Does Your Marketing Click?
You probably know the feeling, you meet someone new – socially or at work – and you just hit it off. There is an instant sense of bond. In a word, you click.
More often than not, we think of this click as applicable to our social lives but possibly don’t understand its resonance in the business world.
There is a lesson in this for marketers. Recent research has shown that consumers who form an emotional connection to brands and products are far more loyal, spend far more money and tell more people about how great your brand is than those that don’t.
Tests conducted by myself supports evidence compiled by Roger Sant of Maritz Research and Thorne of Marketing Week that conditions can be put in place to help engineer this click.
Before we can start to engineer these conditions we must firstly understand what happens when the click occurs. For that, we must turn to science, in particular the field of psychology, often a discipline that spends more time looking at negative relationships – why things break – rather than why things bond. If we examine an fMRI scan (a brain scan to you and and I) at the moment somebody is describing a time when they felt that they instantly clicked with another person, you find the brain is flooded with dopamine creating a sense of euphoria frankly not unlike the reaction the brains pleasure centre has when introduced to cocaine!
Interestingly, the language used when people describe experiences of clicking reveals another important lesson for us. They say things like magical, euphoric, thrilling and special.
What does this mean to a brand wanted to promote sales? It means that those are the phrases we need to be getting out of our focus groups. It isn’t enough to hit all of the rational selling points of a product, we need to stir the emotions with our campaigns and promotions.
How to we do this? The research conducted by Tomkinson and Hartley has thrown up some interesting possibilities. They looked for click accelerators factors we can manipulate to speed up an emotional connection. Some unusual factors are at play.
Firstly vulnerability. We are naturally receptive to vulnerability if (and this is key) it’s sincere and introduced by the individual or the brand. Remember the famous Avis car hire campaign? – We are number no2, so we try harder. That’s a great example of a brand being unafraid to admit a weakness.
Secondly, proximity, in other words, get close. If you want to meet somebody for instance at a party, then it makes sense to stand close to them. Equally, the number of times we are seen really does effect how much we are liked. Opportunities for spontaneous communication increases the chances of a click. Thinking of blowing all your budget on a one-shot maximum impact hit? Think again. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds regard.
People think of communication as a wave – it’s not, effective communication is a flow. And things can disrupt that flow. If we want as marketers to connect then its fundamental to understand the factors that can disrupt that flow. Its about being present in the moment. Have you ever wondered why when get up to go to the bar, a comedian will immediately hone in on you? Its because they understand at that moment the audiences attention is on you, not on them. The principle applies to brands. Be in the moment, understand your audience and its environment. Make yourself present. It is a fundamental principle of marketing that you must understand your customers…too often we take the lazy route and assume they are like us, what we like, they’ll like. It’s not always the case, to really click, we must understand what holds our customers attention.
Introducing the three concepts of proximity, vulnerability and resonance into your communications can have a profound impact on your brand’s ability to click with your customers. It may appear at first to be complex but when we interviewed Julian Hartley of Husk Design he was able to boil in down to a simple piece of advertising wisdom. Make them nod, or make them smile.
Mark Errington is the owner of Ech0 Creative Labs, a strategy and advertising agency based in Derby UK. He describes himself as a strategist, designer, psychologist and storyteller.Ech0 Creative in Derby can be found on http://www.ech0.co.uk
Mark can be contacted on 07974 153811 or at marktomkinson@me.com
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