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A Strange, Brief History of Subliminal Messages in Advertising

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.

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/27/archives/subliminal-ad-pops-up-in-national-tv-promotion-but-mr-choate-stated.html

[4] Cacioppo, J. T., & Petty, R. E. (1984). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. Advances in Consumer Research, 11, 673.

[5] Consumer Behavior P 129

[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

The Marketing Implications of Our Flawed and Imperfect Memories

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 7^th 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.

Episodic Memory

family decorating their christmas tree — Photo by Jonathan Borba on Pexels.com

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.

The Best Guerrilla Marketing Campaigns from the last 20+ Years

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.

Mind Share – The Currency of the Future

This is an article about addiction. It’s a new kind of addiction. One that isn’t as taboo as substance abuse. It’s not one that you would go to a treatment center for. It’s not one that you’d see on Intervention, but make no mistake, advertisers want to make you addicted and keep you addicted. It’s also an article about economics. The currency is your time and attention. This is an article about something I am calling mind share, which is the amount of attention and time that you pay to something.

From an economic standpoint, the same principle applies to your attention that applies to your dollars. Economics is based on scarcity. Value is simply the equilibrium of the supply available and the quantity demanded. However, whereas you could always make more money, you will never be able to take back your time. Unfortunately, we already live in the Black Mirror future where advertisers know how much you are worth to them based on how much you engage with their brand and this attention can be quantified with a dollar amount.

The old-school way of quantifying attention is called CPM, which basically means cost per 1,000 impressions (using the Latin reference of M=1,000). While an advertiser is much better served with a CPC or cost-per-click type of model, a lot of advertising platforms still use the CPM metric as it takes less of the burden off of the advertising medium. However, there are so many other ways of measuring your attention. It’s not just impressions, those are cheap. Engagement is worth so much more than impressions. As an advertiser, I really don’t care too much about how many people see my ad, although that’s nice. I care if someone is actually doing something with what they see. While impressions are a passive medium, engagement is active and engagement=mind share. So why is engagement so valuable? Well, your engagement, your…addiction, is worth a ton of money.

They Call Your Addiction “Average Revenue Per User” (ARPU)

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Facebook and other social media companies make money from your engagement. They do this by advertising to you. They make money off of your clicks and you only click if you are engaged. So they created the cute term “average revenue per user”, or ARPU. I’m guessing they made an acronym so they didn’t have to think about it as much. They didn’t have to think of the things that you’d have to do to increase that number. They didn’t think of how manipulating the platform would impact someone’s mental health, but I digress…

The more ways you can become engaged, the more likely you are to click. Interested in a robot vacuum? Maybe you join a social media group dedicated to different types of robot vacuums. This keeps you on the site. It keeps you engaged with the community. From an advertising perspective, it puts you into a potential target bucket of people likely to purchase a robot vacuum soon, and increases your likelihood to click on an ad that is targeted to you. The more you do this inside the platform, the more valuable you are to them. The more you do this outside of the platform, the less valuable you are.

In November, Facebook reported a $7.26 quarterly ARPU. To put this into perspective, Snapchat’s ARPU was $2.12, Pinterest was at $0.90, and Twitter was estimated at $5.68.[1] So Facebook makes about $30 per year off of you. Although it doesn’t seem like much, take that $30 multiplied by 2.7 billion monthly active users and you get one of the largest brands in the world built off of getting and keeping your attention. If this quarterly ARPU drops just by a dollar, that’s an annual loss of 10 billion dollars, which is far more than most companies make annually. That’s more than the GDP of 49 distinct countries.

In addition to the actual revenue produced per user, you also have to consider the opportunity cost. If you’re not familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, it’s basically the loss of potential gain from doing something else. One economist found that adult Americans engaged with ad-laden content 58% more than they worked in 2019. He also found the amount we consumed this content equaled $7 trillion in opportunity cost[2], or over $33,000 per American adult. So if you were making money instead of scrolling social media, you could be up $30K, but I get it. Part of being on social media is like bubble gum for your brain. For some people, it fulfills something missing like seeing photos of their grandkids or keeping up with their friends. For others, this race for mind share can lead to addiction.

Facebook and Social Media Addiction

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Is Facebook addictive? Good question. Many social media sites use certain tactics that can keep users on the platform and keep them coming back. The most obvious and possibly the most infamous tactic is infinite scroll. The creator, Aza Raskin, now advocates for social media to change their practices has been cited as saying:

“It’s as if they’re taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface. And that’s the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.”[3]

Many social media websites also use a “pull to refresh” feature, which has the ability to give reinforcements intermittently, much like a slot machine.[4] There are also opportunities for dopamine hits such as other users liking your content and continually engaging in a (probably angry political) ongoing conversation. Our brains crave dopamine. If your brain starts to think that you will get all the dopamine it needs from Facebook, maybe you’ll spend more time on Facebook. There are also push notifications and constant emails giving you updates to keep you from fear of missing out (FOMO). All of these items, again, are to increase your mind share. They’re there to keep you there and keep you coming back.

I can also point out that is there has been a psychological scale since April of 2012, called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale. This helped to link psychological problems with the use of Facebook.[5] I can also point out a 2018 study of Portuguese emerging adults (adolescents) that found their most addicted participants used Facebook an average of over three hours per day. These participants showed an increase in depression, anxiety, and interpersonal sensitivity.[6]

Time Distortion

Social media distorts our perception of time. One study found that both low and at-risk social media addiction groups actually had an upward trend of perceived time after abstaining from Facebook for a week[7]. This basically means that they thought time was taking longer than it actually was.

Netflix Addiction

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Remember when Netflix made you actually click on something before it would play? That was nice. Well, there was a long period of time where autoplay was the only way that the platform worked. You couldn’t even browse the selection without everything that you pass by starting to autoplay. When you were done with a show, you didn’t have to do anything. The next show would come up and play, skipping the intro before you can even get a chance to decide if you want to continue watching. Why did they do this? Mind share, that’s why.

I personally think this feature sucks, and apparently, a ton of other people did too which is why you can now turn that feature off. Honestly, I stopped logging into Netflix because autoplay was really annoying and I didn’t even know you could turn off the feature until I started researching the Netflix section of this article, about…10 sentences ago. But yeah, they now made it an option[8] which is pretty amazing. However, you have to do this through a browser. Who watches Netflix on a browser? Weirdos, that’s who. Netflix knows you don’t watch on a browser (unless you’re a serial killer), so they allow you to turn off the feature, but they don’t make it easy.

But let’s get into the mind share for Netflix. Should they really care about mind share? Absolutely, but the reason they care about mind share is much different than the reasons social media sites care about mind share. Netflix needs you to keep coming back so you don’t drop their service. Once you are a customer, the purpose of Netflix’s mind share strategy is to keep you a customer. As customers evaluate their monthly expenses, Netflix has a goal of moving toward a need, rather than a want. How can they get customers to feel an urge so strong that they don’t even consider dropping their service? Creating a greater market share of the customer’s mind, that’s how. They do a great job of creating content that customers cannot live without. Shows like “Orange Is the New Black”, “Stranger Things”, and “Mindhunter” are shows that you cannot get ANYWHERE else so customers feel the need to keep their subscription active.

In addition to current customers, Netflix has had an amazing ability to attract new customers with this same strategy. With the publicity they receive from their regular shows, they’ve been able to continually pique curiosity to attract new subscribers. With their limited run documentaries, however, they’ve found a way to dominate the mind share of both traditional and social media. Shows like “Tiger King” and “Making a Murderer” have been limited-run smash hits. If they can get someone to try to log on to see one of those shows, their goal should be how they could create mind share with a subscriber while they are there. That’s why their algorithms are targeted to feed you content they think you will like. They even show different preview images for the same show to different audiences, based on your customer profile. You’ve got to admit, this is slightly creepy.

One term that is commonly associated with Netflix and other streaming services is binge-watching. Binge-watching could impact your mental health. Seriously, have you ever heard the word “binge” referred to as anything that would have a positive impact on your mental health? One study from the University of Toledo showed that binge-watching increased anxiety, depression, and stress.[9] So what does your brain get out of binge-watching? Well, it’s back to good old dopamine. When you get sucked into a story for a show you are watching, your brain gets a dopamine hit. Since your brain likes dopamine, it will typically crave any source that is known and available.

You’ve Been Targeted

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Your data, everything electronic that can be scraped and known about you, every website you visit, every button you click in an email, every time you swipe on an app that is “swipe tracing”, all of this is being collected and categorized. You probably have a Gmail account. You probably use Google Chrome. Guess why Google is so powerful. Data. You willingly tell them what websites you visit. You trust them with your email. That’s fine, I do too. What do you think they do with that data? Well, create more mind share, that’s what. They try to sell your data to advertisers and keep you on the platform so they can keep selling even more of your mind share back to advertisers. It’s really an endless loop.

