2 - The Advertising Ecosystem
The world of advertising has been increasingly fragmented, both in the customers' experience of advertisements in the various channels they use as well as within marketing departments, in which the brand is subdivided among individuals with domain assignments (a channel, campaign, a product, or a market segment) whose work tends to be very poorly coordinated.
In essence, no-one is minding the store, such that there is not any holistic sense nor informed management of the total messaging that is intended to reach any given customer profile and companies may be entirely unaware of the complete set of messages have been sent from their own business units for any given product.
Customers make no such distinctions, and expect that the messaging they receive in various channels is coordinated by the brand, and have little tolerance for conflicting messages. If anything, this further serves to discredit the brand's authority to speak on its own behalf - which should be reason enough to more carefully manage and coordinate advertising efforts.
Always in motion
The author describes a theoretical model he borrowed from a committee of an international advertising industry association. Instead of a process, they describe a circular model that is always in motion, with no starting or finishing point, which more accurately describes the situation when advertising is an ongoing process and customers do not enter or exit a linear process at a specific point.
He stresses that the model puts "the human" rather than a consumer, customer, or prospect at its center because advertising reaches many who are not contained within those categories - and while advertisers prefer to ignore the messages received by unintended targets as meaningless, it becomes quite meaningful when they later become a purchaser or influencer in a buying decision.
(EN: I recall a premium car manufacturer who recognized that marketing begins very early. A person may become aware of and fascinated with cars early in childhood, and this impression will govern their later purchasing choices. Even those who would purchase their vehicles are considered important, because their brand has great esteem and part of the benefit sought by customers is being admired and envied by those who cannot afford it.)
It's also mentioned that people are much more complex than in the past: the same person is a consumer, an employee, a citizen, a shareholder, and an activist. He encounters numerous people in numerous contexts in his daily life and considers not only his own needs as a consumer, but the impressions that others will form of him by citrate of his consumption. So his purchase decisions go beyond needs and budget to the political and social implications of patronizing a brand.
Returning to the model, it consists of a number of "spheres" with the human being at the center of the model, and all other aspects overlapping it as well as interacting with one another.
The central sphere: the human
The individual person is at the center of this model, as without him nothing else matters. People are still considered by advertisers according to their demographic characteristics, attitudes and behaviors, lifestyles, motives, and psychological drivers. It must be recognized that people are not all the same, and even within narrowly defined segments there is a great deal of variation.
Knowing the person whom you are targeting is critical - to determine what will be most effective and relevant in reaching him, as well as determining whether his potential to provide revenue over the course of his lifetime makes it worthwhile to pursue his business at all.
The more you understand about the person, the greater your potential to succeed in sending him a message that will motivate him to consider your brand. The less you understand, the less focused and successful your efforts will be.
The vehicle access and information acquisition sphere
This sphere represents the media mix that will deliver your messaging to the consumer, which will include a mix of both traditional and new media, as well as channels of communication that are not generally considered to be media. Each method of communication has advantages and disadvantages, that make it more or less effective in delivering a specific message to a specific user at a specific time.
Each given medium can be analyzed according to parameters such as the audience size, audience composition, consumption habits, etc. but this must all be done with an eye toward your target market: a medium with a large audience of people who are not likely to be customers, or which reaches customers at the wrong time, or which reaches low-value customers, may not be as effective as one that reaches a small number of prospects highly likely to purchase and become regulars at an opportune time.
The campaign creative and scheduling sphere
This sphere considers the message itself, both in terms of its content and the manner in which it is scheduled, particularly in terms of four qualities:
- Style - Determines whether prospects will have a positive enough first-glance reaction to be receptive to the message it is intended to deliver
- Context - Considers the environment in which the advertisement will be consumed. For example, the editorial content of a magazine in which a print ad is placed can influence the reaction and determine if it's noticed at all.
- Branding - The ability to create a strong enough impression of the brand and associate it to a product that the prospect will remember it when making a purchasing decision at a later time
- Message - Whether the core message transmitted by the advertisement is persuasive, relevant, credible, and useful to the recipient.
In terms of scheduling, this involves questions of when it will be seen - both in terms of the reach and frequency of the advertising impact, but also considering how receptive the recipient will be to the advertising message at the moment he receives the message.
