When my wife and I moved cities in 2018, I purged some of the stuff I’d been keeping for years, and in the process, I ran across an essay that my 16-year-old self had written for a college scholarship application (which I did not get). It read in part, “I am interested in the art of persuasion…[W]hat conditions and evidence will convince one person and not another. I think that this is a very important interest to have if one wants to enter the field of advertising or public relations, which I do.”Please forgive that awkward sentence construction. I’m quoting myself because it’s spooky to see that my decade-long random walk through college across four programs and three degrees led me back to the start. Persuasion is, indeed, my passion. It has been my career.
This thought piece is a self-reflection about five things I’ve learned along the way.
1. Nobody Cares. The biggest challenge in marketing is indifference. Getting people to pay attention, much less remember or act, is insanely difficult and expensive. What I’ve learned is that you overcome indifference by asking less of consumers not more.
My second job was at Texize (later DowBrands). We sold cleaning products like Fantastik, Scrubbing Bubbles, K2R, Pine Power, Spray ‘N’ Wash and GlassPlus. Low-involvement categories, one and all. Focus groups on glass cleaners are a sure cure for insomnia. But during a slow moment in one group, we all sat up in our chairs on the other side of the mirror as one woman described how she shopped for glass cleaners.
She said she doesn’t look for them specifically. Instead, she said that as she’s pushing her cart down the aisle, she will notice the blue color out of the corner of her eye and reach out to snag a bottle as she passes by. We knew this category involves little to no deliberation, but this remark brought us up sharp. This wasn’t brand habit at work. This was far less involvement than that. The category leader was Windex, with many more shelf facings. If buyers were blurring out everything but the color, then almost every random reach for the blue would hook one of their bottles not ours, and our advertising was wasted.
This focus group moment was a clarifying reminder that nobody cares. But here’s the thing. It also crystallized into a brand strategy. We realized that we needed stopping power—something to get people to actually look at the labels and make a brand choice. So, we shifted some ad dollars to in-store promotions (which also made the remaining ad dollars more effective). The end-result was record share for GlassPlus.
By focusing more on in-store activities we were engaging with consumers in the moment, not asking them to think and plan a lot in advance. People want glass cleaners with as little work as possible. For GlassPlus, that meant breaking through indifference with less marketing not more—less work by consumers not more attention to our ads.
Many times, our knee-jerk response to indifference is heavy-up media spending to make our ads impossible to ignore. But it is better to work with than against the reality that, more often than not, nobody cares.
2. Tell Stories. Storytelling is the watchword of the moment in marketing research. We are finally catching up to advertising and PR. But this is not easy for anyone. In all communications, we tend to write and speak as if facts are the final word. What I’ve learned is that narrative trumps data every time.
Research has shown that stories or narrative structures are the best ways to get people to listen, learn, retain and recall. This is not to say that facts are unimportant, only that people make sense of facts in the context of a story. (This is why it’s so hard to dissuade people from wild theories about conspiracies—contrary facts feed into a suspicion that those who don’t share their beliefs are manipulating the data.)
Years ago, I did a positioning study for a leading manufacturer of turf maintenance equipment. Our project was about their residential lines. We did the usual evaluation of attributes and benefits in terms of motivating power and competitive evaluations. There were several highly motivating dimensions for which the client’s brand was uniquely perceived as strong. So, my presentation to the client was a rundown of these facts.
What I presented was pretty much the brand equivalent of a LinkedIn profile. All the facts and figures. But it felt parched, both to the client and to me. Fortunately, their ad agency pulled together my list of strengths and weaknesses into a brand story about “power.” That’s what was missing—I had all of the data but none of the story. I had brand data.
Not a brand story. I had nothing the client could say to consumers. David Ogilvy’s classic, On Advertising (1983), tells stories to teach readers the finer points of advertising practice. Let me quote two. “Writing advertising for any kind of liquor is an extremely subtle art. I once tried using rational facts to argue the consumer into choosing a brand of whiskey. It didn’t work. You don’t catch Coca-Cola advertising that Coke contains 50 percent more cola berries.” “In 1947, Harold Rudolph, who had been Research Director in Stirling Getchell’s agency, published a book on [photographs in ads]. One of his observations was that photographs with an element of ‘story appeal’ were far above average in attracting attention. This led me to put an eye-patch on the model in my advertisements for Hathaway shirts.” If we want to persuade people, it takes an eye-patch. Data are powerful, but narrative comes first.
