The year was 1992, I was in college at the time. I got incredibly lucky with respect to the soundtrack to my time at university with the dawn of alternative music (Pearl Jam, Nirvana) and the archetypal root of hip hop (Dre, Snoop). Music at the time was delivered to the user on CDs and the radio, and discovering new music was a function of the radio in my car.
If you were alive in 1992, you’ll know the iconic 10,000 Maniacs hit single, “Candy Everybody Wants”. The lead singer, Natalie Merchant, opens the tune with the catchy refrain, “Hey, hey, give ’em what they want.” The core lyrics speak to the base(r) nature of humanity, and that which gets and keeps our attention. Merchant knows on some level how the mind works, the primitive amygdala that reacts to lust and hate, blood and love.
When I get stuck thinking about a client and their path to success, I’ll put this song on. So often, as marketers and as clients, the focus is on achieving an end result measured in units sold, revenue gained, or share achieve…and none of that is about the consumer. Your agenda and the customer agenda are not the same. The “step-back” question to ask about your marketing? Are you giving the customer what they want? Seems simple enough, but ad campaigns commonly miss the mark in the following 4 ways:
1) Audience:
If you have not clearly identified the ICP, the ideal customer profile for your product, you’re starting from a disadvantage from jump. Failures in audience curation exhibit in two ways, in poor targeting OR in messaging.
Targeting: You current customer database will give you some clue as to the kinds of people that have typically responded to your product, by gender and geo, by age and ethnicity. Eliminating those that won’t have natural interest is foundational to any ad campaign. In the most basic terms possible, who is your customer and where can we find them at scale?
Messaging: Your ICP or target audience will have affinity for certain phrases, words, sounds and cultural attachments that must be advantaged to begin to give the customer what they want.
2) The Story
least 50% of the ads I see are guilty of this mistake; they fail to tell a story. Absent a story, an ad is just a collection of facts and if engineers are your target set, plow ahead with this strategy. For the rest of humanity, facts tend to roll off of us like water on distracted ducks. Why is that?
Humans seek resolution and closure. Facts don’t ask much of us, and we can elect to process them or not, but a story is quite different. Our minds want to see resolution, especially to intrigue that involves heros, victims and villains. We’re captivated by conflict, by suffering and need, especially our own. The ultimate ads paint the consumer into the story, and make the watcher feel (operative word) that this applies to them, nay screams for them to follow the story to see how their life could be better resolved.
This is the key. Can you remove a pain from my life? Heck…I don’t even need to know that it was a pain, but please do solve this possible future potential pain for me. No pains in my life? Speak to me of tales of pleasure that I can only imagine, the joys I will experience and the respect I’ll garner by having this widget in my life.
Do you see? This is giving them what they want- a starring role in a story, resolved to their benefit. This is the recipe for any successful ad (except to engineers).
3) The Ego
Your ICP has an ego. You can see how we poked that by getting on the right audience, and by telling a story that put them in the role as the lead. Guess what has NO place in this story? Your competing ego. In the world of paid content, you have 15-30 seconds to weave that emotional story to the right audience that seeks resolution and closure. I know deep down that our agency clients want their end consumers to know all the facts about the product, all the neat things about the company and company history/values…and most of that doesn’t matter at all to the end consumer.
Let go. Let go of the egoic need to tell tell tell…because telling isn’t selling. A transference of feeling, making the prospect FEEL like their world would be better with your product than without? That’s selling. Decisions come from the emotional part of our brain, not the factual part. Let that sink in: no decision gets made unless the emotional scales tip.
Let go of your need to tell. Let go of your founder’s ego. Use every bit of ad space to set the story, drive the story, resolve the story. That’s giving them what they want, whether they know it or not.
4) Test
It’s wild to see assumptions upended. Quick example, Honda back in 2003 launches and struggles with the Element SUV. You’d know one if you saw one, freakish looking and thus polarizing. Their original target and marketing was for a younger, quirky audience but sales were increasingly to a much older demographic that was growing a cult-like following for the utility of the element. If you were retired, had dogs, like antiquing…this was your ride.
So we test. As you were determining your ICP (step 1), you built a few different personas in your mind. Maybe your product has 2-3 audiences. Testing creative and media mix against those assumptions is invaluable to driving stronger ROI in future campaigns. The surprises uncovered during A/B testing almost always give the client what they want: actionable data and future direction.
5) What? There’s no 5….I clearly said 4 ways to miss. That’s true. The fifth step? Just step back and ask, “Am I giving them what they want?”
At the end of the day, nothing else really matters.
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