Customer Experience, Creative Efficacy

Lesson 6: What, Not Where

Posted 03 Mar 2020

Optimise what you say and then worry about where you say it

In the past decade, marketers have become more than a little obsessed with media. That is, where to say the message.

The origin of this obsession largely relates to digital media. Even though “pound for pound”, the advertising effectiveness of digital media is generally inferior to traditional media, when you augment digital with data on the individual’s past behaviour and append the same individual’s search and social behaviour, then the ROI equation can indeed, tip in favour of digital. Using lower-cost digital channels, marketers can be forgiven for believing that they can simply message the target into submission.

What seems to have been lost along the way is what to say in marketing communication. Optimising what to say requires understanding of the category and market-specific consumption motivators – both rational and emotional.

In this era of marketing science, we can be relatively certain of what drives consumer choice – more certain than the intuitive marketer.

CONCLUSION:
Both the what and where of your messaging are important, but what you say is more important than where you say it. The content of your communication needs to land on the scientifically-derived rational and emotional drivers of choice to catalyse consumer action.

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