Unsure on how to make your Brand Research more effective again? Stick people into MRIs.

I recently read an article in Adage, written by Moshe Bar, Director at the NeuroCognition Lab at Harvard Medical school. As more and more people say that asking consumers to critique ads is, like, so yesterday (which I mostly agree with), Moshe comes out and puts his Ph.D. and scientific research to use for the Advertising folks. In fact, the last paragraph of said article ends:

[...] advertisers could go even further by better understanding the basic science of the human mind. Don’t you want to know how to better generate positive associations that will stick in memory? Or how context and attentions filter the perception of reality? Or the way that mood affects people’s desires? My guess is you do.

Ok. Duh. Yeah, who wouldn’t like to know? Especially when there are so many pseudo-scientific research methodologies that all promise the same. Looks like Mr. Bar isn’t just offering a new look at things to Brand Researchers, he is also pushing the right buttons for us a target audience (i.e. real science giving answers to difficult marketing questions).

So is this type of research really any different in terms of effectiveness to create compelling ads, or did Harvard’s research grant fund run dry as to have to go in cahoots with the lowly spheres of the communications industry? Is it that instead of a nice subjective and ineffective chat with your consumers around a table, you actually stick them into an MRI? That certainly is upping the ante (those things are huge and expensive after all), and I do believe it gives you answers to which emotions might be triggered. I am not a scientist, but when Mr. Bar says “If we scientists have behavioral methods that we believe could modify the associations elicited in post-traumatic stress, changing associations in a retailer’s reputations should be a walk in the park in comparison, using the exactly the same principles,” I kind of go “Mreep?”. I am not sure why, because I don’t have an MRI in our research lab, but let me try to guess.

First of all, likening post-traumatic stress to a emotional reactions to an ad seem kind of, well, like making a mousetrap the size of a house. It’s friggin ads, not memories of your tank Humvee being blown up in Iraq. While I do believe the article that, scientifically, the same principles apply in terms of being able to measure emotional triggers, even in ads, I wonder if the level of the response in those cases when you measure ads is equally as relevant as when deal with real issues like PTS. What I mean is, if you find out (as described in the article) that an ad containing sharp objects makes people nervous, and you use this insight as part of a creative brief, may we not, at some point be overdoing it? Does an ad message have to be as complicated as including deeply rooted human psychological and even phylogenetic insights? Maybe it can and maybe it is not as complicated. I just feel that continuing research on PTS is more important and different league than that of making ads. Currently brand research suffers from too many methodologies, not to little. Apart from that, there may be a bit of a problem with applicability and feasibility with this scientific approach for the purposes of brand research at this point. I am all for trying out research methodology as described in the arcticle is a good idea to gain more understanding in how we, as humans, work, and I do believe it will even have effects on how we think about communications. But for now, I know there are a number of really good and inexpensive tools (some even scientific) that allow us to observe human behavior instead of simply ineffectively asking people’s opinions. Those seem like a good way forward for now, and the kind of stuff done by researchers like Moshe Bar, as mind-bogglingly amazing it really is, operates at a more fundamental level: the kind of level that is established when scientist try to find out how we all function.

Testing Tales: Using Testing to ensure the delivery of vacuous, uninspired mediocrity in brand communications

I have been quite frantic recently, so I apologize for not providing endless tirades on the future of advertising as usual. However, the good news is, I do have a tirade that has grown like a bacterial infection in my strategic tummy and it needs a good antibiotic rant.

My question these days is:
What is this whole obsession with communications testing??

Not a day goes by, it seems, without unique campaigns being shot down because a panel of a few consumers chose the one “they liked most.” Or to put it another way: bland, mediocre and sterile campaigns do get chosen because they were the ones with the least potential to upset anyone.

Now, I am not saying there are no good big ideas with effective campaigns out there anymore. Also, I am not saying that testing is a bad idea. However, there may be a trend that more and more marketing decision makers resort to testing as a way to make a decision instead of using it to improve the execution of an idea. And really, comms testing can just help you improve the execution of an idea, not serve as a tool to make a decision on whether your brand idea is a good one or not. So if you shoot down a campaign after communications testing, you really shoot it down because of its execution, not because of its idea. Why? Because recruits can’t tell the difference. They will rarely go: “Oh, well, I really liked the idea behind this one, but I think the execution is way to urban and sophisticated for me, so if you’d adjust the tone-of-voice to be a bit more down-to-earth on this one, I would definitely go for it.” If they did, you’d have to fire your recruiting agency for letting agency hacks get through the screening process.

