Sell Yo-self

Content. The marketing strategy catchall. No matter the problem – declining sales, poor branding, lack of distribution and reach – content can solve it. Is this just wishful thinking?

How to Write About Advertising

If you want to write an article about advertising and have it blow up overnight – the comments section rife with equal parts cynicism and dismissal – there are two ways to do it.

Being Consistent

In many cultures, consistency is viewed as a desirable personality trait. People who behave predictably and routinely are seen as stable and dependable, whereas people who are inconsistent are generally seen as having little focus and direction.

Psychologists have known this since the 60s because it applies to many routine behaviours, but the principle of consistency is, ironically, consistently misapplied in advertising.

Social Cognition: Part 3

Every day, you are persuaded by those around you. Whether it is to make a quick decision, buy a product, or read an article with an evocative headline like this…

…We are likely to be open to suggestion during critical moments of non-thinking; what Kahneman famously refers to as System 1 processing. This is when our emotions take precedence over rational strategies while making decisions.

Social Cognition: Part 2

To most people, being part of a large group grants a sense of autonomy, relatedness, and power. When we are tied to something greater than our individual selves – be it a social cause, ideology, or cultural attribute – it can help shape our identity.

But being a member of a large group significantly changes the way we behave. We may gain some identity through shared group attributes, but those attributes make us feel less responsible for individual actions.

Social Cognition: Part 1

“People don’t just receive external information; they also process it and become architects of their own social environment” – Markus and Zajonc (1985)

Imagine yourself in a new environment full of people you’ve never met. For most, this is a stressful situation. Interacting with people without knowing how they see and interpret the world carries a fair degree of uncertainty, and therefore, vigilance.

Micro-Moments

There’s been a lot of discussion recently around micro-moments, one of the latest marketing tactics from Google, as an attempt to facilitate shared experiences between brand and user.

In short, micro-moments seek to capture consumer demand at its most powerful; in those small, every-day moments when people seek answers to the questions they are most frequently asking.

Self-Confessed Experts

There is an idiom that sometimes pops up on social forums about ‘incompetent people being too incompetent to recognise their own incompetence’.

While often used as a catch-22 to win Internet arguments, it does have some grounding in reality, as over-estimations of competence are surprisingly common in all fields of knowledge.

Insights Good and Bad

Back in the early 90s one of the most pervasive sources of misinformation weaved its way into mass media, one that is still widely believed today despite numerous revisions and an updated scientific consensus.

The source in question is the USDA food pyramid, introduced in 1992 and the first of its kind to not only separate food into common groups, but also recommend daily servings of each.

Changing Minds

When it comes to influencing people to pick up a habit or start a new behaviour, it helps to consider how they think about existing habits. The best framework for exploring this is Sherif’s Social Judgment Theory.

An important component of this model is the Latitudes of Acceptance; a theory of how people respond to information that either confirms or denies long-held beliefs.

Me, Myself, and Brands

Around fifteen years ago, the Truman Show hit cinemas; a film about a guy whose entire life was a reality TV show manufactured by an executive board and broadcast 24/7.

Since then, in the US and UK alone, psychiatrists have documented over 40 cases of those suffering from the belief that they are in fact the centre of such a reality TV show, and that every action they take is being monitored by hidden cameras that secretly broadcast them to millions across the globe.

The frequency of such cases was enough to give the condition a name: the Truman Show delusion. The question is, why the hell did this happen?

Disprove Yourself

For all the talk on how marketing is as far removed from science as a discipline can be, marketing and advertising progress and evolve in much the same way as any field of science. Falsifiability.

I’m coming up to the ‘one year’ mark of being a planner, so I thought I’d impart as much wisdom as a 22-year-old psych grad can ever hope to, and talk about being wrong.

Implementation Intentions

One of the best ways to modify behaviour and focus on hitting goals is to construct an ‘if-then’ plan, which follows this formula:

If situation X arises, then I will do Y.

Marketers use this technique to focus consumers on future behaviours by simply asking if they have been considered. While this doesn’t necessarily cause the behaviour to occur, it does nudge the consumer toward it by making the idea of it more salient in their mind. What is not considered now, may well be considered later, at the optimal time of performance.

