WHY MARKETERS STRUGGLE TO MAKE EXPERIENCES REAL

Dave Norton, PhD. Yamamoto Moss

There has never been a better time to be a marketer. There has never been a time when consumers have more wanted meaningful experiences with brands. And there has never been more need for innovation in marketing than there is today. Tremendous opportunity to do great work and be rewarded for it awaits -- if you can make it real. Opportunities like capturing the demand of the explosive Geotourist market for meaningful travel experiences. Or producing a real product, like the Dyson DC07 Root Cyclone, a torqued up, bacteria - killing, 100,000 g vacuum cleaner. Or promoting your vast cornucopia of brands the way General Mills has with their Box Tops for Education - the single most successful promotion idea ever to come out of Big G.

What makes it real? Intention, heart, purpose, and the ability to do the right thing for consumers. While there are hundreds of examples of how companies successfully made it real for people, there are millions of examples where they failed. The reason why marketers struggle to make it real is that most are held back by three things:

  • Promises that are never kept.
  • Having no higher purpose than profit.
  • Models of consumer behavior that reduce people to pocket books.

    Promises Never Kept,

    Ask yourself, when was the last time you had a truly meaningful experience, as promised, on an airline, with an HMO, with a phone service -- let alone with a credit card. Yamamoto Moss surveyed marketers and asked them how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statements: brands make life more meaningful. Only 16 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. Fifty-two percent disagreed or strongly disagreed. And the rest, 31 percent, were neutral. Now if marketers, the producers of promises like the Priceless campaign, don't believe that brands in general make life more meaningful, why should consumers?

    No Higher Purpose

    In order for MasterCard, Coca-Cola, Kaiser Permanente, Best Buy, Disney, or whomever to make meaningful brand experiences, they can't just advertise that they are real. (In fact, advertising is probably the fastest way to send just the opposite message.) They need a message and a product that are so well intertwined that people can simply feel the reality of the brand experience. Some quintessential examples of a real brand experience are the American Girl Company, the Dyson Company, and Sundance.

    These companies have commonalities. They all started with a higher purpose than simply making a profit. They were guided by a vision of how the world should be, at least as far as their market was concerned. And their marketing respects consumers' ability to create their own meaningful experiences. Consumers today not only expect the promises made by marketers to be kept, but they also demand brand experiences that stand for something - a difficult thing for brands that have never stood for something to pull off. And, consumers expect to play a significant role in the production of the experience. It feels more real when they are involved.

    Reductive Models of Consumer Behavior

    You can hardly blame our profession. Consumers weren't supposed to behave this way. We were first taught that stimulus demanded a response. Then we were told that consumers followed a rational process of developing a consideration set, narrowing their choices, and picking a product based on certain criteria. Perhaps the root of marketers' struggles to be real is grounded in how we often perceive the people our products serve. Are they a demographic? A psychographic? A share of wallet? Or are they just emotional wrecks? It's hard to see the need to be real if you donšt see your target audience as consisting of real people. And even if you feel a connection with the people your products serve, if the frameworks that explain who they are don't account for what makes a brand real and meaningful, you're stuck.

    Dave Norton is the Vice President, Experience Strategy and Research at Yamamoto Moss and runs their experience strategy practice. Yamamoto Moss unites strategic insight with Endless Imagination to create, reinvent, and communicate compelling brand messages. Click here to send an e-mail to Dave.

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