Agency Buzzwords

Let’s kick things off with a bang. Below are four marketing buzzwords often praised by professional admen, or as I like to call them: Bullshit Extrapolators.

These words communicate nothing and still continue to float around agencies, but thankfully each are replaceable by modern, empirically tested alternatives. Oh how I love a good science high. Lemme puff that beaker, bro.

I – Awareness

So-called “awareness campaigns” rarely achieve their goals unless they are effectively paired with some sort of behavioural trigger (see: ice bucket challenge), and even then they’re mostly left to luck. This is because awareness of a product in any given category is absolutely non-indicative of our likelihood to buy or use it.

This is not just a question of semantics. The term is often used in place of its correct alternative: salience. If your product does not find its way into working memory in a buying or usage situation, it is not salient in its category.

If your branding is tripe and your behavioural triggers are absent, then ‘awareness campaigns’ are money down the shitter. Indeed, making consumers aware that your product exists only serves to drive sales if they are already highly motivated to use it: thanks to the very reliable Fogg Model of behaviour.

Motivating people is hard, but by creating implicit positive associations between the brand and the context-dependant buying behaviour, it can be done.

Brands don’t sell by consumers being ‘aware’ of them, they sell by being memorable, and strong associations create memories. Kahneman’s theories on the experienced vs. remembered self should be a mandatory read for every planner.

II – Segmentation

Or ‘targeting’, because that’s all it is.

Apparently, dividing up potential markets based on demographics, psychographics, or any other graphics that eliminate potential consumers based on arbitrary lifestyle and personality factors, is still a common sales technique.

As the brilliant Byron Sharp puts it, not only are you effectively marketing to a single, artificial consumer by doing this, you are giving those not part of the target market a reason not to buy.

If you want your audience to do something (i.e. buy your product), then look at what they do, not what they think. Because as any planner who has had to monitor the dreaded focus research group will tell you, people don’t have a goddamned clue in heck what they want, what they think they want, and what they think they do to get to what they think they want.

There is always a series of actions a consumer must take when buying or using a product. Identify them. Use them. Cognitive dissonance is a strategist’s best friend.

III – Differentiation

I hear this was an effective way to market back in the Madmen era of advertising, but today competitors in any category are likely to number in the thousands instead of the tens, and we need to start accepting that people just don’t give a fuck about brands.

Really, they don’t (fuck your ‘stories’). And they care even less about how brands they don’t give a fuck about are different from other brands they don’t give a fuck about.

The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Logic and Actual Science (or something) along with Millward Brown released a fantastic paper on what they call meaningful differentiation and meaningless distinctiveness.

Every day we are assaulted by advertising, and the campaigns that are consistently remembered play to our intuitive, System 1 style of thinking. Contrary to classical economic theory, we do not make fully informed rational decisions, and it is often emotions that guide our actions.

When brands are associated with creatively inspired emotional responses, they are likely to have influence over our more evaluative thinking processes. And we do what we feel.

And hey presto, suddenly you really are lovin’ that 2am, piece-of-shit-flaccid-patty-on-a-plastic-bun-acne-ensemble.

IV – Loyalty

Only a fraction of the population are brand loyal, and only a fraction of those true loyalists are consciously loyal and don’t just do it out of habit.

Consumers are far more likely to be ‘brand switchers’ and deal-driven, in that we might prefer one or two brands, but will switch without hesitation to whichever offers better value or promise of a better experience (subjectively and contextually).

There seems to be a big focus on buyer retention, when really the vast majority of market penetration comes from one-time buyers.

There is a statistical law (stay with me) known as negative binomial distribution (NBD), which seems to be the normal distribution of the ad world. It states that the majority of buyers in any given category buy a product 0-1 times in a relevant period (weekly, annually, etc.). There are fewer buyers who buy 2-3 times, and this decreases exponentially as the frequency of buying increases. This law obviously varies depending on a product’s market share (particularly double jeopardy), but often holds true.

So unless you market for Nike or Coke, it is far more beneficial to take advantage of ‘switchers’ and influence consumers who buy within the category to buy your product one time, instead of influencing existing buyers to buy more often.

If increasing market share is the endgame, acquiring new buyers is the strategy. Don’t spend resources focusing on retaining those who already buy your brand. They won’t stray too far if the product is consistent.

Awareness < Salience

Segmentation < Dissonance

Differentiation < Distinctiveness

Loyalty < Acquisition

Our four dated buzzwords and their science-based alternatives. With thy knowledge imbued I dub thee: Slightly More Well-Informed. Go forth and sell.

Oh, and that’ll be 10k, thanks.

a.ce