You are being targeted not only by your demographics but from your psychographics as well. This includes your attitudes, opinions, values, and your interests. Why? Well, combined with your past behavior, psychographics can be great predictors of future purchasing behavior. They can also give some insight to an advertiser where you might be in the buyer’s journey so they can target you effectively. Ironically, the retail store Target is great at this. You may recall the story from the New York Times in 2012 of a father complaining to a manager at a Target store that his high-school-aged daughter was receiving coupons for maternity clothes from Target. Well, turns out she was pregnant, and Target was able to predict this before her father knew. This was done with a combination of buyer behaviors including unscented lotions, cotton balls, and other supplements which constructed Target’s “pregnancy prediction score”.[10] While I question the validity of the anecdote given in the story, the data analysis is likely pretty accurate.

So why is this important? What should Target try to do with this data? Well, it is obviously great information in trying to make an immediate sale, but from a long-term perspective, it’s better to create mind share. Being relevant to a customer helps increase build a relationship with that customer for the future. In this instance, a woman who is shopping at Target throughout her pregnancy is likely to continue that customer journey well into the early years of the child’s life and beyond. In this case, mind share=wallet share.

I can tell you from first-hand experience, the mind share Target creates around maternity and the early childhood years is strong. Their store brand of essentials for babies like wipes and diapers are much cheaper and in my opinion, much higher quality than national brands. Their baby section is easy to navigate. They have just enough choices to give you options, but few enough that you don’t feel too overwhelmed, especially as a new parent. The prices on their higher-end items like baby furniture and strollers are right in line with what you would find if you shopped for competitive products online. I’m not sure if Target has their baby items priced as loss-leaders, but their strategy of focusing on maternity and baby items certainly has led to a greater mind share for me, which has translated into a sickeningly high level of wallet share.

The thing that is interesting to me is I know they are doing this. I know that they are trying to create a relationship with me (and my family) as a customer. I know they are trying to establish long-term brand loyalty by creating mind share. I know they’re probably manipulating me and walking me through a buyer’s journey that they have defined, but I still fall into the trap. Why? Well, probably because it’s easier. Like just about everyone on the planet, my brain is a cognitive miser, which essentially means it likes to take the path of least resistance. In a situation where I have a lot of baby stuff to buy, or even just grab something and go, am I looking for a perfect solution? Probably not. I’m looking for a solution that is good enough. If it means that the pricing is similar to what I can find somewhere else and I don’t have to go to Walmart, I’m in.

Micro-Influencers

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A micro-influencer is someone that has a niche following. They don’t have a mass following like Taylor Swift, but they have a very dedicated and loyal following for some particular type of follower. For instance, I listen to a podcast called “The Ultra Runner Podcast”. It has a really niche following for crazy people that like to run distances longer than a marathon. This could be 50K, 50 miles, 100 miles, all sorts of insane distances. There aren’t many people that are interested in this type of behavior, let alone, people that like to do this and listen to the show. I would guess they have somewhere around 10,000 active listeners.

The show has been around for around a decade and has had the best athletes in the niche appear to tell their stories. The loyal following of this podcast would be an excellent opportunity to try and advertise something that people that run that much would need, namely shoes. Who is going to go through shoes faster than someone that puts 100+ miles every week on a pair of shoes? Micro-influencers have already created the mind share. They already have an audience. Their fans are loyal. A brand will pay more per potential customer for that level of loyalty than for a much less engaged and targeted audience. Someone with a wider appeal doesn’t have nearly the mind share as a micro influencer’s audience. The reason you’ve heard the term micro-influencer gaining so much popularity in the past few years? They know how to create mind share, and advertisers want to harvest that connection.

Account-Based Marketing ABM

Possibly the biggest trend in marketing right now is called Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is essentially a diversion from mass-marketing techniques to a more strategic, segmented approach. The basic idea is that your company identifies key accounts within your organization to try to enhance your relationship. This is done with a behavioral-based approach. Generally speaking, it is a fancy lead nurturing system that is based on content. This content could be articles or white papers, videos, or even an audio podcast. Once a potential customer enters the marketing ecosystem (generally your website), AI and some other fancy tools track the person’s engagement with different content on your website. Based on their behavior, they receive the next piece of content, which is a little more relevant, and possibly a little more value for the customer. Based on their behavior, the AI tries to predict someone’s next action. This funnel continues to narrow until there is some type of action, whether it be a lead form filled out, a call to a sales rep, or some other deemed action by the sales team. Some of these software packages are around $25,000 per year or more. What are all of these software platforms trying to do? You guessed it, create mind share. The longer and more items you interact with, the more likely you will be to become a customer.

Wrapping Up

I opened this by saying that mind share is the currency of the future, but the more I wrote, the more I realized that the future is now. And it’s not even the future. This has been happening for hundreds, if not thousands of years. If your customers are not thinking about you, regardless of how fancy your marketing tech stack might be, or how smart your analytics team members are, if you don’t occupy a space in your customer’s brain, you’re sunk. Amazing brands know this and are continually evolving their brand for the ever-changing needs of their customers. Customer needs are not static. There are likely many brands in your niche vying for your customers. They’re trying to figure out how to convert your customer into being their customer. Many companies will stop here. They’ll try to get a customer in the door and make the sale. When you design your strategy, however, realize that the secret to keeping and maintaining your customer relationships is a longer-term approach. The secret that the world’s greatest brands truly understand comes down to two words: mind share.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/01/facebook-towers-over-rivals-in-the-critical-metric-of-revenue-per-user.html

[2] Evans, David S., The Economics of Attention Markets (April 15, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3044858 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3044858

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-insiders-tell-bbc-how-tech-firms-turn-users-into-addicts-2018-7

[4] https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/trapped-the-secret-ways-social-media-is-built-to-be-addictive-and-what-you-can-do-to-fight-back/

[5]https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/245251#:~:text=Researchers%20in%20Norway%20have%20published,of%20the%20journal%20Psychological%20Reports.

[6] da Veiga, G.F., Sotero, L., Pontes, H.M. et al. Emerging Adults and Facebook Use: the Validation of the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS). Int J Ment Health Addiction 17, 279–294 (2019). https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1007/s11469-018-0018-2

[7] Turel, O., R. Cavagnaro, D. Effect of Abstinence from Social Media on Time Perception: Differences between Low- and At-Risk for Social Media “Addiction” Groups. Psychiatr Q 90, 217–227 (2019). https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1007/s11126-018-9614-3

[8] Mishra, M. (2020). Netflix finally turns off autoplay. B & T Weekly, Retrieved from

https://proxying.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/login?url=https://www-proquest.com.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/docview/2352237197?accountid=12725

[9] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313236736_Viewing_Patterns_and_Addiction_to_Television_among_Adults_Who_Self-Identify_as_Binge-Watchers

[10] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#51f13a946668

Build a Brand That People Hate

Think of a brand that you hate. A brand that every time you think about it, you have a visceral reaction. You wish you could exist in a world where that brand does not exist. The Real Housewives perhaps? Maybe the Kardashians? Maybe you hate the entire Bravo TV or E networks? How about Microsoft, or Apple? Ford or Chevy? Peloton? How about the New England Patriots? If you really start to think about brands, I’m guessing that you could come up with more brands that you really hate than brands that you love.

A strong brand attracts a lot of haters. Why? Because it stands for something. Many brands get so concerned catering to everyone’s thoughts, emotions, and concerns that their brand becomes a boring, watered-down brand that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone. Kmart is a great example. While other department stores seemed to find a niche (Walmart for low prices, Target for trendy retail), Kmart has been in a tailspin for years. At the time of this writing, there are only 34 stores left in the US. Kmart was never really a leader, they were a follower.

Does Anybody Hate Kmart?

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Kmart never really found an identity. They had some stores that were named Kmart, some that were named Super Kmart Center, some that were named Big K, some that were named Super K, and that was all just in the early 2000s. They’ve been in a decline for over 20 years and it’s partially because they could never find their identity. Do you hate Kmart? Did you ever hate Kmart? The only thing I ever remember about it is that it kind of smelled like mothballs. Other than that, I never really cared much about Kmart. I’m guessing that most people never really cared either.

GM Tries Not to be Hated

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In my opinion, a similar thing happened to GM’s portfolio 30+ years ago. GM has what’s called a “house of brands” strategy. This basically means that the parent company has many different brand names under the umbrella brand. GM has Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC. Among others, they also used to have Pontiac and Oldsmobile. The original plan that existed in the ’60s for this house of brands included a really smart segmentation strategy that positioned their brands perfectly for their target audience. The Pontiac brand was exciting they had the slogan “We Build Excitement”. They built the GTO and the Trans Am. The Cadillac brand was strictly top-of-the-line luxury vehicles.

The bigger GM grew, the more they tried to create economies of scale. Basically, how could they do things more efficiently? GM started platforming their vehicles. They took the same chassis, and even the same or very similar body styles and tried to market them to different audiences. One common combination they introduced is what is known as the G-body. G-body cars included the Buick Regal, Chevy Monte Carlo, Pontiac Grand Prix, Chevy Malibu, Pontiac Bonneville, and a few others.

While this line of cars was incredibly successful, and in my opinion, created some of the most memorable American cars ever built, the prevailing idea of platforming started to create brand dilution for the GM brand. As the ’90s came around and SUV’s and minivans changed the vehicle landscape, GM didn’t properly maintain a strong segmentation strategy. Most of their brands had a minivan. Every brand had an SUV. Every brand had a luxury vehicle, a sports car, a cheap compact. Their brands had had something for everybody, and they didn’t really stand for anything.

