At some point throughout our lives, we lost our way. We lost our ability to dream, to take risks, to fail. With all of life’s responsibilities and an effort to protect some type of image that we’ve built, we lost our creativity. It reminds me of the movie Hook when Peter Pan gets old and fat and completely loses his imagination. There is a scene in the movie where Peter Pan meets Rufio and the Lost Boys. Well, he doesn’t really meet them because, at some point, they knew each other until Peter Pan lost his way.
In this scene, the Lost Boys are told he is Peter Pan, but they don’t believe him. At one point, Peter says, “I want to speak to a grown-up,” to which Rufio replies, “All grown-ups are pirates.” Accurate…
Later on in the movie, he doesn’t transform into the “real” Peter Pan until he uses his imagination. Once he starts using his imagination, he can alter the world around him. This movie is an excellent metaphor for how our responsibilities and stresses in life shape us into a version of ourselves that is quite different than our potential. Unless we nurture it, creativity, and our ability to believe in our creative ideas, tends to fade. We replace creative ideas with ideas and processes that have worked in the past. It’s the reason the joke exists of asking why something is done a certain way, and you will invariably get a response of “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”
Settling for good enough solutions to problems is easy, and many executives have a long to-do list. However, just because it’s easier doesn’t mean it’s better. For really complicated issues or systemic issues, it’s usually not. That’s why most of the top universities teach a customer-centric, empathy-focused, design thinking approach to solving problems. While this isn’t an article on design thinking, many of the steps in the creative process overlap with a design thinking model. Much like design thinking, the more you use the creative process, and the better you understand why creativity operates the way it does, the better you will get at creatively solving problems.
Creativity is a Process
Creativity doesn’t come from a magic ether where musicians and artists are the only people who have the right spell; it’s actually a process. More specifically, it’s a macro process that involves several micro-processes. Although the details of the macro process differ, the most famous example was developed by Graham Wallas in 1926. This four-stage process involves preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification[1]. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these steps in the creative process.
Preparation
The preparation step of the creative process is where you collect information and think about the problem. Since everyone can be creative, this could be anything. It could be researching a customer segment with primary data. It could be reviewing industry trends. It could be constructing empathy maps or buyer personas. In many cases, it can help for the preparation phase to define the problem that you are trying to solve. As many design thinkers will tell you, a well-defined problem is one that is half-solved.
Incubation
Although this is the easiest step, it’s often one of the most challenging parts for many people in decision-making positions to allow. Creativity rarely happens in the board room. It rarely makes appearances in team meetings. It often occurs at really strange times, usually when you are not even thinking about the problem. That’s because creativity requires an incubation period. You have to walk away from the problem and do something entirely different for your neural network to build linkages between other parts of your associative network.
Do you get your best ideas when you are out for a walk or driving home or in the middle of the night to the point where you can’t get back to sleep? That’s the incubation period. It takes time for your brain to fully digest and comprehend the problem to solve it. It’s why I recommend working on large and important projects one piece at a time with a more measured approach rather than working as much as you can until it’s off of your to-do list. You will have better ideas along the way, and you won’t stifle your creativity by not allowing for proper incubation periods to set in.
Illumination
Illumination is the part of the creative process that most people think of when they think of creativity. This is the aha moment. It’s the part where you get the creative idea to solve the problem. You suddenly know what you will do, and you’re kicking yourself for not thinking about this sooner. You may have had this experienced this feeling two days after a meeting, thinking about what you should have said or thought of a better way of doing something that is already done. Regardless of the situation, this is the illumination stage of the creative process.
However, this part doesn’t happen without the other parts. Without the right information or enough, this part doesn’t happen. There’s no magic creative ether. There’s no one type of person that is creative; everyone is creative. Everyone can, and does, go through this process with any complex problem; you probably just don’t realize that you do.
Illumination happens because we’ve allowed the first two steps to start building an associative network. An associative network is our brain’s way of connecting different things.[2] Our brains have a way of categorizing and associating different things together. It’s the reason that when you think of jelly, you probably think of peanut butter, or when you think of cereal, you also think of milk. These linkages in our brains are also helpful in connecting two previously unassociated items to now be associative, and voila, you’ve got creativity. At some point, we’d never associated computers with phones or satellites with navigation, but at some point, somebody joined them in their associative network. Creativity is all just one big process of connecting the dots.
Verification
I hate to break it to you, but your creative idea might be crap. I know, I know…I just spent a lot of time telling you that ANYONE can be creative, and it’s a simple process. Well, it is, but the thing that can hang many people up is the last step in the process, verification. Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and great creative ideas require adoption from other people. Each person has a unique worldview, and while on the one hand, all the freaky people make the beauty of the world, on the other hand, a great creative idea has to have appeal to more than just you to be successful. Not only does it need to appeal to you, depending on the technology, but it might also be something people need to change their behaviors to adopt.
Luckily, we know a lot about how product adoption works too. I’m not going to get too much into this because it deserves its own post. Still, the cycle of product adoption follows a five-group cycle with the innovators, followed by the early adopters, then the early majority, then the late majority, and finally the laggards. Product adoption can vary from continuous innovation, which doesn’t require consumers to adopt new learning, to discontinuous innovation, which could require considerable new learning to adopt a product. In the creative process, the verification of your idea will be dependent on your degree of innovation, the size of your market, your positioning, and a whole lot of other things that are involved with a product rollout.
Everyone Can Be Creative
Let me reiterate this point; everybody can be creative. Well, I guess unless you are in accounting, that’s just called fraud. Creativity keeps everything moving. It keeps things interesting. It allows you to solve problems you might have thought were not solvable. Our creativity adds so much to our lives and will enable us to think in ways that enrich our own lives and the lives around us. The next time you have a complex problem, instead of defaulting to your typical behaviors, try running through the creative process and see what kind of outcome that you can create.
[1] Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
We live in an attention economy. One where some of the most profitable companies in the world base their entire business model on keeping you hooked. At its best, our attention can lead us to new ideas, new careers, and moments of mental clarity. At its worst, our attention can drive us to addictions, obsessions, and anguish. We devote our mental activity to something that is one of the core psychological tenants that drives consumer behavior.
Our Limited Attention Span
The attention span of consumers is shrinking dramatically. In the year 2000, the average human attention span was 12 seconds. In 2020, the average was eight seconds, one second less than the attention span of a goldfish.[1]
So what does this mean? One amazing study measured the attention span of online shoppers using an EEG biosensor cap. They found:
When under time pressure
Shoppers focus on fewer products
Shoppers pay less attention
When not under time pressure
Shoppers focus on well-known brands
Shoppers spend about the same amount of time browsing regardless of their level of online shopping experience[2]
So what can we do about this?
You can’t be everything to everybody. When you are developing your marketing or product rollout strategies, realize that consumers have limited attention. If you try to promote everything equally, it will give you less time and budget to promote the products or services that are most important to your organization.
Brand awareness matters. Consumers focus on well-known brands. This is true in both low-effort and high-effort consumer behavior.
You Are Not Multi-Tasking
Advances in technology have led to some great opportunities for us to reinvent the workplace. However, with all of its positives, it has also led to some challenges that many of us have difficulty managing. As our task lists become longer and the lines between our work lives and personal lines blur, the idea of multitasking sounds like an attractive option to try and keep us on track and to keep us sane. However, our brains aren’t built for multitasking. Numerous studies highlight our inability to perform multiple tasks at once. Instead, our brains engage in task-switching, where we rapidly switch between one task to the next. We’re so bad at this that some estimates find that it takes us 40% longer when we multitask than if we were to try to devote our attention to two separate tasks.[3]
So there’s no such thing as multitasking; a better alternative is single-tasking. Devoting time to a single task can make you more productive. One way that I like to do this (and the only way I was able to juggle a full-time job, grad school, and a kid) is the Pomodoro technique. Basically, the Pomodoro technique is where you devote 100% of your time to one task for 25 mins. When the timer goes off, you stop what you are doing and take a break for five minutes. Rinse and repeat. It works wonders. However, this isn’t a blog post about how to best utilize your time; it’s a post about how our attention spans suck and what you can do as a marketer. Just realize that our attention can and is going to be divided. We’re going to be distracted. We’re going to be on an important Zoom call when our kid walks in.
The Cognitive Miser
Our brains are hardwired to be cognitive misers. This essentially means that we’re kind of lazy. Our brains seek solutions that require the least amount of mental effort.[4] It’s the reason that we have the “For Dummies” series, one-click buying on Amazon, don’t read books, only read headlines, just text and don’t talk, create acronyms, and try only to find answers that support our position. The cognitive miser effect plays a significant role in our short attention spans. And it’s not just in fundamental, everyday decisions like buying toothpaste. Even in important decisions, like where to get a mortgage, the average number of sources we consult is two.[5] Yep, two sources.
So what are the marketing implications? As a marketer, you’ve got to be able to cut through the clutter, grab someone’s attention, and try your best to hold on to that attention while you make your case. You’ve got eight seconds (probably a lot less if you’re trying to get someone’s attention that is “multi-tasking) to try and convince someone to find out more from you.
As a regular guy that is just trying to write about consumer behavior and marketing, I can say that this equation is incredibly tough. It’s a saturated space, and there are so many people that have been writing about these topics for decades more than I have. And either good or bad, I personally don’t have anything to sell. I’m just writing about these topics because I like doing it, and I want to start some conversations with people interested in what I’m talking about. In my job, though, I design campaigns for a company with a well-established value proposition and a recognizable brand within the industry; it’s much easier.
In a high-effort consumer behavior event, the process that a consumer goes through follows five steps. This includes problem recognition, information search, consideration set, purchase, and post-purchase behavior. Just consider the implications of the cognitive miser mortgage study has on one of the most important steps, information search. If the average number of sources that someone consults before making a major purchase is two, if you’re one of the sources that they’re seeking for information, you are halfway to the consideration set. Since the preceding paragraph is sounding really academic, and even I’m starting to get bored with it, let’s look at a real-world example.
Last year I had a 125’ Willow Oak fall in my backyard. However, it didn’t just fall; it leaned. Yep, they call leaners “widow makers” because someone like me likely tends to just grab the chainsaw and have at it. After several rounds of convincing from my wife (who just gave birth) and my father-in-law, I finally stepped into part one of high-effort consumer behavior; I recognized there was a problem. I didn’t think there was at first because I thought I would take care of it. After I realized they were right and probably shouldn’t die trying to take down a massive tree with an 18” chainsaw, I entered step two of high-effort consumer behavior, information search. I spent a couple of searching for tree services near me and making calls. I talked to these companies, read a few reviews, and moved into step three, consideration set. I made 3 or 4 appointments to get estimates. During the consideration set phase, I talked to the estimators and moved into step four, where I made my decision. I’m still in step five, where if one of my other trees falls, I probably won’t call the same company because the experience wasn’t the greatest. They were kind of messy and didn’t do the greatest job cutting the tree into small enough rounds that I could hand-split (which was a request).
This is Fine, but How Do I Get Someone’s Attention?