Alas, people see and judge the execution first, then they intuitively understand the idea (often much later, when they had a true brand experience with the product in question instead of being subjected to a test being stared at through a one-way mirror). It’s friggin common sense and should be obvious without going into a segue about the Heisenbergian Uncertainty Principle.

But wait, that’s not all! Within this already zany approach, what is being tested is often just one type of brand communications: mass media communications. This essentially means: we will test a TV spot to make a decision on which brand idea will work the best (mistake #1) without bothering to test brand interactions in other channels (mistake #2). Now why would you test a brand idea through a piece of uni-directional communication with a medium with the least amount of brand interaction? I am too tired to hazard a guess.

Now where did this come from? Why don’t some markters believe in their brand/product ideas anymore, why is communications testing misused for something it can’t really deliver, and why is there a surge of this kind of activity? There are probably a couple of reasons, such as blindly following marketing processes made for yesteryear, or inefficient hierarchies and budget structures, but how about this: maybe it’s the fault of them dang Internet people.

“Huh?” you might proclaim. Well, we all now how hyped up the whole web thing is, and how marketers and agencies (traditional ones, especially) are struggling to understand it, use it, sell it, scrambling to “upgrade their website to web2.0,” generating a plethora of buzzwords like “participative brands” “viral marketing” “user generated content” “behavioral targeting” etc.

You can definitely say that digital technologies have re-written the rules of how people consume and discover, and that the interplay between human behavior and receptivity to marketing has been significantly altered.

Because of this, and because everyone is trying to figure out what to do with the changed media and communications landscape before you, your CMO sends you to a congress on digital marketing and you learn that the “consumer” and traditional advertising” is dead, and that in the brave new world of the Internet, the customer is an active participant, not a passive recipient of branding. So, you (or your digital agency du jour) start coming up with community ideas, widgets, social networking tools and a Second Life Presence for your Brand, with little brand or business strategy behind it. And, this is my point: you even let recruits decide which brand idea you should go with.

Bad idea. How can you be a strong brand if you let them decide what your brand idea is supposed to be?

Just to be clear: by all means let consumers participate in how you can improve brand experiences in all stages of the customer lifecycle from store layout, orientation, information architecture of your digital offering, additive services, hotlines and customer service. Also let them help you improve your product through product testing and observe their true behavior when they interact with your offering at all touchpoints.

However, it is foolish to believe that customer-centricity means allowing people to chose what you need to say in the first place. Customer-centricity and the lore of the empowered consumer cannot be a chicken-hearted way-out of Brand Management, just because we live in a time where the consumer has the last word. Because, so what? You still need to make sure your brand has the first word. People need strong brands to make decisions, not brands that ask them what to be.

Just imagine this: How would you like to go to your doctor and hear this after he examined you: “Well, it looks like you have cancer. Would you like to have your leg amputated or would you like chemo with a lower chance of success?” No matter what you would answer, you’d be tormented by the choice and wonder: “Why didn’t he just propose the best course of action, he’s the doctor!”

Now, this may be a bit drastic as an example, but still: if you ask people what your brand is supposed to say, you are losing the function it has: Guidance and room for identification in a sea of options and choices.

So, all in all, hardly a good way to proceed, I think.

What you really need to come up with effective communications for your brand idea is is brave belief in the idea itself because you believe in the product, your engineers, your employees and your company and because you know it serves your brand strategy and business objectives, and because you have a good idea how it will resonate with consumers in real life. Then you test whether or not you can improve the execution to make sure that the message gets through. This has always been true and is still true whether or not digital technologies have changed consumer behavior. In fact, it’s even more important today to have a strong stance on what a brand is.

Therefore, I believe it’s time for brand balls, because balls is what has been missing.

1. Today, authenticity and brand intimacy is not created through single-minded propositions, it is built through brand interaction, so observe human behavior instead of starting with the brand itself, the category or a marketing toolkit.
2. Being a marketer or agency professional following a marketing process can become quite abstract. Don’t forget you are a consumer yourself and use common sense. It works.
3. The only difference today to 15 years ago is that markets are conversations. Enable your brands to be listeners, but make sure you have a statement with which you can join a market conversation. You don’t want to be a moderator of market conversation, you want to be the driver.

The Problem with Viral Marketing (Part II)

Just recently I posted something on the problem of viral marketing, naming some of the reasons why it doesn’t always work. Just days later I found an article on Adage about an Math Professor explaining it his way, rooted in a much more fundamental theory that some of the readily-accepted theories like “tipping points”, “social network media” and “influencers” may actually not be all that true.