About the Real Housewives

close up photo of martini in cocktail glass — Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

So you probably didn’t hate Kmart or GM, but how about something like “The Real Housewives”? I’m guessing if you don’t hate this franchise, you know someone who does. If you’re not familiar with the show, first off, congratulations, and second, even eight years ago, it was a half a billion-dollar franchise.[1] It’s a show that, well, let’s just say that it’s pretty much about rich women getting drunk and fighting. This is why people hate the brand. This is also a big reason why people love the brand. There’s a percentage of viewers that tune in just to hate-watch, which is this weird phenomenon where people watch shows just to talk about how much they hate it. This term is so prevalent in society that it’s on dictionary.com. This brand is so powerful that people watch it just to hate it and by doing this, it increases ratings and ad revenue. This only fuels the brand’s success. If people didn’t care so much, it wouldn’t be such a strong brand. If people didn’t hate the brand as much as they do, it wouldn’t be worth a Billion dollars.

It’s Not For You

For this discussion, I want to make clear that I’m suggesting building a brand that people hate which is different than a brand that fails, like a product that breaks easily or a brand that has poor customer service. It’s easy to hate a brand that doesn’t perform to expectations, and a brand that is hated for this reason will ultimately fail. The type of “brand hate” I’m describing is essentially hating a brand that is not for you. The reason you don’t like it is that it’s aimed at a different target audience. Their message is intended for someone else. If you find yourself hating a brand, chances are that a ton of people love that brand. You don’t have to like it. The creators of the brand were able to build something that really connected with a particular group of people. These brands probably don’t impact your daily life, so if you really want to show your dislike for a brand, just forget about it. It’s really no big deal, some people love a brand you hate, and our strange differences are what makes us amazing.

Building a brand so strong that people hate it involves “niching down” to a point where it connects so well with one or two target audiences that anyone outside of those groups doesn’t get it. In these instances, you build a connection so strong that the in-group becomes so rabid about the brand that the out-group is upset that they don’t understand. Slogans like “It’s a Jeep Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand”, and “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” come to mind. The creators of Billy Bass seemed to have nailed this concept when they identified the novelty Christmas gift segment, likely for males that were even loosely into fishing when they created a product that seemed to have the fastest trajectory from funny to annoying of any product that has ever been created.

People Hates Crocs

Crocs is a brand that people seem to love to hate. There are videos of people burning Crocs, people cutting up Crocs with Scissors, at one point, there was an IHateCrocs.com. Yep, people hate the brand so much that they buy the product just to destroy it. They spend money and time buying domains and producing content just to protest the brand. Just Google “people hate crocs” and you’ll see how people spend their time hating a brand. As I described earlier, this likely only fuels the brand’s success.

Do you know who loves everyone’s hate for Crocs? Crocs, that’s who. After selling 700 million shoes, they’ve built a brand off of being one of the most distinctive shoes of a generation. At the height of their popularity, they had tons of standalone retail stores, a massive distribution network and so many products that veered out of what they were known for: those weird-looking clogs. They started trying to be everything to everyone and like just about every company that tries to do this, they failed. But they didn’t let a little brand dilution get in their way, the refocused and made a comeback.

Crocs had a resurgence with a fashion trend called “ugly fashion”. Ugly fashion is not just a clever name, it’s, well…it kind of reminds me of “Saved by the Bell”. Mismatched clothes, plaid suit jackets, loud colors, oversized shirts, ugly fashion, and Crocs were a perfect match. The company saw this trend, realized their failure of trying to go mainstream and doubled down on their clogs. Now you can get all sorts of crazy Crocs. You can get Goth Crocs, KFC Crocs, bacon and egg Crocs, donut Crocs, you can even get Grateful Dead Crocs.

About Nickelback

I’d be remiss if I spent the time to write an article about brands that people hate without touching on Nickelback. Nickelback hate is real. They’re possibly the most hated band on the planet. Why? Well, I don’t really know. Let me be clear, I don’t like Nickelback. I think they suck, but I think there are objectively worse bands on this planet. I’ve also heard first-hand accounts from people that say they were really good to their fans when they met them in person. So why all of the hate? I’d like to think that I know, but there are people waaaaaaaayyyyy smarter than me that have tried to figure this out. Some explanations include that they lack any type of authenticity, they don’t really stand for anything, they are only trying for commercial appeal, etc.

These explanations sound to me like a band that is trying to be everything to everyone. As I explained, this is typically a bad strategy as it lacks brand direction. But as I also explained, a strong brand is a brand that some people hate. What if a TON of people hate the brand? Well, maybe that’s what we’re seeing with Nickelback. Are people “hate listening” to Nickelback? Is there a Nickelback “silent majority”? I’m guessing that 50 million record sales into their career, Nickelback is okay with people hating their band. If you build a strong brand, you should be okay with all of your haters too. If you hate Nickelback, it’s okay, they’re not for you. Your hate is just fueling their success. You could just forget about them.

So, How Does This Work?

To build a brand so strong that you have haters outside of your target audience, you need to build an amazing brand. So how do you do this? Well, unfortunately, there’s no one formula or process that you can follow that will immediately create a strong brand. Anyone that tells you any different is either lying to you, trying to sell you a book, or more commonly, both. Anymore, they’re more likely to be trying to sell you an online course on how you can create a strong brand for the low, low price of only $199 and if you act today, they’ll throw in a side of snake oil. There are so many shifting factors to consider like economics, changes in consumer behavior, other entrants to the market, and competitive pricing pressures.

Good brands don’t exist in a lab. They’re living and constantly evolving in the real world. There are, however, a few best practices that we know help.

Know Thyself

Although it sounds really basic, many brands struggle with an identity crisis (see GM or Kmart examples referenced earlier).

Some of the most common traps that I typically see are:

Trying to be who they want to be instead of who they are
Trying to be their competitors

Knowing what you do well is critical and positing those brand differentiators is key. If you’re not doing that, your message is NEVER going to connect. Think of this extreme example. If a brand like KFC discovered that all of their competitors were becoming really successful with selling salads they might want to get into the salad game. Even starting to sell salads seems a little strange for a brand that is known for fried chicken, biscuits, and mashed potatoes. However, if they REALLY wanted salad market share and started neglecting their core business to focus on salads, they would struggle. They’d be facing an identity crisis, which many brands struggle with daily.

Most brands just don’t completely change direction like in the KFC example, it happens more gradually. This often happens when a company continually introduces new product lines without the proper support. With economies of scale approach, most administrative staff would typically handle both new and existing initiatives. When this is done without bringing in the proper additional support personnel, existing product lines can get diluted, new product launches don’t get the proper attention, and a company can lose sight of its foundation. In many cases, this takes years and the support erodes so slowly that the team that is managing the product or products don’t even realize the impact until it is too late. As I pointed out earlier, it happened to GM, it happened to Kmart, it happens everywhere. Knowing your strengths and “niching down” to really connect with your target audience is key. Be different. When your competition zigs, you should zag, otherwise you’ll just be another Kmart.

Know Your Customers

woman wearing maroon velvet plunge neck long sleeved dress while carrying several paper bags photography — Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com

Just as important at knowing yourself is knowing your customers. Have you built a customer profile? Do you know your customer demographics? Do your customer psychographics? Do you know what impacts their decision on whether or not to buy your products or buy your competitors’ products? Do you know their typical buying journey? How long is their sales cycle? What problems can you solve? How can you be of service? It’s likely that if you have more than one product, this is different for every distinct segment of your market.

Do your products fall under the category of low-effort consumer behavior or high-effort consumer behavior? Although brand awareness is critical to both types of behavior, knowing how the brain processes these decisions is key to help map out your buyer’s journey.

A customer’s needs are constantly changing and evolving. Their buying behaviors and preferences are always developing. Are you keeping up with their needs and wants? If not, you will quickly find yourself outside of the category of a brand people hate and into the category of a brand no one cares about.

Don’t Suck

Another thing to consider are the elements of your brand. Your name, logo, URL, packaging, taglines. Make sure these don’t suck. They don’t need to resonate with everyone but make sure they resonate with your target audience. Also, make sure your products and customer service don’t suck. If not, people will hate your brand for all of the wrong reasons. Make sure you attract haters for all of the right reasons.

Encourage Your Haters

The next time you think about your own brand, think about how many people hate your brand. It could help you discover and embrace the people that love your brand. To your brand, those are the people that matter. That audience is going to make your brand strong enough for people to hate.

You can find out more about niche marketing here.

[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/real-housewives-bravo-andy-cohen-cover-278072

These Seven Creepy Ways Advertisers Know Everything About You Will Make You Cringe

Digital advertising has changed the ad landscape. As an advertiser, I can not only target you based on past behavior, but I can know when you are going to make a purchase using AI. Advertisers know some pretty creepy things about you and technology makes it all possible. To do this, they need the currency of the future: your personal data. This data is a goldmine and ad tech companies will do just about anything to get it.

