We are witnessing the gradual emergence of a new phase in commercial communications, which is the 'era of consent'. As we have seen there is an explosion in the availability of media, a massive increase in the numbers of commercial communications messages being sent to customers by brands and a greatly enhanced ability for people to interact with them. The latest estimate of the commercial portion of our daily media diet, if we wish to consume it, is in the region of a phenomenal 5000 brand communications per person per day.
While most people might accept intellectually that this is roughly the right amount, it's doubtful whether anyone believes that they personally are engaged by anything like that number in practice. According to Robert Heath and his theory of 'Low Involvement Processing' (LIP), we may well be absorbing much more information at a subconscious level than we realize and this is a significant contributor to our perceptions in general, and thus of brands too. More work needs to be done in order to take full account of LIP, but at a conscious level we can see the human being is remarkably adept at screening out irrelevant messages.
How often have we observed people flicking through pages of advertising in the newspaper or magazine that they are reading in favour of the celebrity editorial they bought it for? How often have we asked ourselves a few minutes after a commercial break what commercials we have just seen and been unable to recall most of them?
Many would argue that this screening or blinkering facility is becoming ever more finely tuned as the explosion in media continues apace around us. We have a picture of the archetypal customer, surrounded by a fortress built of his or her own indifference to brands. The customer lives safe inside this 'castle', protected by a moat and accessible only by a drawbridge that is seldom let down and a portcullis which is rarely raised up. At a conscious level the customer selects which communications to be interested in and, while entertainment is a key factor, usually this interest is purposeful. If they are looking for some product or service, they will selectively perceive relevant brand messages. Statistically, this means that at any one time a relatively tiny proportion of the customers will be 'in the market' for a particular product category or item within it.
This is why the big users of direct mail and loose inserts, such as credit cards and banks and insurance companies, usually rely on an essentially commodity approach to their marketing and why they are satisfied with response levels that are perhaps only 1% or 2% from the millions of items distributed. This editing process comes naturally to all of us and very few of the 5000 commercial messages we receive daily are consciously allowed in. But, increasingly, brands are allowed to communicate with us by invitation only and we are rapidly entering the era of permission marketing. In this new environment brands will have to make themselves sufficiently attractive and trustworthy in order to be invited in over the drawbridge. An association with a desirable celebrity is likely to be a powerful way to achieve an 'access all areas' pass to the customer's castle.
One result of increased interactivity in commercial communications is that brands are able to collect very much more detailed information about their customers and to build databases which can be interrogated to produce increasingly sophisticated segmentations. Marketing programmes can then be constructed that are tailored very specifically to particular segments and enable customers to receive appropriate communications, benefits and offers in a highly cost-effective manner. In this context it's hardly surprising that some of the fastest, almost exponential growth in direct marketing is coming from the more 'intrusive' media such as direct mail, tele-marketing, email and SMS.
Unfortunately, too many people are bringing the commodity mass mailing mentality from direct mail to these new technologies. But in the digital world there's no excuse for accepting a response rate of 1.5%, because of the potential for genuine one-to-one dialogue. Plus the irritation factor of 98.5% spam in an inbox, let alone intrusions on voice mail or on a landline, is out of all proportion to what it might be on the doormat and thus much more damaging to the brand responsible.
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07192010
1. Dede Allen was a famous movie editor with a big talent
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