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Advertising and the Customer Experience
Jul 14, 2004
I have an almost allergic reaction to most advertising. It's usually irrelevant, gratuitously manipulative, or obviously ineffective in its design, contributing unnecessary noise to the surroundings (whether the TV, the magazine, the Web page, or the street).
There are exceptions - online text ads, for example, tend to be relevant to me and occasionally even welcome, depending on the context. But text ads are (sadly) dwarfed by the mountain of advertising and marketing messages that seem to appear nearly everywhere these days.
So I was happy to read in The Economist that I'm not alone in my reactions, and that the ad industry is beginning to take notice.
"Consumers are getting harder to influence as commercial clutter invades their lives." (This from The Economist on June 24th.) More: "People are tiring of ads in all their forms... [a recent] study found 65% of people now feel 'constantly bombarded' by ad messages."
Here's an example of what people are reacting to. Yahoo News reported recently that the Spanish Steps - "Rome's premier gathering spot for tourists" - has "been draped in a giant advertisement for L'Oreal beauty products, the latest in a series of controversial advertisements that obscure the ancient city's monuments." As I might say elsewhere, this is BROKEN.
Then on July 12, Seth Godin wrote online that it's becoming harder to distinguish between legitimate companies and bad or ineffective ones; the traditional trappings don't mean much, while smaller or unknown companies without those trappings could very well be a better choice.
...So, how do we tell the good from the bad? In a connected world
where people don't have letterhead, don't wear suits (don't even
own suits), work out of tiny rented office suites (or their
living room), have a simple website and buy only [online text
ads], ... in that world, how do we tell?
His conclusion will be familiar to regular Good Experience readers:
[T]he winners are those that treated their customers and their
constituents with respect and did it with honesty. Trust and
respect are the two things we haven't figured out a shortcut for.
I think the reason for these changes is that customers have gotten smarter. People see beyond the ads' empty promises and are interested in substance, effectiveness, and results. The Internet, combined with customers' irritation with increased advertising, have motivated customers to care (and research) what lies behind the promise.
It's clear how companies must react. At a time when traditional advertising is failing along with other expensive and conventional "signaling mechanisms" - promotions, direct mail, product placement - there's one mechanism that companies can rely on to build their business. This is, of course, the customer experience. By consistently creating a good experience - showing trust and respect to the customer - the company can thrive, long-term, no matter what its size or traditional media reach is.
I feel compelled at this point to clarify the relationship between customer experience and advertising. It's a simple relationship that I'm afraid is lost on many companies, given the relative size of the budgets for the two activities. (More on budgets another time.) Here we go:
Advertising is a promise of something.
Customer experience is the something.
Note that you can substitute "a brand" for "advertising", and it still holds true:
A brand is a promise of something.
Customer experience is the something.
There are some people who have to be good at making promises. Politicians come to mind: "Vote for me and I'll deliver XYZ." Vote him or her into office, and then you see if the promise holds. Advertisers, branding experts, marketers - they're in the same game: "Buy this product and it will deliver XYZ."
But who are the people who actually have to deliver on that promise? Product designers. Project managers. Customer service reps. Customer-facing executives. Practically everyone in the organization. That's because the customer experience makes or breaks the company - not the advertising. It's better to deliver well on the promise than to promise well and not deliver. Though there's a place for both, it's better to have substance than surface.
So here we are in "the age of delivery": promise what you like, but you'd better be sure you deliver on that promise. Companies with a good customer experience excel above traditional companies that put all their resources into the promise.
Seth asked how we make sense of it all, in these changing times: "How do we tell the good from the bad?" I would simply answer: Is it a good experience?
Great column on the "empty sell" of advertising, which is loosely (if at all) tied to actual product or experience, more focused on creating indeterminate desire through brand promise. But what a wonderful laugh to see the job posting in the same newsletter for a promotional copywriter who *SELLS*. LOL.
Mark, you hit it on the head when you wrote that the brand and the advertising are interchangeable. The only place that advertising can actually be seen as effective is in branding. The more mindshare a brand has, the more trusted it is. The size of the brand in the mass mind is an accumulation of all the advertising it does (It’s obviously more than that, but we’re talking in the domain of advertising). I once drafted a challenge to Coke to stop all advertising for one year and see if their brand suffered in comparison to Pepsi (just to pick two obvious brands that provide no real, definitive service to the world). They spend billions on advertising. What if they saved that billions for a year and see what happened?
Anyway, I’m biased. I’m among the 65% of people who are sick of being bombarded by advertising. I once read that a successful direct mail campaign receives a 2% return. Two percent! Think of how much cheaper it is to send a billion emails. The return requirements for a successful campaign there must be infinitesimal. I have never -– not once –- received an unsolicited offer via any medium (e.g., direct mail, email, phone call, door-t-door, etc.) in which I was actually interested. The model is all wrong. As you would say (and I would agree), "This is BROKEN!"
Advertisers: take your money, go back to the fucking drawing board, and find a better way.
