Nobody loves brands
This presentation by Martin Weigel vividly explains the real challenge marketers face: not winning people’s love, but getting their attention. It’s 100 slides, but only takes a few minutes to view.
I hesitate to add anything to such a brilliant piece of work, but I think Martin could have made one more point. Yes, there’s a yawning chasm between what marketers and consumers think about brands. But although Martin contrasts those two groups for rhetorical effect, they’re not really that different.
‘Marketer’ and ‘consumer’ are just hats we wear. All marketers are consumers: they have to clean their teeth and insure their cars the same as everybody. And these days, when everyone’s creating content and managing social profiles, you could also argue that all consumers are marketers too.
Look to your own experience.
The antidote to delusion is reality. And the best way to bridge the gap between branding delusion and consumer reality is to look at the realest thing there is: your own experience.
Do you really have strong feelings about many brands? Because I don’t.
I buy clothes from Gap because their jeans fit me and I can go in the shop without feeling too much like mutton dressed as lamb. I drink Beck’s all the time, even though I know craft beers taste better, because I can’t face researching which ones I like (or becoming an ale bore).
When buying homewares, I constantly confuse Homebase and B&Q, which have branches quite close together near my home. In my mind they are both ‘orange’ (even though Homebase is mostly green). I sometimes drive to what I think is Homebase, only to realise on arrival that it’s actually B&Q, or vice versa.
Meanwhile my partner, who usually shops for food, has loyalty of less than zero and chooses between Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Morrison’s and Aldi based on obscure, possibly random criteria.
People don’t have time for this stuff.
As you can see, emotion doesn’t really figure. Inertia is far more powerful, with convenience running it a close second. While an over-zealous marketer somewhere may interpret that as ‘loyalty’, it’s really much closer to tiredness and not really giving that much of a toss either way.
With barely enough bandwidth to take care of everyday life, I’m hardly on the lookout for new ways to engage with brands. In fact, I want the exact opposite: the road of least resistance to getting my needs met. And that doesn’t include playing a branded game on Facebook or uploading a lame selfie of me using a product.
Maybe younger consumers do have the time and inclination for all that, but since they also have less disposable income, that’s hardly a powerful argument.
Experience precedes emotion.
For me, the acid test is whether I would enthusiastically tell a friend about a brand, as opposed to a product (insofar as they can be separated). And the only brand that really passes that test is Apple.
The problem is, Apple is a one-off. It’s the exception to every rule and not a brand others can realistically hope to emulate.
And even with Apple, the experience came first, the feelings later. While undeniably beautiful and seductive, Apple stuff simply lets me work, play and run my life with less resistance than anybody else’s. I’m loyal, but partly to save a load of exhausting research every time I buy a gadget, or the hassle of breaking out of Apple’s walled garden. And if the brand stopped delivering, that could change.
The only time I can remember consciously choosing a brand rather than a product was when I bought my first (and indeed only) hi-fi separates. Correctly intuiting a total lack of product knowledge on my part, the salesman steered me towards Cambridge Audio, the go-to brand for entry-level noobs like me. But I didn’t like the 70s naffness of Cambridge’s brand (see image, and it was even worse in the 90s), preferring the clean Helvetica and warm grey of NAD. And that determined my choice. So for me, the brand only came into play when I had absolutely nothing else to go on.
Advertising is more honest than engagement.
It’s well established that we don’t buy stuff for purely rational reasons. But that doesn’t mean we buy for purely emotional reasons either. We buy for a shifting mish-mash of reasons so amorphous and chaotic that they’re barely worthy of the name. We buy for reasons that we probably never articulate, even internally (until a researcher asks us about them, at which point we make something up to avoid looking stupid). We buy impulsively, lazily, randomly. To the extent that we do think, we think about ourselves and our lives much more than the brands we buy.
Unfortunately, the second we step into the office, we expect others to act in a completely different way. Suddenly we’re ‘marketers’ – and our job is to target remote ‘consumers’ with a load of clever button-pushing, rhetorical tricks and cheap gimmicks that we hope will somehow inspire deep emotion, as if people were eagerly waiting to hear what we had to say.
Maybe it would be more honest just to ask for the sale. A traditional ad is transparent and upfront, offering a straightforward transaction of benefits for money. It’s a peer-to-peer, adult-to-adult communication. In contrast, trying to tweak the buyer’s heartstrings while obscuring your true motive is profoundly cynical.
All of this is self-evident when we look at our own lives, but it somehow gets obscured by theory and groupthink in a professional environment. It’s something we all need to get back to. As Darth Vader said, ‘Search your feelings. You know it to be true.’
Comments (10)
Comments are closed.
