I don’t typically like to quote the “big guys,” but I happened to like this one from Steve Greifer, Senior VP of Promotions at Digitas, as printed in the August edition of Promo magazine:
“Even when we’re not driving a final sale, we’re always driving to create a relationship….and incent people to give us information and continue the dialogue.”
I’ll forgive him for the use of the non-word “incent” because what Greifer says makes a lot of sense. It isn’t always about the sale or closing the deal. It’s all about continuing the dialogue. That isn’t always easy to measure, of course. But maybe that’s why measuring the performance of a single campaign doesn’t always give a complete picture. It’s what you do over time, over multiple campaigns. And if your clients/customers/prospects are willing to pick up the conversation where you last left off, ideally both talking and listening, then you’ve succeeded, at least partially, in building a relationship. And all good things follow from that.
Incidentally, this is why marketing professionals using the e-mail channel care about unsubscribe rates. It's a useful indicator for looking at what percentage of your list is wanting to shut down the dialogue and could tip you off to problems with your communications.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Friday, August 05, 2005
Subliminal advertising 2.0
In its June issue, Fast Company featured a write-up of a book by a former ad exec who has written an academic-sounding tome (with a textbook price of $45!) entitled “The Advertised Mind.” Apparently, the premise is that emotion is at the basis of all decision making and thus the key to marketing success lies in understanding how to trigger positive emotional reactions. Sounds innocuous enough (and pure common sense), on the surface anyway.
Then in the August edition of Business 2.0 we find an article on the emerging science of neuromarketing. Neuroco, a privately held firm in Great Britain, is at the forefront of this new discipline, melding neuroscience and clinical psychology with the heretofore fluffier discipline of advertising. The result? Sensory and psychic manipulation (my term) that’s thoroughly tested using electroencephalography technology (brain scans) before an ad goes prime-time.
The first sign that this obviously growing market research trend borders on troubling, if not alarming? None of the company’s clients (among them six multinational companies) were willing to talk about the research they’ve commissioned.
I do believe in delivering results—results that can be measured. And the neuro-marketing approach goes a long way toward taking the guesswork and capriciousness out of campaigns that companies spend countless dollars on with no guarantee of a return. In addition, it corrects what is a fundamental flaw with the focus group concept: what people say doesn’t always jibe with what they’re truly feeling or experiencing in the recesses of their minds.
But I viscerally object to such an approach, in part because it takes a lot of the fun out of marketing and, at the risk of sounding trite, it smacks of Orwell. In addition, I do think on some level it’s manipulation, perhaps even more insidious than so-called subliminal advertising. Call me a Luddite.
Perhaps I’m ascribing too much power to neuromarketing. After all, stimulating emotional responses and steering them toward a desired behavior is a tricky proposition; conceivably, such efforts could just as easily backfire.
Final soapbox thought: I shutter to think of the lawsuits coming down the pike that will blame criminal and other antisocial behavior on Proctor & Gamble or some other advertiser once neuromarketing really takes root. And you know what—given the lengths some companies might go to trigger just the right synaptic response, I just might be sympathetic to such claims.
Then in the August edition of Business 2.0 we find an article on the emerging science of neuromarketing. Neuroco, a privately held firm in Great Britain, is at the forefront of this new discipline, melding neuroscience and clinical psychology with the heretofore fluffier discipline of advertising. The result? Sensory and psychic manipulation (my term) that’s thoroughly tested using electroencephalography technology (brain scans) before an ad goes prime-time.
The first sign that this obviously growing market research trend borders on troubling, if not alarming? None of the company’s clients (among them six multinational companies) were willing to talk about the research they’ve commissioned.
I do believe in delivering results—results that can be measured. And the neuro-marketing approach goes a long way toward taking the guesswork and capriciousness out of campaigns that companies spend countless dollars on with no guarantee of a return. In addition, it corrects what is a fundamental flaw with the focus group concept: what people say doesn’t always jibe with what they’re truly feeling or experiencing in the recesses of their minds.
But I viscerally object to such an approach, in part because it takes a lot of the fun out of marketing and, at the risk of sounding trite, it smacks of Orwell. In addition, I do think on some level it’s manipulation, perhaps even more insidious than so-called subliminal advertising. Call me a Luddite.
Perhaps I’m ascribing too much power to neuromarketing. After all, stimulating emotional responses and steering them toward a desired behavior is a tricky proposition; conceivably, such efforts could just as easily backfire.
Final soapbox thought: I shutter to think of the lawsuits coming down the pike that will blame criminal and other antisocial behavior on Proctor & Gamble or some other advertiser once neuromarketing really takes root. And you know what—given the lengths some companies might go to trigger just the right synaptic response, I just might be sympathetic to such claims.
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