Your Browser

Noting to see here, right? I mean, it’s just your browser. A browser can’t reveal much about you, right? Oh boy. I’m sorry to tell you, but a browser knows your software, hardware, your battery level if you’re on a power supply, your download speed, social media sites where you’re logged in, and more. Don’t believe me? Click here to see for yourself and be really creeped out. So, how is this related to advertising? Well, if you’re not reading this article on an app, I’m guessing you’re reading it on Google Chrome. You know, Google? The same Google that’s the largest advertiser in the world. They also know your cookies, browsing history, when you log on, when you log off, and probably just about everything that goes into your Gmail account. I hope you’re not ready to go full tin-foil-hat mode yet. We’re just getting started.

Ad Retargeting

person using a macbook pro on a white table — Photo by cottonbro on Pexels.com

You know when you look at a pair of socks online and the entire internet tries to sell you back that same pair of socks you were just looking at? Well, that’s called retargeting. It’s pretty simple, really. Let’s say you visit my website and I’m running one of these campaigns. I’ve got a piece of code on my site that identifies you as a user of an advertising network that I pay to track you. Now, for the next 90 days, or however long I set the ad contract when you leave and visit a website that is affiliated with my network, you will see my ads.

Even though the simplest form of retargeting involves you visiting my site, there are other ways to do this. You can do this through a related search. Let’s say you are searching for a muzzle for your dog because you can’t stop him from barking. I could serve you an ad from my online dog training course in an ad targeting network to try and stop you from doing something like putting a muzzle on your dog. Yay! Now you bought my awesome services, you bonded with your dog, and you have a better understanding of why he was barking so much in the first place. My creepy ad just made the world a better place. There’s nothing wrong with these ads, right?

Then there’s predictive targeting. What is that? Well, it’s basically AI trying to figure out what you are going to buy in the future based on past behavior. Predictive targeting takes all of your past browsing behavior and uses AI to predict what you are going to be shopping for in the future. Let’s go back to the socks example. A simple way to explain this is if you’ve been shopping for a lot of socks, maybe your next purchase will be shoes. Or maybe some toenail clippers. I’ll admit, so far, still not super creepy. Hang on, it gets worse.

Email

computer desk electronics indoors — Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

Email can’t be that bad, can it? I mean, come on, it’s email. It’s been around forever. In the internet timeline, it’s a dinosaur. I hate to break it to you, everything you do and interact with on an email is tracked. I can track if you skimmed or read my email, what parts of it you liked and clicked on, how many times you opened it, and I can even infer if you forwarded it to someone. From there, well, who knows. I could do some follow-up targeted emails based on your interests.

Let’s say I was trying to really narrow down niches within my customer base. Back to the sock example, let’s say I sell socks and shoes. If I really wanted to understand my customers’ interests, I could send them a simple, general email and see what they click on. Let’s say they click on shoes and nothing else. Wow! I’ve just identified them as a potential shoe buyer. Cool. I can put them in a “shoe” target email. They’ll get that email 24 hours later. That shoe email will have running shoes, hiking shoes, and walking shoes. The shoe email goes out, they click running shoes, boom! I’ve got a runner. Wow, let’s add them to the running list, so every time I have a promo on running shoes or publish a blog about running tips, they get the email. Depending on how active you are on social media, and how tied in and easy my ad tech platform can find your email, I might be able to find you there. And an advertiser can scrape that info pretty easily.

Geofencing

crown group modern motion — Photo by Burst on Pexels.com

So you know how all of your apps want to know your location? Well, from an advertising perspective, this data is really valuable information. An advertiser can set up a “fence” based on your GPS coordinates. Let’s say I’m trying to sell video game accessories. I could choose to target everyone that visits any GameStop store in the country.

An advertiser can get pretty specific. With hyperlocal Geofencing, I could target a specific aisle. Let’s say for instance I just wanted to target everyone that passed by or visited the video game section in a larger department store. Yep, that’s an option.

Your Smart Speaker

black amazon echo on table — Photo by Fabian Hurnaus on Pexels.com

In July of 2019, it came out in The Guardian, that Apple was paying contractors to listen to Siri conversations to “help Siri and dictation…understand you better and recognize what you say”[1]. Of course, Apple denied using this information for any nefarious purposes. But we should all trust a company that has a higher value than the GDP of Brazil, Australia, or Canada, right? While we’re on this train of thought, how about Alexa? Well, in May of 2019, the Washington Post [2] reported how Alexa records everything after it hears its name. Yep. Everything you say. Everything you do. Every noise that it can pick up. Neat. There’s also been a bunch of warrants to obtain the recorded data.[3]

Social Media

apple applications apps cell phone — Photo by Tracy Le Blanc on Pexels.com

Let’s not get into the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I’m guessing you know about that already. Let’s just start with the easy stuff. The first thing to understand is why social media exists in the first place, besides cat pictures. Okay, I’ll give, it also exists so you can argue with your aunt on who she is voting for. Actually, those are just residuals for the real reason that social media exists: data. Yep, as I said before, your data is super valuable. Most people just willingly give it up. They give their name, location, interests, and tons of other information when they first fill out their profile. But it goes deeper. You can be targeted by the pages you like. Did you happen to like a few posts about shoes? Cool, you’re lumped in my sock shoe store thing. Did you happen to share a few posts about grilling out? Congratulations, you’re a candidate for A1 Steak Sauce. Is your feed manipulated based on what you do? Well, let’s just say they call that “how the algorithm works.” Did you have the geolocation feature turned on? Cool. Now I know that you just grabbed a pizza, maybe I can serve you an ad for ice cream.

The Super Creepy

photography of person peeking — Photo by Noelle Otto on Pexels.com

So let’s get to the speculative. Well, sort of speculative. I’m sure you know something about the TikTok ban but maybe you don’t know why it was banned. Well, not banned. Well…sort of banned? Anyway, one of the things that TikTok does is access the iOS clipboard. Yep, Apple. You know, the company worth $2 Trillion that’s famous for their amazing security. The very same Apple. What does this mean? Have you ever cut/pasted information on your phone, maybe a password? Well, that goes to a clipboard. They’re not the only one that does this. CBS News, Accuweather, well, a bunch of others are or have been doing this too.[4] Not only that, TikTok’s own privacy policy says that they collect your mobile carrier, IP address, “unique identifiers”, and keystroke patterns.[5] So other apps are doing this, but the reason that TikTok is banned is because it’s Chinese? From what I can gather, yes.

So let’s get to the big question. You know how you had that conversation with your friend, whether via text, or on the phone, or even in person and you mentioned something? For the purposes of this exercise, let’s say it was Nike. You then pick up your phone, check a social media network and immediately see a Nike ad. You then call or text your friend frantically and say something like “OMG, you know how we were just talking about this, check it out”. So, is Facebook using your microphone and camera to spy on you, even when you’re not using the app? Well, they’ve repeatedly denied these allegations and try really hard to come up with explanations on why this happens. So are they? Good question.

Wrapping Up

Regardless of if you are now masterfully creating a pattern for a new tin-foil hat or not, creepy ads are here to stay. As a society, I don’t really see how we can go back. The only way they would go away is if they didn’t work. Maybe they would go away if we found out that many of the advertisers were committing fraud. Oh wait, we already did that. In 2019, Facebook paid $40 million because they lied about their video stats, [6] Google ran ads with a bunch of fraudulent traffic [7], oh, and about all of those fake clicks…[8] Maybe we’ll never learn.

[1] Hern, A. Apple Contractors ‘Regularly Hear Confidential Details’ on Siri Recordings, Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/26/apple-contractors-regularly-hear-confidential-details-on-siri-recordings

[2] Fowler, G. Alexa Has Been Eavesdropping on You This Whole Time, Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/06/alexa-has-been-eavesdropping-you-this-whole-time/

[3] Epstein, K. Police Think Amazon’s Alexa May Have Information on a Fatal Stabbing Case, Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/02/police-think-amazons-alexa-may-have-information-fatal-stabbing-case/

[4] Jones, T. It’s Not Just TikTok Spying on Your iOS Clipboard, Retrieved from: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/07/ios-clipboard-apps-spy-tiktok/

[5] Mahadevan, T. TikTok Responds After Reddit CEO Calls it Fundamentally Parasitic, Retrieved from: complex.com/pop-culture/2020/02/reddit-ceo-calls-tiktok-fundamentally-parasitic

[6] Gardner, E. Facebook to Pay $40M Under Proposed Settlement in Video Metrics Suit, Retrieved from: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/facebook-pay-40-million-under-proposed-settlement-video-metrics-suit-1245807

[7] Haggin, P. Google to Refund Advertisers After Suit Over Fraud Scheme, Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-to-refund-advertisers-after-suit-over-fraud-scheme-11558113251

[8] Fake Clicks on Online Ads Costing Companies Tens of Billions a Year, Retrieved from: https://www.ft.com/content/8f0d4b98-21c7-11ea-b8a1-584213ee7b2b

Four Powerful Life Lessons I Learned by Working With One of Ringo’s All-Starrs

August 1st, 2003, I was late coming into my internship at Compass Records. We all were. We were all at our homes watching Good Morning America. Why? Well, we were just about to witness one of our artists performing live on national television with Ringo’s All Starr Band. Yeah, that Ringo. The freakin’ Beatle. That year’s roster included Sheila E., John Waite (the “Missing You” guy), and Colin Hay, from Men at Work. Yep, that Men at Work. You may recognize some of their songs like “Land Down Under”, “Overkill”, and “Who Can it Be Now”. I was barely 21 and I was fortunate enough to be working with a brilliant group of people that were focused on relaunching Colin Hay’s career. They were repositioning him as a solo artist, helping distance him from the famous 80’s sound to allow his amazing songwriting to flourish.

