Six New Marketing Strategies to Engage Consumers Emotionally

Emotions

Speaking to a worldwide advertising industry audience gathered in Geneva, P&G head of worldwide media strategy Bernhard Glock announced two years ago that the world’s leading package goods company saw the need to “touch the hearts” of consumers.

In the U.S., the industry’s three leading associations, the ANA, 4As and ARF embarked on an ambitious project to expand the industry’s ability to measure and understand the emotional element in advertising. They then popularized the term “Engagement” as a rallying cry. Let us engage consumers emotionally, is part of their message. The other parts of Engagement besides Emotional Bonding, according to Dr. Joe Plummer of ARF, are Utility/ Relevancy/ Targeting and Surprise/ Discovery, and they are also largely emotional/ unconscious responses too.

A topnotch marketing research scientist and Harvard professor, Gerald Zaltman, drew upon neuroscience and other disciplines to synthesize a picture of how consumers think, concluding that 95% of how we think is unconscious and emotional, and is not being measured by 99% of the $16 billion spent each year on marketing research.

In a gathering last year at the New York Yacht Club convened by the viral marketing company Informative, clients of that company including P&G, Pfizer, Lego, Bose, and Intuit talked about how Informative’s natural language based Internet communication system, designed to bring marketers and consumers closer together, had revealed important consumer insights that had been filtered out by the standard tools of marketing research such as focus groups and surveys.

These scattered events form a pattern. The world’s leading corporations, who collectively spend on marketing about one-fifth of their total revenue (about a trillion marketing dollars a year) – money spent essentially based on guesswork with little after the fact proof that the money was well spent – are reaching the end of their patience waiting for this intolerable situation to right itself. Using econometric modeling and every other tool they can lay their hands on, they are mounting their own version of an ad hoc non-coordinated Manhattan Project to make marketing measurable and accountable. And as they peel the onion they are discovering that there are more layers there than they thought, and that even cutting edge science is only on the frontier of being able to answer their questions, and that emotion and unconscious aspects of the mind must indeed be engaged by marketers who are serious about having an effect.

These momentous changes in the field of marketing are occurring simultaneously with an explosion of new media triggered by new digital technologies. Marketers using econometric modeling and simpler metrics are becoming disillusioned with the apparent lack of efficacy in their traditional mass media marketing techniques, and are turning to these new media with hope that they will provide greater returns on marketing investments (ROMI). For one thing, almost all of them allow consumer response – they are interactive. For another thing, almost all of them leave a census-level audit trail – they provide a foundation for deep accountability.

It is the point of view of this paper that simply changing media will not in itself cause a substantial increase in effectiveness. Readers who know us will infer from our career-long affection for the New Media that this latter statement is not to deny that the New Media will play a major role in the future of marketing. Rather we believe that the underlying problem is that the communication strategies being used are at fault, and that if these strategies are translated wholecloth into the new media, the problem of low ROMI will persist.

Flashbacks

In 1976 we approached one of our early teachers, Dr. Larry Deckinger of Grey Advertising, one of the wisest people in the field, with our own speculations about the impending demise of the general advertising industry communication strategy – the strategy of hitting people with unwanted messages containing information designed to persuade them to buy.

We showed him evidence that the mind of the market was changing. People were becoming more skeptical about advertising content, more distrustful of large corporations, less interested in shallow materialist interests, and more vocal about yearnings to find real meaning in their lives. Talking to them about largely fictitious advantages of one commodity/parity brand over others – while interrupting them from watching something they had chosen to watch – seemed in this new context to be insulting, and a guarantee of boomerang effectiveness.

We predicted that advertising in its traditional form would become less effective due to these seismic shifts in the consumer psyche, and proposed that Grey go to its advertiser clients with a proposal to change the nature of advertising in a way designed to succeed in the new mental environment.

We made our proposal with the foreknowledge that the industry would be biased in favor of continuing to insert commercials in TV programs in much the same way for as long as possible, and that any proposal revolutionary enough to meddle with that practice would not be likely of adoption. This is because any industry is loathe to totally overturn processes which have made so many individuals so wealthy for such a long time. So we made what we thought would be an acceptable proposal, one that would keep the wheels of industry turning in much the same way, only changing the exact nature of the content in those inserted video blobs.

We proposed that advertisers create miniprograms the same length as commercials. Miniprograms that would inspire, uplift and expand the minds of viewers, add to their quality of life, teach them something useful, or report on the good citizenship charitable works of the brand or its parent company. We called these units PSADs – public service announcement ads. Alternative names: sponsored miniprograms, Quality Of Life advertising (QOL).

A beauty product might create spots about how to be beautiful by projecting an inner beauty emanating from having set one’s mind into a loving mode. A pet food manufacturer might pass on a tip about how to communicate with a cat. A cooking tip from a food advertiser. A soap manufacturer’s tip about how to remove a certain type of stain from a certain fabric. How a company was raising the standard of living in a poor country by its new plant opening there. And so on.