3. Comparison Points. Everything is relative. In particular, people draw conclusions about their own well being through comparisons to other people. Notwithstanding the ongoing replication crisis roiling social psychology (and other fields of research), one thing remains unimpeachable—people understand themselves only by comparison to other people. What I’ve learned is that comparison points rule the roost.
The key to social psychology is there in the term itself—social. It is the study of how groups interact and how groups affect or influence the individuals within those groups. Social comparison is what it’s all about. For example, you will feel richer or poorer based on your comparison point. If you compare yourself to those with more to assess your own station in life, you’ll feel bad. But flip that around and you’ll feel differently. This is a mental trick you can play on yourself, and it works even though you know you’re doing it to yourself.
Martin Seligman, founder of the field of positive psychology, created a writing trick to help people with their sense of happiness and well being. It’s called the Three Blessings Exercise, and it involves writing down three good things that happened during your day each night before bed, and repeating them to yourself out loud. (It’s been vetted and validated in clinical research.) The key to this is that it changes your reference point from the bad things that day, that other research shows you are most likely to remember, to the good things that you would otherwise overlook. In doing so, your perspective is improved.
Comparison points are also the trick of persuasion. Marketers use this to create a sense of dissatisfaction by contrasting your position with others who are depicted in ads. Politicians use it, too, to influence your vote. For example, Ronald Reagan famously did this in his closing remarks during the October 28, 1980, debate with Jimmy Carter when he asked, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Yet, most of the focus in marketing is on the individual buyer. To the exclusion of the social context within which decision-making occurs. Yes, we study influencers and word-of-mouth, but we generally make a study of these factors as sources of information rather than as comparison points for defining aspirations or wants or needs. Ironically, social comparison points are used all the time in our advertising, but rarely in our modeling of the consumer shopping journey. The entanglement of the individual in a social web of self-comparisons is the superior framework for understanding consumption.
4. Minds Are Made Up. People don’t want to change their minds. Even when people say they are open to something new, it’s hard to convince them to think or act differently. It’s not that people are narrow-minded. What I’ve learned is that persuasion is hostage to convenience. Most choices are habitual. What’s familiar and known requires no work and no headspace. It’s automatic and easy. People have experience with it and know how to use it. A different choice takes time and effort. Good enough is usually sufficient. It doesn’t have to be the very best ketchup or the very best TV or the very best mobile service. Good enough will do, especially since finding something perfect takes time and effort.
In a related vein, engagement with marketing is often disagreeable. The 2023 wave of the National Customer Rage Survey found 74 percent report at least one “serious problem” with a product or service in the past year. So, people will do whatever they can to avoid more of that. There is too much information and too many options to sort through everything. At some point, the glut of abundance becomes claustrophobic. It feels overwhelming. So, people figure out a choice that works and then spend no more time or effort.
The consumer marketplace is only so interesting. People have other passions than shopping and buying. There is little upside for greater happiness or enjoyment from more time with advertising and retailing. For these reasons, among others, people make up their minds and move on. Being open to persuasion comes at the cost of inconvenience. And convenience is the biggest force in the marketplace. People will pay extra for convenience. Inconvenience is the death knell for any product, even superior performing products or products at a better price. The same is true of persuasion—the time and effort required must be small if not rewarded in exchange for attention.
5. The Message Must Deliver, Too. Most of our focus in marketing is on brand benefits. We think of messaging or communications as a way of making people aware of the benefits they’ll get from the product or service. What I’ve learned is that the message itself must deliver a beneficial experience, too. I think we know this implicitly. We want ads to be humorous or immersive or mini-movies or provocative because people enjoy ads that are stimulating and engaging. But we must try harder to keep it front and center in everything we do.
We don’t seem to think that customer service should be an enjoyable experience. We rarely think about making surveys fun to complete not just easy to answer. We populate websites and online content with dozens of interruptive pop-ups. We tread the line on privacy. All of which makes persuasion more difficult. Because a tussle is always more contentious than collaboration. Let’s make marketing enjoyable, too.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider By: Walker Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, Brand & Marketing at Kantar
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