Awareness Means Nothing
Creating awareness and attention means nothing in a world where loyalty and relevant meaning is the currency.
Of course the world is more nuanced than this, and strongly category dependent, but getting someones attention is extremely expensive if you don’t use it to create recurrence. In 2009 you want to spend less money to earn more money and the best opportunity you have to do this is to create loyal, returning customers.
Graham Brown’s 50 Youth Marketing Trends slideshows, which is filled with a range of brilliant thoughts, brings attention to the weakness of the campaign methodology in advertising. Because investing in someones attention for a limited time span is futile when they will forget about the brand almost the instance that the advertising disappears.
The advertising campaign model is constructed around the cost of media placement, not the usefulness or logic of marketing. And by that it has become an awareness and anticipation model, not a loyalty model.
Which to some degree is fine for brands using display advertising to create traffic and attention to stores or products that build the loyalty for them, but are we seeing the full potential in advertising if we do this? And is this the best advertising model for every category?
The solution is aiming to become a part of the customers values, help them say something about themselves that give them the identity and ads to their unique and personal brand.
View Graham Browns 50 Youth Marketing Trends, part 1 and part 2.
Via ThreeBillion.com
11 Comments, Comment or Ping
Rob @ Cynic
Awareness was a metric created by marketing and adland to ensure they could maintain their indulgent approach to communication rather than focus on their ultimate goal which is to ultimately ‘sell stuff’ …
I always say to clients if they want ‘awarenes’, I’ll run down the street naked screwing a frozen turkey with their brand drawn on my back …
Funnily enough, no one has taken me up on the offer, but that could have more to do with how I look naked than the fact they appreciate awareness would have no direct benefit to their business, quite the opposite if they were to adopt my suggestion.
Dec 31st, 2008
Rob @ Cynic
Awareness was a metric created by marketing and adland to ensure they could maintain their indulgent approach to communication rather than focus on their ultimate goal which is to ultimately ‘sell stuff’ …
I always say to clients if they want ‘awarenes’, I’ll run down the street naked screwing a frozen turkey with their brand drawn on my back …
Funnily enough, no one has taken me up on the offer, but that could have more to do with how I look naked than the fact they appreciate awareness would have no direct benefit to their business, quite the opposite if they were to adopt my suggestion.
Dec 31st, 2008
Rob @ Cynic
I have no idea why my comment appeared twice … apologies … but if you don’t mind, this post about research/awareness may be of interest and if it’s not, just delete it.
Ta
http://robcampbell.wordpress.com/2008/06/27/is-research-as-deluded-as-advertising/
Dec 31st, 2008
helgetenno
Hi Rob, thanks for posting. I appreciated your contribution so much I had to let both duplicates appear.
Dec 31st, 2008
Rob @ Cynic
Well it worked for New York so I’ll take it as a compliment ;)
Jan 1st, 2009
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