5. Think in Headlines
People aren’t likely to pour over your piece of marketing, savoring every image and every word, and most people are not going to read everything a long-format piece of content unless they’re interested. I’d be dreaming to think that my audience actually read the first twelve paragraphs and didn’t just skip down to the listicle. As a marketer, you have to realize that this is okay, and it happens all the time. Many people will just read the headlines, so make your headlines clear, concise and portray your entire marketing message. We used to do this thing in the ad agency world called a creative brief. Part of that process was to try and distill the entire campaign into just one thing. Think of it this way, if your audience knew only 7-10 words about what you were selling, what would you want them to know? It’s as simple as that.
4. Create Your Content in Blocks
It’s not just headlines, but scrolling, even doom scrolling through the news is usually built-in blocks. You will typically see a headline, image, preview, or small amount of content. In my experience, this is a really good approach in an email. 7-10 “content blocks” is a great way to view your next consolidated email. By organizing your emails in content blocks, you can distill a massive amount of content in a very small area. The added bonus is that your call to action (CTA) or other embedded links are tracking your users. If you give them just a couple of sentences and they have to click through for more information, you know they engaged with that particular piece of content, and you can adjust your next sales pitch accordingly. A word of caution, don’t be a creeper by calling them to say, “I saw you clicked on XYZ.” Trust me, I’ve gotten these calls, and they don’t last long.
3. Create an Omnichannel Approach
Omnichannel is just a fancy way of saying create a lot of versions of the same thing. For most of my big campaigns, I’ll do a press release, email ad, social media posts, direct mail, and work this into other email content. Someone may see your message in one spot and forget about it. They see it in two spots; you’re closer to getting your message across. Three spots? You’ve gotten their attention. Keep in mind that memory works on source decay, so regardless of what the message is, where they heard, the information will ALWAYS fade before the message itself. Remember hearing that Subway used ingredients found in Yoga mats? I’m guessing you remember that message but forget where you heard it.
2. Talk To Your Sales Team
If you’re in marketing, you probably kick out a lot of content, but I’m guessing that your customer interaction is limited. You may have some really good survey data or a wall of impressive metrics on CLV and CTR, but you’re probably not having the daily one-on-one conversations that your sales team is having. Remember that regardless of how good your marketing department is, they exist for one reason: sales. A marketing department is essentially a sales support department, even when they are the sales drivers. Make sure to share the marketing you are producing with your sales team, not only for feedback but also to make sure that they are communicating the same important points you are trying to do with your digital and physical media.
1. Refine, Refine, Refine
You’re never done, and you can always learn something. There are some great metrics that you can use for KPIs like time on site and click-through rates in emails that can give you an idea of how to get your customers’ attention in a more efficient manner. When you do this, realize all of the many variables that can be affecting your data. In addition to your message, your data could be skewed by audience segment, day of the week, time of day, holidays, industry events, and more. That’s why marketers should get involved in A/B testing to continue to refine the messaging.
[2] Shih, D. H., Lu, K. C., & Shih, P. Y. (2019). Exploring Shopper’s Browsing Behavior and Attention Level with an EEG Biosensor Cap. Brain sciences, 9(11), 301. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9110301
In April of 2013, I finished my first marathon. It was pouring rain in Nashville, TN, and nobody was out. It was cold, lonesome, and my feet were soggy. It’s kind of what you might expect a country song to be about regarding running a marathon in Nashville. The only difference is that my dog was okay, my wife didn’t leave, and I didn’t have a broken-down pickup. When I say that it rained, it didn’t just rain; it rained four inches during the race. It was pretty terrible.
This race was part of the popular Rock and Roll marathon series, where there was supposed to be bands playing at every mile during the race. That didn’t happen. My feet hurt, my body hurt, I couldn’t walk properly for several days…I was pretty miserable. However, there is something indescribable about the feeling of crossing the finish line of a marathon, especially your first marathon. Although it’s indescribable, here I go. It’s like every emotion you could possibly have hit you at one time. It’s this along with this unbeatable feeling of euphoria, almost like you have left reality for several minutes.
Sure, it was terrible, but it was beautiful at the same time, and as soon as I crossed the finish line, I knew that this was just the beginning. I had already set my sights on ultras. If you don’t know what an ultra-marathon is, technically, it’s any distance greater than a marathon. Although I don’t know of any 26.3’s, I guess they would qualify. They are typically 50K, 50 miles, 100K, and 100 miles. Most runners don’t just jump into ultras. The usual progression is marathon, 50K, 50 Miles…you get the picture.
Ultra-marathons are usually run on trails, although there are some really weird ones that are run on concrete. I don’t know why you would ever do that to yourself. Catching the bug of an ultra meant that I needed to find one, and I needed to start shifting my running from the road to the trails. In 2014, I found a 50-mile race close to where I was living, along the limestone bluffs of the Mississippi River in Iowa. So I took the leap and put it on my calendar.
Marathon Training
For non-runners, marathon training is just a lot of running. Nothing fancy, you just have to know that you can do this and train safely. That’s not to say that there aren’t some intense marathon runners that split up their days with speed workouts, weight training, VO2 max training, and cross-training. I’m not one of those people, though. I’m a middle of the pack runner, someone who runs to clear my head and get away from stress for a while.
Many injuries happen during marathon training, mainly stress fractures, plantar fasciitis, and the worst, IT-band syndrome. I’ve had all of these in various places and different levels of severity. While they are not fun, they’re part of the price that you pay for those few minutes of euphoria at the end of the race. Although 2013 was my first marathon, I had trained and entered a couple of marathons as far back as 2010, only to have been sidelined weeks before the race with an injury. I almost had to drop Chicago twice due to injuries but ended up just running injured one year.
I’d never been a runner in high school. I hadn’t run in college. Not to compete, not for fun, nothing. I was not interested, and I never thought I’d ever get into it. However, when I met my wife, she had run a marathon, and so we started running together. From there, I got into it, no, really, I REALLY got into it. From 2011-2015 I ran three seven-mile races, one half marathon, five marathons, and three ultras.
Typically, when you train for a marathon, you slowly build up your per week mileage until you can run a 20-mile run a couple of weeks before the race, then you taper down and rest before the run. During these runs, you only really need water, so it’s pretty easy to manage. Many marathon training programs that you read in the rags will outline a 16-week plan. This is usually done to avoid injury.
Take it from someone that has been injured A LOT. If you’re interested in running a marathon and don’t currently run much (I would say less than 30 miles a week), the 16-week plan is not a terrible idea. You can risk a stress fracture if you do too much too soon because your bones just aren’t used to the repetitive abuse that you put them through during marathon training. I also made the mistake early on of not replenishing properly after a run. In long runs, you need to repair your muscles, so make sure to get a good amino acid supplement for your cool down and increase your protein intake. This is especially important if you are a vegetarian runner. Vitamin D is also great for keeping your bones healthy, so don’t be a weirdo that runs at 4 am. If you are able, run with the sun.
Ultramarathon Training
This was confusing for me, and I didn’t realize why until I ran a 50-mile race, but training for an ultra is a lot like training for a marathon. Again, it’s pretty much just a bunch of running. However, you would think that since you were attempting twice the distance of a marathon that you would need this massive plan that would take half a year where you would run a 40 mile run before the race, but that’s not the case.
Why not? Well, from what I’ve been able to piece together, there’s not a magic threshold. I think that marathon plans just want to make sure that you’re really in and can do 20 miles before you go for the race. However, if you are running an ultra and already run a marathon (which is 99% of people who run ultras), you know you can run a long time. However, with an ultra, you’ve got to be mentally tough.
Running a marathon is physically painful. There’s no sugar-coating it. Your feet hurt, your legs hurt, your whole body hurts. After my first marathon, I couldn’t walk down the stairs forward. I had to go down backward. Running an ultra isn’t more painful; it’s just that same pain for a much longer time period. Yeah, not just double; it doesn’t work that way. I’m not running a 6-7 hour 50-mile race. I’m not an elite athlete. Think more like 10-12 hours. Running…for 10-12 hours. The mental part comes in when you hit about three hours, and you realize that it will hurt like this for another seven or eight hours.
So why does it take so long? Well, as I said, I’m not Superman, and I can’t keep an 8:00 pace for 50 miles. Plus, there are hills. Yep, lots of hills. Unless you are crazy, early in ultra training, you learn to repeat the phrase “walk the uphills.” During my 50, there was 8,000 feet of elevation change. It’s not the craziest, but it was a lot.
The other thing that is different about training for an ultra is that you have to learn how to eat. With a marathon, you just really need water and maybe some Gatorade, but if you are going to run 50, you’ve got to learn to eat and run. There’s a bizarre thing that happens when you run that long, you essentially burn through your protein, so you have to continually consume carbohydrates and protein. Otherwise, your body starts to try and get energy from somewhere else. Your muscles are shot at a certain point, so the most comfortable place for your body to get energy is your brain. More on that later…
The Race
Race day was a chilly November morning. It started at 6 am, and luckily it didn’t rain. This course was essentially a bunch of out and backs (basically, you run to a point and run back) that were somewhere around 6 miles. That made it pretty easy to set up my car as an aid station, so I had everything I needed in the trunk. I would swap water for Gatorade every 6 miles, and vice versa, and get protein every other loop. I alternated protein for a special carbohydrate called Vitargo, a fast-acting carbohydrate, which is good for intense energy.
I ran this race alone, partially because I like running alone and partly because there was no way that I was going to find someone who wanted to run 50 miles with me. To be honest, I barely wanted to run 50 miles with me. I also decided not to have music until the last 20 miles, partially to enjoy the day and somewhat as an incentive to get me over halfway through. Everything was going well until around halfway through the race. I stopped at my car and realized that last time I stopped, I locked my key in the trunk. This was bad. Really bad. No protein at a protein stop. My key was in my trunk, and my phone was locked in my car. Luckily, I was able to get a phone from someone else to call my wife. I told her I would make another loop and try and be there in an hour or so.
However, continually abusing your body at 25+ miles without giving it protein starts to take a toll. Remember what I mentioned about your body taking energy from your brain about three paragraphs up? Well, that’s exactly what happened. I can’t remember much about half of that loop, and by the time I made it back to the car, I couldn’t form coherent sentences. Luckily, my wife was there and had the extra key. Like a neanderthal, I just pointed and spouted single words. “Trunk,” I pointed to the trunk.
I grabbed a protein bar and some more Vitargo and went over to the grass to sit down. I took my shoes off and laid down. My wife massaged my feet as I just stared at the sky for what seemed like hours. By my watch, after about 30 minutes of just laying there, I was able to talk and think. I was mainly thinking about how I just wanted to go home. The other prevailing thought was how much I didn’t want to get back on that trail.
“I want to quit,” I said.
“Okay,” said my wife.
“I’m serious; this is just stupid. Why am I doing this?”
“Well,” she said, “There’s nothing wrong with quitting; this is the furthest you’ve ever run, right?”
“Yep,” I said, feeling defeated. “I really wanted this.”