The record had just come out the prior month and there was so much media appeal. It was receiving pretty heavy rotation on niche radio stations across the US and the team had managed to get him on the TV show Scrubs. How wild is that? Here’s the video:

All of that was great, but this was the big time. National morning television, and, oh yeah, he was with Ringo. To all of our surprise, of the four songs that Ringo played, he let Colin play two.

We sort of trickled into the office that day. I remember giving high-fives all around. We were really excited to be part of something we knew was going to be big. The momentum that surrounded this release and the remaining tour with Ringo had not only the ability to sell a lot of records, but it could entirely reinvent Colin’s career.

At the time, Compass had only three full-time employees and three interns (myself included). I’ll never forget what it was like to see what an amazing job just three, super-talented employees could do. They helped someone make an extraordinary career comeback. They handled everything including input on the actual recording, distribution, radio promotions, public relations, and advertising. As a residual to this success, they managed to sell a ton of records in the process.

I had the coolest internship I could have ever asked for. It was a defining moment that changed my life. The team at Compass was amazing. They didn’t have me doing typical intern grunt work. They were incredibly inviting and allowed me to actually help take care of what needed to be done. For this record, I was able to help set up interviews directly with Colin. Nobody treated me like an intern. They treated me like part of the team.

So, what did I learn from this experience?

Everything Has a Niche

Acoustic Guitar - The Niche Marketer Blog — Photo by 42 North on Pexels.com

Sure, there was some mainstream appeal for this record, but it just wasn’t a top 40, mainstream album. For Colin, those days had come and gone. The audience had changed. The record was “Americana”, not pop and it was largely acoustic. Although there was likely some crossover potential to former Men at Work fans, that wasn’t the main focus. Outside of the mainstream appearances with Ringo, Colin’s record had a niche appeal. It was up to the team at Compass to define that audience. We built a profile around the most-likely buyer. This included listeners of influential independent radio stations like KEXP in Seattle and KPIG in the Bay area. It included readers of roots and acoustic music publications like No Depression and Paste Magazine. It also included shoppers of stores like Borders.

They didn’t waste our time chasing every opportunity. That wouldn’t be productive. By defining our niche, the team able to funnel the modest advertising budget, and more importantly, the human capital, toward opportunities that would resonate with the target audience.

Roles and Titles are Not That Important

Although there was a Director of Marketing, Director of Public Relations, and Director of Radio Promotions, the roles and titles didn’t really matter that much. Everything was a team effort. The success that the team had come from the camaraderie they had built. One great idea would spark another. One big success would build to the next one. Their positive attitudes were infectious. They believed they could do great things and they did, with just three full-time employees. I was just an intern and they valued my opinion. They made a difference because they believed in themselves and they believed in the products they were selling.

Embrace What’s Happening

Concert - The Niche Marketer Blog — Photo by Dom Gould on Pexels.com

I left the music industry in 2007. I’d grown up a musician and I always dreamed about somehow being attached to something I loved. I wasn’t in the industry for very long, but I’ll never forget the time I had when I was there. It was exciting. People that work in the music industry are some of the best marketers I’ve ever met. It’s a really tough business, especially in an era of streaming. It’s a business that is incredibly lean, fast-paced, and innovative. We were early adopters of social media. We were followers of the latest up-and-coming media outlets. We were always looking for a new way to hustle because if you didn’t, you would be sunk.

Although everyone I know that has left that industry has never gone back, they are the most creative people I’ve ever met. They’ve been able to excel in new industries and I’m guessing that’s because the music industry naturally attracts creative people. Most of us just followed our hearts, not our heads, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

However, when you get involved in something so special, like the project I worked on with Colin, you tend to get wrapped up in the task. What is happening almost doesn’t seem real. Looking back on it, I still have a hard time believing that it was a part of my life but it happened. Even though I remember it all well, I do regret not embracing the moment more than I did. It was unreal. Sometimes you just have to stop, take a breath, and enjoy life rather than be so focused on your next challenge. It’s something I still struggle with, but I think I’ll get there some day.

Careers Need to Be Continually Reinvented

man performing on stage — Photo by Wendy Wei on Pexels.com

Colin Hay was someone that almost everyone knew. If you didn’t know his name, you knew his songs. However, even someone as famous and successful as him still needed to reinvent his career. If he hadn’t done anything after his time with Men at Work, he might not have been forgotten, but he certainly wouldn’t have had the satisfaction of a resurgence. He wasn’t afraid of putting in the work, going on the road, and continue doing everything he could do to stay relevant. Let that sink in. A guy that had one gold record and two platinum records in the US never quit. He wasn’t satisfied after that. His was relentless. He was humble. He was always learning. He believed he could do it. These were the reasons he was so successful.

Wrapping Up

I’ll never forget the kindness that I was shown by everyone at the label. With the experience I gained from that internship, I was able to step into a Marketing Director position at a record label immediately when I graduated college. Without this experience, I never would have gotten that job. Although my time in the music industry came to an end long ago, I’ll always take the hard work, positive attitude, and relentless pursuit of doing something amazing with me throughout my life.

Why You Still Want That Rolex

How Rolex Sells Watches by Creating Problems

I was 16 years old when my dad came home from New York with a gift. He opened his bag. “I thought you needed a new watch”, he said and handed me this gorgeous silver and gold watch.

“Woah, this is a Rolex,” I was surprised. At 16, the only thing I really knew about Rolex was that they were expensive. How expensive? I had no idea, but I probably shouldn’t be wearing this to my job at the grocery store where I pushed carts and stocked shelves.

He just kind of laughed. My mom laughed too. “It’s not real,” he said.

“What do you mean, it’s not real?” I asked. Still, I had no idea what was going on. Well, he didn’t get me a Rolex. As my friend Brendan put it, he got me a Fauxlex. Yep, a fake Rolex. It looked real to me, but I was pretty clueless. I’d never seen the real thing. Now, I’m almost 40 and I’ve still only seen a few real Rolex’s. At least, I think they were real.

I really didn’t care that it was fake. I thought it would be impressive if I could pull one over on someone. I wore it to school. I wore it to work. I didn’t really fool anyone. It clashed with my hoodies, Led Zeppelin tee shirts, and my giant green Doc Martens. Since it wasn’t fooling anyone, I leaned into the joke. I wore that Fauxlex everywhere until it finally met its demise falling 3 feet onto the concrete when I was banging on the glass at a minor league hockey game. It never really worked ever again.

Even at 16, I knew one thing about the Rolex brand. It’s what Rolex has built their brand on for over 100 years. A Rolex was a sign that you had “arrived”. You wore a Rolex because you could wear a Rolex. I knew that even at a time when a watch was more necessary than it is today, that the Rolex brand didn’t really fit much of a practical need. My Folex told time just as well until it broke. So how had they made such an aspirational association with a clueless 16-year-old when I wasn’t their target audience?

Rolex Creates Problems

Problems. As marketers, we’re pretty good at creating them. It’s a technique known as poisoning the well. The strategy is thousands of years old. You essentially tell someone their well is poisoned and that you are the only one that has the antidote. In high-effort consumer behavior, problem recognition is the first step in the purchasing journey. However, some products that involve high-effort behavior do not necessarily involve a practical problem, so problems have to be created. The way marketers typically create problems is by telling you that what you have is not enough. They then make a promise that what they are selling will make you fill in the blank: (happier, healthier, thinner, more successful, etc.)

So, how does Rolex do this? Does anyone need a Rolex? For that matter, does anyone ever really need a watch? Seriously though, there are ways to tell time all around us. We have clocks on our phones, tablets, in our car, just about everywhere. So how does a company like Rolex still exist? Does anyone need an archaic, analog device, that costs $7,500 for the “base” model? Although they have built a strong brand for over 100 years, how does a product thrive to be a $5 billion-dollar company when by all accounts, it should be on its way to obsolescence? Rolex has done what every high-effort consumer behavior expert dreams of doing. In my opinion, they nailed step one of creating problems.

One of their messaging strategies involves the same tactics any motivational speaker uses to get you to buy their products. It’s the “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” method. This strategy is on full display in their “Every Rolex Tells a Story” campaign where they feature people that have “made it”. Check out this ad with James Cameron.

https://youtu.be/RgpoRGq3oBs

So what did they do here? Again, it’s the “dress for the job you want” tactic. Wow, James Cameron. Who doesn’t want that kind of success? Since he’s doing an ad for Rolex, the watch must have somehow contributed to his success, right? They’re planting the seed that James Cameron and everyone else that is part of this campaign can attribute their success to Rolex. The beauty of what they are doing is that they are communicating that message (associating success with Rolex) without overtly saying this. If you hadn’t thought of what they were doing with this type of ad, would you be able to recognize this tactic? Maybe, but Rolex isn’t relying on their advertising appealing to logic. They’re relying on their advertising to appeal to emotion.

