‘Authentic human connections’ is the current buzz phrase in advertising boardrooms. As brands scramble to create these connections with their consumers, a vital piece of the puzzle continues to hide in plain sight.
Advertisers and brands alike ought to realise that authenticity and connections cannot be forced, they are the by-product of carefully curated and agile marketing strategies.
Competition for decreased attention
4000+. That’s the number of advertising messages an average person will see in a single day. However, for those living in close proximity to urban areas and with media consumption rates rising, this number is on the up. For example, the average New Yorker receives over 10 000 marketing messages a day.
As competition for share of consumer attention gets stiffer and the audience experiences ‘ad fatigue’, the knee-jerk reaction for most brands is ‘more’. Put out more content, make it louder and more frequent adding to what some have termed ‘global ad pollution’.
Consumers are juggling up to 4 screens at a time … and ad-recallability is steady declining. The average millennial has an attention span of eight seconds while, with a Gen Z, you have all of three seconds to successfully land your proposition as a brand.
Triple threat: cookie apocalypse, privacy restrictions, economic pressures
Data and insights are the backbone of any marketing strategy and crucial in understanding your audience and predicting their behaviour as consumers. But, with privacy laws tightening globally and the death of third-party cookies from the internet, mining these crucial insights is set to become a mammoth task.
According to Statista 40.4% of people surveyed in South Africa admitted to using online ad-blocking software. This presents advertisers with a most disengaged consumer audience who essentially ‘know an ad when they see one’.
Retail data also indicates that consumers are prone to price switching at the point of sale as economic pressures continue to plague them. Brands that continue to win in sales are those with whom consumers have an emotional connection or those who are cheaper. Competing on price is a race to the bottom and is detrimental to any business’s bottom line.
Trust: the most important factor in creating rapport and fostering emotional brand connections
Historically, prospects were pushed down the marketing funnel with greater focus placed on the bottom end of the funnel: conversion. Now brands need to strategically guide them through and constantly measure and monitor their levels of engagement with our content.
There is a need for the buyer journey and marketing funnel to feed each other in a double helix approach. When we do this, we begin to better understand the consumer audience and curate messages that are most appropriate for each of their need states.
When we tailor these messages and build that familiarity, the familiarity breeds trust and consumers are more likely to form an emotional connection with the brand.
Neuromarketing research shows that messages with emotional content perform twice as well as those with rational content. This is seen with Bentley’s emotion recognition app which used facial expressions to uncover what a prospective buyer was responding to.
The outcome?
A Bentley that was personalised to the user. “By using muscular micro-shifts of the face to pull this off, Bentley harnessed innovative technology to better cater to their customers, going above and beyond,” said Brandi Hassel, a member of Forbes Communication Council commenting on the campaign.
The brand saw over 10 000 app downloads in the first three months with the Bentley Bentayga reaching its launch sales targets.
Phumelela Mtshali is a brand strategist at RAPT Creative Agency.
