« Free Webinar: The ROI of Blogging | Main | Poll Results from our ROI of Blogging Webinar »

Time for Creatives to Engage with Consumer Engagement

In my post on September 28, I said that media companies and clients should disengage from the consumer engagement discussion because their use of the term had gotten far ahead of the ARF’s development of it. The opposite is true for ad agency creatives: two core concepts should lead more directly to Big Idea for their clients’ brands.

An all-star panel of major ad agency creative directors at the ARF/AAAA Engagement Conference revealed that they still rely on inspiration, intuition, and luck to find the Big Ideas for their clients. Such it has always been and agencies struggle for ways to increase the percentage of truly great ads. Consumer engagement may help in two ways:

  1. Consumer engagement is a new “mental model” in which advertising works first on a subconscious, emotional level and only later on a rational level, according to ARF Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer.
  2. The concept of “brand co-creation” details what exactly is going on at this subconscious level. Gerald Zaltman, a member of Harvard University's Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, demonstrated how consumers respond to an ad by attaching metaphors and associations that give the brand more personally relevant meaning. Using a Heineken beer ad, he demonstrated his technique for drawing out these subconscious elements.

These new ways of thinking could lead to a more disciplined approach to increase the likelihood of unearthing one of these Big Ideas.

Why is this so important? As the panelists described the Big Ideas they had created, such as the Staples Easy Button, the Geico Gekko, and the Burger King king character, they admitted to a large dose of luck, accident, and serendipity.

Don't get me wrong, I believe inspiration is real. And David Ogilvy, a great proponent of research-based advertising, advised that after learning everything you possibly can about a product, its customer, markets, etc. one should go for walk or garden or any other sort of activity that would let a big idea bubble up from the subconscious.

These creative directors operated similarly, mentioning the input they use from focus groups, quantitative studies, direct consumer observation, and current culture immersion. But all these techniques rely on too superficial, rational responses from consumers or are too removed from the engagement moment to reliably deliver the Big Idea.

If engagement is indeed the new "mental model" that drives marketing planning, techniques like Zaltman's that apply a more rigorous, disciplined approach should help marketers find what makes consumers tick.

Even so, it will still take a keen eye and a true empathy with the consumer to pluck a core idea out of the many different associations, symbols and metaphors offered by consumers. But at least the odds will be in marketers' favor.

Posted by Jim Nail on October 2, 2006 at 09:45 AM | Email this post Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341cdcdc53ef00d83534e3a253ef

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Time for Creatives to Engage with Consumer Engagement:

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.