One really interesting point he is making is that it’s not just that you need a viral idea, you need to seed it where you get contagion. So in a way, what planning can do, if anything, is find some potentially advantageous contagion parameters and that, actually, specificity of the target and choosing influencers over “normal” people to spread the idea aren’t necessarily the ones who make a viral idea contagious. As the article states, “sounds a lot like mass communication, doesn’t it?”.

Not only does this fly in the face of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping point theory, and the hype of social network’s importance for viral ideas, it also says you can’t actually expect an agency to come up with a viral idea that works, except to see if it maybe will work. AND, it also insinuates that the whole discipline and task of marketing in itself, which is dependent on strategies derived from tested insight, does not apply here.

I am totally torn on whether to say: “Duh” or “Wow.” All I can say is: thank god to the math whizzes for providing a contradictory insight that helps us question how we accept theories and let us fine-tune our process to get a more successful communication outcome.

http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=119274

How not to build a brand community site

Patron Tequila (a Tequila I actually really prefer over any other) just launched their Social Club site. While the idea is nice, and fits the brand, it’s missing out on its true potential.

This is just one example of many. What are some of the issues?

1. Lack of credibility
   • It’s hard to build community sites for brands and stay credible especially for FMCG brands. The attachment to the product doesn’t usually warrant participation in a community for just that one product, unless there is another overaching idea attached to it. For example, I might be in the target and also really like knowing about the latest drinks. If so, why would I not go to a site that shows interactive drink recipes, instead of just getting the company’s product recipes? A coop with a known recipe site that fits the brand attributes might have worked better.
2. Lack of benefits
   • If you can’t or won’t be product centric, you have to offer other benefits to give consumers a reason to believe in the website, like promotions and give-ways. Simply replicating community tools from other non-brand communities that are then limited to this one brand community won’t cut it, unless the product has such a loyal customer base and a product that deserves explanation, e.g. car community sites. A tequila is a tequila. What else is there to say? If you can’t tell a story, then don’t tell anything at all. Another example of where no functional benefits where given is the Stella Artois site. Does it matter? No. It tells a fun story where you can interact and learn about the brand by learning how to pour a beer correctly in a Belgian bar with a grumpy bartender. But you better have that story. And it better be interactive.
   • So, you could be life-style centric: yep, and that’s what Patron tried to do. The thing is, if you want to get lifestyle information, we all know about a dozen local and national community platforms that are connected through APIs to other sites like youtube, google maps, and flickr, giving me real social web and local information that have more user-generated content and lifestyle information than a company website with a couple posts. Telling people to post only works if you communicate a benefit and if you make the posts publically accessible and allow a free sharing of the information. Inclusion of completely standard blog functions such as bookmarking, ping backs, and commenting would have helped.
3. Censorship
   • The absolute no-no! The brand asks for your opinion and then censors your posts? Bad idea. If your brand isn’t ready for the prosumer who helps shape your brand because of corporate or marketing guidelines, don’t try to build a community website with user generated content. It just doesn’t make sense. You will find the guys you censor now on your “community” website on other open communities dissing you brand. And if you’re Agency tasked with this project, don’t try to convince your client it’s a good idea, if the brand isn’t ready. Come up with something else.

Need a new brand building consultant? Hire Paris Hilton.

O boy. According to this New York Post article, the Learning Annex apparently offered Paris Hilton 1 million bucks to “teach” a seminar on brand building because, quote, “She’s a brilliant entrepreneur”.

This is obviously insane. The guy that made her the offer should have his head (or other parts of his bod) examined.

I wonder how that “workshop” is gonna go down:

“And I am, like, wow, you brand is, like, totally uncool, dude.” And he is, like: “No waaaay, it’s not!” and I am like: “Whatever!”

Read more about this madness here.

Pipes: Rewire the web

I’ve followed this site for a while and I am posting it here now. Pipes allows you to essentially “rewire the web” the way you wish, based on all those open web2.0 APIs out there. Talking hard-core mash-ups!

Similar to Greasemonkey, it’s another example that might drive brand consistency zealots nuts: if you can change how everything looks and effectively just combine systems through simple WYSIWYG flowcharts, how can brands own ANY experience anymore? In my opinion, they CAN own the experience. The problem is that brands have equate the brand experience to what the brand experience LOOKS like as opposed to the actual experience.

So when people rewire your brand experience, let go. They are not rewiring your brand.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

A recent example geo-annotated Reuters News, based on the Reuters RSS and Yahoo Maps

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gGThvN_62xG2JH50ZoQMOQ

A reminder that we all represent a brand: our own.

John Windsor makes an observation everyone has made before. The simple, yet compelling thought is: how we act reflects not only on ourselves, but the brand we work for.

http://brandshift.corante.com/archives/2005/10/17/you_called_the_brand.php