We argued that where a brand really had a product difference to talk about, it should do so, but where there was nothing truthful to say about product advantages, brands should use the time to give a gift of content that could be appreciated, creating good will.

Larry said that he agreed with all this but did not think that he could get Grey management to go along with it, and if they did, he was not sure that the clients would go along with it anyway.

Another of our early teachers at about the same time taught us a lesson about great advertising. Nick Pisacane, copywriter and creative consultant, for major brands at McCann-Erickson, Wells Rich Greene, BBDO, et al, explained that he always tried to tie his commercials to larger issues, things that people really cared about. Instead of talking about a product for home improvement, he would write commercials about the deep feelings evoked by the idea of home, and then tie his client’s product to those deep feelings.

Common Sense

To a “civilian” i.e. a human being not in the business, explaining this has always been easier. They take it all as obvious. “You mean, instead of interrupting and insulting me with ads which assume that I am a trivial person concerned about these lowly matters, advertisers should entertain me with something brief and beautiful, or educate me with information I can use? Which of these two approaches would make me like them better, make me want to repay them by considering buying their brand? Duh, let me see, that’s a really tough one….”

If we are now really trying to engage consumers emotionally, to touch their hearts, is it not time to reconsider the content we put into our messages? Can we really engage the consumer emotionally by talking about the absorbency of our paper towel? Isn’t it time not only for New Media and new measurements and new buzzwords, but also for a whole new perspective on how to use the bits of time called advertising?

Gratitude Effect

28 studies conducted over the past five years for P&G, Nestle, American Express, Toyota, Volvo, et al have shown that a 29% average increase in purchase intent can be created by a brand sponsoring useful content on the Internet, eschewing the opportunity to bend the consumer’s ear with a product pitch, and instead merely saying “Brought to you by”.

This compares with an average 4% increase in purchase intent created by the average TV commercial pretested by leading TV commercial pretesting company ARS – 35,000 TV commercials included in that 4% average.

Next Century Media did these 28 studies with the Sponsorship Effectiveness Index (SEI) tool NCM created with Studio One Networks, Inc. SEI utilizes classic experimental design where the only variable between the matched exposed and control group is that the control group does not see any mention of any sponsor. The purchase intent measurement like the pre-post brand choice instrument used by ARS attempts to hew as closely as possible to the original Horace Schwerin methodology which has been validated and revalidated as predictive of actual sales effects many times over the past 70 years.

A study I did years ago for a pet food manufacturer showed that sponsoring a prime time TV Special about cats had three times the persuasion effect as the average TV commercial used by the same brand.

A series of CBS TV Specials measured by Norman Hecht Research showed similarly high persuasion effects, except in one case where there were multiple sponsors. The use of sponsorship – giving a gift of good content without taking it as license to bombard the viewer with product bombast – appears to have its emotive effectiveness when there is a single giver to whom to be grateful.

This apparent emotive Gratitude Effect is a clue to at least one of the likely communication strategies of the future marketing/advertising field.

Six New Strategies

Here are our predictions as to which communications approaches are going to supplant the traditional “rape the consciousness” mode of advertising in a quest for emotional engagement with consumers. In the process of outlining these we will mention the early pioneers who today are laying the groundwork for each of these new approaches.

1. Emotional Advertising
2. Surprise
3. Cause Marketing
4. Gratitude Sponsorship
5. Educational Marketing
6. Experiential Marketing

Emotional Advertising

In my flashback above I mentioned one of my early teachers, copywriter Nick Pisacane. Recently he has been serving as a confidential creative consultant for some of the biggest names in advertising – the “Intel Inside” a number of big hitters. When the research I was doing started to point in an emotional direction I gave Nick a call and said in effect “Your time has come.” One thing led to another and with me as Research Advisor, Nick and his longtime art director Al Amato formed a new creative resource called EmotionalAdvertising.com. This organization although still in its infancy has already formed a strategic alliance with a production company that specializes in the use of major film directors such as Oliver Stone, et al, in the production of advertising, in traditional and new forms. Not all Emotional Advertising creative product will utilize such talent because as Nick and Al say, it will not always be necessary. Nothing I can say about their work means anything compared to the reel of the great advertising they have already created, all of which touches the heart. A sampling is on their website which can be reached directly by clicking here.

As we move into the new age of advertising, an age of true maturity and practical realism for the field, emotional advertising and its leading proponent EmotionalAdvertising.com is destined to play a major role.

Surprise

I mentioned that the Advertising Research Foundation’s Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer recently hypothesized that the three drivers of Advertising Engagement are:

• Surprise/Discovery
• Emotional Bonding
• Relevancy/Utility

You may already have seen some of the results of the new Eye Tracking study which Next Century Media did for TACODA. These results strongly support the Plummer hypothesis about the importance of surprise.

