Introduction
Organizations spend literally billions of dollars each year to get people to buy their products, support their causes, vote for their candidates, and otherwise behave in ways that are beneficial to the organization which pays for marketing, public relations, and other efforts that are largely ineffective. It is a particular problem of the present age that people are constantly bombarded with attempts to get them to change their behavior, and few of them make an impact - many get no attention at all.
Coville suggests that the principle on which many fail is simply one of relevance.
Marketers accuse the customer of being fickle and inattentive, but fail to realize that the reason people don't pay attention to them is because they are not saying anything relevant to those whose attention they wish to gain. Not only does this fail to get attention, but it trains the audience not to pay attention to you. Even if you later have something worthwhile (to them) to say, they have stopped listening on the observation that you have said nothing worth listening to in the past. You have a reputation for being irrelevant, because you have earned it.
In the modern marketplace, reputation is even more important than in the past. With a large number of vendors offering highly similar goods at highly similar prices, your relevance to the customer is your competitive advantage. Fail to remain relevant, and the customer stops listening to you, and is open to listening to your competition.
She also mentions that with the emergence of media, customers are more likely than ever before to share their opinions about companies they interact with - for better and for worse. This can cause your brand to have a reputation even to someone who has never encountered it. Where those whom you have failed spread the word that your brand is no good, you have little chance to get the attention to new prospects who have heard the bad news from their friends. Where you have won customer loyalty, the message they spread makes new customers more inclined to give you attention.
But back to the previous point: people are overwhelmed with the amount of information they are being sent by companies that want something from them. They have learned to recognize a sales pitch, and ignore it immediately. They have learned to identify brands that are not relevant to them, and ignore them as well. But by the same token, they have also learned to identify brands that are relevant to them, and they pay attention to what they have to say. This is critical - because in order to be persuasive, you must first be heard - and hopefully heard by someone who has an inclination to give serious consideration to what you are about to say.
Relevance is also the reason customer will stay with you, and will ignore the overtures of your competition. If you engage with them in a relevant manner, provide a solution to their personal needs, then form an attachment that makes it difficult for others to intrude on your relationship with that client.
Then and Now
Coville considers the complexity of modern life. Those members of older generations remember a simpler time, when people had fewer choices - because there were fewer stores, and each retailer stocked a limited selection of products.
If you wanted flour, you went to the grocery store ("the" as in the only one in town) and bought the brand of flour he stocked (same note on "the"). In the present day, there are many stores within driving distance, each store stocks a dozen different brands, and the shopper may have seen advertising for a brand that none of them carry, and can order it online or using a mobile device. So in the old days, all a flour manufacturer had to do to sell his produce was convince a grocer to stock it. Nowadays, it is much more complicated to get the brand into the store, and into the minds of customers.
Sellers could also take buyers for granted. When there was one brand of a product, buyers could take it or leave it, and those that later recognized they needed it would come crawling back. Today, that is not the case. There are many brands competing to be chosen, and a buyer can select the one that pleases him, or switch to another at will.
Add to that the identical price/product qualities and it becomes clear that there are many substitutes, and purchasing decisions are made on a different basis than merely price and quality. Increasingly, this factor is relevance: companies that demonstrate that they share the customers' values win the customer.
(EN: The author oddly seems to struggle with the notion suggesting that relevance is "that which provides meaning in our lives" or things that are "important" - I'm going with "values" because a person's values guide their choice as to what is meaningful, important, etc.)
People differ in what they consider relevant according to the things they wish to accomplish. To a student who wishes to become an artist or an architect, geometry is highly relevant, but to others it is not. This is the reason that most classes (and textbooks) begin with a promotional bit that speaks of the way in which the topic is relevant - because once a student recognizes that he will gain something from learning about it, he takes interest and will apply himself.
Concentrating on the Wrong Thing
Companies are often focused on their products, whereas customers are focused on the benefits that they will gain by using the products.
Technology companies are among the worst: they will talk about the futures, functions, and technical specifications of their devices - because that's what's important to the engineers who built it, and the source of pride in putting out a product that "beats" the competition in specific capacities that no-one without a degree in electrical engineering can understand.