I like ads too. I just wish they were somehow tailored to me. For example, I find commercials for male impotence cures and pay day loans somewhat exasperating, but well-executed ads for power tools (I'm rennovating) and local restaurants (I like to eat) actually welcome.
I even filled out the income/interests survey for the New York Times site in the hopes the ads displayed when I'm logged in would be of interest to me.
BTW, you wrote "I have an almost allergic reaction to most advertising." I recommend the novel "Pattern Recognition" by William Gisbon, if you haven't read it already. The main character really does have an adverse physical reaction to bad logos and branding.
Thanks for the article.
As an advertising guy (12 years), I often think about a client I had at Safeway who cut his TV budget and put all the money into improving the stores. Cleaner aisles, fresher produce, better meat, better customer service, etc.
It seemed to me then, and still does to me now (10 years later), as a wise decision. Even though it was predictably derided by the management at my agency (McCann SF).
Though I often come in at the end of the decision making process (I'm now a copywriter), I sometimes wish clients had brought me in earlier to help them come up with ways to improve the customer experience instead of just talking at them.
Mark,
I always like your newsletter. There seems to be a common theme in the last two where you believe adverstising severely lacking.
I think of SPAM as the extreme. The only way people keep doing this, is if someone responds. I hate SPAM, but that doesn't mean someone should not employ that tactic. It may be the most effective tactic at the disposal of the company -- not necessarily the most effective tactic.
So, while some campaigns/ads may look wacky to us, they may be the most effective tool(s) at the disposal of the companies. Ultimately, we need to look at their impact on the bottom line.
Hello Mark,
I agree that much advertising is irrelevant and manipulative (Yet isn’t that what it’s supposed to be? Manipulative, that is). But as Aileen more or less commented earlier, mass media communications can never please everyone all of the time. Therefore, what produces your almost allergic reaction delights someone else and vice versa.
Can advertising be better? Can products and services (customer experience) be better? Yes on both.
Here are a few quotes from Bill Bernbach, one of the founders of DDB, to keep in mind.
“A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster.”
“Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it.”
“The most powerful element in advertising is the truth.”
“If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.”
“Word of mouth is the best medium of all.”
Have fun,
Best always,
Rob
Hi Mark.
Great piece.
One nit to pick, though (and this really is a side argument -- I think your underlying point holds, regardless), regarding the advertising = brand = promise equation.
I think equating brand with advertising does a disservice to both branding and advertising -- and ultimately to user experience.
I used to have a colleague whose mantra was, "the brand *is* the experience," which does have a certain appeal to those of us who do value the customer experience above all else. But I think both equations leave us without any tools for navigating the gap between promise and experience.
I find it way more useful to think of "brand" as the experience mediated by the promise. Conceptually that gives us a tool for aligning advertising messages with actual user experience.
Succesful brands are those where the promise is in harmony with the experience (and, really, this seems to be the underlying gist of all of your -- and my -- work). And if we want to get all philosophical about it, we could say that a failed brand is ultimately self-negating in the sense that the only brands that continue to exist are the succesfull ones. Therefore the only viable -- or truly existing -- brands are succesful brands.
IN more prosaic terms, if we think of brand as the intersection between promise and experience, then it helps to focus advertiser thinking in constructive ways, since ad people are accustomed to thinking about their craft in terms of brand building and it gives us a language for positioning experience at the core of all marketing communications.
- kent
Hi Mark,
Thanks for an always insightful column.
I think your thoughts are very much in line with B. J. Fogg’s research on credibility. Advertising (or brand) lives in the realm of what he calls presumed, reputed and surface credibility, whereas the customer experience is in the realm of earned credibility. Earned credibility is by far the most valuable – but also the hardest kind to optain.
I think companies in general will benefit from keeping Fogg’s credibility grid in mind when they design advertising campaigns, when the do their brand analysis and most importantly when they consider their customer’s experience with the company.
---
Lars Christensen
For those interested in a more theoretical approach to the ideas that Mark is talking about, take a look at Don Norman's recent work on Expectation Driven Design.
http://www.nngroup.com/events/main_event.html
(See after the heading, "Expectation Driver Design, The Next Frontier.")
Love your work. Have you seen "Fierce Animals"? It's a farce with the same crazy group from "A Fish Called Wanda", and it definitely resonates with your column on inappropriate advertising. Perhaps we should call it the Nascaring of America?
JPK
In my (limited) emarketing experience, there are two factors that elicit a lasting response to a ad's message: relevancy and convenience. Even when a traditional ad manages, by chance, to achieve this, it falls short because of its interruptive nature.
The best ads, as you've mentioned, are online text ads. The limitation of words alone forces the marketer to be more creative. It probably helps that users also don't avert their eyes as quickly since they don't see the ad coming. If you're clever, the ad can appear as a helpful call to action in response to demand created by the information of the article before it.
