Marketers constantly ask their customers what they want/need from their products and services. They run focus groups, do usability studies, hire design experts, scour data for product-use trends, etc., etc.

So why don’t they ever ask customers what they want/need from marketing communications? (and I don’t mean the standard “how can we communicate with you more effectively?” kind of thing. I mean straight up, as in “what do you want from us which can be delivered to you online, in the mail, on TV or via some other medium”??)

We are always going to promote good/services with some form of marketing communications or another. In the past this was largely an interruptive process, now the best markers offer their customers communications that are inherently valuable/useful (e.g., OfficeMax’s “Elf Yourself”).

Why not just ask them what they need (e.g., content, digital utilities or peer-networking utilities) and offer it, along with some non-obtrusive indication that your brand is the one supplying the goods?

One role the Strategic Planning Group @ PHD is happy to play in the life of the agency is to provoke critical thought (media-based or otherwise). When such attempts resonate, they can inspire news ways of looking at targeting, behavior, communications, etc. To this end, we’ve been offering a monthly respite from the rigors of daily work called “Inspiration Sessions”; an opportunity to quit Excel, turn the Blackberry off, and think about something explicitly provocative (and implicitly relevant).

A recent session featured Jill Botway, Omnicom’s President of US Strategic Business Units and first female member of the prestigious Explores Club. Jill discussed what she had learned about teamwork while exploring previously uncharted regions of Indonesia with a room filled with media planning/buying professionals.

In another approach to inspiration, we have conducted “White Sessions.” White Sessions, like white papers, are intended to offer up deep dives into issues otherwise considered too technical for casual consumption. Unlike white papers, however, White Sessions harness the power of video to present content that is actually inspiring, as presented by people who are actual experts in their field.

Last Friday we had a White Session based on a TED presentation by Wade Davis (A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence). Wade’s mind-boggling talk covers his experiences with cultures radically different than our own, encountered in his anthropological and ethno-botanical studies.

As media professionals, we are often required to profile/segment groups of people by their attitudes and behaviors. Wade’s talk certainly explodes the idea that the variables we use to define/describe groups of consumer are fixed, or necessary properties. My belief is that we can become better observers of culture by realizing just how arbitrary culture actually is…

In the past, marketing communications have largely interrupted otherwise valuable media-based experiences (e.g., that Chia Pet ad in the 80’s which interrupted your enjoyment of Jack Tripper’s comedic fumblings).

The emerging media paradigm, however, casts marketing communications AS valuable experiences in their own right (think Office Max’s ‘Elf Yourself’).

Add to this the idea that we’ve clearly moved from passivity to activity in our interactions with media over the last two decades (i.e., from passive receivers in a 3-4 network world, to active RSS-feed-establishing/YouTube-content-creating mavens).

(This move, incidentally, is consistent with my generation’s fascination with technology. TiVo, instant messaging, iPods; while fascinating to children of the 80’s and earlier, are largely unremarkable to younger consumers, who see technology as a given [the way we see toasters]…They seem only to ‘notice’ technlogy when it fails them.)

The upshot? I believe that we are headed for a NEW PASSIVITY in media; with the Googles/iLikes of the world anticipating what we want to consume (based, clearly, on our searches and tech-facilitated interactions with people, places and things) and serving it up for us in easy, non-intrusive, easily-configured contexts.

In the future, we’ll turn it on (whatever ‘it’ is) and it will just deliver loads of customized content (plus contextual ads and/or sponsorships, of course).

From passivity, to activity…to the ‘new passivity’.

The May ‘07 issue of Creativity opens with a POV from Brian Collins - former head of Ogilvy’s Brand Integration Group - in which he criticizes a common metaphor in the development of communications; the rampant use of ‘us vs. them’ heuristics in the development of marketing communications.

“War is the wrong metaphor for marketing. How can we think we’ll inspire hearts and minds when we drive “penetration” by launching “campaigns” against “target demographics”? When I go around agencies and see conference rooms rebranded as War Rooms, it makes my teeth hurt.”

While Brian makes this statement in defense of a larger observation about changes taking place in the agency world, I feel that he’s made a very important point here. One that we - as communications professionals - should take to heart.

