Being direct... AdVantage Jul 2004
Does too much marketing 'noise' actually affect the ROI value of marketing?
Consumer aggravation towards marketing and advertising is becoming more and more evident! Should
the media listen to their customer concerns about advertising??
OK, I know, I know…for the people who make their living out of the motivation, creation and delivery of marketing communication - this is perhaps a question that nobody really wants to face, let alone answer. In a 'free-market' economy business is about competition, and competition is good - right? But what happens when the sheer volume of available media choices expand exponentially, and with it the total number of ads. Does the individual consumer of these media not become overwhelmed, or even turned off - by all the marketing babble?
This week I received a phone call from someone involved in the world of advertising and marketing research, who made some interesting comments on my column of March 2004, which I had headlined: 'Is a medium's audience only a means to an end…?' The caller suggested that the problem of advertising effectiveness being negatively affected by volume of advertising 'noise' was even greater than I had suggested in the column, and that in the callers opinion, it was actually worthy of detailed statistical evaluation.
Well, I wait for these insights with baited breath because my own gut instinct suggests to me that public opinion of the role and necessity of advertising no doubt varies across a broad spectrum, and as I also wrote about recently - the low-interest nature of how ordinary people process advertised information, adds even more weight to the idea that effectiveness wanes as the volume of messages increases.
I have also previously commented in these columns that the issue of marketing communication effectiveness was far less complex when we mainly had the 'mass' media as core channels for marketing communication. As society has evolved and interests broadened, so media owners have created media product aimed at smaller and smaller segments of the population. This is true of magazine publishers, of radio stations and of regional newspapers. It has always been true of outdoor - which are geographically positioned, anyway.
Of course, that which we are involved with each day (professionally) - the customer database, is almost an 'ultimate' form of communication segmentation, considering that it communicates with specific individuals based on their actual transactional or behavioural history - rather than on an aggregated starting point of some demographic or other targeting label.
In a paper called 'The Consumer Backlash' recently delivered at the 2004 Samra Convention, Jacqui Greef of research company - De Facto, suggested that several mega-trends are converging to produce a challenging landscape for marketers of tomorrow. Quoting from two key resources: a study by Yankelovitch in the USA, and an SA Advertising Industry Panel, Jacqui mentions several key contributing factors to this worrying state of affairs:-
Marketing Overload; Anti-Globalism and Anti-Amercanism; the drift from the Information Age to the Disinformation Age; lack of Corporate Accountability; and the Speed of Change in the world of Communication.
She says that 'marketing overload tends to play a more prominent role at the top-end of the market, whereas the accelerated rate of change is more keenly felt at the bottom end. Regardless of the reasons, the end result remains a more resistant consumer'. She continues, 'the willing, interested and even malleable consumer of years gone by, is morphing into a resistant, critical and unreceptive animal'.
While acknowledging that there are differences between the US market and South Africa, some of the indications given by the recent Yankelovitch study (see www.marketingweb.co.za) of feelings expressed by US consumers, may well be a clarion call for us to think seriously about these issues, before our own people begin expressing similar sentiments (if they aren't already doing so) :
'61% feel that the amount of marketing and advertising is out of control; 65% feel constantly bombarded with too much marketing and advertising. 59% feel that most marketing and advertising has very little relevance to them; and 69% are interested in products and services that would help them skip or block marketing'
When one actually gets down to the root of this issue - one has to acknowledge that it is once again influenced by the age-old dichotomy between the financial needs of business (and their need to grow and prosper) and the needs of the individuals who populate the 'marketplaces' that those businesses target.
As always when it comes to matters of divergent self-interest (even when a case of 'the few' against 'the many') - we are perhaps left to ponder: Can there ever be an equitable answer?