Profit and Purpose

Marketers use an odd language when they talk to one another. Words like ‘positioning’ and ‘values’ and ‘authenticity’ pop up, which, to the rest of us, are close to meaningless when related to how we perceive brands.

A particularly strong word that marketers throw around is purpose. Supposedly, purpose is a brands reason for existing beyond making money (ironically structured in such a way as to make more money). 

'Purpose' means little to consumers for a number of reasons. One reason is because the strategies marketers use to create a sense of purpose are invisible to consumers (as they should be). But mostly, it is because most brands aren’t bought because of a strong sense of purpose.

Solving Non-Problems

Bad campaigns seem to stem from two kinds of strategy: a.) when a problem isn’t solved at all, and b.) when a problem is solved despite it not even being a problem. The ‘Blockbuster Box’ from Pizza Hut is an almost textbook example of the latter.

It is obviously one huge PR stunt, and though it will gain attention through sheer ridiculousness alone, the Blockbuster Box is just one example of the strange gimmicky trend to blend technology and advertising to “solve” problems that are entirely made up, a trend prevalent enough to be parodied.

Loyalty and Satisfaction

Humans are one of the few species known to be both completely erratic in some behaviours yet predictably habitual in others. This is why customer satisfaction is so difficult to measure. We buy some categories predictably, but we buy others whenever and wherever we feel like it. So how can we identify patterns?

One of the most widely used metrics of customer satisfaction that is still kicking today is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which claims to measure loyalty by asking a series of survey questions on the likelihood of recommending a product or service to others. And apparently, it’s king shit.

Mental Visibility

Getting noticed. It is the single most important strategy in advertising as all notions of consideration and purchase behaviour follow from it. So would deliberately being invisible be even a remotely effective idea?

As it turns out, it can be, as this campaign from Don Giulio Salumeria, an Italian delicatessen in Moscow, demonstrates:

The Psychology of Emotion

Emotion is one of the most powerful tools a marketer can wield, and it is well known that the environment we find ourselves in can spark an unlimited number of emotional responses that influences how we behave in future.

But why? Are emotions rational or irrational? Do they have a strong biological basis? And why do we cluster emotions and behaviours together to explain the culture surrounding us?

Limits of Neuromarketing

Empirical evidence is a good thing, and when looking at how people respond to advertising, it’s something that the marketing discipline will always benefit from. However, there is a fine line between evidence that is applicable to marketing and evidence that is not.

Among more recent trends is neuromarketing, the idea that brain mapping in real time can determine how consumers behave in response to a brand, product, or campaign. While promising, this field of research is still in its early stages, and should be approached critically.

Pervasive Assumptions

A while ago I wrote up a short advertising effectiveness test of sorts to annoy my friends with. I wanted to see how widespread the misconceptions surrounding advertising really were. Below are the eight true/false statements I used:

• Brand loyalty is crucial to achieving high sales
• Demographic segmentation is the best way to reach a target audience
• Advertising works through persuasion 
• Brands should primarily seek differentiation from their competitors 
• Brand awareness drives sales
• The best way to increase market share is by getting existing buyers to buy more often
• Social media strategy must be differentiated from traditional media strategy
• Mass marketing is an outdated strategy

Knowing Your Sources

Market research, like all social science research, falls into one of two categories: quantitative and qualitative. Quant data can be categorised and statistically measured, whereas qual data is non-objective, and cannot be categorised systematically (e.g. numerically).

The difference is pretty stark, but market research is particularly susceptible to pulling quant statistics out of the ass of qual data. This kind of research, unsurprisingly, tells us nothing, and I have found the perfect example to demonstrate why.

Don't Make Things Harder

Trawling through my Twitter feed today I found an environmental intervention by McDonalds aiming to nudge people into disposing of litter more thoughtfully.

At least I think that’s what it’s aiming to achieve. Honestly I have no idea. Judge for yourself: the McDonald’s Bag Tray.

Signalling Virtue

This week has been marred by controversy surrounding a campaign by Protein World, in which posters of a thin, fit woman with the tagline: “Are You Beach Body Ready?” were used to advertise weight loss formula in London.

