The Intolerance of Understanding

Let’s say that at some point in the next week, we discovered how to travel back in time. Let’s say we bring our smartphones with us to show the old world.

How would we explain them?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.