They do a fantastic job of convincing affluent consumers that if they don’t have a Rolex, they haven’t arrived. This strategy has been so successful that the basic concept of their messaging has never really changed. Rolex spends big money advertising in high-net-worth sporting events, publications, and websites. The way they advertise relies heavily on indirect normative influences. They realize that the person that is purchasing the Rolex is heavily influenced by the group of people they associate with. It’s the whole “if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you?” lecture that your mom gave you when you would blame your behavior on your friends. It’s not an uncommon strategy. For example, many companies do this with an overarching message of sustainability. Toyota does this with Prius. Burt’s Bees does this with everything they sell. Rolex just has a much smaller niche, and in my opinion, they do it better than anyone else.

High-effort consumer behavior, like the decision to buy a $7,500 watch, relies on problems. Sometimes, though, your problem involves a legitimate need. You need a car for transportation, your computer quit working and you need to finish your work, or your phone battery won’t hold a charge anymore and it can’t be used for more than an hour off of the charger. Although the way that you arrive at the problem when there is a legitimate unmet need is different than a manufactured problem, the way you buy things is the same. Rolex is just amazing at creating perceived problems that only they can solve. It doesn’t really matter if the problem is real or not.

Photo by **hassan mehdi** from **Pexels**

Consumers are Lazy

Once a problem is realized, the second step of a high-effort behavior is to look for information on how to solve your problem. This type of search could really be anything. It could be internal, like remembering past experiences or ads. It could be external, like getting a referral from a friend or researching alternatives online.

You might think that we put in a lot of effort into making a major purchase but that’s not really the case. There’s a term in cognitive psychology called the “Cognitive Miser”. Our minds are considered to be cognitive misers. This essentially means that when we make decisions, we’re sort of lazy, regardless of our intelligence. In general, we would much rather put in little effort to solve our problems than putting in extra effort and meaning. (Stanovich, 2009)[1]

This can’t really be true, can it? Yep. It’s true. What’s one of your biggest monthly bills? I’m guessing you said mortgage, well, either that or daycare. You would think that we do a considerable amount of research when finding a home lender, right? Nope. Definitely not. Our brains want to take the easy way out and find a solution that is good enough. One major study found that the average number of sources the consumer consulted when selecting a place that was likely going to determine the amount of their largest monthly expense…was two. (Lee & Hogarth 2000)[2] Yep, two. Let that sink in.

analogue chrome dial focus — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

How Can You Use This Information?

Alright, let’s say you’re a marketer and your potential customer realizes there is a problem, whether you created the problem or not. The next step is to be able to nail the information search portion of the high-effort consumer behavior journey. Now you know the secret that all good marketers know. If consumers only check out two sources before they make a purchase, and one of those sources is yours, you’re pretty much halfway there. So, the question is, how are you going to provide this information? Is it going to be through video? An informative blog, or series of blogs? Email to a customer curated list? Social media? Old-fashioned snail mail?

For a well-defined niche market, I usually take an omnichannel approach. This is a just fancy way of saying all of the above. Why? It doesn’t take an in-depth analysis of consumer behavior to understand that people are all different. While some prefer reading in-depth articles, others will skim just for the key points and takeaways. Some need the information delivered directly to their email, some want it sent to their desk, some want to watch an informative video, and some would prefer the interaction and community found on social media. This has been especially effective when you are dealing with a niche market because regardless of the medium, you are not dealing with massive media budgets. The types of markets I work with max out around 5,000 target consumers. I often work with targets of 500 or less. That takes a pretty targeted media approach, one where you can cover just about every type of communication for a pretty reasonable budget.

Can You Combine the Two?

Realizing that consumers are lazy, Rolex has done an excellent job in combining both step one and step two. Their advertisements create problems but they offer solutions. The solution, conveniently, is to buy their watches. One clever headline reads: “A Rolex will never change the world. We leave that to the people that wear them.” As a consumer, this plays to my ego and I just realized that I have a problem. I want to change the world, but I’m not changing the world. Bingo, step one of high-effort consumer behavior, check! How about step two? Well, they just told you. People that change the world wear Rolexes. Are we that gullible? Maybe. Maybe not. Are we that lazy? See Cognitive Miser theory.

What’s Next?

Once we realize there is a problem and consume information on how to solve that problem, we reduce our alternatives down to a few. This is typically 2-8 alternatives, which we often call the consideration set[3] (Allen et al., 1991). However, if you’ve already built your brand to be a frontrunner like Rolex, if you get to this stage, you’re going to have a higher probability to make the sale.

The final steps involved in a high-effort purchase are the actual purchase and post-purchase behavior. The interesting thing about the post-purchase behavior of Rolex customers is that the product is so coveted that the owner will always want it to be seen or noticed. By wearing a Rolex, they’re walking advertisements for the brand. Given the price point of the watch, it is highly likely that the person wearing it is monetarily successful. This perpetuates everything that the brand stands for.

Takeaways

For high-effort behavior, the first step in the customer journey is to get someone to realize there is a problem. Once that problem has been recognized, a consumer tries to find a way to solve that problem. Then, they narrow their choices and buy a product. How can you help them along the way? If you can do this as well as Rolex, you can roll the first two or three steps into one, giving you a greater likelihood of being chosen over your competition.

[1] Stanovich, Keith E. (2009). “The cognitive miser: ways to avoid thinking”. What intelligence tests miss: the psychology of rational thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 70–85. ISBN 9780300123852. OCLC 216936066.

[2] Lee, Jinkook & Hogarth, Jeanne M. Consumer Information Search for Home Mortgages: Who, What, How Much and What Else? Autumn 2000 Financial Services Review, Volume 9, Issue 3. Pp. 277-293.

[3] Shocker, Allan, Ben-Akiva, Moshe, Boccara, Bruno and Nedungadi, Prakash. 1991. Consideration Set Influences on Consumer Decision-Making and Choice: Issues, Models, and Suggestions. Marketing Letters: A Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 2, No. 3: 181-197.

How Bringing a Multimillion-Dollar Jet Through the Streets of Las Vegas Created a Niche Market

In Order to Create a Niche Market, You Have to Take Risks and Dare to be First

In 2015, I was sitting in the back of a brand new Dodge Ram at 11 PM at the McCarran Airport in Las Vegas trying to stay warm. It was freezing to the point where it snowed the next day. I was wearing multiple layers because I was about to walk with a newly refurbished multimillion-dollar jet through the streets of Vegas. My company was displaying this aircraft inside of the convention hall during our largest trade show of the year. Actually, NBAA is one of the largest trade shows in the US attracting owners, pilots, mechanics, and industry leaders from all over the world. I was pretty terrified because this was the first time I had ever done anything like this. Although I was confident we had a great product, there was no way of knowing if the major risk we took as a company was going to pay off.

This wasn’t just my first time. To my knowledge, this was also the first time anyone had displayed a jet of this size inside of the convention hall, so we didn’t really have the proxy to measure our success. I had a major case of imposter syndrome. At this show, we were competing with huge companies like Bombardier, Textron, Gulfstream, and Dassault. How could we compete with multibillion-dollar companies and stand out? They have teams of people who are much smarter and more capable than me.

My mind was racing and I was nervous about all of the things I couldn’t control. What if they didn’t measure the traffic signals properly and the tail runs into a stoplight? What if the belly scrapes coming out of the airport ramp onto the street? What if the tow bar head damages the landing gear? What if they couldn’t get it in the hall? (To be fair, the wingspan was larger than the opening of the door, so that last concern was somewhat legitimate.) I ordered carpet to be laid after the aircraft arrived so it didn’t get chewed up from a jet rolling over it. How was that even going to work? Did I order enough spotlights? No matter how nervous I was, it didn’t matter. All of the hard work, engineering, and craftsmanship that went into this airplane; now it was my job to make it pay off at the trade show. I had to stay confident and let all of the months of planning pay off. Our team had imagined this concept over a year ago and it was finally time to execute.

They opened the north gate at the airport. Since we were the biggest airplane, we were the last in line and we would be the last ones in the hall. After waiting nearly an hour for the caravan of airplanes to progress far enough to where we could actually get out of the gate, we were finally on the road. The Nevada State Highway Patrol was providing an escort, blocking the streets in front and behind the caravan as we slowly made our way up Paradise Road.

Nearly three hours later, we arrived at the Las Vegas Convention Center. We sat outside for a few hours as each airplane was carefully brought onto the trade show floor by a special tug which was operated by a guy that flew in from the UK. An hour and a half after we attached the airplane to the special tug, we were placed in the hall, ready for finishing touches before the show.