“If you want to, you can get back out there, but there’s nothing wrong with going home either,” she said.
I thought about it for a while. It would be really easy to go home. My shoes were already off. I was exhausted. It seemed like the right thing to do. However, at that moment, I realized that I could quit at any time, not just at that moment. I could get back on the trail, and if I felt that I couldn’t finish, I could just drop out. So I did one of the most challenging things that I had done up to that point in my life, I put my shoes back on. I went back to the car, got another protein bar and grabbed my MP3 player (which I hadn’t used yet in this race), blasted some Pixies, and got back on the trail.
It hurt the entire time. I walked a lot of uphills. Sometimes I walked the slight inclines and reasoned with myself that this seemingly flat piece of ground has a slight upward slope. I kept going and finished another 4-5 hours later.
Earlier in this article, I mentioned how it feels to cross the finish line in a marathon. For whatever reason, I’ve never gotten that feeling when crossing the finish line of an ultra. That day, I felt nothing. Well, nothing but pain. I realized that for me, the destination of the race wasn’t the point. The point was the race itself. The people I met, the challenges that I had overcome, the connection with nature, and the building of the mental toughness that is critical for many difficulties and challenges in life. The race was an excellent metaphor for life itself.
Why I (Probably) Won’t Do it Again
Life has a strange way of pushing and pulling you in and out of phases. To me, it’s impossible to remember years, but easier to remember different periods of my life where I was really into something. During this period of my life, I was really into running races. I got hit by a car as a pedestrian in 2016, and almost immediately, I lost my desire to race. I still have no idea why that event triggered my disinterest, but I think it was just a catalyst to push me into the next phase of my life. Shortly afterward, I started grad school, so I got really into that. Then, we had a daughter. Now I’m in the new dad phase.
I probably won’t do it again because I almost feel that getting back into it is revisiting a version of a past me and not the current me. People are dynamic. We’re continually changing and evolving into our surroundings. What you loved when you are a kid really may have no interest to you now. However, I say probably, because I know I did like it. I’m not sure if I loved it, but I was very involved. I still run; just now, it’s with a stroller. I’ll probably run until the day that I can’t run anymore. I have just lost interest in racing. Maybe that will change. Who knows? Much like the point in the race where I almost dropped, though, I don’t want to say that I’m completely out because I don’t have to drop now. I can do that at any point in the race.
Have you ever doubted yourself? Have you second-guessed your achievements? Do you look at other people’s work or achievements on LinkedIn and get depressed? If so, you may be experiencing the ever-pervasive imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is not a diagnosis, but it is a known psychological condition. When a person has persistent self-doubt about their accomplishments, it is accompanied by the fear of self-doubt despite ongoing success. [1] Unfortunately, the odds are that you actually will experience imposter syndrome, as 70% of people experience this feeling.[2] While I know from experience that this is a problem with creatives, it can show up in really any line of work. Before I get into this further, let me be clear that I am not qualified to give any type of mental health advice. I’m just trying to give you a little perspective and talk about a few items that have helped me through imposter syndrome. I’m not a mental health professional, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express prior to the world turning into a trash fire.
Types of Imposter Syndrome
According to Dr. Valerie Young, there are five different types of imposter syndrome.[3]
The Perfectionist
The Superwoman/Superman
The Natural Genius
The Soloist
The Expert
Let’s look at each of these a little more in-depth.
The Perfectionist
The perfectionist is probably the most common subtype of imposter syndrome. The perfectionist is the type of person that needs to make sure that every last detail is taken care of to their standards. Notice that I pointed out “to their standards.” Since perfection doesn’t exist, what could tend to happen is the perfectionist is unable to relinquish any type of control to anyone else. They then carry a more significant workload, and when they make a mistake, the cycle of self-doubt starts to circulate, which creates the process of imposter syndrome over again. It’s also been found that treating intolerance of uncertainty of obsessions could lessen the distress of perfectionism.[4]
The Superwoman/Superman
In this type of imposter syndrome, the person tries to take on as much as they can in an effort to try and keep up with their colleagues. The term workaholic is often associated with this group. Think of the person that is the first one in the office and the last one to leave. They like to take on any and every challenge thrown their way. The problem that can occur with this type of thinking is that all of your validation comes from your work. You can lose your sense of self and get stuck in continual burnout because you don’t know when to stop taking on new challenges.
The Soloist
Are you afraid to ask for help? Maybe you feel like you can or would instead handle everything on your own. You might have trouble as a soloist. The problem with trying to take everything on your own is that you are likely to burn out. Also, as a soloist, your accomplishments are always only as good as your work. When you can work with others and delegate, your achievements are magnified by the amount of influence you have to effect change.
The Natural Genius
Do you thrive under pressure? Maybe you make great decisions in the moment with little research or effort into studying the problem. You might just fall into the natural genius category. A natural genius may have trouble when they encounter an issue or series of problems that do not fall under their area of expertise. They may not attempt challenges that make them look like they are struggling with a topic.
The Expert
Do you feel like your worth is derived by how much you know about a subject? Are you always trying to understand and learn more about that subject to try and justify your worth? While the expert is still incredibly knowledgeable about a topic, their insecurities lie in that they feel like they don’t and will never know enough.
I Hope My Continual Struggle with Imposter Syndrome is Relatable
Although I’ve drifted back and forth between imposter syndrome categories, I would describe my overarching feeling a little differently. I’d describe it as more of an underdog type of theme throughout my career. My marketing journey was unconventional, and I often get crippling instances of imposter syndrome, especially when I compare myself to others that started with a more traditional path. In undergrad, I studied music and was in a program centered around the music business. Not only that, but I entered this program in the worst possible time in the history of the world to join a music business program, right as Napster had launched. So Napster upended the industry, but I was stubborn and decided to go for it anyway. I applied to just about every internship that I could find, and in 2003, I found myself with two concurrent internships in Nashville. One of those internships involved helping Colin Hay’s career (yep, the guy in Men at Work). I wrote about that whole experience here.
Upon graduation, I used my experience to land a job at a small Bluegrass record label. I was 22 and thrust into a position where I immediately had responsibilities over the P&L, hiring, contract negotiations, and vendor relations. I had no experience in any of those areas and barely touched on any of these subjects during school. The only framework I had on how to run a record label came from a three-month unpaid internship. I did the best that I could, and I ended up hiring a couple of my friends from college. Somehow we made it work, won a couple of awards, signed new artists, and secured a record distribution agreement with Sony.
After a couple of years, I wanted to get out of the music industry and grow my marketing experience. I had no idea how to do this and I just kind of turned into a loose cannon applying to any and every job that I could. That didn’t work, so I zeroed in on the idea that if I wanted to learn more about marketing, I needed to join a marketing agency.
I connected with an agency that was close to where I grew up, got an interview, and got a job selling their marketing services. I was 25 years old, and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. There were people at this agency that had deep relationships with some pretty big clients. There was also someone I worked with, who was super intimidating, that had a Ph.D. Here I was with an education heavy on subjects like ear training, recording studio techniques, and performance and I was expected to perform at the level of people with 10+ years of formal education. Every day I felt like a rudderless ship, so I tried to read every book that I could find on marketing techniques and leaned on other people in the agency’s experience. At that job, I had a major failure with a client that literally got me yelled out of the room. It made me want to quit, but somehow I was able to dust myself off and go back and win the business. Through it all, I felt like I was just faking it the entire time.
After my agency experience, I joined a company that distributed 6,500 different products. I was in charge of 11 different private-label brands and helped develop and launch a $20MM electronic cigarette brand that ended up being sold in Sam’s Club and Walmart. From day one, I had key decision-makers of the company asking me what we needed to do on everything from packaging design to pricing. I felt like I was completely over my head. I had zero distribution experience, zero retail experience, and the largest company I had ever worked for, to that point, was maybe $4-$5MM in annual revenue. Now I was expected to make critical decisions for a $200MM company with customers worldwide. I ended up working a lot of hours and trying to learn as much as I could from everyone that would give me the time. I always had a seed of doubt that maybe I wasn’t cut out for making big decisions throughout my time.
That brings me to where I’ve been for the past decade, leading the marketing for a company that sells and refurbishes private jets. When I joined this company, I was concerned by how technical the products are and how segmented and small the audiences were. Some of the key audiences only have less than 500 potential customers in the entire world. I was also expected to drive in leads pretty early after joining the company. I felt like I needed more time, that I needed to learn more, and I was afraid I would fail. The company participates in many more tradeshows than I had ever coordinated before this job, and many customers were influential CEOs of large organizations.
Imposter syndrome nags at you. If imposter syndrome nags at you as much as it nags at me, you never quite feel comfortable. You’re always chasing an impossible feeling of validation. As with any problem, you have to deal with it, and the first step in dealing with the problem is acknowledging that it exists. And as any student of design thinking will tell you, a well-defined problem is half solved, you can start to take steps to resolve imposter syndrome.
I am certainly no expert on managing these feelings, and I would never claim to know what can help other people manage through this struggle. I can only let you know what I have done to help mitigate the feelings of imposter syndrome.
Take well-defined breaks from work. Responding to your email in the middle of the night should not be how your employer measures your value. It should be more about how you create and add value to the organization.
Grow a network of like-minded individuals. Too often, many people go through different phases of their life and never hold on to the people that have made a difference in their life. I recently started an MBA networking group with people within my school that I enjoyed meeting. I’ve got another 25 years left in my career, and it’s easier to work through issues with the help of others.
Move on from mistakes. I hate making mistakes. When you’re in marketing, your mistakes are typically pretty amplified because you are the organization’s external (and sometimes internal) communications arm. It happens, and you letting a handful of mistakes get in the way of years of good work can lead to the toxic trap of imposter syndrome.
Exercise every day. I cannot emphasize the importance of exercise on my mental health and creativity enough. On a rainy day, I can feel the impact of not getting outside. Many studies link exercise and mental health, but the effect that it’s had on my creativity is something that I always use. Creatively solving a problem doesn’t happen spontaneously. It needs an incubation period, and exercise is a perfect time to let your mind wander and connect your neurons in a way that you wouldn’t just sitting at a desk.
Try the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is a way of time blocking that keeps you focused on completing one thing for 25 minutes and then gives you a purposeful 5-minute break. This is the only way that I’ve been able to get through grad school with a baby while working full time and writing 3,000-word articles every other week. If I can find 25 minutes, I’ll take it and try to apply it to something on my to-do list. This has also allowed me to focus on my daughter because I don’t have one eye on her and one eye on work or school.
Don’t compare yourself with others. I don’t know any other way of saying this that doesn’t sound cliché, but your life and career journey are unique. They’re part of your overall life story. In most instances, the best part is that the journey’s not over yet. You might have many years to continue to write this story, and all good stories have twists and turn within a plot. A problem that arises when we compare ourselves to others is that we’re not typically comparing ourselves to one other person. With social media, we’re comparing ourselves to everyone. That’s an unwinnable mental battle.
