Marketing consultant Toby Ralph discusses how information-savvy consumers are changing the face of advertising.
As we migrate from mass to micro media, as cable TV, inter-net, blogs and podcasting explode, more information channels open. The more channels of information there are, the more conventional views are challenged and the more circumspect people become about the orthodoxy.
Traditionally the process of advertising has involved deploying large amounts of money to persuade people to believe things that we don't, be it the tenuous link between the purchase of a soft drink and social acceptance or the notion that a political party cares about people more than power. The thing is, everyone recognises it as nonsense.
We've moved past the era of successful puffery in advertising. We've moved past the era of simple entertainment in advertising. There's a trend to truth and it's gathering pace.
People know how to decode advertising. They know that a celebrity is getting paid and doesn't use the product. They know that if you've got nothing to say you sing it, so they are cynical about jingles. They know they won't look like the models in the ad just by drinking that product.
If a large company claims 'You've got a friend' consumers increasingly decode the real message to be that their customer service is substandard; when a corporation claims to care, consumers invariably assume they don't.
I did a job for a very large company a while back. Their advertising was driven straight off the back of research. The research said "You're uncaring. You're not seen to care about customers who have little or no money or regional and rural communities, and in a macro sense you don't care about the underprivileged."
So what did they do? They tried to address it by running ads claiming that they cared about people and the personal problems they face. Not only that but they sponsored a range of charities for disadvantaged people. So how did the potential clients react? They saw through the ads, and were simultaneously increasingly cynical about the company.
Now we've got a society that isn't looking for entertainment. They are busy, they have access to more information than ever before, and they expect to be treated like individuals, not part of a target market. They are zapping commercials, blocking out spam, hanging up on telemarketers and putting no-junk-mail stickers on their letterboxes.
What does the trend to truth mean for business? Three things: first, and most importantly, actively listen and respond to customers, second, remember that distortions, pretences and half-truths will be spotted and punished, and third, remember that it's better to demonstrate the claim.
This article appears courtesy of
Expense Reduction Analysts.
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20-Aug-2007