Creating the Niche Market

So, how did we arrive at the Las Vegas convention center with a refurbished jet? Was it just to display our quality of work? Was it just to be noticed? No, we were creating a niche market. To be successful in a niche market, you have to have a team that is willing to take huge risks to create an outstanding product at a reasonable price. You work together to create the niche. That makes the advertising pretty easy. Let me explain.

The Problem

Garmin was launching a new avionics program, known as the G5000, for a light jet called a Beechjet 400A (and the newer iteration, the Hawker 400XP). Our company was and still is, the industry’s leading Garmin retrofitter. So much so, that we have done more Garmin retrofits in King Air turboprops than all other dealers in the world, combined. However, this was the very first jet that would be certified for a Garmin retrofit, so transitioning from our expertise in King Airs to Jets was critical. We needed to leverage our experience in completing large Garmin retrofits to a completely new niche. This new market had a different type of buyer, with different buying behaviors. Although the audience was small (this system applied to less than 600 airplanes across the world), even conservative projections for the overall market saturation rate and our projected market share made financial sense for us to pursue this niche.

In our industry, being the first to complete a major project like this particular Garmin retrofit was critical. The business aviation community is small. Since our brand was so closely aligned with Garmin, an early lead in a new niche would establish credibility with the new target audience and lead to early success. Once that credibility caught on, we would be hard to catch.

Why This Niche Made Sense

As stated, we were Garmin’s largest aftermarket dealer and as they expanded into new niche markets, we wanted to expand with them and maintain our position as the industry leader. This market made further sense because we were an authorized service center for this kind of aircraft and we had many maintenance technicians that had 20+ years of experience working with the airplane. As a one-stop-shop, we would also be able to handle any avionics, maintenance, paint, interior, or landing gear overhauls the customer might need when receiving a large retrofit.

Action – The Big Risk to Be First

I remember the meeting. We were all sitting around the small conference room table discussing how we were going to become industry leaders. If we wanted to be the frontrunners, we would have to take some major risks. If we were going to pursue this niche and be the first to market, everyone who owned this type of aircraft, and everyone in the industry would need to know how serious we were.

“What if we bought an airplane, completed all of the refurbishments, brought it down the street, and parked it inside the convention hall?” The room got quiet. I don’t remember who asked the question, whether it was me or one of our other team members. It didn’t really matter because we were all thinking the same thing, but we knew there were huge risks. We would have the initial multimillion-dollar risk of the acquisition cost of the airplane. We would have additional costs tied up in the refurbishment. We would also have the opportunity cost of turning away some customers for the number of hours that this refurbishment required.

Although we knew there would be major risks, we knew there would be huge rewards. In addition to being able to sell the airplane after the show, if we succeeded in receiving several orders for the Garmin system at the trade show, we would have a major lead in the industry. As stated earlier, a head start in this program was all we needed.

For this November trade show, we started sourcing an aircraft in late spring. We found a 2006 Hawker 400XP, but the challenge with this airplane was that it needed engine overhauls. This added a major expense and additional downtime in our already compressed timeframe. Despite the challenges, we purchased the aircraft and began work. The entire scope of work included a major inspection, engine overhauls, Garmin G5000 avionics retrofit, special Vegas gold pearl paint job, and a refurbished, weight-saving interior with WiFi and color-changing LED lighting.

Marketing Actions to This Niche

From a marketing perspective, the biggest goal was to create an associative network in potential customers’ minds linking our name with the new Garmin G5000 system in this particular aircraft (Beechjet 400A/Hawker 400XP). This type of plan involves understanding how the brain works and how an associative network influences retrieval. As marketers, we know several things about this type of network. The first, and most obvious, is that stronger links are more accessible. That’s why we try to strengthen the links between brands (in this case, we were trying to strengthen the association with the Garmin brand).

Good marketers also know that there is a spreading activation effect, which allows for the free association between like-products. For instance, when you think of BMW, you may think of luxury cars. As another German brand, you may think of Mercedes or Audi. However, due to the luxury nature, you may also think about Rolex. Your brain could also think about leather. By putting a top-of-the-line avionics system in a pristine looking airplane, we were building a spreading activation centered around the Garmin system but also associated with “the best” quality. This included the best quality Garmin installation, but the best quality paint, interior, and engineering.

We also know that there is a sleeper effect, meaning that the actual message stays tied to recall much longer than the recall of the source of the information. Basically, I wanted to create a plan where we were seen as the experts in any and all sources that I could use.

So, to the best of my recollection five years later, here’s what we did.

Public Relations

There were several hooks that we identified in this story that made it interesting to the press. The first, and most obvious, was that we were the first Garmin dealer in the world that was going to attempt this type of retrofit. Even before the project started, we took the risk and committed to being the first dealer to deliver. That alone got the attention of the press in our industry. However, to truly make a good story before launching the PR strategy, we had to fully develop the five basic elements of the story. By committing to purchase an airplane and displaying it in Vegas in a short time frame, we had all of the components we needed. We had the characters (our team and brand), setting (Vegas), plot (buying and retrofitting an airplane with something that had not been done before), conflict (short time frame), and the resolution (successfully completed everything).

Once we developed the story arc, we sent and press releases and landed coverage with industry publications from the day the airplane was purchased. Our initial press release outlined our entire plan. We then had follow-up press releases that highlighted when we started the avionics system, and when the aircraft delivered.

From the day the first press release was sent, the top publication in our industry ran a feature on the project. The subsequent releases were also picked up by several other outlets. From a PR standpoint, all of the major trade publications wanted to know more and track the progress of the project. During the trade show, we had several articles published in the daily publications. Media outlets also conducted video interviews with our team members going over the project details.

After the show, there were residual public relations opportunities which included press releases when we sold the aircraft and after each milestone delivery (the first company to five installs, first to 10, 20, etc.)

VIP Event

We set up a cocktail event for owners and operators of this type of aircraft where they could come by at a certain time and have a drink on us. This was exclusive to our industry partners as well as owners and operators of this type of aircraft.

Digital Advertising

Our team developed a digital strategy to target operators of this type of aircraft via email prior to the show to let them know what all was included in the aircraft upgrade, where they could find us, and when they could attend our VIP event. We also created a preview video on YouTube and targeted our customers through YouTube ads.

We also set up retargeting ads to any viewer that visited our G5000 page and targeted emails to anyone who had visited this page a certain number of times.

Direct Mail

Our team designed eight-page brochures introducing the new system. To add to the feeling of luxury, we used a combination of soft-touch and high-gloss UV coatings. We had also mailed special invitations to our target audience including VIP identifiers to attend our VIP trade show event.

Social Media

Social media posts were scheduled before, during, and after the event on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Posts were boosted to the target demographic.

Result

Although we were all nervous about the huge risk that we were taking, this series of events of buying and retrofitting the airplane had major rewards. Prior to the system even being certified, we were able to pre-sell a dozen Garmin G5000 retrofits, which was more than all other dealers in the world combined. From the very beginning of this program, our team put a considerable amount of effort to be the industry leaders. However, it was not the result of just one series of actions. It took our entire company to believe that we could do it. When diving into a project of this magnitude, the first thing you have to do is believe that you can do it. With the entire company behind the success of the program, we were able to create a great niche market, one that has now ballooned nearly 30 systems sold, which again, is more than all other dealers in the world, combined. Throughout this process, we also found an opportunity within the LED lighting market. We have since created and now manufacture LED aircraft lighting and currently have 13 US dealers.

What I Learned

Building a niche market involves creating a product that truly connects with your target audience. Your market can be incredibly small. In this case, there were less than 600 potential customers in the entire world. However, the financial case for us to pursue this market made sense and it perfectly fit our brand. When you create a niche, what you are selling will apply only to a small group of people, and that’s okay. The bottom line is this: create something of incredible value to your audience that no one else can provide.

You can find out more about niche marketing here.

How Your Brain Hijacks What You Buy

And That’s Not Necessarily a Bad Thing

For a good portion of my career, I fell into the trap of thinking that good marketing was driven by great advertising, so I would spend all of my time focusing on how to create a good ad. I’d carefully try and choose an image with stopping power, a clever headline, compelling ad copy, and a call to action. I’d do this over and over with mixed results, never thinking about the psychology of consumer behavior and how to use it to make my job easier.

Although I was also really interested in psychology, I had never tried to understand the psychology of why we buy what we buy. It wasn’t until I started getting interested in consumer behavior that I really started to understand the key elements of how the brain works. Having an understanding of consumer behavior allows you to apply an understanding of why customers choose certain products to the building blocks of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Fully understanding these concepts can give you an edge to be a better marketer, or just help you grasp why you do what you do.

Low-Effort Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is a fascinating topic. There are two main ways that your brain processes purchasing decisions, central-route processing, and peripheral-route processing. In central-route processing, you engage in what’s known as high-effort behavior. This is just a fancy way of saying that you think deeply about your purchases. Peripheral-route processing, however, considers little thought (Petty & Cacioppo 1986: 191).[1] It’s the reason that you only buy name-brand peanut butter. It’s the reason you’d never overpay for milk or butter. Ironically, it’s the same reason you’d never be caught buying cheap wine.

