Is your brand a few bars short of a symphony?

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How music and sound can help to capture the hearts of more customers

Is your brand fit for the fight? Of course it is.

I bet your mission, vision and values are all nailed, glued and velcroed down and that your brand promise will never ever be broken. I’m equally sure that key tints of the colour palette are in place, there’s a crystal-clear tone of voice and an x-height demilitarised zone around the logo. (I’m guessing it sits in a corner and is never reversed out of a full-colour image. Right?)

All good so far. But can you describe to yourself, your colleagues, and your customers what your brand actually sounds like?

If not, why?

Visual consistency and tonally-compliant writing are your table stakes – critical yet necessary.

However, marketers looking to make meaningful connections know that well-developed sonic attributes can help their brand perform at its brilliant best.

Beethoven’s Dopamine Symphony

The last two decades have given us endless sonic brand triggers and a plethora of brand sound designs wide enough to make Phil Spector’s wig spin.

But research has proven that hearing songs that we like triggers a dopamine release. And, as we all know, dopamine = pleasure. But, interestingly, even the anticipation of hearing likeable songs, or upcoming parts of songs, is enough to release dopamine in some people.

Beethoven, it’s reckoned, used anticipation expertly in many of his scores. He would define the tonic chord, then never actually play complete versions of the tonic until the very end…finally fulfilling audiences’ expectations and letting loose a commensurate deluge of dopamine in the run-up.

Clever huh?

Now, imagine a pleasurable song happened to be your brand’s sound. Suddenly, you’re engaging with customers on a very different, multi-sensory level. You’re making them happy. They want to hear from you. They feel positive about your brand. So they’re more likely to tell others. What’s not to like?

But wait. It gets even better.

There is solid evidence that music can actually change the type of attention we are paying to the world around us. Iain McGilchrist (author of The Master and his Emissary) proposes that listening to music in a major key, or with a simple rhythm, tends to attract the narrow-focused attention that we use our left brain to generate. Conversely, McGilchrist argues that minor key songs, or those with a more complex time signature, tend to attract the more open attention of the right brain.

Could bespoke deliver an even better ROI?

Music is beautifully abstract, yet very powerful. It’s pure escapism, guiding emotions effortlessly through major and minor tones. And it’s memorable. Why else would we claim to suffer from ‘earworms’ or use phrases like “the soundtrack of my life/year/day”?

In practical terms, music and sound can make a congress experience more memorable; they can help an e-detail or other face-to-face sales piece create a more vivid experience by supporting the tone of the piece as the story develops.

Four watchouts when creating sonic branding

Creating the right sonic landscape for your brand could be the best commercial commitment you make this year. But it’s wise to beware the pitfalls. Wary treading is essential, as is the need to follow these recommendations:

  1. Commit to making sound an integral part of your brand’s architecture and devote concerted energy to getting it absolutely right.
  2. Determine the role(s) that sound will play in your brand’s presence – do you need it to support content, help lead the conversation, introduce innovations?
  3. Think carefully about the character of your brand and decide how best to reflect this in a brief.
  4. Diversify the talent you involve in your brand’s sound creation. Don’t be afraid to mix creatives, planners, colleagues, and music professionals.

If you need any further help, my Bontempi organ is plugged in and ready to go! You hum it, I’ll play it.

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Got a technology question? Steve Jobs still has the answer.

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A client recently asked us for our opinion on which technology software solutions could best support the creation of customer journey mapping within their company.

It reminded me of a famous Steve Jobs YouTube clip from the 1997 Apple worldwide developer conference. There he was, in his trademark black polo neck, perched casually on a bar stool, taking questions from the floor. There’s a good chance you might have seen it too as it’s been watched by millions of people.

One man in the audience stood up and says: “Mr. Jobs; you are a bright and influential man” (so far so good) but then he added, “…it’s sad and clear that, on several counts, you don’t know what you are talking about. I would like you, to express in clear terms, how say, Java addresses the ideas embodied in OpenDoc…”

Essentially, what this man was saying to Steve Jobs was: “you don’t understand the technology”. His answer to the challenge was: “You’ve got to start with customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology.” And everyone knows how well Apple grew under Steve Jobs.

And this is perhaps the best answer to any question that starts with “Which technology can help us with…?” We are often involved in meetings where it becomes clear that there’s a belief, a hope, that technology might answer a bigger strategic need. But that’s a dangerous place to be. The only way to effectively answer the “which technology…” questions is to first ask “what are the needs we are trying to meet – and what is the customer / user experience that we are trying to create?”.

