The how & why of effectiveness

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd – Voltaire

The fundamental issue we face as communicators is one of joining up the what and how of what our communications achieves: proof that what our brands say and do is directly linked to the actions our audiences take.

Proof is a seductive notion in brand communications: the merest whiff of it is enough to send us and our clients into self-congratulatory paroxysms of relief; a perceived absence invariably induces a similar bout of panic. Proof is also illusory. Even science, with its fundamental physical laws, finds proof impossible. We cling to cod-scientific approaches to the measurement of brand communication which ignore logic. The irony being that communication is an art, not a science.

The manner in which this art is evolving, combined with the new depths to which we understand how our audiences process and ultimately use what we communicate, necessitates a new approach to the way we measure the what and how our communications achieves.

I believe that the legacy measurement tools we labour under are not simply erroneous, but potentially detrimental to achieving our desired outcome: persuasion in thought and action among our audiences; business growth for our clients.

Our communications measures tend to be ignored in the boardroom – metrics such as emotional engagement, “affinity”, purchase intent and brand loyalty are viewed as nebulous – something for the marketing department to concern itself with, not the financial department.

We need to toughen up these measures and make them more robust because they are hugely important. Emotional engagement has strong links with the bottom line; understanding how our audiences emotionally engage with brands and brand communications is therefore vital if we’re to maximise efficiency and effectiveness and develop best practice for the future.

Our current tools for unlocking the influence of these soft metrics are woefully inaccurate. We persist in asking focus groups and panels how they feel about brands when we know that people are rarely capable of saying what they actually think, or doing what they say they will. Granted, new, more robust psychological and scientific research methods – for instance, the FMRI scanning experiments undertaken on people viewing ads – are unlocking greater understanding of how audiences can and will react to certain messaging, but they are expensive, impractical and are invariably explored in isolation from the net effect of communications, divorced from the hard business metrics we assume they’re influencing. This has to stop: we can only truly demonstrate the effectiveness of our brand communications if we view and measure them holistically: what and how, united.

This need for change is also being driven by step changes in the way we understand our audiences. Neuroscience has taught us that emotions are vital in the creation of memories, and that unconscious memories drive brand choices. We know, too, that low-involvement processing is the dominant means by which our audiences “consume” our messages yet our measurement tools appear welded to a world in which awareness and interest lead to decisions and actions. The brave, new world of behavioural economics, while not a panacea, is helping us to unravel the causes behind some of the decisions people make about brands and how brands satisfy fundamental human emotions.

Moreover, change is needed because brands and the way they communicate have changed. We have long since moved from a push to a pull dynamic and we are now in an age where what a brand does is frequently more important than what it says. Yet the vast majority of soft brand measures persist in attempting to quantify the net effect of what a brand says to an ill-conceived, arbitrarily notional target audience. Measures such as Millward Brown’s AI score, with its emphasis on “new news” and reliance on high audience involvement, will always focus on what brands say.  How do you measure the AI score for a flashmob in Trafalgar Square or a piece of brand utility in the form of an iPhone application?

Brands and their custodians urgently to explore a new approach to understanding how people interact with brands and messages and how that translates to the bottom line, using an approach that melds two existing practices – behavioural economics and econometrics. Together, these practices help measure both cause and effect.

When executed carefully and honestly, econometric testing does a good job of isolating the net effect of communication – what it achieves. But in its current form it doesn’t nor can’t answer the how. If we’re to evolve from communications as a dark art which not even the initiated fully understand, we need to apply additional intellectual rigour to understanding this how.

This is where behavioural economics helps. While it is not a black-box solution, behavioural economics provides us with a good understanding of causes. Thinking logically, like Popper, it helps us disprove the null hypothesis: that our communications does nothing to persuade or influence people and state with a degree of statistical confidence that it does.

I propose a method by which we conflate the practices of behavioural economics and econometrics into a unified system of behavioural econometrics.

Behavioural econometrics is a relatively new field of study. With its roots in behavioural psychology, it aims to build a bridge between the modelling insights of psychology and the statistical tools of economists.

It works by building complex econometric models which take into account various behavioural economic theories to demonstrate their influence in a decision making process. For instance – cumulative prospect theory (the behavioural economics “framing” effect which states that people tend to think of possible outcomes of a given situation relative to the status quo rather than the final status) and the priority heuristic (the notion that conflicts are mastered by making trade-offs) and their role in gambling outcomes.

