideas, feelings, images, experiences or anything else that will increase their likelihood of choosing it when making a purchase. It should be easy, but for decades many in our industry seem to have been hell-bent on making it as difficult as possible.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE GLOOM
This brings us to the last and most encouraging point of all. Most people want to like brands. They are increasingly suspicious of the companies behind them, and cynically aware of the techniques used to 'manipulate' them. But we don't suspect everyone we meet of being a psychopathic killer until they have set our minds at rest. Apart from the hard work this would require of us all, liking is simply a more pleasant state of mind than disliking; so why not be generous with 'the benefit of the doubt'?
And, in a similar way, we don't go around hating every new brand we find, until it has proved itself worthy of our goodwill. We may never really care about brands as much as we do about people, but we can feel mildly positive. Sadly, there seems to be a diminishing list of candidates that we can feel good about in the overheating, terrorised, politically disenchanted, celebenfreude world we live in.
What other explanation can there be for how the marketing industry has got away with such cultural murder for so long? The most extreme case in point has to be that particularly scabrous sub-class of drivel known as 'skincare ads'. Who on earth would believe such a load of old cobblers? Why, the target market of course; women (and increasingly men, too) who are worried about looking old. They are prepared to believe practically anything, however ludicrously pseudo-scientific, so they willingly swallow an indigestible goulash of molecules and meaningless polysyllables. And now, thanks to the wonders of spam, our inboxes fill daily with the 21st-century masculine version of this pandering to deep-seated anxiety – penis enlargement!
Presumably people keep falling for it, or the spammers wouldn't keep sending it out. If you believed in the primacy of the rational, you would assume that something as important to people as looking old, or being under-endowed in the bedroom department, would make them incredibly rigorous and picky about what they spent their money on. But in fact the reverse is true – they feel so emotional about it that they fall for any old nonsense.
A similar paradox is at work with people's feelings about brands. Paranoia about the evils of the marketing communications industry and emotional attachment to brands are two sides of the same coin. Any researcher who talks to people about brands and marketing will tell you about how knowledgeable, how cynical and how savvy they have become about the tricks of our trade. And yet, at the same time, the power of brands has continued to rise inexorably. Our positive feelings about particular brands may serve as an ever-more necessary comfort, as we confront the endless revelations of devious skulduggery in the business community.
Dan Ariely4 reports on a variety of experiments in which a transaction based on a 'social norm' (such as 'please pick up your kids from the day care centre on time') was compared to one involving a 'market norm' (such as 'we will fine you if you don't pick up your kids from the day care centre on time'). The latter approach was not nearly as effective as the former – but once it had been introduced, the 'spell' of the social norm was broken; in this case, parents carried on being selfish about arriving on time at the day care centre even after it had gone back to appealing to their consciences. Most importantly, we seem to prefer social norms to market norms – we don't want to be reminded that we are nothing more than cogs in Adam Smith's market mechanism.
So, it seems reasonable to suggest that marketing communications work best when they help people feel good about brands. And most of the time most people will be willing us to succeed. This fact has been staring us in the face, but still we scurry off to make our jobs as difficult, unrewarding and ineffective as we possibly can, clinging to the wreckage of 'messages' 'USPs' and 'strong preference'. Maybe this is the puritan ethic at work – if we faced up to the fact that our task is simply to create likeable stuff that encourages people to feel good about brands, how could we justify getting paid so much for doing it?
In most cases, our primary obligation should simply be to create appropriately branded communications (or 'content') that people will feel sufficiently good about that they don't ignore it or switch it off (or in extreme cases, start to hate it for being so desperately dull and/or irritating). Sometimes we succeed, but it is scary to look at how unpopular our industry's efforts are when measured against simple, lowbudget stuff like putting Mentoes into Coke bottles or enacting the history of dance on a stage in front of a small audience. (At the last count, the dance film had received over 78 million hits on YouTube, and the bottle fountains have had around 50 million hits.) No advertisement features in YouTube's Top 100. Aren't you ashamed?
BRING ON THE BURRS OF SINGULARITY
You can't beat a good gag. It provides valued entertainment in its own right, and associates the brand responsible with the 'GSOH' that is such a staple of all lonely hearts ads. But there is a finite supply of knockout rib-ticklers, and sometimes a brand needs to convey something more than that it likes a laugh – though probably not nearly as often as most overwrought brand managers assume. Words like 'insightful', 'sympathetic' and 'sophisticated' often come into play when marketers talk about how they want their brands to come across. But all too often this gets lost in translation because of anxieties about 'single-minded messages' and the like.
As a result, we end up breaking three of the golden rules of seduction: don't appear desperate to impress; don't take yourself too seriously; and don't talk down to your intended conquest. The great David Ogilvy used the phrase 'Burrs of Singularity' to describe those illogical but essential elements of an execution that make it stick in people's minds and work harder than you might have expected. The eye patch on the 'Man in a Hathaway Shirt' is a perfect example of this. It doesn't make sense, it isn't obviously attractive or admirable, but it just makes the whole thing a bit more interesting, and implies to the reader that the brand has some sort of personality that goes beyond a ruthless drive to sell stuff. Apparently it worked really well – perhaps in part because it enabled people to believe that there was something likeable about Hathaway.
In a world where earning attention dollars is a more cost-effective strategy than buying them, and where people are looking for brands to like, we need more burrs and less bullshit.
REFERENCES
1. Feldwick, P., and Heath, R. (2008) '50 years using the wrong model of advertising,' International Journal of Market Research. Vol 50,. No. 1.
2. Lannon, J., and Baskin, M. (2007) A Master Class in Brand Planning. Wiley
3. Binet, L., and Field, P. (2007) Marketing in the Era of Effectiveness. IPA.
4. Ariely, D (2008) Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape Our Lives, Harper Collins.