Why Emotion Is Still Essential To Brands And Communication, Even In The Age Of Big Data.
Advertising has never been an industry to concern itself much with economics, but in the interests of self-preservation, now might be a good time to start. Classical economics holds that in a marketplace with perfect information, advertising doesn’t exist. Consumers make choices based on a fully informed understanding of their options. Advertising creates no economic value. It is irrelevant. All of which might sound rather quaint or academic, if it wasn’t for the fact that over the past decade, especially since the arrival of the ubiquitous smart phone over a decade ago, the global economy has accelerated at pace towards this very idea of more perfect information. Are we there yet? No (the era of ‘fake news’ has seen to that for starters). Are we getting closer? Absolutely and COVID-19 is only likely to accelerate this trend towards our adoption of a more information-rich digital world.
As I sit in quarantine scanning options on Netflix for my evening viewing I can simultaneously check rating scores on Rotten Tomatoes and movie reviews in the Guardian or New York Times. While standing in my local Dan Murphy’s wine store I am free to ignore the ‘staff pick’ suggestions or the scores of the in-house wine panel and check online to see independent reviews for a bottle of Penfolds Bin 28 and decide whether the 2012 or 2013 vintage might be a better drop. At the same time I can make sure the price is competitive and see whether anyone is offering free delivery to my suburb. Amazon helps me decide which books to buy, eBay where to shop and Mr.Porter which fashion brands I will like. Consumers today are able to access information, prices, reviews, commentary, ratings or opinions and do so almost instantaneously. And of course we can do this in just about any category you’d care to think of – hotels, restaurants, fashion, electronics, banking, cosmetics or travel. You name it, Google, Seri or Alexa can direct us to the right information or even provide immediate answers.
The rise of these new persuaders, from Trivago to Trip Advisor to Top Gear, is bad news for advertising. The information characteristics of their content is the key to its advantage – the content is often more detailed, accurate, objective, entertaining and reliable than much of the material we are exposed to by advertisers. The new consumer “pull” touchpoints, as McKinsey calls them, have another even more compelling advantage over advertising. We go to them. We seek them out, often online, and we do this when we want them. They don’t have to interrupt us to try to get our attention. Advertising now has to fight for relevance in a way it didn’t have to before and that’s a big change.
How is the world of advertising responding to the challenge? The industry’s data and analytics gurus, and the agencies and advertisers they work for are leading the charge to tactical campaigns powered by digital technology. Driven by short term metrics and sales pressure, many are doubling down on a precisely targeted, data-driven approach typically designed to persuade consumers with highly rational selling or ‘activation’ messages. Massive amounts of data lets brands believe they know all about us and what we want. They spam us using analytics based tools that are deemed a success if we respond to more than one out of every two hundred approaches. They use cookies to create banner ads that chase us around the Internet and programmatic advertising to be always on and always in our face. I look at a pair of designer trainers at an online fashion boutique and these same shoes seem to follow me around for days online. Last year I received hundreds of emails from Qantas alone and many thousands more from other brands. Advertisers are shouting their messages louder, longer and more repetitively than ever online, simply it seems, because they can. Marc Pritchard, the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, was recently quoted in the New York Times as saying: “We tried to change the advertising ecosystem by doing more ads, and all that did was create more noise.” Is it any wonder that consumers are not following the big data script?
What we see playing out in the marketing landscape is a battle for influence that brands are at risk of losing. The problem isn’t the technology, it’s what it is being asked to do. You don’t influence people by being boring, dull and relentlessly annoying. Rational, fact-based, tactical advertising informed by good insights clearly has a significant role to play in the marketing mix, but the risk is that an over-reliance on this way of driving consumer behaviour well be less effective as consumers find new and better ways of informing their decisions.
What many advertisers seem to have forgotten is that influence has to be earned. This is something that brands like Nike, Apple, John Lewis and Coke have always known and which is arguably more important, not less so, in our information age. They understand the real USP of advertising is its ability to move us emotionally. The power of emotional communication has been established consistently in the ground-breaking work of Les Binet and Peter Field through their analysis of the IPA Databank (over 1,200 case studies submitted to the IPA Effectiveness Awards) and is outlined in their book Effectiveness In Context: A Manual For Brand-Building, 2018. At its best, emotional advertising does more than merely communicate information about a brand, it has the ability to alter the brand itself by attaching powerful associations to the brand’s image.
Advertising is never going to win an information war against the Internet. Instead its data gurus should place a greater emphasis on how they can connect with audiences emotionally. But emotion isn’t something that fits easily into their scientific and data driven view of the world, until it does, their sums won’t add up no matter how impressive their technology.