Private: Intelligence

Marketing is all about psychology.  It’s about culture.  It’s about audience.  These are simple facts, but the other fact is that technology is substantially changing the psychology and culture of the audience.

The fact is the Internet has had an enormous impact on the audience we speak to as marketers, and as a result its made them more difficult to affect, yet when you affect them its easier to see the results and affect their behavior.  That has resulted in a culture with a higher barrier of entry, but once you get over the barrier they’re more malleable than ever.

My hypothesis is based on the fact that the pathways for consumer, and overall human, education have changed.  If you go back 20 years, and you ask someone a question they either know the answer or they don’t.  If they know it, it’s because they read it or learned about the topic previously.  If they don’t know the answer, they make a decision to go learn about it or to have someone teach them about it.    Fast forward to today… if you ask someone a question and they don’t already know the answer, then they whip out their phone and Google a response in 60 seconds or less.  The path to drive learning is shorter, and it requires less anticipatory knowledge about a topic when the human understands that every answer is less than 3 clicks, or 60 seconds, away. 

This immediate gratification for knowledge is coupled with the fact that a consumer is deluged daily.  The average consumer spends approximately 12 hours per day consuming information, which consists of more than 100,000 words and 34 GB of data (according Time Magazine).   There are around 3,000 marketing messages thrown at a consumer every day.  The level of clutter is high, and this is coupled with the self-selecting data that a consumer is searching for throughout the course of an average day.  That means for a marketing message to resonate with the consumer, it has to score high on the relevance and immediacy quotient in order for them to take action.   It also has to be frequent, which brings us back to the age-old model of reach and frequency.  It’s simple mathematics that relevance + recency + frequency = resonance for a marketing message.

Of course, the culture has changed because if you achieve that formula with the audience (relevance + recency + frequency = resonance), then things can take off.  We’ve created a culture of virality, wherein a message that is resonant can be shared among consumer-to-consumer groups.  This virality drives additional reach and resonance because it feeds the other elements of frequency and recency.  That creates a circular situation, driving interest and consumer engagement.  The psychology of the audience is such that if you can get over the barrier of entry and gain access to the mind of the mob, then the mob takes over and shares the message quickly. 

What this means is that marketers should be spending their time strategizing about how to achieve relevance through creative and recency and frequency through media.  The purpose of that forethought is to make the best use of the eyeballs for the audience when you have them, and increase the likelihood of their engagement.  If you don’t think of these elements in combination, and if you don’t enable the sharing of the message for the supposed eventual activation of audience, then you aren’t setting yourself up for success.

Are you using that formula for success?  Let us know on the Spin Board!