Tell the customer all of this, and he will be bored senseless. Tell him that the gadget "lets you take pictures and upload them to the internet to share with friends and family" and he gets it - that's relevant, and it's what he wants to do.
(EN: In some instances, your customers are nerds who care. Computer nerds obsess about the process clock speed, and car nerds obsess over the air-to-fuel ratio. However, most people are not nerds.)
To be relevant to a customer, you have to speak to them in the terms that matter most to them, not to you.
Relevance in Three Dimensions
Coville mentions three dimensions of relevance, which will be explored in depth later, but which she will quickly summarize here:
1 Segment
Segmentation is an element of relevance, as it is not possible to be all things to all people. The more tightly you focus on a specific market segment, the more specific and accurate you can be in identifying their interests and speaking in a way that is relevant to them.
Segmentation leads to product specialization. Consider eggs: there was once only one kind of eggs, but now there are many varieties. They can be white brown. They may be organic, locally sourced, freshly laid, free-range, and so on. Each of these qualities is relevant to a specific market segment
Even the packaging material might be the trigger that prompts a customer to choose one over another: a paper, plastic, or polystyrene carton. Or it may be that one brand supports a charitable cause with which the buyers identify.
2 Intangibles
The author mentions four key intangibles that will influence the way in which customers will respond:
- Logic - Whether the offer you are making makes sense to them, on a logical and functional level
- Sensory Appeal - Whether the appearance, sound, scent, taste, or texture of the item is appealing or repulsive to them
- Community - What they expect the opinions of others would be
- Values - Whether there are moral or philosophical issues involved
Many times, users are not able to articulate these items, or may be reluctant to do so, but they impact their consideration of your proposal. Consider the person who chooses one car over another because they like the color, even when the trade-off means the car whose color they like lacks a feature they expressed was very important.
3 Circumstances
Some relevance occurs through content, context, and source:
- Content - The words and images of the message itself may create a sense of connection or disconnection.
- Context - The situation in which the message is received. A person may feel something is relevant at certain times but not at others, or in the context of certain events and not others
- Source - The source of information will sometimes cause the message to be accepted or rejected. A small child giving advice about tax accounting would not be taken seriously, even if he happens to be correct.
Coville dwells a bit on an age-old problem of teens ignoring adults. For decades, anti-smoking campaigns figuring doctors, teachers, and other authority figures went unheeded, and even became the subject of sarcasm and derision. It was not until they started using different spokespeople - other teens, musicians, and others whom the audience found to be attractive - that the message started to be heard.
The Relevance Challenge
Another bulleted list of things that make relevance difficult to achieve:
- There are many choices available to customers, which means advertisers can no longer "sell" the product, but must convince them of the specific relevance of the brand. Advertising that promotes only the product effectively promotes all brands - including your competitors' brands.
- Younger generations are more individualistic than their elders and more diverse in their culture, which means that it is harder now to make a single brand relevant to many customers than when the audience was a "melting pot" and people wanted to fit in with their neighbors rather than express their individuality.
- You are no longer the only voice speaking about your brand, which means people hear more from one another (and believe one another more) than they do from your official communications efforts.
- The markets are constantly shifting, which means that if you identify a profitable segment that is being under-served, your competitors will quickly move in to attempt to become relevant to them
Stages of Relevance
Coville defines five stages of behavior change:
- Pre-contemplation: an individual is satisfied with the status quo and isn't considering making a change, though they may be receiving information that will move them to the next stage.
- Contemplation: an individual is actively contemplating a change, asking themselves whether it will be worthwhile. When they are convinced that it is, they move on to the next stage.
- Preparation: people don't turn on a dime, but general think about what they need to do before doing it, particularly when they are changing from an established habit or procedure
- Action: they take action that constitutes a change from previous behavior.
- Maintenance: the difference between doing something differently once and adopting it as a new normal involves deducting oneself to perpetuating the change - which is only solidified when the change was satisfactory
(EN: The connection to relevance seems rather sketchy here - though it can be inferred that each of these decisions is evaluated based on personal interest and personal experience, such that an experience that is satisfactory for one person may not be satisfactory to another)