Two: Experiencing the Brand
There are credible claims that mass marketing is heading toward extinction with the disintegration of the mass media: while television, newspapers, and magazines are still available, their audience is diminishing in favor of digital media in which customers are more discerning in their own consumption and less tolerant of the intrusion of commercial messaging.
While the media are decaying, the principle of branding remains: brands still need to gain awareness, still need to communicate their unique qualities and benefits, and still need to instruct the buyer how to obtain them. The media and tools may change, but the task remains the same.
One fundamental change that brands must face is the lack of credibility in the new media. The brand is not the only voice, nor the loudest voice, nor the most credible voice to the market, who have come to recognize the tactics they once used to deliver false promises to an unsuspecting public. It will take quite some time to restore the trust that has been broken.
In the present market, branding is more about what you do than what you say
Mass marketing may be going the way of the dinosaur, but we would never suggest the principle of branding is on its deathbed. The need to establish and sustain name recognition and associative benefits will always be a part of the competent marketer's stock in trade. However, the complex and interconnected relationships between emerging media and the information they now make available mean that name recognition and associations alone are insufficient. Increasingly, customers are associating brand not with a message but with their entire experiences surrounding the product or service. In other words, branding is now more about what others say about you than what you say about yourself - and what other people say depends not on your words, but your deeds.
Being heard, then being believed, are the first two obstacles a brand faces. The next hurdle, and one that is critical in motivating customers to purchase, is answering their question: what's in it for me?
Maslow's Hierarchy
The author refers to Maslow, whose 1943 "Hierarchy of Human Needs" classified the motivators of people into basic classes, from the most urgent needs of immediate survival to the most dispensable needs such as achieving personal aspirations. His original point was that a rational person attempts to satisfy basic needs before climbing the hierarchy to address needs on a higher level.
Additionally, but less famously, Maslow separated deficit needs from growth needs. That is to say that a need such as hunger, which results in pain if it is not addressed, is a stronger motivator of behavior than one such as self-expression, which produces pleasure when it is achieved but no discomfort if it is delayed.
From a marketing perspective, advertisers have used the hierarchy as a formula for determining how to message customers. In order to sell a product, you must convince customers that it correlates to a specific need - and the better you identify the need that a product serves, the more compelling your message will be. In addition, targeting a need that is lower on the hierarchy results in a more compelling pitch, as does targeting a deficit need.
While Maslow's theory is valuable to matching a product to a need, there are many mistakes that firms make in targeting the appropriate need, or targeting a need that is lower or higher on the hierarchy than customers consider appropriate to the benefits, or misidentifying the nature of the need. Understatement or overstatement are equally damaging to the brand - not merely the results of a given campaign, but the creditability in future, for as long as the badly targeted campaign remains in the memory of the audience.
Problems and Solutions
Once you understand the customer's need and how they perceive it, you must then "explain how your particular brand scratches their particular type of itch." The failure of the broadcast model is that it could never communicate this in specific terms to a specific user: because it addressed the masses, it was reduced either to suggesting its benefits in a general way, or to focusing on one market segment to the exclusion of others.
One significant problem of the mass-market ear is that brands would present themselves as a solution to a problem that didn't exist, and then try to convince the customer they had a problem. (EN: Infomercials did this to a ridiculous extreme, and many still do - showing dramatizations of people who struggle to do fairly simple tasks.) As the number of suppliers increased, the competition became to demonstrate that a given brand was a better solution than the rest.
The most difficult tasks marketers face is in attempting to sell products that don't address a given need. Consider the marketing of soda pop, a product once billed to have health benefits. Logically, they should have gone out of business when it was discovered that soda offered no health benefit and, in fact, was harmful. However, manufacturers refused to close down their shops and instead found other "benefits" to offer, from sensual stimulation (a drink that tastes good) to sexual appeal (a habit that puts you in the company of attractive people).
In terms of Maslow's hierarchy, what the manufacturers did was to acknowledge that the product did not serve a lower need (health), but could still be appealing on a higher level (expressing your personality or belonging to a group of people who consume the same brand). Additionally, appealing to self-expression enabled brands to diversify - such that "the real thing" was an expression of authenticity and individualism, whereas the "choice of a new generation" was an expression of belonging to a fashionable youth culture.
When Problems and Solutions are Difficult to Articulate
In some situations, the need and solution are more difficult to communicate, either because the problem itself is complex, the product is meant as the solution to various problems, or when products in a given category are largely commoditized.
The authors consider personal computers, which meet all of the criteria: customers have a diverse array of highly idiosyncratic needs, computers are designed to be capable of solving many problems, and most brands on the market are "clones" of one another (though models of a given brand may differ in various ways).
Historically, IBM was very successful in personal computers, owing to its reputation in accounting systems - and given that the earliest buyers were users of office systems (who had familiarity and training on the job, and often sought a personal computer as a means to carry work home), competitors identified themselves as "IBM-compatible." This generally exempted IBM from the need to market itself at all.
The customers of computers generally regard the product as a multi-purpose tool that serves an array of needs - it does not boil down simply to a singular need such as thirst or hunger. And while it was possible to advertise the capabilities of a machine individually (accounting, gaming, word processing, etc.) this failed to create a single association on which to anchor the brand.
As such, most computer brands have been able to develop a loyal consumer base and, given their main claim is compatibility to one another, there were no reservations abandoning one for another. Apple computer, meanwhile, fostered a close association to creative professions by appealing to their specific needs, and there have been some boutique brands of computers built specifically for gaming (Alienware, Falcon, etc.)
A New Playing Field for Bell-Ringing
There is some concern that traditional media for marketing will have decreasing relevance to consumers. Statistics vary by the medium, but generally show a dramatic increase of the ratio of advertising per programming, and commercial "placement" has blurred the line between them. Customers are increasing their consumption of media in general to the point that social critics are referring to consumption as an "addiction."
It's also been noted that media audiences have become more savvy about advertising - as well as being more cynical and dismissive, and are very quick to recognize and ignore commercial messaging. The most important factor for customers today is the experience itself, and they are judicious in finding and assessing information about the benefits that products deliver.
While media consumption is growing, the audience is becoming more fractured and more selective, and as competition for attention increases, the principles of "mass media" no longer apply.