“Disruption,” “The Promise to the Viewer,” “roadblocking”…why do we feel that we must be so forceful and contentious in our efforts to persuade? When’s the last time you distrupted or roadblocked when trying to get a friend to join you at a concert, or when asking someone out?? When we engage in acts of interpersonal persuasion in our own lives, we typically use subtle, gentle overatures. We are gracious, thankful, complementary and seductive. More likely to tempt, tickle or tease…not beat someone over the head with it!

Just think of the door-to-door salesman who changes his tone of voice, language and body language when attempting to make a connection with a potential customer. Why should we be any different? And while we have typically used the blunt tools of mass marketing in the past, the Internet is changing this everyday.

The point is this: If you want to affect someone positively (as 99.9% of marketing communications are intended to do), then speak to them with respect and choose your words with the kind of nuance that comes from knowing something about them. If your approach to marketing communications is wildly different (in principle) than your approach to everyday interpersonal persuasion, than you should probably re-examine your assumptions.

The Washington Post conducted an intriguing social experiment in April; they had the 2007 Avery Fisher Prize winning violinist Joshua Bell play his gazillion-dollar Strad in a D.C. Metro station during the morning rush in order to assess commuter reactions to live, world-class musicianship in their train station.

Would people stop and listen?

Only 7 (!) of the 1,070 people who passed Bell that morning made any conspicuous attempt to listen to the virtuoso; someone who routinely commands $100+ a ticket for scheduled performances.

The moral: People in D.C. don’t like classical music? Joshua Bell shouldn’t quit his day job??

Actually, the experiment highlights the crucial role of context when assessing the impact of any communication (after all, ‘music-from-a-violin’ is just as much a communication as, say, ‘:30 Jeep ad during an NFL game’).

The Post invoked Kant in their analysis: “…In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.” (emphasis added)

As connections-engineers, we need to be mindful of the conditions that may affect our targets’ reception of our clients’ messages. As the Bell experiment demonstrates, even the most compelling ‘creative’ can fall on deaf ears if not placed strategically.

This idea will be obvious to many mar-com types, but I believe it’s worth repeating. Often.

Ads don’t sell anything.

Marketing communications merely suggest a way of seeing, thinking or feeling about something. They offer a ‘context of interpretation’ for a product, service or, in the case of our client Discovery Communications, a content source.

Here’s the trick: If you’ve made the right inference about what this belief, thought or feeling should be (given the target’s worldview and any existing beliefs/thoughts/feeling about the brand being promoted), then you just might motivate the intended behavior or attitude (a sale, a brand affiliation, some kind of purchase intent, etc.).

(This assumes, of course, that the person receiving the message has access to the product, has the appropriate funds, isn’t disposed to buy a competitive product, hasn’t had a-deal-breaker-of-an-experience with your company, service or product…hasn’t decided to renounce worldly possessions in religious observance, etc., etc. Taken all together, issues like these are considerable.)

One should consider this when establishing success criteria for a communications effort. If you focus only on market share, ratings, or some other transaction-like behavior, then I think you’ve underestimated the complexity (and subtlety) of the communications process…

I believe that TV content ‘works’ to the extent that it offers up narratives which allow/elicit the mental participation of the viewer ‘in’ the narrative (i.e., it causes a “projection” [in the technical, psychological sense]). Think of someone escaping their own life for a half-hour while projecting themselves into the shinanegans of the Entourage posse on HBO, for instance.

The questions is; how do narratives that work well for women differ from those that work well for men (if at all)?

I think the conventional (read: naive) view is that women prefer idealized/romantic contexts while men are more into realistic/rational contexts. Ironically, it seems that just the opposite tends to be the case.

Compare a man watching a pro football game and a woman watching Oprah (just to be brazen about it); at a deep (possibly subcionscious) level, the man is projecting into the game as warrior, blinged-out pro, hometown hero, or some other idealized sense-of-self, while the woman is wondering how she might react to the relationship or real-life issue being addressed by Ms. Winfrey.