TACODA is one of the leaders in the use of Behavioral Targeting on the Internet. Behavioral Targeting sends ads to people who appear to be targets for a product because in their very recent (last few days) Web behavior they have visited sites related to the purchase of that product. Over the past two years Behavioral Targeting has proven itself in numerous case studies as reaching the same people the advertiser can reach on highly targeted Contextual content sites (e.g. Autobytel) but reaching them in environments where the CPM is far lower. While this is great for the advertiser in extending the reach of targets most efficiently (most advertisers buy a base of Contextual sites then add Behavioral on top of that base), it’s also great for publishers because it allows them to raise the CPM of a Run Of Network site by offering Behavioral Targeting there – a true win/win situation.

Behavioral Targeting never claimed to be as good as Contextual Targeting (advertising on the sites specifically related to purchase of, and information about specific products), just more efficient in reaching targets. Then the unexpected happened – case studies started to roll in from TACODA, Advertising.com, Revenue Sciences, 24/7 and others, showing that Behavioral often beats Contextual in clickthrough rate, lift in purchase intent, ROI, and other important measures.

TACODA asked NCM to investigate. We suspected surprise as one possible element. Seeing a car ad on a baby site, we hypothesized, would surprise the user and therefore perhaps gain more attention than if the car ad were on a car site. It looks as if we were right. An eye tracking study conducted to our design by The PreTesting Company, the best-known user of the technique with numerous patents to its credit, found that users looked more at the same ads in Behavioral Targeting environments than in Contextual Targeting environments. Interestingly, this advantage for Behavioral Targeting became even more dramatic – a 54% advantage for Behavioral over Contextual – after the first exposure (specifically, across the second, third, and fourth exposures of the same ad to the same person). Apparently the effect of surprise does not wear out as quickly as some other psychological effects do.

TACODA and NCM are now planning a brainwave study to delve even more deeply into the matter of surprise. Stay tuned.

Surprise is one of the most important and least researched elements in advertising. Researchers interested in delving deeper should start with the work of Dr. Emmanuel Donchin, who discovered the brainwave signature of surprise (the P300 Wave).

Cause Marketing

Cause Marketing is the doing of good works by companies, and the appropriate communication of those good works using media. 30 second miniprograms as espoused above is one form in which such good works might be communicated to the public. The segment of the population which Stanford University’s Stanford Research Institute (SRI) has dubbed “Societally Conscious” is likely to be most affected by this strategy, but its effects are not limited to that group. Cause Marketing is estimated to be a $1 billion industry segment as of 2005 (we conservatively project from a 2001 IEG Sponsorship Report estimate of $733 million). An MIT article further estimates that 69% of 2005 sponsorship dollars went to sports, while 9% went to social causes, implying a $11 billion size for total sponsorship dollars in the U.S. in 2005.

Case studies show that Avon, Stonyfield Farm and Starbucks benefited from sponsoring social causes. Cone Communications, an agency specializing in Cause Marketing, conducts surveys to measure consumer reactions to this form of marketing. Among their findings:

• 80% of Americans say they have a more positive image of companies that support a cause they care about
• Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they would likely switch brands or retailers to one associated with a good cause
• More than half say they would pay more for a cause marketer’s product or service
• 87% of employees at organizations with a cause marketing program feel a strong sense of loyalty to their company as opposed to 67% of those at companies that do not support causes

The average consumer is vocal in saying she/he couldn’t care less about most advertising. The same average consumer is a human being with real feelings, who is passionate about some subjects. An advertiser seeking to make a deep connection with real human beings can learn what they care about and then do something good for something they care about. This can have deep and long-lasting effect on the relationship with those consumers,
far in excess of what can be done with almost any advertising.

Look for Cause Marketing to become a larger share of the total marketing pie in years to come.

Gratitude Sponsorship

Gratitude Sponsorship has already been described above. Studio One Networks is a pioneer in the use of this form on the Internet and radio (and is now moving into television). Hallmark is an advertiser who has long been associated with this form on television. The sponsorship approach was the main mode of advertising in the early days of radio and television until the quest for efficient reach (and the “eggs-in-too-few-baskets” downside of an all-sponsorship approach at least as regards new TV pilots, only 2% of which make it to a second season) led to scatter plan strategy in the early 60s.

Andrew Susman had been an executive at Time Warner prior to forming Studio One Networks. At Time Warner he helped P&G launch their Parentime site, one of the first uses of Gratitude Sponsorship on the Web.

Of the 28 studies NCM has done so far for Studio One (three more are in the field right now), the one that has been fully disclosed with advertiser permission is the Volvo case. The Volvo study was made possible by Phil Bienert, VP Marketing of Volvo, Charlie Tarzian, CEO of Euro RSCG Circle, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau who helped line up the Internet publishers including Yahoo, Terralycos, Conde Net, Studio One Networks and others.