The brand history and meaning sphere
An advertisement does not give a recipient an entire impression of a brand, but is merely the most recent impression the recipient will have. It is important to remember that any message is received and interpreted in the context of the consumer's memory, which includes any former contact he may have with the brand.
A few specific parameters are mentioned:
- Awareness - Whether the consumer has even heard of your brand, or recognize the products or services related to the brand.
- Salience - Whether the consumer would be likely to notice the brand or consider it in purchase situations
- Knowledge - The information the customer has received about the brand, even that received long in the past, that shapes his present conception of what it means.
- Prior Usage - Has the consumer used your brand in the past? The experiences of shopping and purchasing are also to be considered, but there are instances in which a person used a brand they did not purchase or select.
- Attitude - The way that the customer "feels" about the brand, considering all the knowledge and experience he has about it.
The acquisition experience sphere
This area concerns the complete range of acquisition experiences in every channel - recognizing that in instances where the advertising works, the prospect must go through one of these channels to complete the purchase, and that they may drop out if the acquisition is too difficult or out of alignment with the expectations set in the advertising message.
The consumer reaction sphere
The behavioral reaction to advertising should be considered. This should be extended to consider pre-purchasing behavior (visit a web site or join an online community, spread word-of-mouth about the ad), the nature of the purchase (getting new users to try the brand or loyal ones to purchase more often), and post-purchase behaviors (whether the purchase made as a result of the ad leads to a string of additional purchases).
AIDA and ADIA: The best of both worlds
The author provides a quick review of the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, and action as the four steps in the selection of a given brand) that is used for new customer acquisition. (EN: I'm skipping the detail as it's well known.)
A second model uses a similar acronym, ADIA, which is focused on customer retention, and is not necessarily linear in its nature but suggests four tasks to address with customers after the purchase:
- Acknowledgement - Thanking the customer for their business.
- Dialogue - Attempting to remain engaged with the customer after the purchase to encourage the next, or at the very least to keep your brand in their memory.
- Incentive - Recognize and reward customers to create a sense of reciprocity that encourages future purchasing
- Activation - Collaborate with customers, particularly the highly enthusiastic ones, to encourage them to take action to promote the brand to others
While there are debates about the relative merits and demerits of AIDA and ADIA, some dismissing them as outdated simply because they have stood the test of time, there has not been a replacement system that has been found to be effective in practice (EN: I've also noticed that many seem to dismiss "old" concepts but their suggested replacement is often a paraphrase or rearrangement.)
It's of importance to note that the two are not at all contradictory, but deal with different tasks (new customer acquisition versus existing customer retention) - so the answer to the question of "AIDA or ADIA" is "both, in that order." (EN: This is oversimplified, as the question arises when budgets are limited as to whether to spend on retention or acquisition, and there is no single answer because it depends on the buying patterns for a specific market segment, given the product, though acquisition often wins out when firms are looking for short-term results or take retention for granted.)
Reintegration
The problem faced by the majority of companies is the reintegration of their marketing departments. The larger and older the firm, the more disintegrated its marketing efforts have likely become. But even new firms may create separate "teams" to deal with a specific channel (the social media team that pops up, sometimes outside the marketing department), a specific product, or a specific market segment, with no communication among them. To further complicate matters, a flock of different agencies or consultancies are engaged to help with different pieces of the whole - which does not function as a "whole" for having been fragmented.
The greatest obstacle to reintegration is organizational: the different departments that are responsible for marketing efforts can be expected to defend their own territories, often motivated by the defense of their own interest. For example, if the PR department manages the company's Facebook presence, they may fear that turning it over to marketing means it will no longer serve as a vehicle for corporate relations.
There is also the matter of the broad range of interests: "the public" consists of people who are customers, investors, partners, potential employees, and other roles - and quite often one individual serves in a number of roles. To give each department with an interest a fair hearing would result in a bureaucracy of immense size, decreasing the timeliness and effectiveness of communications.
The author suggests that "integration does not have to mean stifling uniformity" and that there can be "significant rewards" to taking an integrated approach. (EN: he does not provide a list of rewards or a suggestion of how to avoid stodginess, though.)