In these instances, relevancy is key. Here's one that grabbed my attention, despite the obvious "ADVERTISEMENT" above it:
===========================ADVERTISEMENT===========================
How to avoid "Email Marketer's Syndrome"
You're at a party and tell people you use email marketing. And they
give you that look. Next party, tell them you don't send email to
just anyone, but only to people who want it. Tell them you use
[Technology Name] to create entire email campaigns right from your
Web browser for less than 1¢ per email. Everybody will want to
know more, of course, so tell them to call ###-###-####. Or go to:
http://www.weburlhere.com/
===================================================================
This higher relevancy will immediately evoke a greater response rate. In fact, when users that have grown accustomed to targeted ads are presented with a message that has little-to-no relevance, they might be so offended that they'll leave the site/newsletter altogether.
This is a distinction that isn't being made with traditional ads and I think is one of the reasons why so many online brands have such loyal client bases.
I agree that targeted advertising for the right consumer with the right set of circumstances will generate a response possibly leading to a sale. High end brands (Tanquery and Movado to name two) realize this and seemingly are directing their ad dollars wisely. That said, who are the idiots at cineplexes who thought any ad would be fit for a movie audience, let alone ignore the fact that we go to or rent movies precisely to avoid advertising? My supposed art house cineplex in Ottawa, Ontario, showed an ad for Microsoft XBox filled with jarring, violent imagery as we settled in to view "Adaptation". Film: 10. User Experience: 0.
Denise - you mention my pet peeve - advertising in the movie theater. Jarring, irritating ads. (It may be a US phenom - I think in Europe the ads before movies tend to be clever and more fun to watch. Can someone confirm?)
Speaking of which - why are movie trailers so long these days? They're like Cliffs Notes for the whole movie, showing you the highlights of the whole story! Who thought that one up - giving away all the surprises in the preview? Back in my daaaay...
Mark,
Thanks for your article.
I'm not fully convinced of your argument, though. I agree, there is a lot of bad, untargeted advertising out there and that it is the brand we have relationship with because advertsing is just the medium to convey the brand identity/image. In my work I do a lot of Ad Testing in the market and gauge people's reactions to Ads (online and traditional) and in the most part Ads are about brand recognition and brand recall, not "get off your arse and by the brand". Ads have several different purposes/aims here are just three examples:
-reminding you of your experience AND your association/relationship with a brand,
-bringing new brands to your attention,
-encouraging you to talk about the brand with your colleagues (the L'Oreal Ad in Rome in this case is not broken - it has succeeded at least with you)
Encouraging you to get out of your chair and buy a product tends only to be used for low value products which require little thought process when buying and the Ads tend to be cheap and nasty to encourage to simulate that process.
Conversley, Ford, for example, spend less on advertising to get new customers than they spend on advertising to reassure existing customers of the 'lifestyle' the car offers them.
The trouble is, is that many business want to achieve too much at the same time with Ad campaigns and send out mixed messages which we cannot compute and conclude that the Ad was a waste of their dollars and our time.
Your L'Oreal example again - the Ad was certainly too much 'in ya face' (scuse the pun) but, as mentioned above, WOM is the best nedium of all.
For the trash that we do get though, I don't blame the creatives / copy writing guys in the design but I do blame them for not challenging the client on what would be better for the client to have an effective Ad campaign.
Dear Mark,
Thanks for a great article. As usual, your stuff is insightful and interesting to read.
But I tend to disagree with the way you use the words 'branding' and 'advertising' interchangeably. I know that many marketers like to use the word 'branding', or 'to brand the product' when they talk about bombarding our minds with their logo or slogan.
But to me, a brand is more that a marketing promise. When we say that Apple is a brand, surely we are not only taking about its logo and advertising campaigns. Apple, for example, became a high value 'brand' because it continued providing customers with a compelling customer experience, mainly via its products.
It is this continued delivery of good products and services, coupled with consistent and clever corporate design and communication that creates an affinity between consumers and a company (call it loyalty too). This is what enables a company to charge a premium for anything that carries its brand mark (or logo).
In this sense, I see that a brand is 'a promise + fulfillment of promise', not just the promise alone.
On another level, I feel that the strict contrasting of the brand (understood as advertising about a thing) and the customer experience (the thing itself) cannot explain many brand phenomena. Take for example perfume branding. Do people buy the perfume strictly because the product delivers a superior customer experience, or does the corporate design and communication and the aura created around the product play a decisive role here. Another example: where exactly do we draw the line between advertising and customer experience when it comes to lifestyle products like Nike's (even Apple's).
Yes, I agree that customer experience, delivered consistently, is a major factor for winning in the marketplace. Yet, products can also 'win' if they 'tell a good story', connect with people on an emotional and intellectual level, not just on a functional one.
At heart, I am biased towards the product designer (I describe my own company to clients as being 'not-an-ad-agency'. But I believe in a holistic design approach that tackles all aspects of a product's or service's 'reality' (functional, informational, emotional, etc).
Thanks for the great newsletter and keep them coming.
Hi mark, ive always admired your articles and i wish i have time to read all of em. i have just been given the task to be the user experience gal in our company - as you can see here in the philippines, usability and user experience is not a big deal - if at all, present. i have been learning a lot from you and i wish soon enough - i can have that uncanny ability i believe you have. kudos to you! i am looking forward to more articles.
you're the best,
teng