In the context of brands, behavioural econometrics will become a more applied version of econometric testing; a system in which we will use our understanding of how people react to certain communications and what it helps them achieve and confect this into a true measure of what brand communications can achieve in total, and how it does this. For instance, we could and should be experimenting with models that seek to shed light in the following areas:

• We know that consumers engage less with future events and more with the here and now. What bearing does this have on on-pack anti-smoking messaging?

• Loss aversion and scarcity value are powerful forces in decision making – can we isolate their contribution to “must end soon” sale advertising?

• How would “chunking” a message around a home-improvement project to make it feel more achievable work for a DIY brand?

• Price perception: price can dictate value. Can we use behavioural econometrics to identify the precise contribution that price perception plays?

• Can we explore the anchoring effect of proximity advertising upon in-store purchase patterns?

I believe we urgently need to start these experiments in the context of brand choices, isolating the levers that behavioural economics have identified and which we’re pulling with our communications and establishing their effect in econometric modelling. Yes, it’s a difficult task; yes the maths will be complicated, but it’s the best hope we have at present of joining up the how and what of brand communications.

Agents of ideas, not agencies

In his inaugural address as IPA president in April, Rory Sutherland laid out the nub of what we – an agglomeration of advertising, media, PR and research agencies – do. “We create ideas that turn human understanding into business value for our clients.”

The manner in which we achieve that goal will change dramatically over the next decade. It has to: our playing field is unrecognisable from that of even 20 years ago. Fragmentation has led to an explosion of media and clutter; the rise of interactivity has opened a rich world of connections; free content is the norm, not the exception and heightened consumer sophistication means the old, persuasive ways simply won’t work. Consumers are tuning out.

Yet we cling to an outdated information processing model of rational messages in cosy emotional wrappers;  of USPs and RTBs which somehow persuade consumers to steer a shopping trolley in a certain direction.

This much isn’t news. That these changes have opened a wealth of new vistas for brands to explore is not open to question. Debate rages, however, as to how they best navigate this new landscape. How to deal with audiences that are either screening out our messages, or are beyond our reach.

That debate has focussed on communications planning – the analytical tool we’ve offered clients to help them target their messaging more effectively, and measure the results more accurately.

I don’t believe that we are in the communications planning business now and nor do I believe we will be so in the future. In fact, possibly controversially, I don’t believe we should define ourselves as merely being in the communications business. I  believe we are in the problem-solving business.

continue reading Agents of ideas, not agencies

The lonely market

I’m juggling three books at the moment – Geoffrey Miller’s Spent, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.

The latter reminded me of two sociology texts I read at university years ago – Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, and a piece by Robert Redfield on folk society.

In The Great Transformation, Polanyi describes the upheavals that resulted from the creation of the nation state, a construct that went hand in hand with the general adoption of market capitalism. The “great transformation”  involved the destruction of the basic social order which had existed throughout earlier history.

This social order was an ersatz “folk society” – an idiom coined by the Redfield to describe a simple society based upon primary communal relationships. The changes these societies underwent as they dislocated and metamorphosed from rural  to urban lay the foundations for the creation of the cult of self identity in what Anthony Giddens describes as the “post-traditional” order.

Folk society was a “we”, not an “I”. The irony is, of course, that the very brands which were invented to fill the trust vacuum caused by the lack of traditional “folk” communities are now creating their own social networks.

Rushkoff argues this is no coincidence – the public-relations strategies concoted to support mass production  (for him, codified and epitomised by the Great Exhibition of 1851, an event designed to “distract the domestic public from the dark underbelly of international industrial modernity”)  were designed to “disconnect people from one another and to require them to interact with each other through things instead.”

Industrialism was a harder sell in the US in the 1800s, where the economy was dominated by local, independently-run farms and businesses. The scale of business enterprises and proximity of farms to small factories created a high level of local awareness and social cohesion.  “Imposing industrialisation on America would have to involve the diminuation of these social institutions and a heightening sense of self,” Rushkoff argues.

While mass production desocialised the worker, mass marketing desocialised consumption – brands had to alienate people from one another in order to replace the human bonds that once characterised commerce with artificial corporate ones. “instead of supplying a neighbour with a particular good, the best one could hope for in an industrial economy was finding a friend loyal to the same brand”.

Mass production desocialises us. Brands desocialise us in order to keep consumption going. The best market for a brand is a lonely market. Make consumers feel as if they’ll win some friends if they buy into the mythology.

I’m currently neck deep in an essay on brands and self-identity … I’d like to include some of this thinking but can’t see a way in without busting the word limit by 1000. And the clock’s ticking.