The Social Media Trap
Remember the days where you had to go to someone’s Facebook page to find out what they were posting? Social media, really any type of social media, is a highlight reel of people’s personal and professional lives. The problem gets compounded when not only are you viewing someone else’s highlight reel, but you’re viewing EVERYONE’s highlight reel. Go ahead, pick a social media platform and start scrolling. Unless you’re getting into many arguments on Facebook or seeing many people “double-tapping the image” on LinkedIn (PLEASE STOP DOING THIS), for the most part, you are seeing things that everyone that you’re connected with want you to see. It’s sort of like talking to someone that is a compulsive gambler. They’ll always tell you about all of the times they won and never tell you about the times that they’ve lost.
Many of our mentors challenge us to make sure we’re not the smartest person in the room. If you follow this advice and you’re ambitious, you may be connected to many people on LinkedIn: CEOs, heads of departments in large companies, or successful entrepreneurs. If so, your feed will be a highlight reel of people you aspire to be, which could ultimately harm your mental health and well-being. Studies have shown that comparing yourself to others who are seen as “doing better” than you on social media leads to envy and depression.[5]
So What Can Be Done?
Again, I’m not qualified to give advice, and I’d never claim to know what could help, but I can reiterate what I did that has helped me over the years. I am the type of person that feels empowered by knowledge. Before I knew that imposter syndrome existed, all of these emotions would just really be fragmented in my mind. Now that I know that this is a problem, and not only that, it’s a prevalent problem that many different people struggle with, I find it easier to walk away from the feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, and frustration that tend to accompany imposter syndrome. Again, it goes back to design thinking and fully understanding and defining a problem. Just defining imposter syndrome allows for efforts to solve the problem.
The other difficulty is the way that imposter syndrome hits creative people. I’m not necessarily talking about people in a typical “creative” field like graphic design or advertising; I’m talking about real creative people. Creativity is all about connecting the dots between problems and solutions. Creativity can be found in just about every field, except maybe accounting. That type of creativity is called fraud… When you are creative, you take risks. You step outside of your comfort zone. You are not afraid to lead the way and offer your opinion on how to go against the status quo in an effort to make your organization a better place. When you do this, you are invariably going to make a mistake.
As a creative person, your mistakes will be more public than others that are comfortable just doing what they’re told to do. Making decisions is mentally challenging. Because you are not always going to make the right decision, you are probably spending more time reflecting on yourself and your abilities than non-creatives. Although self-reflection is typically healthy, it is also an opportunity for imposter syndrome to creep in through self-doubt. The next time this happens, realize that it’s more than likely just imposter syndrome trying to derail you from your path forward.
[3] Young, Valerie. 2011. The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Imposter Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It.
[4] Reuther, E.T., Davis, T.E., III, Rudy, B.M., Jenkins, W.S., Whiting, S.E. and May, A.C. (2013), INTOLERANCE OF UNCERTAINTY AS A MEDIATOR OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERFECTIONISM AND OBSESSIVE‐COMPULSIVE SYMPTOM SEVERITY. Depress Anxiety, 30: 773-777. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1002/da.22100
[5] Wei Wang, Mingzhu Wang, Qian Hu, Pengcheng Wang, Li Lei, Suo Jiang,
Upward social comparison on mobile social media and depression: The mediating role of envy and the moderating role of marital quality, Journal of Affective Disorders, Volume 270, 2020, Pages 143-149
It all began in a Fort Lee, NJ movie theater in 1957. Psychologist James Vicary projected images on the screen at 1/3,000 of a second urging viewers to “drink Coca-Cola” and “eat popcorn”. Vicary conducted this study over a six-week period and claimed to have increased popcorn sales by 50 percent and Coca-Cola sales by 18 percent compared to the previous period.[1] Here’s the problem, it was all made up.[2] Yep, when other researchers couldn’t replicate these results, he admitted it was completely fabricated. Since this fabricated study, there have been numerous others that have been conducted. I would guess that everyone reading this believes that subliminal advertising is a thing that has, or at least could work. Why? Well, because it’s used EVERYWHERE. So could it work? Keep reading, I get to that at the end.
The pervasiveness of this idea has infiltrated so many brands and even many areas of pop culture. Why would so many brands try subliminal images and messages if they didn’t work? The Simpsons use it, KFC and Coca-Cola have done it, there are even many famous logos that are intended to have hidden images. And of course, who can forget Kevin Nealon’s character, Mr. Subliminal from SNL’s Weekend Update in the 90’s, who always gave a hilarious parody to the notion that our minds could be controlled by subliminal means?
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However, if we notice something, is it subliminal? I’m guessing the answer to that would be no. Although it’s not illegal, the FCC will revoke the licenses of any company that uses subliminal or deceptive marketing. However, if it’s truly subliminal, how would they ever know? Where is the subliminal threshold in our minds? How much is subliminal advertising being used and is it secretly controlling our minds, turning us into brainless zombie-like consumers? I’m guessing if you’ve ever seen the aftermath of a big music festival, or been to Wal Mart on a Saturday, you might say yes, but don’t fall into the anecdotal evidence trap just yet.
Subliminal Advertising is a Sticky Idea
Dan and Chip Heath’s groundbreaking book, Made to Stick, outlines why so many people believe that subliminal advertising might secretly be controlling everyone’s minds even though that is (probably) not the case. The creepy mind-control idea is one that is sticky, and a sticky idea is one that will perpetuate throughout the cultural zeitgeist. As humans, we really just want a good story and it doesn’t really matter if it is true. Also, there was the whole CIA mind control experiments, MK Ultra, that were actually a thing, regardless if the hat you wear is made out of tin foil or not.
Once you hear about the idea of subliminal advertising and your brain ties it to being controlled into doing something, it’s hard to shake. To add to this problem, consumers experience what’s known as source confusion. Source confusion is basically when you hear one of these sticky stories, forget about it, and when it comes up later, you can remember the story, but not where you heard about it or if it is actually true. Do you remember hearing that KFC officially changed their name to just KFC from Kentucky Fried Chicken because their “chicken” doesn’t actually contain chicken? Or that McDonald’s uses pig fat in their ice cream? Well, these stories are not true, but they remain true in people’s minds regardless of the actual truth. These and many other myths about companies stay in our minds because they are sticky.
These stories are strange enough to be remembered and they’re on the fringe of being believable. They’re the type of story that you could tell a friend and their response would simply be “Yep, I could see that” and the myth spreads. So, the stickiness of the story that subliminal advertising controlling our minds continues to permeate throughout our society, all just because it is a weird and interesting story. But not so fast, there may actually be some evidence that it can impact our behaviors (more on that later).
The 1950s
After Vicary’s bogus “experiment”, he went on to write one of the most influential books on the subject of subliminal advertising, The Hidden Persuaders. This book sold over a million copies and became one of the major influences that shaped our views of the possibilities of subliminal advertising. Should a guy that lied about his experiment be taken seriously? Again, back to the stickiness idea, did it matter? Not really, it was a good story, so it went straight to the top of the bestsellers list and people like me are writing about it 60+ years later.
1960s & 1970s
Well, dust off your tin foil hats again because this is a weird one. Forever ago, TV used to not broadcast 24/7. In the ’60s, before the networks would go off the air, they would play the Star-Spangled Banner, complete with subtitles. However, if you slow those subtitles WAYYYYY Down, you can see subliminal words briefly flash across the screen. You can even try it yourself, slow this down to the slowest setting on YouTube, which is 0.25.
There are several series of subliminal words that you can find like: trust the US government, God is real God is watching, and rebellion is not tolerated. That was creepy. Moving on…
In the ’70s, Premium Corporation of America marketed a memory matching board game called Husker Du (not the punk band from St. Paul). In the process, they created a TV ad that showed the gameplay, but they also flashed several frames with the words “get it”.[3] This ultimately led to declaring that subliminal ads were contrary to the public interest.
The 2000s
Who would have ever thought that tobacco companies would try to break the rules? Well, in the early 2000s, Marlboro was a major advertiser in Formula One racing sponsoring the Ferrari team. In 2005, in order to try and subvert an EU ban on advertising cigarettes, they decided to replace their logo with a really strange barcode. Well, if the barcode is blurry, it sort of looks like the Marlboro logo (sort of). Nice try Marlboro. Years later, they tried this other approach by creating a “company” called Mission Winnow (win now:). So, it’s a new strange company and if you are curious enough to look it up online, you’re going to land on a website owned by Phillip Morris. Is that subliminal advertising? Again, people noticed it. It’s not completely hidden, so probably not. Is it subversive and right up a tobacco company’s modus operandi? Absolutely.
In 2007, in an episode of Food Network’s Iron Chef America, a McDonald’s episode flashed across the screen. Both McDonald’s and the Food Network claim that it was a glitch. Check it out for yourself:
In 2008, KFC was pushing a chicken sandwich called the KFC Snacker. In one of the closing shots, you can see a dollar bill hidden among the lettuce. They claimed that they were running a contest for the first people that spotted the dollar, but the contest was never announced until they started hearing about people accusing them of subliminal advertising. Again, is it subliminal if you can see it? Check it out here:
Also of note, check out @kfc on Twitter. They follow 11 people: Herb Scribner, Geri Horner (Halliwell), Melanie Brown, Emma Bunton, Mel C, Victoria Beckham, Herb J. Wesson, Jr., Herb Waters, Herb Dean, Herb Sandek, and Herb Alpert. If you don’t get the joke, you might claim that they’ve engaged in some form of subliminal advertising, but I presume you weren’t born yesterday.
Special Categories:
Hidden Messages in Logos
I’m guessing that you probably know about most of these, but I think that if nothing else, the artistry for pulling off the hidden elements in a logo needs deserves a special mention in a blog post about subliminal messages in advertising. Designing a really cool logo is tough enough, but it’s even harder to design something that looks great and has a hidden message. Let’s get to it.
FedEx
Created in 1994 by Landor Associates, the FedEx logo is one of the most brilliant logo designs ever created. Although it’s possibly one of the most boring looking logos (on the surface), it has a hidden message. What hidden message? Well, the arrow between the E and the X. Once you see the arrow, you can never unsee the arrow.
Baskin Robbins
I actually did a case study on this in one of my MBA marketing research classes, but in 2007, Baskin Robbins was feeling the heat from people like Cold Stone Creamery. In addition to a logo redesign, they were considering complete store redesigns. Their new logo design featured the 31 making up the B and the R of the logo, which is a nod to their original claim to fame of having 31 flavors. Something you might not know, they actually have something like 1,300 flavors now, the 31 flavors was originally created in the ’50s and was built on the idea that someone could have a different flavor for each day of the month.
Toblerone
Toblerone originated in Bern, Switzerland, which is a city that is famous for bears. They were able to integrate a hidden bear in the mountain in the logo.
Toyota
The Toyota logo is in a category all its own. There’s not really a hidden graphic or anything, it’s just that you can spell the name of the company with the shapes in the logo. Go ahead, try it.
