Being direct... AdVantage May 2005
A Journey of Discovery Comes of Age ...
We were emotional beings long before we learnt to reason…intuition often makes the best decisions for us - even brand decisions!
On July 26th 1983, I started a business which had as its foundation, some 18 years experience in media and advertising, however was primarily built on a sense of intuition about a one-to-one future for commercial communication. I had left a reasonably successful career in the ad-agency world - during which time I had spells at JWT, DeV&S and Mortimer Tiley. My time in agencies culminated in my becoming a partner in the re-launched Mortimer Tiley in 1979, and I enjoyed being part of a team responsible for 3 years of its resurgence, before the agency was bought in 1983 by BBDO.
Over the years, I have been very involved in a number of Industry bodies such as the Institute of Marketing Management, where for a time, I was National Councillor and Branch Chairman; The Media Association of South Africa, where I served as Education Committee Chairman for a period; a member of SAMRA since 1991; on the Board of Directors of The Direct Marketing Association of SA; and so on. I thought that I understood how advertising works.
On a fateful day in March 1983, by courtesy of some of the money paid to me when my shares in the agency were sold, I decided to take a trip to the US, and in a place called Boca Raton in Florida, was introduced to the Personal Computer - then just recently launched by IBM. For the first time, I really became stimulated by the possibilities for a different kind of human communication - one assisted by technology. Never did I think then that it would evolve to where it is today - however today I at least know that we haven't begun to scratch the surface of possibilities for human interface through technology.
What I did recognise at that time, was that if marketing and marketing communication had the primary task of encouraging people to learn about their needs for a branded product or service, then the computer (in its various iterations over the years) would enable marketers to keep information about customers and use this information to enhance communication with those customers (in all its various forms)…over time.
During these more than 21 years, I have been fortunate to travel widely and to learn from technology-savvy people about database structures, one-to-one communications, and various psychologies of communication that use direct as opposed to mass channels. It has been a very interesting time indeed, and we and our clients have constantly learnt more and more about how to get people to respond to direct communications.
A week ago, I jumped on a plane to Cape Town and spent two days together with some 25 other marketing and research people in the company of two most fascinating individuals, both with backgrounds in advertising research - Mr Robert Heath, of The University of Bath, and Mr Roy Langmaid, of the Promise Corporation Ltd, London.
It took this decision to pursue the work of Robert Heath, whom I also mentioned in my column last month, for me to become awakened to a different perspective on how mass advertising actually works - and believe me when I tell you that it was a completely unexpected approach to the subject, which has both shattered all the things I thought I knew about advertising; but has also left me elated and excited by the opportunities that Robert's theories portend. Roy, in turn, focused his day on showing us how to understand the role of emotion in human interaction. What powerful stuff! More about Roy in a future column.
Once again, in writing about this, I am faced with the almost impossible task of trying to summarise an extensive all day workshop into a couple of paragraphs - almost impossible. So, I have decided instead to quote liberally from Robert Heath's 2001 publication called 'The Hidden Power of Advertising' published by Admap Publications, and more particularly from his summary and prognosis section. As always, I strongly recommend that whether you personally agree with him or not, get yourself a copy of this work (mine was acquired via Amazon UK) and put it all into your own context. This is what he demonstrated to us:
'Consumers in general regard most reputable brands as performing similarly and because of this they do not regard learning about brands as very important. Because it is not seen as being very important, most brand information tends not so much to be 'sought' as passively 'acquired'.' 'Mostly, we process brand communication using an automatic mental process called low-involvement processing…..Much of it involves what is known as 'implicit' learning - learning that takes place without you knowing that you are learning…..The way our long-term memory works means that the more often something is processed alongside a brand, the more permanently it becomes associated with that brand…..Thus, it is the perceptions and simple concepts, repeatedly and 'implicitly' reinforced at low levels of attention, which tend over time to define brands in our minds. And because implicit memory is more durable than explicit memory, these brand associations, once learned, are rarely forgotten.' Frequency is therefore very important - but not perhaps for the exact reasons that we were taught. 'Brand associations can exert a particularly strong influence on brand choice if they trigger an embedded 'somatic' marker…..Somatic markers are….feelings generated from secondary emotions…[which] have been connected, by learning, to predicted future outcomes. When a negative somatic marker is juxtaposed to a particular future outcome thecombination acts as an alarm bell. When a positive somatic marker is juxtaposed instead, it becomes a beacon of incentive.'
Last word goes to a quote from Antonio Demasio from his 1994 book Descarte's Error:
'Reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is and wish it were… Emotions are not a luxury, they are essential to rational thinking.'