Unsurprisingly, the posters received backlash from those who believed they glorified an unhealthy perception of what a ‘beach body’ should look like. However, this perception has been around for decades, so why is this comparatively tame iteration receiving so much negative attention?

False Causation

What do horoscopes, psychic perceptions, and palm reading have in common? The Barnum effect, in which we falsely believe that certain statements are tailored especially for us, but in reality could apply to a general population.

A particularly interesting example of this surrounds lunar cycles, a myth that exists to this day. The lunar effect, as it’s known, is the belief that certain events occur more frequently when there is a full moon. Why do we believe this?

Caring Companies

The other day I received an email from coglode.com updating me on a new cognitive bias that had been added to their ever-growing registrar: the Noble Edge Effect. In short, it describes the tendency to perceive socially conscientious companies as superior to those that are not.

How fitting then, for the recently slaughtered Fresh in Our Memories ANZAC campaign from Woolworths to come along and demonstrate that manufacturing social conscientiousness can do the exact opposite, while crashing and burning spectacularly.

Validation | Social Proof

Everything we do is driven by the need to accomplish goals. These drivers can be hardwired, internally motivated, or socially derived, but what they all have in common is that they trigger certain behaviours.

Many theorists argue that certain drivers take precedence over others. Gad Saad argues in favour of four evolved instincts that drive our need to consume. Maslow’s well-known Hierarchy of Needs demonstrates that certain needs must be fulfilled before other, ‘higher order’, needs are considered.

Social drivers, too, have been scientifically studied. Social proof is a phenomenon often used by marketers to drive conformity to a particular behaviour, but can be difficult to leverage. This is because social proof is a complicated pattern of behaviours influenced by the need for validation.

Mapping Doings

Last year’s Behavioural Economics guide contains a dandy little behaviour map, grouping similar behaviours together in on a simple axis. I’ve slightly adapted it to the version below, in my own scrawl.

This is useful for marketers trying to figure out what the type of behaviour is they’re looking to change, as it will have some influence on the direction of strategy. Elaborations within.

How Do People Work?

Psychographics: the alternative to traditional forms of target marketing based on demographic segmentation, or put simply, the targeting of what people do rather than who they are.

Commonalities determine grouping of consumers: shared affect, shared behaviours, and shared experiences. These are encompassed in cultural attributes that influence how people respond to the environment around them. Dive in.

Big Data | Faffery

Quick guys, we need to know ASAP how this target market behaves. We need to track eye movements and mouse hovering and other arbitrary wank to really know our customers. We need to know our customers so we can push this brand vision and do some real and proper engagement.

You know what we need? We need some data. And I mean, data. Big fucking fuckloads of data. What do you mean, “how do we get it”? It’s only data, numbers and shit, yeah? Here, just take these surveys and throw them at people.

Breaking Bad Behaviours

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Humans are strange. We’re creatures of habit. We do things because they are familiar, comfortable, rewarding, and automatic even if they are harmful to our wellbeing.

It’s a tricky thing to detach from. Familiarity breeds liking, and liking creates biases against anything falling outside of that category. So how to break habits that are detrimental? Science is here to save everything.

The Psychology of Remembering

Somewhere amongst all the bollocks of brand values and personality and ‘vision’ a lonely planner did raise a hand, suggesting a revolutionary concept of brand recall not based on target market analysis.

Except this concept has always been around. Only problem is it goes against the traditional marketing foray, and therefore tends to be ignored. It's the process that determines what information we recall, and it looks a little something like this.

Trendy Activism

Two words that probably shouldn't go together but unfortunately do.

Whether we do it by liking, sharing, reposting, reblogging, retweeting, regoogling, or reclickbaitifying, we all love rallying behind a worthy cause, especially when we can reap those extra-validating Internet point rewards.

Social Currency: the Warm 'n Fuzzies

People don’t want to talk to brands. They don’t want to hear about your stories, your personality, or how you plan to ‘engage’ with customers.

That being said, when it comes to social media, people still tend to share branded content. Why? Strap on your empathy helmets chaps, let's investigate.

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.