There are other really cool hidden items in logos, I just didn’t include them because I couldn’t find any good legal photos that I could use to illustrate. If you’d like to see more, check out the following:
The word MOM in the collar of the Wendy’s logo
Two people sharing a bowl of salsa in the Tostito’s logo
Bike rider (possibly on steroids) in the Tour de France logo
Hidden Hershey’s Kiss hidden in their logo
Pin in the Pinterest logo
The bird in the Atlanta Falcons logo makes an “F”
The M and the B in the Milwaukee Brewers logo
Backmasking
Depending on how deliberate it is, backmasking is either a technique or in most cases, it’s just pareidolia, like seeing a face in a tree or the virgin Mary on a piece of toast. Backmasking is essentially where you play a record backward and it reveals a hidden message, or someone finds something that sounds pretty vague, they say that it says something, and then a bunch of people start believing they heard the same thing. I use the term record, and not song, because this phenomenon really took off in the ’60s and 70s when you could literally take the turntable and spin the record backward. I actually did this a bunch with my Led Zeppelin records as a kid when I heard about this. Sometimes it’s deliberate, sometimes it’s borderline, and sometimes it’s probably just a coincidence.
Here are some examples:
The Beatles
In 1966, The Beatles kicked off this technique on the song “Rain”. When played in reverse, you can hear, “Sunshine … Rain … When the rain comes, they run and hide their heads”. The White Album sparked the Paul is Dead conspiracy (that he died in a car crash and was replaced with a lookalike and that’s the reason they stopped touring). For instance, when you play Revolution #9 backwards, you hear “turn me on dead man”, and when you play “I’m So Tired” backward, you hear “Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him”. Actually, this kind of makes Revolution #9 actually makes sense…
Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven is one of those songs that was intertwined in the now-debunked Satanic Panic era of human history. The famous line is “here’s to my sweet Satan”, although I tend to hear, “Yish de maze we zaydin”. Now I loved Led Zeppelin as a kid, but if you really want to have a conversation about subliminal messages and Led Zeppelin, let’s discuss their huge catalog of “borrowed” work and how Stairway to Heaven sounds eerily similar to the song Taurus by Sprit.
ELO
After being pulled into the controversary and being accused of satanic messages in their music, ELO explicitly placed some backmasked tracks on the instrumental, “Fire on High” that says (in crystal clarity when played backward, “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!” They even doubled down on this further, when they released an entire album called Secret Messages.
Others
There are so many others to choose from, it’s hard to pick but here are the artists, the song, and the backmasked message that can be heard:
Pink Floyd – Empty Spaces – “Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont”
The Waitresses – The Smartest Person I Know – “Anyone who believes in backwards masking is a fool.”
B-52’s – Detour Through Your Mind – “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you’re playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.”
Devo – Whip It – “Hey come over here!”
Weird Al – I Remember Larry – “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands”
The Simpsons – Drop da Bomb – “Join the Navy” (This was from the episode where Bart joined a boy band and had a hit song with the repeated lyric “Yvan eht nioj”.)
So, does backmasking even qualify as subliminal messaging? Does it fit the theme of the article of “subliminal messages in advertising”? I would argue that it could qualify for both. For the messages that are gibberish when played forwards and clear when played backward, these are deliberately placed by artists, often just to have fun. These are definitely not subliminal. This is just taking the track and reversing it. However, when there is clearly no gibberish played forwards, there’s a chance it’s subliminal, although it’s likely just pareidolia. However…listen to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” backward and I would have to say, that might actually be a subliminal message.
Is it advertising? Well, sort of. For many of the bands that either did this deliberately or just got accused of adding messages to their songs, it’s generated a ton of PR. Any press is good press, right? The best part is that they didn’t have to spend anything extra to generate the buzz. Have I ever mentioned how musicians are inherently the best marketers? PS, read between the lines of this article and let me know if you can find the hidden message.
Why Do I Think Subliminal Advertising Could Work?
The Elaboration Likelihood Model
Thirty years after The Hidden Persuaders was written, a couple of researchers, John Cacioppo from the University of Iowa, and Richard Petty (not the drives real fast guy) from the University of Missouri-Columbia published a paper that would completely change the way that we study consumer behavior. The Elaboration Likelihood Model describes two distinct methods of persuasion: central-route processing and peripheral-route processing. Central-route processing occurs when the receiver of the message has both the ability and motivation to think about a message. Central-route processing occurs when the recipient is thinking about the content of the message and carefully considering the pros and cons of selecting a particular product.[4] Think of evaluating a new car, or a home. This type of reasoning involves central-route processing.
Peripheral-route processing, however, is when the consumer doesn’t think very much about their purchase. During this type of processing, a purchase is made for reasons other than the strength of the arguments. Think of grabbing a snack or choosing a toothpaste. Unless you’re a crazy person, you don’t spend much time evaluating all of your alternatives on low-effort items that you pick up at the grocery store. With peripheral-route processing, a consumer is more driven by unconscious influences and the environment and simple beliefs about a product or a brand. During low-effort consumer behavior and peripheral-route processing, feelings, and emotions toward a product can be swayed by a consumer’s mood, attitude toward an ad, or just being familiar with the brand.[5] Yep, it can be that easy. If you like a product or an ad or are even just exposed to an ad enough times, you could be influenced to purchase the product.
So What Does This All Mean?
So this is where it gets interesting. In one respect, we know that we prefer familiar products over unfamiliar ones, and this can be done by repeated advertising or messaging.[6] On the other hand, we have numerous studies that are unable to recreate the success from the Vicary “study”. So, I guess this raises several questions, what counts as subliminal? Does it need to be noticeable to the consumer? Is 1/3,000 even noticeable? How many frames of video would you need for this to have an impact? What frequency would you need to combine with a noticeable amount of subliminal advertising to make a statistically significant impact on someone’s purchasing behavior?
Since you can’t prove a negative, it is impossible to say that subliminal advertising or subliminal messages have no impact. What could be said is that there are no credible studies that show that any type of subliminal advertising had the intended effect on the advertiser. To prove that subliminal advertising or messaging worked, you’d have to create a really clever lab or field study. Well, it turns out that a few studies have actually shown that subliminal influence had long-term effects on decision making[7], can change our mood[8], and showing logos subliminally can actually alter our brand behavior[9]. There are more but come on, I’m not doing a doctoral dissertation literature review here…
So it has been shown to change people’s behaviors and if you dive into a research library’s database, you can find a bunch of credible studies. This leads me back to one of the original questions if it’s truly subliminal, how would anyone ever know? How would the FCC catch an advertiser that is using subliminal advertising? I’m personally not willing to believe that many advertisers are actually doing this. I’ve worked in marketing for 15+ years and I’m about to get a marketing certificate in an MBA program and I can tell you that the topic of subliminal advertising gets very little attention. I don’t think it’s happening that much, but it’s certainly happening and has happened for decades. Does it have much of an impact on our behavior? That’s something that I can’t really definitively answer.
[1] Fullerton, R. A. (2010). “A virtual social H-bomb”: The late 1950s controversy over subliminal advertising. Journal of Historical Research in Marketing, 2(2), 166-173. doi:http://dx.doi.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1108/17557501011042533
[2] Broyles, Sheri J. 2006. Subliminal Advertising and the Perpetual Popularity of Playing to People’s Paranoia. The Journal of Consumer Affairs.
[6] Baker, William E. “When Can Affective Conditioning and Mere Exposure Directly Influence Brand Choice?” Journal of Advertising 28 no. 4, Winter 1999. pp. 31-46
[7] Ruch, S., Züst, M. A., & Henke, K. (2016). Subliminal messages exert long-term effects on decision-making. Neuroscience of consciousness, 2016(1), niw013. https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niw013
[8] Monahan JL, Murphy ST, Zajonc RB. Subliminal Mere Exposure: Specific, General, and Diffuse Effects. Psychological Science. 2000;11(6):462-466. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00289
[9] Muscarella, C., Brintazzoli, G., Gordts, S., Soetens, E., & Van den Bussche, E. (2013). Short- and long-term effects of conscious, minimally conscious and unconscious brand logos. PLoS One, 8(5) doi:http://dx.doi.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1371/journal.pone.0057738
Economics is all about scarcity, and scarcity drives pricing. Most people have a general understanding of the interplay of supply and demand without really knowing how it works. As one half of the supply/demand interplay, the law of demand states that the quantity demanded rises as price falls. This takes into account two items, the substitution effect, which indicates price changes relative to another good, and the income effect, which says that the change in price changes disposable income.
If the demand curve is linear, the relationship can be estimated with the demand curve formula Qd=a-b(P), whereas Qd is the quantity demanded in number of units, a is a constant which represents the demand determinants (this is the X intercept), b is the relationship between Qd and price, which is a negative (inverse slope of the demand curve), and P is price.
The demand curve slopes downward on a graph. This is because consumers are always willing to buy more goods at a lower price. Typically, demand shifts from demographics, prices, income, and consumer tastes and trends. Firms with market power can also impact demand with advertising.
Keep in mind, this formula is only used as an estimation of demand, as real-world applications are not linear.
Your memory is flawed. It’s not what we’ve been taught to believe. It’s not a perfect recorder that captures every minute of our consciousness. Instead of a recorder, our memories are more like a broad representation of our lives. Your memory is less like a recording device and more like a game of telephone.[1] To some people, this can be scary because humans are collections of experiences and if you can’t remember these experiences, it might make you question who you are.
Our memories are flawed and that’s okay. Vivid memories are especially flawed. Why? Well, every time that you recall a memory, you bring the past memory into the present moment and each time you do this, it is likely to be modified, even slightly. You do that 100 times, and that’s 100 opportunities for the memory to get altered. There are also so many different types of memory. The best marketers understand how the brain works and how memories are made. In this article, I’ll cover the marketing implications of your brand competing with several different types of memories.
Short-Term Memory
Your short-term memory is your working memory. There are two different types of short-term memory processing, imagery and discursive. Imagery processing is just like it sounds, it involves processing an image where discursive processing, involves the processing of words.[2]
Short-term memory also has a limited capacity. How limited? Well, based on a famous study by George Miller, most adults can remember 7 items at once (plus or minus 2). Dubbed “Miller’s Magic Number”, this study had lasting implications. Think of the amount of digits in a phone number, the number of words on a typical billboard, and the number of words in a good headline. They all hover around Miller’s Magic Number.
Our brains try to compensate for this lack of short-term memory availability with a concept called chunking. This is essentially grouping items to make them easier to remember. Mnemonic devices are a classic example of chunking. Do you remember “my very excellent mother just served us nine pizzas?” I get it, Pluto is no longer a planet, but still… I also remember one from 7th grade: King Phillip came over from Greece swimming, which is a mnemonic device for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Or my favorite, to remember my guitar strings, every average dude gets better eventually. That’s not just a great trick to remember your guitar strings, it’s also funny, not to mention its sage advice if you’re an average dude like me and you just happen to be feeling defeated when you sit down to play the guitar.
Marketing Implications
Due to limited processing, marketers have to not only capture your attention, but they need to keep it as well. As stated earlier, headlines and billboards need to appeal to short-term memory. Also, marketers need to keep three words in mind: repetition, repetition, repetition. In order to permeate the short-term memory to be imprinted to long-term memory, your message must not be forgotten.
