Playing to the Audience

For completely unrelated reasons, I have been learning a little about book publishing, and more particularly, about how to get your book published. It should come as no surprise to any of you marketing savvy folk out there that it’s all about, well, marketing. The first step to getting a book published is pitching your idea to the publisher with a clear and concise description about the book and why the proposed audience would be interested in it. Ultimately, it is about convincing the publisher that you understand your audience well enough to create something that will interest them. And to a publisher, this means a good shot at sales, and more importantly, profit. Marketing 101, right?

Right.

Yet sometimes I think this simple truth - that the foundation of marketing success lies with knowing your audience well enough to create something that will appeal to them – gets lost amidst the flurry of branding templates, marketing processes and our seemingly pathological desire to make things more complicated than they need be.

Yes, of course execution matters. A lousy writer with a good idea for a particular audience is not going places, most certainly not on display at your nearest Dymocks. Execution matters a great deal. But if execution is the building, then audience is the foundation. And if the execution is not flowing directly from a deep understanding of the audience, we’re going to get into trouble.

Imagine starting with your audience. Spending time up front understanding them and their needs before you do product development, and most certainly before you do advertising development. Imagine the advantage of designing your product with their specific needs in mind. Imagine the clarity such single-minded focus might bring to the creative development process?

The problem is, we tend to work back to front. We start with our brand or product and say, “Right, who will this appeal to?” And that’s understandable. After all, there are factories to fill, assets to use and brand growth targets to hit. Hopefully, though, we then seek an “insight” about that audience on which we can hang our marketing efforts. However, quite often, that insight development phase (or, consumer understanding phase) is short-lived, or worse, skipped over, as timelines tighten and the focus turns to execution. Heaven forbid, we may even find ourselves re-engineering the consumer need to fit the product or brand (or advertising idea), so that we can just get on with the creative development. Not a recipe for a smooth creative process or success, by any account.

Maybe we don’t always have the luxury of starting with our audience, but if we don’t have a very clear understanding of who our audience is and how our product meets a real and meaningful need, before we embark on our marketing development, its bound to end in confusion about what works and what doesn’t. And we end up in this creative development quagmire where we are not sure if consumers are rejecting the very basis of our offering (the insight or strategy) or the execution of that strategy.

Can you sum up your product idea in a 30 second elevator pitch that captures who its for, and why they want it, in a simple, clear and compelling sentence? If not, its probably time to learn more about your audience.

Story Telling as a Research Tool

I am a great believer in the power of stories as a tool for understanding and communicating insight. Story-telling is an intrinsic human habit. It is how human beings have transmitted learnings, values and morals from one generation to the next, ever since we started stringing words together. Stories are also the easiest way to remember information, to make it stick and are therefore a good way to share your insights with your business partners. Listening to people's stories, rather than their rational answers, often provides a more fertile opportunity for discovering insight. We spend a lot of time in research asking consumers "why" they do things. And the truth is, consumers can only ever answer that question rationally, and we seldom do things for rational reasons alone. In addition, rational answers are not particularly exciting or stimulating from a creative point of view. Within the subtext of consumers' stories, however, we find people's motivations - the reasons why they may be doing the things they do. And these possible "why"s" provide richer springboards for idea generation - whether that's for communication strategy, new product development or creating ongoing and meaningful engagement with our brands.

What about me, your customer, already?

It must be said that there are a lot of things that get my goat. But floating somewhere near the top is the practice of "discounting" for new customers. Pay TV is a prime culprit of this, offering a month's free viewing and free installation. I can understand the business case, but as a consumer I sit on my sofa staring at the TV in annoyance thinking, "what about me?". Here I am, your loyal customer, paying you month in and month out, and there you go rewarding the newbies. Credit cards are another culprit. Just recently I was shopping around for a new card, my decision making entirely dependent on rewards. I was offered thousands of rewards points for switching to other cards - the equivalent of a free domestic flight. Its tempting. Its nice, when you are new. But what about next year? Then I'll be last years news. I suppose there is a level of arrogance, especially in things like banks, where it is time consuming and annoying to switch and people are unlikely to bother. Or with pay TV, where you might fall into the trap of thinking (erroneously) that people don't have other options. This sort of thinking only leads people to go out and find other options. But wouldn't it be more profitable to build loyalty and commitment from those people you've already switched into your brand? Its expensive continually recruiting new customers. And if you annoy them enough that they leave you, you've just got to go out and find new customers to replace them -an endless cycle. Happy customers, surely, are more valuable? Not only do you save on recruiting costs year in and year out, they can also do a lot of newbie recruiting for you. Especially in this day and age. How about giving away some of those points to reward customers who are profitable for you? How about rewarding customers who encourage friends to switch into your brand? How about making your existing customers feel loved? Focusing on retention - maybe that's a good recruitment strategy, after all?