How different would marketing be if we defined markets in terms of what people do in their lives - how they spend their time and attention - rather than the products and services they pay money for?
We say that the market for cars - or current accounts, or soap powders - is worth pounds xm, and that Brand A has y% of that market. But what if we defined markets differently, in terms of the time and attention people devote to brands?
As mere mortals, we have only 24 hours in each day, and lots of different things to think about and do. There's earning a living and maintaining relationships with friends and family. There are our basic 'life departments' such as 'maintain my home', 'manage my money', 'my health', and so on. Then there's our yearned-for downtime and fun time.
So what share of consumer time and attention does your brand achieve? Ten minutes a day? Not a chance. Ten seconds a day? Highly unlikely. Ten seconds a month? That's probably getting closer to the reality.
We think about most brands, most of the time, in vanishingly small slices of time - nanoseconds - before moving on to something more important or interesting. We may have our awareness of some brands reinforced daily, nanosecond by nanosecond - the Hellmann's mayonnaise in my fridge, the Visa card in my wallet, my BlackBerry device. Yet, when I use any of these products, I don't really think about the brand.
In fact, for many brands, most of the time our preference is not to have to think about them at all. Right now, for example, I'm thinking about washing machines, so washing machine brands are back in my head - but that's only because my machine has broken down. It's a pain in the neck. I would much rather it continued making its little contribution to my life without my having to think about it.
Once upon a time in marketing, in an age long disappeared, but still somehow fresh in the sector's memory, marketers didn't have to worry about how people invested their time and attention. We had a battering ram called TV and it hammered brand messages into consumers' heads whether they liked it or not. Brands got their daily, or weekly, dose of attention automatically (if they had the budget to afford it).
That old world hasn't disappeared entirely, but it has changed enough to require a rethink. The stark fact is that brands are in as intense a competition with each other for consumers' time and attention as they are for consumers' money.
In fact, in some ways, the battle for 'share of time/attention' is even more important than the battle for share of purse, because if you don't win the first battle for attention - or 'engagement' - your chances of winning the second battle, for money, are greatly reduced.
Yet, thanks to the rise of the internet, social networking and so on, the means by which we fight this battle are shifting under our feet. So what's the way forward?
Strategy rethink
One response is to intensify the attention arms race. If you have unlimited budgets, that's great - but it can be eye-wateringly expensive and very irritating for consumers.
You can try to turn the problem on its head by recruiting customers as 'brand ambassadors' and advocates, spreading the brand's message among their peers for free.
This is brilliant when it works, but most often it doesn't. Why should they invest even more time and attention than they already do by talking about a brand with friends? For most people, it's not top of their list of priorities.
Adland's stock answer is that brands can achieve this by creating 'engaging content' with added viral properties. Yes, they can ... sometimes. To win consistently in this battleground, however, you have to be truly exceptional. As a recent Marketing editorial noted: 'Competition for consumer attention has increased over the past half-century - so much so that the road to success is now littered with the wreckage of brands that have tried and failed to engage their customers through content.'
Looking around, there are some clues to a way forward. At the heart of it lies the simple recognition that peoples' time and attention are precious, non-renewable assets that they invest when dealing with a brand.
The underlying driving dynamic of modern markets is not the financial ROI that brands earn on their marketing campaigns. It's the exact opposite. It's the ROI customers get from engaging with brands: 'Is it worth my while investing my precious time and attention in this brand? What return will I get?'
Here are six things to think about on this score:
The dream of creating engaging, viral content that leads consumers to do the bulk of your marketing for you, for free, will remain a dream for most brands most of the time.
However, the underlying insight is important. Whatever it is, if you make it easy and fun rather than a hassle and boring, you're on the right track. The point is, this applies to every touchpoint - not just 'content'.
Let customers choose when they want to engage with the brand; empower them to 'manage the relationship'.
As with my washing machine, often the best engagement is no engagement. My ideal is not to have to think about it at all, but, if I have to, make it as painless and valuable as possible.
In other words, it is important to concentrate your brand's engagement resources when and where they really matter.
The whole peer-to-peer thing is great. Peers are a great source of fun content, insightful advice and so on, so do your best to harness it for your brand - but harness it to help customers do what they want to do, so that it becomes a natural part of 'engagement ROI', not to divert it and corral it into some brand objective.
Make the brand a natural, positive part of peoples' lives; don't try to make people live your brand.
Use knowledge and information (both your own and that of your customers) as a tool in the customer's hands, to help them solve their problems and pursue their goals. After all, most people 'hire' brands as tools to help them get something done (see box).
Work relentlessly to improve the process of 'getting it done' (whatever 'it' is). The better, simpler and easier it is, the more people come back. Which websites get most traffic? The ones obsessed with so-called 'stickiness'? Or those, like Google, that help you achieve want you want to achieve? This logic - that 'if you save me time and hassle I will engage with you more' - is as powerful as it is simple.
Respect people's personal information. Help them keep control of their own data and manage it how they want, rather than launching a personal data landgrab. That builds trust, and the process of managing the information is a form of engagement in its own right.
None of these ideas is good enough to win the battle for brand engagement in isolation. Nonetheless, the correct combination, weighted appropriately to the circumstances, might just provide a way through the impasse.
- Alan Mitchell is a respected author and a founder of Ctrl-Shift and Mydex.
ENGAGEMENT - BRANDS DOING IT WELL
Countless ways of using information to add value and engage with consumers are now emerging. They span traditional functional silos such as 'product development', 'marketing communications' and 'customer service'. But how to put which options together, in what combination, to deliver maximum customer ROI? Answering this question is becoming the key to successful customer engagement.
When Procter & Gamble builds its Pampers website around parenting advice (rather than the merits of its nappies) it is focusing on the consumer's 'engagement ROI'. When Lloyds TSB advertises services that text you when your bank balance reaches certain trigger points, it's building useful engagement. When Apple and Nike get together to create Nike+ for runners, they make their brands a part of the information customers want to gather and use for their own purposes.
Amazon is turning its My Account web facility into a sort of 'control dashboard' for customers wanting to manage how they engage with the organisation. The DVLA is delivering significant customer ROI via its new car-tax renewal process, which reduces a major hassle into a simple online process that takes just a few seconds. Last.fm's use of information about the music you listen to (and what other people like you listen to) significantly enhances the relevance and value of its service.