Quick Read: There are ads that try and communicate a message of ‘contrast’ and there are those that communicate ‘similarity’. While the former type of ads ride on a diverse set of story telling devices, there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices deployed by the latter set. It’s the ‘Split Screen’.
A lot of advertising is meant to tease out / explain / amplify an element of a brand that is supposedly in contrast w.r.t the competition. Think about it for a moment and think of the core narratives behind most of the ads that you see around.
A lot of advertising narratives tend to fall into this camp, where they try to land a message through a narrative that is designed to communicate a contrast – sometimes in a straightforward manner or sometimes in perhaps a tongue in cheek style.
And oh, btw just for fun, see this one and it’s hard to not think that the Jeep’s creative team didn’t have this in mind while conceptualizing the above work.
As you can see, ads that have ‘contrast’ as the core message, ride on a diverse set of story telling devices.
Interestingly, this is in contrast with ads where ‘similarity’ is the core message.
When similarity is the core message..
.. there seems to be an interesting trend in the story telling devices that most of them seem to draw upon. Most of such narratives are rooted in a singular story telling device – the split screen.
Sample the following examples.
1. The Day Before
(Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)
2. McDonald’s
(Agency: Agency: Leo Burnett Chicago)
3. John Lewis
(Agency: DDB Worldwide)
4. Coca Cola UK
(Agency: David The Agency, Buenos Aires)
For the record, the split screen as a story telling device has also been used in ads that seek to communicate a contrast.
Like this one from Apple.
In fact this entire campaign for iPhone (in May 2017) had creatives that all used the split screen.
What other story telling devices have caught your eye in the recent past?
Quick Read: Our future selves are strangers to us. For any brand marketer that wants to drive a habit change among people, this could be a million dollar insight.
The answers are always wise, instructive and helpful. As they ought to be. For the exercise of looking back and reflecting upon one’s journey so far, tends to be a highly visual and (thereby) a pretty straightforward affair in our minds.
Brands like Tine – a Norwegian Dairy brand – have even used it as a construct to tell one of their stories. (more on this in my older blog post)
The idea of looking into a younger version of oneself was also the central theme of a fascinating photography project called Reflections by Tom Hussey.
Each photograph features a person looking into a mirror and seeing a reflection of his/her significantly younger self. Result – a powerful and a poignant means to communicate the story of someone whose mind has gotten stripped of its more recent memories.
Novartis – the pharma giant, used these photographs towards a campaign for their Exelon Patch – a prescription medicine for Alzheimer’s. (more here)
Think about it for a moment. Is it as easy as envisioning our past selves?
The answer tends to be in the negative. Well, mostly.
Many studies establish our biological truth that one’s future self is a stranger within each of us. For example, Jason Mitchell – Professor of Psychology at Harvard – has found that when we picture ourselves experiencing something pleasurable a year from now, many of us use the brain areas involved in imagining a stranger.
He says that it is this lack of relationship between our present self and our future self that is at the core of many of our behavioural problems — from not saving enough for our retirement to unhealthy lifestyle practices and many more.
This is such a compelling insight that I am tempted to go out on a limb and wager that this lack of a more intuitive relationship between our present and our future selves could actually be the key to solving for classic marketing challenges like low levels of penetration prevalent across several future focussed categories like BFSI (Mutual Funds, Insurance) or Beauty (Anti Ageing) or other FMCG categories (like Oats, Sugar free F&B variants) etc.
The solution to this lies in getting our present self to be more aware of, relate to and empathise with our future self.
It is known that the feeling of empathy between two persons diminishes as the physical and temporal distance between them increases. So how do we get our present selves to build empathy with a self that is 20 or 30 years ahead in future?
Now that could be a great problem worth solving for, with creative possibilities in marketing communications.
Biju Dominic’s article even provides thought starters for possible approaches. He writes..
Hal Hershfield, a social psychologist at UCLA Anderson found that people who spend a few minutes getting acquainted with a computer-generated simulation of what they might look like in the future were motivated to make better decisions about retirement planning.
Now that’s a spring board of an idea – using computer generated simulation to show what one might look like in the future.
Now hold on to that thought and juxtapose that with this famous Dove Sketches execution.
Invention and Innovation could sometimes be polar opposites.
Seems counter intuitive, right? But when you read this brilliant piece on Segway, it would seem almost commonsensical. Segway, the article posits, failed because it was focused solely on invention – believing that it alone has come up with the perfect idea for a great product. The company didn’t spend as much time or effort on innovation– the ongoing iterative process of going back and forth with the consumers to test and understand what the market wants and ensuring that the product meet their needs.
This on going iterative process with the consumer to test and understand what market wants and applying these learnings to make your product meet their needs has a specialised name today.
Growth Hacking.
Depending upon who you are / what you’ve been smoking / or what you’ve been reading recently, this could possibly be the first time you hear this term or probably even the zillionth! Whichever be the case, Growth Hacking as a term is topping the charts in popularity, appeal and relevance to describe a must havemindset in the world of product design and marketing.
Coined by Sean Ellis in this legendary article, Growth Hacking is essentially marketing – albeit repurposed to the evolving dynamics of consumer, product and consumption today. Chances are that most of us would have been witness to, experienced, and were target consumers of live Growth Hacking experiments. Don’t believe me?
Did you yearn for an invite for a Gmail account back when Gmail was introduced? That was neat Growth Hack from Google!
Did you refer your friends to try out Dropbox to get free storage space in return? You were being Growth Hacked!
Do you remember those end lines in mails that said something like Sent from my Blackberry/iPad/iPhone..? Growth Hack, it was!
Read about the 10 of the best growth hacks of all time here. Aaron Ginn’s page is a great place to start on a journey to explore more resources on Growth Hacking and Ryan Holiday’s book Growth Hacker Marketing could make for a great primer on this topic over an afternoon meal.