Following the herd

I was lucky enough to hear a presentation from Mark Earls last night. His new book (the follow up to the excellent Herd) talks about our natural propensity to mimic and explains how social influence is largely a mass-participatory activity, not the effect of lone influencers.

I wrote about influencers in my Al Qaeda-as-brand post. While I think they’re important in that case study, Mark’s presentation has changed the way I think about participation inequality.

Received wisdom on participation inequality seems to assume that those participating the most exert the most influence over those below them in the pyramid. Looking at it through last night’s lens, the reverse appears true: could those one-percenters at the top of the pyramid be an effect, not a cause of social influence? Are we retrospectively inferring a causal link when none occurs?

Michael Blastland (great name) and Andrew Dilnot (less great) lay out the dangers of mistaking cause for effect in a short chapter in The Tiger That Isn’t … it’s a good read if you do any work with numbers.

Brand fundamentals

I’ve finally finished my first IPA Diploma assignment. It’s a touch long for a blog post, so I’ve published it here for a more leisurely read.

The argument goes something like this: brands are essentially viruses – ideas which are held in our (collective) minds and spread as memes. Those most effective at spreading the ideas are the brand fundamentalists – the small minority of brand advocates who make the most noise.

The piece hangs on the al Qaeda-as-brand example: a truly viral brand;  a franchise which has sprung up spontaneously around the world on the back of brand- and user-created content.

The most successful brands will be those which can create and arm their fundamentalists with the tools to propagate the brand virus. Mars has recognised this and is effectively allowing Skittles fans to dictate the brand’s online presence. Coca-Cola learned the hard way not to restrict its fundamentalists when it attempted to pull down youtube films documenting the results when Mentos and Diet Coke are combined.

Our jobs as agencies is to create more of these tools, allowing viral brands to flourish and thrive.

The illusion of choice

I’m currently studying for the IPA diploma – a kind of MBA/MA in brands run by the advertising trade body. It’s the first time I’ve done any kind of academic study since an aborted masters degree in journalism ten years ago, and I’m finding the change all the more stimulating for the haitus.

It’s possibly a little early to start thinking about my final thesis, but certain areas are already jumping out as interesting. I’m particularly fascinated by the way in which we (humans) use brands as a way of defining and shaping our sense of self.

The British writer and academic, Goronwy Rees, writes about the illusion of personal identity:

“For as long as I can remember it has always surprised and slightly bewildered me that other people should take it so much for granted that they possess what is usually called a character: that is to say, a personality with its own continuous history which can be described as objectively as the life cycle of a plant or an animal. I have never been able to find anything of that sort in myself…”

Rees views his life not as a novel, but as a collection of disjointed short stories, linked by mere accidents of (conscious) memory.

In a small, but significant way, brands help us create a sense of continuity of self. We have complex relationships with brands – there are those that we feel define us, those that speak for the kind of people we’d like to be … those for which we have strong feelings. I’m interested in exploring to what extent our brand choices are that – free choices. As the philosopher John Gray notes in his brilliant Straw Dogs, “the cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives … choice has become a fetish, but the mark of a fetish is that it is unchosen.”

The most perfect picture

I’ve never subscribed to that art-needs-to-look-like-art debate, but I think my favourite painter would have to be Gerhard Richter. The National Portrait Gallery has a great (but small) retrospective of his photoreal portraits. Moritz (his son, above) is one of the best.

And it’s the contradictory blurring that, ironically, conveys the sense of viewing the subject through a lens. Richter says he blurs the images because he believes painting is an imprecise representation of reality. The intrinsic banality of the subjects and the pointed lack of detail deny the natural human instinct to look for meaning in things; a meaning that isn’t really there.

There’s a parallel with work here: at planning’s heart is the search for insight. All too often, insight is conflated into some form of universal brand/behaviour truth which can only ever be an approximation of a flawed reality. Planning sits as the interface between two worlds – digital (data and numbers) and analogue (creativity); as with any conversion process, those fuzzy truths have a habit of mutating, picking up noise as they go. Perhaps there’s a way of working to a more blurred form of reality. Something ironically more real as a result.

Edit: Have just finished reading The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning (part of the IPA Diploma reading mountain) … the piece argues that we plan using systems or models under the mistaken belief that our expectations/inputs will be what we achieve as results: a fallacy based on three (fallacious) assumptions – that prediction is possible, that strategists can be detached from the subjects of their strategies and, above all, that the strategy-making process can be formalised.

True strategic thinking synthesises intuition, creativity and brings it to bear on a problem. And the results of this kind of thinking are normally far more unexpected.

So, the question is, how do we plan for unexpected, positive results?