A lot of advertising tries to trigger desire. We portray products as critical to filling a painful gap. e.g. that toothpaste will make my smile whiter at the same time as preventing cavities; a whiter smile will make me more attractive to people, etc and so forth. With an abundance of choices - products, services, issues - "brand" is more important than ever. What a product or service promises to its customers beyond the price-for-perfomance often becomes the deciding factor in purchase decisions. All basic stuff. But what about the scientific understanding of influence? Has that changed at all with the explosion of digital media?
At the recent Verge conference in NYC, we were talking about new measurement models. I had John Batelle from Federated Media, Nick Denton from Gawker, and Owen Van Natta from Facebook on the panel. Most of them catering to the existing advertising media-based model. John Batelle - especially - is trying to go beyond that with different ways to value ...eek, that word....engagement.
Old Models
Our old models of what people find persuasive need to be recalibrated. In a frequency-based world we count on repetition to make an impression. That and the relevance of the message may drive customers to buy or take an action (or prefer the brand). In a click-through world, we operate based upon direct-response principles which appear a little cruder at the surface but with a hardcore "conversion" result.
In the word of mouth or peer-recomendation world - what is the best way to measure effectiveness of marketing efforts? Like a lot of marketing, we have a brand benefit as well as a sales benefit. In the former, we establish a stronger connection with customers by participating with them on some level - conversation, co-creation, being of-use. In the latter, when 81% of US customers find WOM more trustworthy for purchase decisions - we have a powerful conversion story. So why is it so hard to tell the marketing value story to trained brand marketers?
As described before, there is a great temptation to compare WOM to advertising to try and simplify the brand marketers dilemma: how to compare strategic approaches to make wise marketing budget decisions.
We need to get back to the science of persuasion
I'm talking Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I am talking about books like Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice. To some extent, Made to Stick, offers a contemporized digest of ideas that motivate people - kind of like public relations-lite.
There was a time when advertising agencies employed academic types: anthropologists, psychologists, deomographic number-crunchers. It's hard to see that this was anything but a fad. But now, we need to get back to the science of influence. If we are truly going to understand how the vast array of word of mouth approaches can motivate people to buy or act and how they can spread, we need to also be able to document how different types of word of mouth from different sources actually forms opinion and drives action in others.
Are marketers ready to talk psychology or do we all just want a simple way to count like the one proposed by BzzAgent? They cam out with a little white paper a month ago that basically said, "let's just call WOM a $300 cpm." I am not sure I disagree with their approach. But it is sacrificing some very interesting learnings about how WOM can be persuasive for the benefits of actionable simplicity.
How can we re-examine our assumptions about how influence is applied in today's social media-infused marketing without getting mired in an academic black hole for the next 5 years?
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