Volvo placed a simple “Brought to you by Volvo – for life” message on its coverage of the New York Auto Show from the Jacob Javits Center. There was no advertising. However, because it was a car show, all of Volvo’s competitors were showcased in the editorial. The user must have typically been quite surprised to see Volvo obviously paying real money to bring the user rave reviews about new Mercedes, BMWs, Chryslers, etc.

The inclusion of Volvo in the Consideration Set of those seeing this (vs. a matched control group seeing the same editorial with no sponsor message) was over 600% higher. Marketing Mix Modeling applied to the data deduced a 90 to 1 ROI for Volvo. A study done by Erwin Ephron and MMA in 2003 for presentation to ESOMAR showed that for non packaged goods products, paid media advertising averages only a 2.24 to 1 ROI. Volvo exceeded the average by a stupendous margin by surprising the audience with great content in which Volvo’s competitors were showcased. Go figure.

Sponsoring content liked by the target audience without asking anything in return (i.e. not even taking advantage of the opportunity to insert advertising) hits all three of the Plummer Engagement Drivers: Surprise, Emotional Bonding, and Relevancy. No wonder it worked for Volvo.

Look for a renaissance in the use of sponsorship as more and more ad-skipping takes place. Product placement may move in this direction, so as to gain the Gratitude Effect by getting the viewer to understand that the program might not have been there at all if it were not for the sponsor. The concern for ad skipping on VOD will undoubtedly cause a move toward the use of sponsorship on VOD. The same is true of content on mobile devices, where interruptive ads will be particularly disliked by most users.

Educational Marketing

Educational Marketing is the teaching of subjects to consumers for free, sponsored by specific advertisers. Powered is a pioneer in the use of this form on the Internet for companies such as HP and Sony.

HP for example sponsored a course on digital photography. The only subtle advertising for HP’s products occurred when the course had to show products in use and these happened to be HP products…almost like product placement. But HP was also the giver of the gift of a free course, and HP also distinguished itself from other marketers in its restraint from using the opportunity for a pitch.

The result (not specifically for HP but the average across all Powered sponsors during 2005) was an ROI of 55 to 1, 25 times the average ROI for paid media advertising for non CPG advertisers according to the Ephron/ MMA study.

Observers of human society have often focused on education as the key to uplifting the human condition, and have often identified its opposite, ignorance, as the main driver of what we call evil. Wouldn’t it be convenient if advertisers found that they could gain huge increases in ROI by helping to educate rather than by what we have been doing under the guise of advertising for the last Century or so.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential Marketing is the use of in-person experiences/events to allow human level communication among and between companies and consumers. Dan Belmont is a pioneer in the use of this form.

The way I met Dan was my cell phone rang and it was John Bernbach, son of Bill, one of the greatest creatives in the advertising business, whom it had been my honor to meet many years ago, introduced by my friend Rosser Reeves. John, a genius in his own right, teamed with Martin Puris in a company called NonTraditional Media about which I will write in another posting, said “Remember you said you had a plan to measure the ROI of
event sponsorship? Well, I’ve got a guy with me right now named Dan Belmont who wants to do just that.”

15 minutes later Dan and I were having a drink and comparing notes. I learned the term “Experiential Marketing” means more than event sponsorship, it includes everything that can be personally experienced by a consumer directly i.e. not through media – including such things as product sample tastes given in supermarkets. I was amazed to discover that Dan had put together Intel, Cisco, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and AOL in a group called the Technology Experience Marketing Strategy Council. They are seeking empirical measurements of the ROI of experiential marketing. I told Dan that NCM had been invited years earlier by the ANA Sponsorship Committee to put together a plan to do the same thing as regards the event sponsorship piece of it.

This story does not yet have an ending. Dan has just taken a big job at Omnicom, as Chief Marketing Officer for The Marketing Arm, the Omnicom agency that plans, buys, measures, and executes across all the emotional platforms, and as President of its sports marketing division Millsport. The Technology Experience Marketing Strategy Council continues in its mission with Dan as Chairman. The next chapter will be an interesting one. Experiencing direct contact with marketers is the most personal form of persuasive communications a consumer can have. Personal experience goes deep. With Dan’s passionate leadership we have no doubt that there will be empirical measurements of just how deep in the not too distant future.

The Over-Story Hasn’t Got an Ending Yet Either

As with all things, there will be advertisers who move first into these new areas of generating positive emotion which drives sales results. Since the emotional bonding with anything tends to go deep within human beings’ psyches, once some advertisers achieve emotional bonding, the ability of their competitors to do the same thing may well be decreased. This creates more of an incentive for advertisers to lead rather than settling for the fast-follower strategy preferred by so many. The years ahead will be interesting to watch.