Monthly Archives: April 2008

The Desire in Desirability

Brand Management, DataBase Marketing, Web Analytics,

So, what have we got with this Desirability thing?  Let’s start with a Strategic View, and then get down to the Tactical “what it means to me at work” stuff.

Going back to the classic AIDAS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction) Psychological model of buying behavior, I think what we are seeing is a gradual acceptance by traditional Brand Marketers that:

1.  The actual definition of “Brand” is changing
2. A media type is best optimized for a specific AIDAS job

1.  Brand is traditionally a premium strategy – I convince you to pay more for essentially the same goods because they have this “Brand”.  But there is increasingly an experiential component required of Brands, a “proof” of sorts that affirms the Brand Promise / Premium.  These proofs often reach deep into areas outside what most people think of as “MarCom”.

So now you’re talking about package and product design (Usability), you’re talking about Service, you’re talking about Customer Experience.  All of this together is now Brand.

Brand is both Promise and Payoff.

2.  This means Brand folks now effectively have a two-step to execute: they can create a Brand Image / Promise “Attention and Interest“ with the Mass media, but actual Payoff / Action requires an “affirmation” of Brand Promise.  These affirmations now take place largely through web research and interactivity.

In other words, with the consumer knowing they have easy access to tons of fact and opinion on a product through the web, they’re probably not going to make it to the Desire phase without doing a few minutes of research first.

These Affirmations create Desirability, which leads to Action.

Put simply, Mass media can no longer drive people through the entire AIDAS cycle.  It loses them at Interest, where the web largely takes over the role of creating Desire.

This is the hard linkage between Engagement and Desirability  Engagement is a measure of Desirability, of the Brand to “pull” people into the Desire phase of AIDAS from the Interest phase and through to taking Action.  You can “push” people into Awareness and even Interest, but you have to “pull” people into Desire and Action.  A two-step, as it’s known in direct.

The qualifier and the closer, the front-end and the back-end.

None of this means Mass media is dead, or Web media is better, or Social Media Rules, or any of that. What it means is you can waste a lot of Marketing budget saying the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time.  More about that when we talk about Tactics.  It also means MarCom folks should think about becoming true Marketing folks if they want to succeed in the long run.

If you’d like to read detailed background on the Brand / Media idea above, see Online, the Web Site is the Ad.  More background on the proper (Strategic) role of Marketing in the Integrated Interactive business model is found at CMOs: Strategic Seat = Chief Customer Officer.

What do you think?  Is this model of Media and Behavior making sense to you?  Anything broken?

Want Engagement? Get Desirability

Analytical Culture, Brand Management, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics,

Forrester’s Marketing Forum this year covered Engagement, but not the kind of Engagement so often discussed in web analytics.

Nope, Engagement from a Marketing perspective, you know, surprise and delight leads to better customer experiences leads to better customer retention and higher profits.

The presentation came complete with some nifty offline Engagement examples, e.g. the more a patient is Engaged in their healthcare the better the result.  The improved results came from, get this, “improving doctor usability”.  And yes, there was a test on this business optimization effort with tangible results generated.

You can get a good feel for where this conversation is headed from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog by listening to the 2 Forrester keynotes, each about an hour long.  For those short on time, pick one, depending on your interest:

Strategic Level: platforms, frameworks, etc. from Brian Haven

Tactical Level: examples, “how to” etc. from Kerry Bodine

No time for a video?

For a bulleted list of the key points you need to understand in order to optimize your Marketing model, see the “Five Fundamentals of Integrated Marketing” ClickZ article here.

I’ll have more to say on why these ideas are so important in the next couple of days.  For now, I will leave you with this:

If the customer is taking control, it’s only because you’re using the wrong Marketing model, maybe one like this one.  No customer wants to have to “take control” in the first place.

The more Engaging you are, the less old-school “pray and spray” Marketing  – online or offline - you should have to do.

That’s the whole point of Engagement.

Comments on the videos or article?  Anything ring a bell for you?

Online Stat of the Year?

Marketing Research, Web Analytics, ,

Over on the Rimm-Kaufman Group blog was a report on what Forrester’s Carrie Johnson had to say at Shop.org’s Marketing Workshop.  There are quite a few interesting tidbits, but here’s the pair that blew me away:

Correlation between Google Gross US Revenues to US E-Commerce Growth: .96.

Correlation with Yahoo Display Ad Sales and US E-Commerce Growth: -.04

Now, I understand that Correlation does not imply Causation but at some level when you get directional spreads like this you have to sit up and take notice.

One explanation is this:  e-Commerce sites do not buy any Display to speak of, but we know that’s not true – don’t we?

Other questions:

1.  Another conclusion would be Yahoo matters very little to e-commerce activity.  Sure, less than Google, but to this degree?  If in fact Display enhances Search performance, you would think Yahoo would have more of an effect. Perhaps folks see Display on Yahoo and then Search on Google?  Wouldn’t that be a trip…

That scenario would really provide a whole new twist on the measurement of view-throughs.

2.  Google gross rev’s include AdSense, of course.  So we’re not really comparing PPC to Display here, though one could argue AdSense is more targeted than Display.  So what we are discussing here is the relevance of ads, not PPC versus Display.

3.  Does Yahoo Display include Travel ads triggered by selection of Location?  Auto ads triggered by selection of Model?  Etc.  Etc.  You could argue those ads are really “Search” if you look at it from a behavioral (customer) perspective.

Sure would like to find the source on this, and see what we are actually talking about here.

Other questions you would ask / data you need to make a judgment on this?  How about wild speculations on what this data means, if anything?