I’m sick to my back teeth of receiving story telling informational (sales) emails from “content marketers”
The will game will be up soon enough. The attempts to emotionally engage succeed only in pissing me off far more than if they just asked for a sale.
Well said, agree on all fronts.
Well, I’m not sure that’s an argument against content marketing. It’s an argument for better content – content that offers benefits in and of itself.
If you don’t find value in the content you’re receiving, it isn’t doing its job. But there could well be some other potential content that would offer value.
I also get a lot of emails that I don’t particularly value, but I get a few that I do like. As I argued in this post, that doesn’t mean I have an emotional attachment to the brand – it just means it’s offering something of value to me, that I may one day reward with a sale (if I haven’t already).
Yep, agree Tom. Just hate regurgitated content that most of the marketing companies are currently sending.
I often tell advertising students who present work that expects way too much interest in a brand: “you are the people in this country probably the most interested in advertising and branding and marketing, and yet how often do even YOU interact with a brand?”.
I think this is an absolutely crucial point in terms of how people judge and describe ‘good work’.
Let’s say you see a great ad like, say, Guinness Surfer. You don’t immediately go out and buy a Guinness, but you register the brilliance of the ad and it makes an indelible association with the brand in your mind. It moves the needle. So even if you are appreciating it on a professional level, the creative has ‘worked’ on you in the sense that you’ve interacted with it in the same manner as a ‘normal consumer’ would. You may interpret it differently, or more deeply, but the basic experience is the same.
By contrast, we judge social campaigns much more remotely. I often read case studies about campaigns that have achieved big engagement, but I very rarely actually go and do the engaging activity, whatever it is – even if it’s only a click away. When I have tried to do it, I’ve usually got bored because it requires a ridiculously high time investment. So when we say these campaigns are ‘good’, it’s usually a vicarious judgement based on performance stats or case studies, not a direct experience of the mechanics of the campaign. To me, that extra distance makes all the difference – talking about an experience that ‘people over there’ are having, rather than something experienced directly and collectively.
I’m not entirely uncomfortable comparing engagement to traditional advertising. In my world (admittedly a bizarre, freakish place), one is a media channel, the other an outcome.
I believe it’s possible (profitable even) for *some* brands to “engage” with consumers, though I doubt the majority — especially big brands — have a prayer. And I don’t believe social media has altered this reality one bit.
An outdoor clothing company like Patagonia — which goes to a great deal of effort to recycle their clothing and minimize their environmental impact — probably does sell a few jackets to customers with an affinity for the environment. That’s about as good a definition of “engagement” as I can find.
Same for some of my conservation nonprofit clients. Outside of getting results on their key issues, engaging their membership is probably their biggest gig.
To be clear, I’m talking about brands whose audiences have already self-selected based on an affinity for the environment/adventure/the outdoors. Engagement seems like a no brainer.
It’s always existed. In a world where harder measures were available, it hasn’t been needed.
In fact, in a startling act of cynicism, I’m going to suggest the word “engagement” has been hijacked by social media proponents in an attempt to prove value that often isn’t there. My nonprofit clients can (and did) engage with their membership via ads, email, direct — all the traditional channels.
Social media might have made that (slightly) easier, but I’d suggest it hasn’t amplified the effect as promised. Just because Customer A enjoys some level of engagement doesn’t their friends will.
Given the endlessly irritating search for “likes” on the part of some brands, it’s likely social media is resulting in less engagement for some brands.
My clients’ campaigns tell me that social media channels are personal, but they operate like dysfunctional email channels. Not exactly what we were promised.
Two more thoughts.
Apple’s advertising has been almost entirely product oriented and lacks even a whiff of “engagement.” Yet they’ve created a monster brand.
And life’s too short to drink so-so beer.
In any case, a tip of the hat to you for writing challenging posts. The copywriting/marketing blogosphere has become something of a wasteland.
I’d just like to say that I love the term, “Ale Bore”.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment Tom.
I did play fast and loose with terminology. To clarify, ‘engagement’ = campaigns and tactics that are explicitly aimed at involving prospects in some sort of social-media or content-generating activity rather than directly or explicitly selling to them; ‘traditional advertising’ = campaigns that ask for the sale, or at least don’t put any other objective in its way.
Your definition of engagement is broader and also more illuminating, highlighting the fact that, as you say, engagement can be a worthy goal in a non-profit context, or a simple by-product of serving customers the right way. But as you say, it’s been torn free of those roots and made into an end in itself.
Actually, I do drink some craft ales. Goose Island is a particular favourite.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who doesn’t interact with brands that much. I’m sick to the teeth of ‘digital marketing gurus/rainmakers/experts/ninjas/ appearing to be ‘engaged’ with everything, all the time, when in actuality it is mere superficial façade.