You have very little control over how your brain manages peripheral-route processing, so the best that you can do is to try and understand how it works. Typically, low-effort consumer behavior products are everyday items (think groceries, toothpaste, toilet paper — if you can find it), although they don’t have to be. These are purchases that you make every week, if not every day.

Heuristics — The Things You Do That You Don’t Realize

Low-effort purchases rely heavily on heuristics, which is just a pretentious way of saying shortcuts but hey, it makes you sound smart…so we’re going to use it! Heuristics are so subtle that you probably don’t even realize that you are using them. Although they can lead to bad habits and are prone to errors, the fact that you use heuristics isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Think about it, you’d be living a pretty miserable life you agonized over what kind of butter you should buy or spent an hour comparing toothpaste. Consumers just don’t have time to worry about trivial items and although they can be prone to error, heuristics help us manage our time without us having to do much thinking.

Types of Heuristics

Price

Price-related heuristics are incredibly common. If you’re a cheapskate like me, for many low-effort items you buy the cheapest item available. This type of purchasing is commonplace for grocery staples like cans of vegetables, bread, and milk. However, if you again are like me this can translate beyond low-effort items and you end up buying the cheapest (vacuum, cooler, lawnmower, coffee maker) every year for the rest of your life. Earlier I mentioned that heuristics are prone to errors and this is exactly why they don’t always work.

How Marketers Use This

A strategy based on being the low-price leader is one that rarely allows your brand to ever increase your prices in comparison to the market or to gain any value. Committing to being a price leader in a category can be a dangerous strategy that should be based on favorable volumes and variable cost structures. Many companies will attempt to temporarily interrupt lower-priced competitors by offering coupons or sales. This allows them to potentially disrupt a customer’s brand loyalty or purchasing habits. It’s sort of like saying to the consumer, “Hey, you know that brand you always buy sucks, so try ours. It’s better and worth a higher price.”

Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is another low-effort purchasing heuristic. Brand loyalty often occurs when we have tried a certain brand and had a great experience. Until that brand lets us down, or we have a better experience with a different brand, we will likely maintain that brand loyalty. It’s the reason that you buy Oreo’s and not “chocolate sandwich cookies” because, well Oreos are great, and chocolate sandwich cookies are trash.

How Marketers Use This

The only reason to have a brand is to build market power and that market power is directly tied to the loyalty that you create with your customers. Your brand should represent something. It should give your customers a reason to not only choose your products but to return to your brand. Building loyalty ultimately strengthens your customer lifetime value and can decrease your customer acquisition cost. That’s fancy marketing speak for “your customers will pay you more money and you will spend less getting new ones”. In addition, the intangible asset of a strong brand can help financial analysts determine the future value of a company. A strong brand commands a higher price over a longer period of time. Another thing to note, a brand has a target audience. It’s not for everyone. If you build a strong enough brand, you may have people that hate your brand, and that’s okay as long as you have people that love your brand. A watered-down brand that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one.

Habits

Habits are different than brand loyalty. Although they involve continual purchases, sometimes of the same brand, they don’t necessarily involve loyalty to that brand. A habitual purchase can be the corporate coffee that you drink every day or the junk food from the vending machine that you buy in between meals. It can even be the really bad morning radio show that you listen to every morning. The main difference is that a habit doesn’t require a strong preference for the brand that is being purchased. Habits also involve little evaluation of other options and little information seeking for other alternatives. Habits make decisions easier because it reduces our risk when we have purchased the item several times in the past and it has satisfied our needs (Hoyer, MacInnis, & Pieters 2018).[2]

How Marketers Use This

Marketers of low-effort products spend a lot of time either trying to create or break a habit. Companies that have habitual buyers are always trying to maintain a cycle of perpetuating a customer’s habits. Grocery stores may attempt to maintain a habit of a customer returning to their store by honoring coupons from other stores or matching their prices. If a marketer is trying to break a customer’s habit to get them to purchase their product, they may offer a lower price than a competitive product or offer free samples. If you’re a tobacco company, you might try to do evil things like advertise to children or say that more doctors smoke your cigarette than any other cigarette.

Emotions

Your emotions also have a profound impact on the way you make your purchases. When you are emotionally connected to a brand, you are buying it because it makes you feel good. One example might involve purchasing a Tom’s of Maine product because of their corporate commitment to sustainability. Another example might be buying a local brand as even though the product might be similar to other brands, we might feel better about supporting local members of their community. Your emotions can also cause you to make altruistic choices like donating to charities. Your emotions can also drive you to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s you eat when you are having a bad day, or if it’s just a Wednesday.

How Marketers Use This

Companies can attempt to appeal to emotions by adopting a cause that aligns with their product. They may also position their advertising with certain imagery and advertising copy that focuses on how the product makes you feel instead of simply listing the features and benefits. For instance, a pizza restaurant may run a commercial that represents togetherness with images of a family watching a movie. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that several studies have shown that different emotions mean different things to different people (Mogilner & Kamvar, 2012). [3] The challenge for marketers is to determine the temperament of their customers and to understand how emotions impact their purchases.

Unfortunately, consumer’s emotions can also be manipulated by strategies that are purposefully made to misinform the customer. One of the most popular types of this type of manipulation is misleading packaging. A common example is labeling unhealthy foods as fat-free. While this may be true, this label often shows up on foods that are loaded with sugar or sodium. A marketer may believe that a consumer has a negative association with the word fat, and by labeling their product fat free, they are implying that the food is a healthy option. This makes you feel better about your decision.

Normative Influences

Normative influences occur when other people guide our choices. This can be a direct influence, like purchasing something that your kids want. This could also be an indirect influence, like buying a brand because a friend or a group you belong to tend to buy that brand (Hoyer, MacInnis, & Pieters 2018). An example of an indirect influence might be buying an overpriced luxury car because everyone you know, or at least the Jones’s, have one.

How Marketers Use This

Since the person making a purchase isn’t always the decision maker, marketers need to consider advertising to all appropriate audiences. This is why there are so many commercials for cereals and toys during kid’s shows. Even though they are not making the purchase, they are a direct influence on the purchaser. To reinforce an indirect influence, a brand could institute a referral program.

Representativeness

Photo by Preankhan Gowrypalan on Unsplash

The representativeness heuristic is a way that our brains try to link things that are similar together (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). [4] This is the heuristic that is the reason that hilarious knock offs and intellectual property lawsuits exist. In marketing and branding, this often occurs when a consumer compares a brand to a prototype, or category leader (think Coca Cola for all colas, Kleenex for tissues, and Band-Aid for bandages).

How Marketers Use This

The most common way that marketers use the representativeness heuristic to their advantage is to mimic the prototype brand. Private-label brands often try to make knock offs, like Dr. Thunder, Panburger Partner, Mountain Lightning, and Butter It’s Not. Although these brands are pretty hilarious, they do a great job capitalizing on imitating the prototype and take advantage of a representativeness heuristic.

Availability

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash

The availability heuristic happens when a consumer views the probability of having a good experience with a product on how easy information about the product is to recall (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974). For instance, you could have a friend that told you that every time they order from a certain pizza place, they get her order wrong, the pizza was cold, and it took two hours. Would that make you want to place an order with that restaurant? Probably not. This story may influence your future decisions.

How Marketers Use This

To address the availability heuristic, a marketer can try and reinforce the information if it is positive or reframe the information if it is negative. In 2010, Domino’s pizza took extreme steps to address the availability heuristic that their pizza was garbage. To regain credibility, they completely changed their recipes, focusing on their ingredients and flavors (Brandau, 2010).[5]

Humans Are Variety Seeking

For low-effort purchases, unless you are the type of person that has an entire closet full of plain white shirts, you probably seek variety in your purchases. This is the reason there are so many flavors of yogurt, ice cream, soft drinks, and even bread. One study showed that this is particularly true when repetitive purchases are viewed as negative. The boredom of repetition triggers the need to seek variety (Fishbach, 2011).[6]

How Marketers Use This

Coupled with a strong brand, a company can take advantage of a consumer’s need for variety by introducing new items. This could be something like new flavors or seasonal items.

Wrapping Up

Heuristics are a way for consumers to make quick decisions about items that don’t require a lot of thought. They’re almost like a built-in time management system for our brain. They’re not necessarily good, but they’re not inherently bad. At best, they can save you a lot of time and opportunity cost making decisions that would not have a negative impact on your life. At worst, they could lead to habits that turn into harmful addictions. One thing is certain. Your low-effort purchases, which make up most of what you buy, are governed by heuristics. These short cuts are something that are generally out of your control. By understanding the way consumers think about these low-effort decisions, marketers can create more demand for their products.

[1] Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Kao, C. F., & Rodriguez, R. (1986). Central and peripheral routes to persuasion: An individual difference perspective. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(5), 1032–1043. https://doi-org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/10.1037/0022-3514.51.5.1032

[2] Hoyer, W., MacInnis, D., & Pieters, R. (2018). Consumer Behavior (Seventh Edition). Cengage Learning: 180–199.

[3] Mogilner, C., Aaker, J., & Kamvar, S. (2012). How Happiness Affects Choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(2), 429–443. doi:10.1086/663774

[4] Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131. Retrieved August 2, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1738360

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