Perhaps media planners should consider this when place messages for male- or female-skewing targets. It may even be an insight that Discovery, TLC, The Travel Channel and/or HBO can use in their programming efforts…

When crafting a communications strategy, marketers and their agencies often clash over the relative importance of product details and brand imagery. A brand manager may be convinced that his product will appeal to the market because it does X, Y or Z (usually X, Y AND Z [!]), while the account planner may feel that product loyalty is basically an irrational impulse which feeds on established brand narratives and/or associations. “Brandtailing,” message mixes, earned/paid media synergies and several other approaches have sought to reconcile this brand vs. product debate.

The recent Mac TV campaign (you’ve seen ‘em; the ones with cool-guy/tool-guy representing Mac/PC) seem to resolve the debate by essentially being product-attribute messages that are so couched in brand imagery that the ads just feel like “brand ads.”

The message of each ad is fairly technical (e.g., with Macs you don’t need to use a ‘wizard’ or other software intermediary when using peripherals, or Macs have a magnet-secured power connection which keeps them from being thrown to the ground when someone trips on the cord, etc.). However, when these less-than-titillating bits of information are served up metaphorically, with an approachably clever personality and that clean, ‘designy’ aesthetic, it just feels Mac-like, and (at least for me) elicits some of the same feelings I associate with other, uncompromisingly ‘brand-heavy’ Mac ads.

This highlights the importance of “brand behavior” (a concept at the heart of the PHD approach to communications strategy). Given the way the Mac brand has behaved over the years (i.e., a heavy brand-building emphasis), when Apple speaks out about one of its product attributes, we feel that the attribute is simply an expected consequence of the brand personality (it’s like a celebrity’s re-entering rehab being written about in a gossip magazine; have we really learned something about the person, or have we just been presented with yet another reminder of what we’ve come to expect from the celeb?).

The upshot: If your brand behaves consistently — and with a meaningful narrative — even your unsexy-product-attribute messages can elicit visceral brand-associations.

“Of course you don’t need wizards with a Mac; Apple’s all about easy and intuitive use.”

In a previous life, as a consultant working on the development of TV content (via www.arcllc.com), I found the following (oversimplified) account of how TV content ‘works’ to be very useful. The idea is that successful TV content ‘works’ to the extent that it allows the viewers to feel good about themselves, which typically means at least one (or some combination) of the following narrative-types are at play:

“Escape TV”

Escape TV comes in two major flavors; ‘escape to fantasy’ and ‘escape to the familiar.’ Fantasy-escapes are those narratives which allow the viewer to leave his life momentarily and project into an idealized life; a life where he can be wealthier, better-looking, more athletic, or some other desired state of being. Sports programming, for example, often provides such an escape.

Familiar-escapes, on the other hand, take several ‘everyday’ — but notable — experiences and build them into an easily digested period of time (a single ‘Seinfeld’ episode, for instance). Taken together, this series of otherwise-standard events becomes greater (funnier, more interesting) than the sum of its parts. The psychological consequence is the self-realization “my life looks/feels like that…I must be OK.”

“Embarrassment TV”

This is most reality programming and is most clearly demonstrated in content like ‘The Jerry Springer Show’. By observing the failures of others, the viewer consciously (or unconsciously) thinks “wow…I’m glad my life doesn’t look like that”, which makes the viewer feel OK about him/herself.

“Edification TV”

Highly relevant to PHD client Discovery Communications, this type of content (Discovery Health, The Science Channel, etc.) is often considered attractive to the extent that it teaches the viewer something. And while some segment of the audience may indeed learn something, for others the appeal is really more about – you guessed it – the viewer feeling good (proud, perhaps) that he is the kind of person who actually cares about this kind of thing.

(Let’s face it…if it were really about acquiring facts, wouldn’t the viewer just go online instead?)

This affect is almost always unconscious, but evidence that it’s there can be elicited in qualitative research. It is an affect that seems to be reinforced by other types of TV content (as in “No, I’m not going to waste my time with insect-eating on ‘Fear Factor’…I’d much rather learn how nylon and spandex become pantyhose on ‘How it’s Made’.”).

The upshot: Brand-engagement and media strategies that reinforce these (perhaps unconscious) attitudes of escape, embarrassment and edification may resonate like TV content itself does (e.g., online forums which encourage Anthony Bourdain fans to share [or invent] their own adventure-eating experiences).