Today ‘Growth Hacker’ as a term has gone mainstream even in the jobs’ lexicon. For it is not unusual to run into marketing job postings that come labelled as “Wanted Growth Hackers”!
While case studies of how Growth Hacking has worked out for (now) big brands like Instagram, Pinterest or Airbnb make for a fascinating read, lesser known examples can give an equally compelling perspective and an insight on how Growth Hacking can actually move the needle. The story of Bilingual Child – an iOS App to teach Spanish for kids – is a recent example. Not content with how their sales were panning out, the team at Bilingual Child went on to delve a bit deeper into the data and discovered a Growth Hack. The result: they tripled their revenue by adding one button! Read the story here.
(Source, Medium. Click on the picture to read the story)
Well, if you have come this far you could be forgiven for thinking that Growth Hacking is majorly applicable to software products or startups. But nothing could be farther from the truth.
Amy Webb was having no luck with online dating. So she figured out the system, monitored and measured the impact of her ‘hacks’ and went about achieving what she set out to do – finding her match. Hear this story of how she went on to hack her online dating life — with frustrating, funny and life-changing results.
Is this Growth Hacking? You bet it is – Amy’s bold and calculated attempt to drive growth in the quantity and the quality of potential matches for her. The core essence of her approach is equally (if not more so) applicable to something like say updating my LinkedIn profile. And that for me is a compelling takeaway from her TED talk.
So the bottom line is clear, irrespective of the field of application – a company, a product or even a person, the ability to delve into data, bring in curiosity and operate with a mix of creativity and an analytical ability has huge implications in driving growth. No wonder then, Growth Hacking is said to be redefining the very mindset of marketing as we know it.
After all, when was the last time you had a name for a discipline that neatly encapsulated the objective and the enabler of the activity in a single breath?
(Featured Image, Medium’s collection on Growth Hacking, Another great resource on this subject)
At a fundamental level, that’s what Marketing is all about. Think of any marketing activity – right from the branding that you see, the product/packaging/experience (UI) design, the TV commercials, print ads, digital ads, promotions/offers – everything is essentially an effort to change our behavior in a very specific way. Given this, marketing is intricately connected to a number of other ‘behavioral disciplines’ like Behavioral Economics, Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, Praxeology, Cognitive Science etc, and each year a number of research papers are published based on the intersection of one or more of these disciplines with marketing.
One such seminal research paper was recently published by Dr. BJ Fogg, (Stanford University), titled: A Behavior Model for Persuasive Design. Here he posits a simple model by name FBM (Fogg Behavior Model) that delineates 3 factors affecting human behavior: Motivation, Ability and Presence of Triggers.
In summary, it says, for any behavior ‘change’ (B) to occur, it needs to get the user to an activation threshold, which is a factor of:
Motivation: (M) Is the person high or low on motivation to perform the target behavior?
Ability: (A) Does the person have the requisite ability to perform the behavior (is it simple enough to be performed)?
Triggers: (T) Does it have the necessary triggers to instigate the target behavior?
While motivation and ability can ‘trade off’ (People with low motivation may perform a behavior if the behavior is simple enough (meaning, high on ability), and inversely, people who find a behavior being not so simple (meaning, low on ability) may perform it if they have sufficiently high levels of motivation), triggers can happen only when they are ‘timed’ – i.e. they need to be triggered right at the moment when we have the requisite levels of motivation and ability to perform a behavior. Hence it could be instructive to qualitatively think of this relationship as:
While he champions this model as a framework to guide persuasive design of web services, online interaction design etc I believe that it is equally if not more applicable to more traditional instances of product marketing / brick and mortar retailing etc.
For instance, one of the most direct, straightforward ‘behavior change instigating device’ that is often employed in stores is – sales/promotions/offers. These seek to change behavior in that they instigate the consumer to consider buying the product / or buying more of the product / or buying the product more often. And arguably, as long as the sale offers are attractive enough (depending upon what I define as attractive for myself) I could have substantial levels of ability and motivation to consider the sale. But what often makes a world of difference is the third factor – trigger. If the right triggers are not pulled in me at the right time and place, my motivation and ability to consider a sale are just dormant, resulting in no action being taken by me.
Meat Pack is known to be the trendiest shoe store in Guatemala and had garnered a cult following from the youth within just 3 years given its irreverent and edgy style of branding. Recently they needed to launch a promotion that stood up to these standards characterized by innovation and surprising their customers in the most unexpected ways. So what did they do? They cleverly set out to hijack you while you are at a competitor’s store and triggered you to literally run to its stores! See this video on how it works:
Essentially MeatPack created Hijack – an enhancement of the official Meat Pack app used by their customers. The beauty of this app is that whenever the user walks into competitors’ stores (as recognized by the users’ phone on the basis of its GPS/ GeoTagging info, that are increasingly becoming ubiquitous), it flashes a special promotion that starts at ‘99% off’ and decreases by a percentage point with each passing second – that is till the moment you get into the nearby MeatPack store. So in effect, the sooner you run to the Meat Pack store the greater the discount that you can get.
The results: (source: This Cannes Lions filing for 2012 Mobile)
More than 600 costumers were hijacked from the competitors.
All discounted merchandise was sold in record time.
Every time a discount was redeemed the persons Facebook status automatically changed informing the world about the promotion and generating a viral competitive attitude that spread like wildfire.
The brilliant thing about this concept is that, as the video says, this is the first ever promo campaign that started the sale in the competitors’ stores! This is clearlyone of the most innovative triggers that I have come across to literally hijack the customer’s behavior, at a place and moment where it matters the most. Hats off to Meat Pack!
Any other fantastic triggers that you know of, that were known to have influenced consumer behavior?
Riffs on technology, marketing & culture 