Long-Term Memory
Your long-term memory is where information is permanently stored. Permanent? Well, many people believe that it is permanent, there are just so many items that can distort the memory itself and the retrieval cues to recall a memory.
Semantic Memory
Semantic memory is a type of long-term memory that shapes the facts about the world around us. Cars are things that have wheels that get us to where we need to go. Pizza is a round object that has sauce, cheese, and toppings. Semantic memory involves what we have gathered from our experiences that tell us general information and facts about the world around us.
Marketing Implications
Your product or your message can’t be too disconnected from what is known about a product. We see this happen in adoption rates for new products. When a product improves upon something that we’re already used to, it typically has a higher adoption rate rather than one that completely forces us to engage in a new behavior. Take something like Google Glass as an example. Besides potential legal and ethical issues of recording other people without them knowing, this strange device was also incongruent with people’s semantic memory of glasses. Glasses should improve your vision, not turn you into a nerdy cyborg. The stark difference in people’s views of reality likely led them to have a low adoption rate.
Mobile phones, however, have evolved more slowly. First, they were just regular phones that you could take anywhere. Then you could text, then came the Blackberry, and now, they’re not really used to make calls at all. Seriously, unless you’re in sales, when was the last time you answered a call from a number you didn’t recognize? Collectively, our semantic memories have changed over time to recognize phones as they are today.
An episodic memory is a type of long-term memory that is tied to an experience. It could be a vacation, a party, or a bad day at work. Episodic memory involves many senses. Let’s say, for instance, you were remembering a birthday party you had on the beach with friends. You might remember what people were wearing, the smell of the sunscreen, the taste of a lunch you packed. You might remember what it felt like to get that really bad sunburn.
Episodic memories are very complex and could potentially shape the way that you think about certain places, people, or events. Let’s take that same example. At your party, maybe you were playing your music too loud and a couple of people approached you to ask for you to turn it down. This experience may shape the way that you view that particular beach, or beach town, forever. You might feel like it’s full of a bunch of fun haters, when in fact, it was just a couple of people that you are likely to never see again.
Marketing Implications
Marketers want to build strong episodic memories that are attached to their products. Places like Disney World cater to your desire to create episodic memories for your children. Car commercials don’t often focus on the features of the car, but where the car can take you (again, to create episodic memories).
Explicit & Implicit Memory
Explicit memory is when you consciously remember something. From a consumer behavior standpoint, maybe it is something like the ingredients in a Big Mac or the number of horsepower in a certain car’s engine. Implicit memory, however, occurs when you are not consciously aware, something comes to mind that you were not trying to remember, like a song that just pops up in your head out of nowhere.
Marketing Implications
Marketers are always fighting for space in your memory, whether you consciously or unconsciously remember the message. That’s why jingles and taglines are so popular. They are devices to create explicit and implicit memories in consumers’ minds.
Source Confusion
Memory source confusion, or source misattribution, happens when you can’t remember where a memory came from. Do you remember hearing that Subway’s bread had ingredients that were used in Yoga mats? Do you remember where you heard that? How about that McNuggets don’t actually contain chicken? Have you heard that and do you remember where you heard this information?
You probably don’t remember where you heard this information and probably didn’t do much fact-checking to make sure the information was true. Unfortunately, some of these items are really sticky in our brains and the story is just so interesting that it sticks with us, regardless of what is true. Source confusion can even be harmful. Misinformation campaigns can have lasting impacts on the way that we interact with the world.
Marketing Implications
For source confusion, there are many marketing implications. One implication is to carefully consider your response to negative PR. If you’re not careful, you can get in a fight with the press that ends up in an exchange that leads to more and more exposure which is rarely in your favor. This can just end up reinforcing the original claim and a consumer is not likely going to remember what was said in defense. You should develop a solid crisis communication plan so if you are ever in this situation, you have a step-by-step guide to help you through the problem. If you don’t you will certainly make the wrong move, maybe many wrong moves.
A crisis communication plan should have a section for an immediate response and an ongoing response. You should have an incident management and media relations team. My crisis communication plan has six steps:
First alert, where the team is notified
Get the facts
Verify and keep information moving
Prepare for media
When reporters arrive
Media follow up
The plan that I built also has worksheets for each team member, other than the spokesperson, that will be involved in any type of communication with the media. This plan was built off of the CDC’s crisis communications response. I would highly recommend anyone reading this that does not have a crisis communications plan to build your plan from the CDC recommendations.
Another marketing implication is that your brand has to accept is that for consumers, perception is reality. Regardless of the truth, if your consumers believe something negative about your company to be true, you need to do something about it. Remember the Subway yoga mat thing? They actually made two great moves. First, they didn’t come out and fight the claim and make everything worse, they just quietly got rid of the ingredient and moved on.
Source confusion doesn’t always have to have negative marketing implications for your brand, you can also use this to your advantage. Suggestibility bias shows that our memories and behaviors are subject to outside influences. Use an omnichannel approach to communicate your message. A combination of video, display, retargeting, print ads, direct mail, and public relations can help your key message stand out. The consumer is likely to forget where they saw your message, but if you run a comprehensive campaign with one strong over-arching message, you are more likely for it to stick.
Associative Network
An associative network is a group of items that are associated with one overarching concept. It includes all of the items that you might link with the concept. Some links may be strong, and some may be weak. For instance, for the concept of skiing, you may think of snow, skis, chair lifts, cold, or fun. But you might also associate items on the periphery, like the bar at the ski lodge where you sing karaoke. You may think of the only car that you can take because it has enough room to pack all of your equipment. You might live in Florida, so you might think of traveling. You might think of the cost. You might have really weak links like the kind of food that you typically eat before you go or warming up in the lodge or car afterward.
Marketing Implications
Knowing the associations customers have with your product can help you develop a stronger story for your marketing plan. For instance, an association related to M&M’s may be Christmas. Pushing red and green M&M’s at Christmas time could lead to stronger sales. It also appears that M&M’s have also attempted to increase their associative network with other holidays like Independence Day, Halloween, Easter, and Valentine’s Day. Around these holidays, you can find special, seasonal M&M’s with colors that fit the theme of the holiday. While what may have started as an attempt of building an associative network around the Christmas holiday for M&M’s has grown to attempt to just be associated with any holiday. They’re targeting parties and other gatherings in an attempt to be one of the links that tie all of these holidays together.
Wrapping Up
Our memories are perfect recordings. They’re more like representations of our lives. They are prone to distortion and manipulation. There are also so many different types of memories that shape the way we view the world. Our past experiences impact our future decisions. Marketers can shape our memories, whether it is changing our views of the past or promising positive future memories. Although your memory is far from perfect, all of these imperfections make up who we are.
[1] D. J. Bridge, K. A. Paller. Neural Correlates of Reactivation and Retrieval-Induced Distortion. Journal of Neuroscience, 2012; 32 (35): 12144 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1378-12.2012
[2] Hoyer, W., MacInnis, D., & Pieters, R. (2018). Consumer Behavior (Seventh Edition). Cengage Learning.
I was recently listening to an episode of “The Hidden Brain” podcast called “Creatures of Habit” and it reminded me of just how powerful of a role that habits play in our lives. Depending on the habit, their impact can be either positive or negative. Regardless of their intent, we engage in habits to achieve some type of realized (or unrealized) goal. Some studies show that 40 percent of the activities we perform each day are habits.[1] One study shows that habits can range from 18 to 254 days to form, with a median of 66 days.[2] Habits take repetition. They take time. They take patience. Since they take so long to form, they can take even longer to break.
As consumers, many of our purchases are habitual. In low-effort consumer behavior, these decisions are straightforward, involve little risk, are purchased often which is why many low-effort purchases become habitual. Think about some low-effort products you buy from the grocery store. What determines the brand of toothpaste you buy? What about bread, or milk? For many of these purchases, you are likely to buy whatever is cheapest. That’s a consumer behavior habit based on a price heuristic and you’ve likely been developing that habit for longer than you realize. You probably inherited many of your purchasing habits from shopping with your parents.
Habits can occur in both high-effort and low-effort behaviors. Although breaking a habit can be incredibly difficult, good marketers understand how to break your heuristics and introduce new products.
The Habit Loop
All habits happen in a loop which consists of three main components: the routine, the cue, and the reward.[3] The routine is self-explanatory. It’s the ritual that you are engaged in, which you likely see as the habit itself. This could be something like grabbing a drink with friends after work or eating something unhealthy at the same time every day. The routine, however, starts with a cue.
The cue of the habit is essentially the piece that triggers the routine. For instance, if you have a habit of eating a sugary snack every day is the cue your stomach rumbling? Is it going into a long meeting? Is it just because you engage in this behavior at the same time every day? When the cue is triggered, the habit begins.
The reward of a habit is the satisfaction that you get from engaging in the habitual behavior. For a sugary snack, it could be that you get more energy, or it is more likely that you are getting a dopamine hit from the sugar intake. For a healthy habit, like running, it could be the “runner’s high”, or the reduction in stress.
How a Marketer Hacks the Habit Loop
Purchasing and consumption habits can be decades-old rituals. Most companies want you to purchase their products out of habit. The key is to get you into the habit loop. Forget the typical products you might think of as habitual, like alcohol and cigarettes, how about something that doesn’t seem as harmful, at least on the surface. Let’s pretend that you need to get a few household items, you don’t want to go to the store, and you need them soon. Where do you go. I bet you go straight to Amazon and you probably didn’t even consider a different retailer. Why? They’ve figured out the habit loop. Whenever you need something (cue), you go to your ritual (go to Amazon and find your product), and get your reward (your stuff quickly). That two-day or next day shipping is tough to beat and they’ve got just about everything. Your reward, in this scenario, is probably the time that you save by not comparison shopping a bunch of different websites.
Okay, great, companies spend a lot of time trying to get someone hooked, how does a marketer intervene? Well, you’ve got to hack the habit loop. What consumers are you targeting? What are their habits? If you know this information, the easiest way to hack the habit is to focus on the reward section of the habit loop. The most obvious example is like-kind products since this is by far the easiest to replace. Although habits are incredibly hard to break, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the reward is always the same product, it is likely the same type of product. For instance, the habit loop could involve you eating ice cream every night after dinner. What we know about low-effort consumer behavior is that regardless of the habit, humans are typically variety seeking. That’s why there’s an entire aisle full of different ice cream flavors. You can easily swap out the flavors and receive the same reward for your daily ice cream habit. The way a marketer tries to hack the loop in this scenario is by trying to get the addicted consumer to switch brands to their brand of ice cream. Good marketers know this and will try to prevent switching by offering many flavors under their brand to keep loyal customers from trying other brands.