At wethepeople, we believe that understanding people, and how they behave, must always come first. We build marketing strategies and campaigns using techniques based on how our minds have evolved to function. If you are interested in how wethepeople can accelerate the effectiveness of your marketing activity, and indeed help you to answer the big technology questions, then get in touch.

Why apps that fail to reward ultimately end up failing

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I was in a client meeting the other day when I was asked a very blunt question. We were talking about behaviour change, gamification and apps. His question was simple. “Why do many apps, gamified or not, suck and fail?”

From a fail point of view, probably the main cause of failure is that no one ever sees them. All the money went on dev with nothing left for promotion, the cause of death for many an app.

The second reason is that the usage opportunities are so narrow there’s little point in having an app. Staying at a hotel chain the other day I was invited to download their app “to chat live with a host”. Really? I can’t just ring room service or talk to the concierge? I’m sure that it does other stuff but if this is their lead functionality, unless I am mainlining this chain’s loyalty programme, that download is never going to happen.

These two are pretty obvious, as are their solution. Don’t spend all the cash on dev, have a plan to promote your app. Don’t develop an app that only you need…

Another fail is the experience itself. This is more subtle…

The experience, particularly in health, may well not be all fun but could be challenging, interesting or even plain hard work at times. The key is that it must be rewarding. This too is a concept clearly understood by the mobile gaming industry. Many games contain an element of the “grind”. This is when, at points during the game, you have to carry out repetitive tasks in order to achieve a better level/equipment/skills which allows more interesting stuff to happen.

The way that this is handled should be of enormous interest to anyone wanting to harness gamification techniques to drive behaviour change. It is well documented that our brains release dopamine – a key reward neurotransmitter – both when we get a reward and/or achieve an objective and in anticipation of that reward or achievement.

It’s easy to see how this could work from a health behaviour change perspective. Starting with simple day-to-day objectives and tiny changes which are rewarded, then building harder to complete multiple missions around diet, smoking, activity, health education etc. with each carrying increasing perceived rewards. The piece about perceived rewards is key. The rewards experienced via dopamine can be triggered virtually as effectively as in reality.  This explains why so many millions of hours have been eaten by Candy Crush Saga™…

So the three main answers to my client’s question are as follows:

  1. they’re invisible
  2. they’re not useful
  3. they’re not rewarding

You might just survive getting one wrong (as long as it’s not the first one) but good luck surviving two!

 

The Fall and Rise of Useful Advertising

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Remember when programmatic was going to effortlessly turn DDA (digital display advertising) into a push-button instant revenue generator for clients, agencies and media owners alike? As we all know, this prophecy hasn’t quite turned out as many would have hoped. But fear not. As Joe Hoyle explains, the digital world is well-served by opportunities to fulfil everyone’s and every brand’s qualities and ambitions.

Programmatic tools were widely deemed to be the promised land for digital display advertising (at least that’s what the media industry wanted us to believe).

However, it didn’t count on the power of consumers to deploy their own new set of powerful tools, effectively enabling them to ’cock a snook’ at the advertisers and their agencies who were producing a glut of ubiquitous, lazy creative that followed them around the web like a bad smell.

And it’s a real shame, because brands can most certainly advertise, entertain and sell products and services, whilst still delivering useful customer experience as added value that will engage the audience.

Back in 2008, online display advertising was starting to get really interesting – both technologically and creatively. There was an opportunity to start delivering real, tangible super-rich customer experiences inside new, larger-format display units that could be targeted to specific users and even personalised in terms of their content. In parallel, programmatic media buying was gathering pace.

Things were looking up for advertisers. They were about to be armed with tools that would allow them to buy media on the fly at much better value, target more accurately and progressively re-message to encourage consumers further into the purchase funnel. We were even starting to look at producing commerce-enabled campaigns.

A step back

However, things didn’t go exactly to plan. It quickly became obvious that the new media technologies couldn’t serve or interrogate the more advanced and intelligent creative that was being produced. As a result, the industry ditched creative innovation in favour of simply following the media money until advertisers became disgruntled with the return to basic creative messaging and a meaningless 0.01% CTR.

The stark legacy of this practise is an industry that has clearly become more and more inward-looking over the last few years. Also, it has completely disregarded the audience and, in turn, its clients’ needs. What it also precipitated was a general widening in the gap between the creative and planning departments.

An integrated approach

So what’s the answer to this? First and foremost, we need to adopt a completely new creative approach to digital advertising… one that intelligently combines all tools at the disposal of creatives and planners and encourages them to work more closely to realise digital’s true potential. Hopefully, campaigns will then become much more integrated, using a combination of channels and mobile devices as a enablers rather than standalone channels.