More sophisticated marketers have a better understanding of the reward cycle. Take for instance a really old campaign. In 1990, Wrigley’s partnered with ad agency BBDO to try and boost gum sales. They understood the power of habits and zeroed in on one habit that was starting to have many restrictions across the country, smoking. As legislation banned cigarettes from offices, restaurants, and airplanes (yep, you used to be able to smoke on airplanes), Wrigley’s saw an opening in the market. They realized that part of the routine of smoking was a habitual oral fixation, so they took a gamble that if consumers replaced smoking with chewing gum in places where they couldn’t smoke, the consumer would get a similar reward. Their campaign was so successful for their spearmint line that they extended it to all of their flavors.[4] Wrigley’s wasn’t successful in competing with other gum brands, they were successful by completely reimagining the habit loop and taking on a completely, seemingly unrelated product.
I’m Stuck in a Loop, What Can I Do to Break it?
Okay, that’s great. Marketers are manipulating my purchasing behaviors. How does that help me from stopping a habit I want to break? In “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg explains that the biggest difficulty in changing habits is that every person is different, so there are infinite ways to actually change habits. An added challenge is that all habits are different. Quitting drinking is different than exercising, which is different than grabbing a mid-morning snack. He goes on to describe that each person will need to experiment with all of the components that make up a habit. All habits happen in a loop that includes a cue, a routine, and a reward. The framework to change a habit is to “identify the routine, experiment with rewards, isolate the cue, have a plan”.[5]
The easiest part of recognizing a habit is likely identifying the routine. It’s the compulsive behavior that you want to break. In the earlier example, its eating ice cream every day. The routine is really tough to break, and depending on your situation, the actual routine may be impossible for you to break. Never fear though, as stated earlier, a habit involves three parts, and you can experiment with the other two.
Although the routine is tough to break, you could try to determine the cue that drives the routine. If you are able to eliminate the cue, you could eliminate the routine. To figure out the cue portion of the habit loop, Charles Duhigg recommends that the moment the urge hits, write down the time, location, emotions, other people around, and the immediately preceding action.
The rewards portion of the habit loop could be really difficult to determine, and Duhigg recommends experimenting for several days, or possibly weeks to help identify the reward. In my ice cream example, is it the ice cream that is the reward? Is it the dopamine hit from the sugar? Is it the cold feeling after a hot meal? Duhigg recommends experimenting with other types of rewards. In this case, maybe you could try a cold seltzer water, or a bowl of popcorn. He recommends writing down what you are feeling as you experiment and waiting several minutes after the experiment is over to see if you still have your craving.
Final Thoughts
As humans, we run our lives on habits. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Our lives would actually be pretty terrible if we had to make conscious decisions about each item we put in our cart every time we went to the grocery store. These shortcuts can save us time, and make our lives easier. However, they can also make our lives miserable. Marketers are always looking for ways to hack into a habit loop. While this can be done pretty easily by focusing on replacement products, truly remarkable marketers have a profound understanding of how the brain works. Marketing is not just an art, it’s also psychology. If you take the time to understand consumer behavior, you can gain a clearer understanding of how to stay in front of the competition.
Your brand is not your logo. It’s not your color palette and it’s not your fonts. Those are visual identities. They are part of your brand. These visual identities help communicate your brand and help distinguish your brand among all of the other logos and visual identities, but they’re not your brand. Obviously, you need to do the basic blocking and tackling of making sure your visual identity and name are consistent throughout your business and that people know who you are and what you do. However, there’s much more to it.
Your brand is your promise to your customers and your employees, and although your visual identity contributes to the recognition of that promise, it goes much deeper than that. I’m guessing that you already know this, but this post is dedicated to the things that make up your brand, the people.
You’re Not Completely in Control
Yep, unfortunately, this is a sad reality. When you are in business, you’re not totally in control of your brand. You can take steps to manage the direction and perception of your brand, but you are not completely in control because your brand is only as strong as how your customers and potential customers perceive your brand. You can obviously cover some of the basics, like making sure your products don’t break and your service doesn’t suck, but depending on the size of your company and the steps you need to take to evolve a negative brand perception, this could be easier said than done. So, what can you do? Although you probably dread the subject, the next part of this post is partially about the good old mission, vision, and values. Okay, I know I probably made you groan and maybe I totally lost you, but don’t stop now, you already sunk a few minutes to get to this point. I hope to bring a real-world approach on how to integrate these items to help drive your brand and not just be something that gets created behind closed doors and hangs on the wall somewhere in the office.
Your Internal Customers
Your brand begins and ends with your employees (more on this later). They are the number one asset to your organization. A great organization has Rockstar employees that feel empowered. They feel proud to be part of a company that is treating them right and letting them make decisions. When reviewing your brand, make sure that your employees understand your company mission, vision, and values. Also, it is critical that your employees share your corporate values. If not, your employees are not aligned with your company’s foundation.
Developing Your Values
Whether you are a startup or a well-established company, developing or refreshing your company values is essential to maintaining your current employees and making the right hires. Values are an excellent way to communicate the fundamental ideas to empower your employees to make decisions. Without an empowered workforce, there are always people that serve as bottlenecks to making decisions. This typically leads to overall employee frustration, lost opportunity cost, and a decrease in productivity. Instead, an empowered workforce that is encouraged to make decisions based on your corporate values can exponentially increase your productivity and innovation.
For instance, if your values include a relentless pursuit of the best customer service, given the right structure and autonomy, an empowered employee can take several steps to handle customer issues when they arise before taking the issue to the manager. A value like this can also help define the direction of your company by placing a higher emphasis on employee training for items like how to deal with difficult customers, how to manage tough situations, and how to create customer-centric solutions.
What’s Your Vision?
Do you really know where you want your company to go? Who you want to be? What you strive to achieve in the future? If not, your brand value can and will continue to erode. In business, you evolve or die, and having a well-defined vision is critical to driving your company forward. Do you strive to be innovative? Want to diversify? Deep down, do you really want to completely change the way that your company operates? Having a vision for your brand is kind of like setting a stretch goal for your business. The same thought process that applies to personal goal setting applies to your business. However, think of this as a stretch goal.
While a normal goal will be slightly unattainable and may only require you to stretch yourself only a little, a stretch goal makes you push for amazing things. Oftentimes, stretch goals will require you to completely reimagine what you are doing. If running a 5K is a goal, running a marathon is a stretch goal. If taking an online course is a goal, getting an MBA is a stretch goal. So how could you apply it to your business?
Let’s say for instance your goal is to launch a new product in the next year. Your stretch goal could be to become the leading product in the category. These are two completely different goals. One requires you to check all of your normal boxes for a product launch. The other requires you to completely take over the category. You’ve got to lead in features, pricing, packaging, promotion, industry relationships, advertising, well…everything. A stretch goal can make you a little crazy, but it typically takes this type of thinking to do anything amazing.
From an overall business standpoint, where does this put your vision? Well, does it make you a little uncomfortable? Is it something that everyone can believe in? Is it measurable? If so, you’re on the path to setting a stretch goal.
Mission Statement
Aah yes, the dreaded mission statement. You’ve probably agonized over this in school. Maybe you’ve messed with it in a meeting. Maybe you’ve never been part of this conversation and you’ve just been told what it is or sat in a meeting where it was explained. Maybe you don’t know it at all. Regardless, your mission should actually mean something and not be something that you dread. Think of your own personal mission in life. What do you want to do in this life? Is it to leave the world a better place? Is it to teach your children your values? Is it to be a Rockstar? Maybe to be a doctor? Regardless, you should have something inside of you that drives you to achieve these goals; something that pushes you to be better every day. This is what your mission statement should convey.
Customer Service
For nearly a decade, I’ve been an advocate for the idea that your customer service personnel should be run by your sales and marketing departments. Regardless of what your business does, there will likely be a person, departments of people, or entire buildings full of people whose job is to attend to customer issues. This is the perfect time to perfect your brand.
Without fail, high-effort consumer behavior follows a five-step process. If you haven’t read anything I’ve written on high-effort consumer behavior, the way consumers process high-effort behavior is through what’s called central-route processing. This is just a fancy way of saying that you have to really think deeply about a decision. This is opposed to low-effort consumer behavior, which uses peripheral route processing; this basically means a consumer doesn’t think much about their purchase. The five steps involved in high-effort consumer behavior are:
Problem recognition
Information search
Consideration set
Purchase
Post-purchase
This last and final step of post-purchase is where so many organizations don’t focus enough energy on improving their brand. This is not just an opportunity to make customers happy, but it’s an opportunity to make longer-term incremental sales. For high-effort behavior, many companies have the opportunity to solidify their brand when there is something wrong. As a company, you are always going to have things go wrong. Something is going to break. As humans, we get it, not all products are perfect. However, with high-effort behavior, each step is as important as every other step. If a company exceeds expectations after a product is purchased, it is likely going to lead to more purchases in the future. This can also lead to the most powerful marketing available, positive word-of-mouth marketing, or personal recommendations.
However, forget the furthering the brand conversation for a minute, this is also an opportunity to sell. You have customers calling you, and regardless of if they are having a good experience or a bad experience, they are calling you and no outreach is really necessary. Are you using this opportunity to let them know about something new that you are launching? Obviously, you have to be tactful about this and train your customer service people on how to read the room. You can’t have somebody try to sell anything to someone that is pissed off about something that impacts your brand. However, if you solved their problem, what better way to make a sale than to simply mention something that could turn into another sale? Credit card companies have this figured out. If you ever have an issue where you need to talk to someone, they will almost always try to sell you on their rewards card. However, you don’t have to take it to that annoying level. You could simply just ask for permission to email them some information on a new product that you are launching.
Let’s take this customer service reps as salespeople thing to a whole new level. How about keeping logs in your CRM for customers that you’ve helped? You can use this CRM to track outbound communication from the customer service team to proactively pitch new products. You could simply filter your customers by satisfied or unsatisfied. For the satisfied customers, your customer service team could send an email saying something like Hey (customer’s name), my name is (customer service rep name) and I helped you with (insert issue-from a category list) back in (insert month). We’re launching a new product that solves (insert problem here) and we have special introductory pricing through the end of the month. Would you like to find out more? With variable data and smart content, you could easily do this pretty much exactly like I just listed. Smart content would fill everything you had from a spreadsheet and voila, you’ve got a marketing and sales email sent directly from the customer service team.
However, in many companies, it doesn’t work this way. This primarily happens because most companies operate in silos. The marketing group is focused on data and advertising. The sales group is focused on net new conversions or increasing market share. The customer service team is focused on retention. The operations staff is focused on efficiencies. Instead, by removing the silos and thinking through the entire high-effort consumer behavior process, you can create a better and more efficient way of making sure you’ve covered every part of the process.
Your Brand is Your Attitude
Let’s put your company aside and talk about your personal brand. You will, more than likely, have a career and a personal brand that lasts much longer than your relationship with your current company. Your personal brand is made up of mostly your attitude. Sure, it’s other things like your talent, your education, and how your brain works. However, all of these things can come crumbling down if you are steered by the wrong attitude. Your attitude is what drives your success. If you are always looking for ways that something is going to fail or isn’t possible, you are going to stifle yourself and your career. You’re going to be a person that is miserable to be around, and this is going to likely translate to your personal life. Having an attitude that holds other people back is also holding you back. It’s making you depressed and it doesn’t have to be this way.