Putting users first for Vodafone McLaren Mercedes

In our experience, the best results come when campaigns put users’ needs at the forefront of the strategic planning phase.

When the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 team approached us a few years ago, they initially wanted us to stream a selection of HD videos inside our proprietary display unit. They wanted to create a distributable channel inside a media unit that could be seeded in paid media and blogs then shared across fledgling social media and earned, free media.

This was all well and good (not to mention also being a media first) but something was missing. We felt that the audience we were targeting would be more engaged with another data set that was available. So, we set about taking the difficult steps to persuade the racing team to provide is with the live telemetry from the two McLaren cars of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button. And it worked.

Over an extended campaign of four years using essentially the same unit with updated functionality and content – much like an app these days – we delivered 10% interaction rates and astounding 32-minute interaction time during practice, qualifying and race sessions.

Lessons we’d all do well to learn

There are several key take-outs from our work for Vodafone Maclaren Mercedes, and subsequent campaigns that still ring true.

First, campaigns don’t just have to advertise, they have to engage and fulfil.

In the campaign for Vodafone Maclaren Mercedes,  the content channel was as critical as the content itself. As someone once said, “if no-one can hear you scream, you may as well whisper for help!”.

Secondly, programmatic and fast-pace retargeting deliver highly-sought efficiencies for clients and their brands – the real challenge is to reignite a passion for innovative and successful advertising that engages within this landscape.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, people – be they customers or marketers – will always find a way around limitations. The best way to make this work is to collaborate, co-create and re-imagine together.

Read the full Vodafone McLaren Mercedes case study

Are you making the classic multichannel marketing mistake?

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When we consider MCM it is vital that we remember what the last ‘M’ stands for – Philip Kotler defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit”. Fundamentally, this still defines how we approach marketing strategy and MCM as an integral part of that.

From an MCM point of view, one common definition brings together most of the required elements:

“Multichannel marketing refers to the practice of interacting with customers using a combination of indirect and direct communication channels – websites, retail stores, mail order catalogs, direct mail, email, mobile, etc. – and enabling customers to take action in response – preferably to buy your product or service – using the channel of their choice. In the most simplistic terms, multichannel marketing is all about choice.”

For me, the key take-out is that it’s all about customer need and choice, ie the customer chooses the channel so they are in control. Therefore, the multichannel approach is built firmly around customers to meet their needs.

None of the definitions that I could find says that MCM is a way of using different media, built around the sales force, to deliver a sales story.

“So what?”, you might ask. Well, the reason I am writing this is that I have just read a recent piece (2016) by IMS titled ’The Essential European Revolution: Why Multichannel is Vital to Europe’.

The key success factors that they identified in their lead case study make interesting reading:

  • Content is king: Doctors seek content that is interesting and useful to them – rep personalisation of content and feedback on what doctors use enables reps to further establish
  • Empowering the reps in the move to multichannel is vital: Regional multichannel rep “ambassadors” understand the need for change and can effectively communicate the benefits of a multichannel approach
  • Digital enhancement of each rep’s effectiveness and reach

As an observation, “content is king” has been true since we learned how to smudge pictures onto cave walls, but do doctors really want representatives to filter it for them? The last two points really frame why this thinking is problematic.

For me, the big questions are “where is the customer?” and “where is the mobile revolution?”. IMS are talking multichannel selling here, not multichannel marketing.

This is the crux of the problem. And it’s not simply semantics; there is a key difference here. Yes, in multichannel sales we use limited channels, controlled by us, to tell the customer what we want to say. But that’s very different to multichannel marketing. And, if companies like IMS make this basic error, it isn’t surprising that it is still a common misapprehension in the industry.

Google talk about “winning the moments that matter” when building multichannel strategies. This entails creating approaches around our customers, their needs and behaviours to ensure that we are there with the right mix of push and pull interactions whenever key information is being sought or key decisions are being reached. Or, as Byron Sharp terms it, “building memory structures that trigger recollection of our brands at those points”. So we still get to say what we need to say, but at points where it is much more relevant to the customer.

If we wish to be successful we need to build our strategy and infrastructure around those objectives. Delivering the selling story is part of that, but can’t define its totality.

Maintaining focus on our customers’ needs and how we meet them, as part of the overall marketing strategy, in an integrated way, is much more likely to lead to success than sawing off a part of that, labelling it MCM and somehow treating it as a separate activity.

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