However, if you have a welcoming attitude that is open to new ideas, inclusion, and always striving to be the best, you will achieve greater success and probably have some fun along the way. People don’t just want to work with smart people. People want to work with and work for, others that are fun to be around. We want to work with people that can cheer us up when we are having a bad day. We want to work with someone who loves jumping in and solving problems. We want to align ourselves with someone that presents ideas that are just crazy enough to work.
In some cases, you likely spend more time with some of the people that you work with than you do with your family. I agree, this seems a little crazy, but it’s just kind of how the world works. Just like a spouse would rather be around someone that has a good attitude, so do your coworkers and you should want this out of the people that you work with too. You are a team and the team is greater than the individual team members. Every day, you have the opportunity to choose your attitude, and every day, you are building your personal brand with your colleagues, customers, and vendors.
How Your Personal Brand Coincides with Your Company’s Brand
So what is your company’s brand? Well…it’s you. It’s your friend that works in sales. It’s your neighbor that works in the shipping department. It’s your cousin’s wife that works in the accounting department. It’s people. Your company’s brand is the collection of all of these people choosing their attitude and representing the company. Your company relies on you and every one of the people that it employs to represent them in a certain way. This is where brand and culture training is critical. You should know your company values. As stated earlier, these are the basic fundamental building blocks of how your company expects you to represent them. If you are working for the right company, your values should be aligned. If not, well…you should probably be working somewhere else.
If your values are in alignment, any growth to your personal brand will likely benefit your company as well. Whether it be getting an education, volunteering, or posting educational articles on LinkedIn called “Your Brand is Not Your Logo” to try and help other people, the growth of your personal brand will have incremental growth on your company’s brand. Just imagine if everyone in the company had the drive to grow their personal brand. What if everyone in the company tried to better themselves? What if everyone tried to have fun? What if everyone had a positive attitude? Well…then you’d have one amazing brand.
Wrapping Up
So your brand is not your logo. It’s not any component of what makes your company’s visual identity. It’s something that you can’t completely control. Your brand is your product or service, but it’s not your product or service. It is your product or service because the thing you have to sell is a major customer touchpoint. However, it isn’t your product or service because, in some respects, those are just representations of what your company represents. They’re just a part of what your brand was, is, and will be.
What’s behind all of this and what makes your brand possible is the people. Your brand is the people that work for the company, regardless if it involves tens of thousands of people or a sole proprietor. These companies aren’t run by robots (yet), they’re run by people. These people have hopes and dreams. They have families. They have hobbies. They’re just like you. Some employees might not have the education that someone else does. They might not have the technical knowledge that others have. They might not have the title or salary that someone else has. What everyone does have, however, is the ability to be kind. We have the ability to tell a dad joke. We have the ability to help someone that is in need. If your brand is your people, make sure that you are attracting, retaining, and cultivating a workplace that is inclusive, open to new ideas, and just fun to be around. If you can do this, you’ve figured out the secret to how to create a strong brand.
Back around 2005, I was reading just about every marketing book I could get my hands on and the hottest topic was guerrilla marketing. Guerrilla marketing is really hard to define, but the best way I can describe it is doing something really strange and unexpected to get attention. Think publicity stunts, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be related to traditional publicity. At the time, I was working for a record label and we didn’t have much of a marketing budget, so the idea of doing things differently was about all I could do to help differentiate my company and our artists from the competition.
For one record, we basically bribed DJ’s to play a particular song to try and get it to chart. We ran a contest in conjunction with Gibson (which sponsored one of our artists), where every time they played the song, the first caller could win a chance to win a Gibson Dobro. Well, it worked. We ended up getting 50+ radio stations from around the world to participate and ended up giving the Dobro to some guy in Chicago. That song went #1 and that artist won “Dobro Player of the Year” that year. Cool. We also had an album titled “New Tattoo” where we got temporary tribal tattoos printed. We sent them to DJ’s with the promo records. We had a band named Wildfire, and we printed album art on a book of matches. When you opened the book of matches, it had the track listing. I think I still have a book of those matches around here somewhere… I don’t really think any of those examples really qualify for guerrilla marketing, but they were inspired by all of the crazy guerrilla marketing that was going on at the time.
For a while, guerrilla marketing was my jam. Although it’s not really something that I do much anymore, I’ve got a serious appreciation for people that can pull this off well. Guerrilla marketing is still a kind of nebulous term. It’s one of those things where you know it when you see it. Regardless, I’m taking a look back at the past 20+ years to hand-pick some of my favorite guerrilla marketing campaigns.
Burger King Liking Old Tweets
Burger King was my first non-farm job. At the time, I was an incredibly sheltered 15-year old and wow, did working at a Burger King open my eyes to the world. I’ll save those stories for another time, but damn, their guerrilla marketing has been on point for a LOOONNNNGGGG time. They’ve got the King. They cancelled the Whopper. They had the Subservient Chicken (I’ll get to that later). Let’s start off with an example from 2019. I love this one because it’s about the simplest and cheapest thing they could have ever done.
So, in December of 2019, Burger King started liking tweets. However, they didn’t just start liking random tweets, they started liking tweets of pretty big influencers. The catch? The tweets that they started liking were from a decade earlier. Unless you live under a rock, you understand that when someone likes a tweet, you get a notification. These people naturally got a notification that Burger King liked their tweet…from 10 years ago. Like any living, breathing human being, they were like, “WTF is Burger King doing liking a tweet of mine from 10 years ago. That’s weird AF,” and they naturally tweeted something to that effect.
So why is this important? Well, they just got someone with millions of followers to tweet about them. They were not only tweeting about Burger King; they were starting a conversation about Burger King. Conspiracy theories swirled and people started talking. Brilliant.
I love this campaign because it is so stupid. It makes me laugh just thinking about it. Honestly, I’d love to be the person that had to go into the board of directors to pitch this idea. Who am I kidding, I bet they just did it and never told their boss until it worked. What did they have to lose? It’s about as low risk as they could get. The only hard part would be trying to beat that ROI.
Red Balloons Tied to Sewer Grates
So, this one is kind of creepy. For the reboot of the movie “It” in 2017, a team in Sidney, Australia tied some red helium balloons from sewer grates throughout the city. Near the grates were notes stenciled in chalk saying, “It is closer than you think #itmovie”. If you know anything about the movie It, well, he lives in the sewer. He also is pictured with red balloons…a lot. This campaign was simple, creepy, and got a lot of attention all over the world, not just in Sidney. Then, people just started doing it all over the place. Why? Well, because…people. That’s why.
Ikea Guerrilla Manhattan
In 2006, Ikea decided to give Manhattan a makeover. But it just wasn’t a little makeover. It involved 600 city blocks and 670 individual tactics. It involved products in subway trains, makeovers of bus stops, furniture at payphones (yeah, those used to be a thing), plates and outdoor seating at food trucks, dog water bowls, random hammocks, and a whole lot more. Each tactic had a sign that said, “Good design can make the every day a little better.” They also had a website, the now-defunct everydayfabulous.com which featured every exhibit and where you could find them.
Domino’s Filling Potholes
Domino’s is famous for telling everyone how their pizza used to suck. And yes, it did sort of suck, and yes, it is definitely better. Well played, Domino’s, well played. However, in 2018, they took on a more philanthropic tone and decided to take on an infrastructure project by sponsoring the filling of potholes all around the US. They called the campaign “Paving for Pizza”. Why? Well, when you hit a pothole transporting a pizza, it can mess up the pizza. They even (still) have an interactive tool on their website with a camera inside a pizza box to see what happens in extreme conditions.
They initially took nominations for what cities and roads needed their potholes filled. They got over 130,000 nominations in all 50 states. The campaign got a ton of national press and had over 30,000 organic mentions on social media in just the first week. The campaign was so successful, they extended it to have a stated goal of filling potholes in all 50 states. They filled hundreds of potholes and put up photos and info on their paving for pizza website. For the states where they didn’t hire someone to fill potholes, they gave $5,000 grants for road improvements.
User Tesla First Impression Autopilot Videos
Tesla is one of those companies that will probably never need to do much marketing. Their marketing is building innovative products. It’s their keynote presentations. Like him or not, it’s their eccentric CEO. When you have a company this disruptive, people will do the advertising for you. They’ve essentially taken the money that most companies would use for advertising and put it toward product development. Well, that and strapping a car to a rocket and launching it into orbit, which I’m sure cost more than I’ve ever spent on advertising budgets in my 16 years combined…so there’s that. However, because of their product innovations, they’ve been able to create a series of loyal, raving fans. This was especially apparent when Tesla launched their autopilot feature.
So, Tesla’s autopilot feature is so revolutionary that people upload videos of themselves experiencing the system. There are videos in heavy LA traffic, videos of people sleeping while the car is driving, and an empty car going through a drive thru. Some of these videos have over 12 million views. Here’s one, check it out.
The Subservient Chicken
Burger King again? Okay, maybe my perception is a little skewed from my formative first job, but in my opinion, no one does strange marketing tactics like Burger King. Originally launched in 2004, at the now-defunct subservientchicken.com, this was intended to reiterate their slogan of “Get chicken just the way you like it”. This one is…weird, but if you know anything about marketing, you know about the Subservient Chicken. Dreamed up by Burger King’s long-time partner in strangeness, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the Subservient Chicken was well…this online chicken. Okay, it really wasn’t a chicken. It was a guy in a chicken suit. And it wasn’t like it was a normal guy in a chicken suit. It was a guy in a chicken suit in a creepy dark apartment. On the website, you could type in what you’d like the “chicken” to do. He’d moonwalk, lay an egg, be an airplane, fight, watch TV, hide, breakdance, do the splits, pushups, cartwheels, headstands…300 commands in total.
The campaign was so successful that they brought it back 10 years later to launch another chicken sandwich.
The Blair Witch Project
Do you remember the Blair Witch Project? Do you remember your friends telling you that it might be “real” or a “true story”? I was in high school when this came out, which was the perfect demographic for falling for the brilliant marketing trap that this movie set. The Blair Witch Project was one of the first movies to use the internet and the marketing was intended to make people believe that it may be a true story or a found footage horror film. Their website had fake reports and sightings, as well as fake interviews. IMDB had the actors listed as “missing – presumed dead”. The mystery was so strong that the website had 20 million visitors (in 1999) before the film was even released.
Offline, instead of movie posters, the movie studio put up “Missing Persons” posters around college campuses. Creepy. Weird. And the movie? Meh. It was okay I guess. However, The Blair Witch Project will always be remembered for the weird marketing that only could have worked at the time.
Wrapping Up
I don’t know if guerrilla marketing campaigns have lost their charm, if companies see them as too gimmicky, or if I just don’t pay as much attention as I used to. However, great guerrilla marketing campaigns are fun. They’re interesting. They’re different. They get people talking. They’re based on doing something unexpected. Next time you are looking for a way to stand out from the crowd consider the element of surprise with some guerrilla marketing tactics.
