Filling spaces vs. Filling time

Advertisers are used to filling spaces: spaces before/between/after entertainment, spaces on freeways, spaces on sites, spaces in papers. Media buys the spaces, Creative fills them with life. Hopefully.

This old advertising paradigm is slowly disappearing. People trained their brains to oversee these spaces. The information age has forced the human brain to avoid these irrelevant messages and focus on the task at hand. Unwelcome messages are considered disruptive and will change brand perceptions negatively.

Conversational Marketing requires decorum, a good handle on etiquette and an understanding for the challenges of everyday life. Announcing your openness to a dialogue with a marching band and fly-over won’t do you any good. Who wants to start a dialogue in that environment?

Instead, brand need to move away from filling spaces to filling moments: Those moments when you stand in line, you’re bored and you watch an engaging show on a screen in the coffeeshop. Moments when you wander around the city and discover a pop-up retail store. Moments when you’re sitting in the airplane, waiting for takeoff.

People have only so much time. The ROI of getting their attention when they are busy is declining rapidly. We need to engage them when they’re open to be entertained, open to new experiences, open to be wowed. Everything else is just waste.

Marketing is about delivering value

We’ve said it many times: Businesses would be better off not spending a dime on marketing for year and re-investing all these funds in their product/service/brand experience. And a new study by Nielsen CGM/Homescan Buzzfacts makes exactly that point:

“Advertising and promotions, whether in traditional media or online, play only relatively small roles in driving consumers to post content about products and services.

This is the somewhat humbling reality, according to survey data from Nielsen CGM/Homescan Buzzfacts. Asked what motivates them to post such content on a Web site, blog or message board, just 18% cited seeing a promotion for the product, 12% cited seeing an ad on TV or in print, and 7% cited seeing an ad or video clip on the Internet.

So what is driving product/service consumer-generated media/CGM? In two words, “product experience.”

Over half (55%) of consumers said they posted because they had used and liked a product; 28% because they’d used a product and didn’t like it, or wanted a refund; and 27% said they’d read a comment about a product on a site, blog or message board and responded to it.”

Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Nielsen Online’s Digital Strategic Services (DSS) group continues:

“It’s vital that agencies and marketers understand that when you put all the data in a blender, the root causes behind why consumers talk are product quality and process issues,” Blackshaw said in an interview with Marketing Daily. “Advertising and marketing generate a certain amount of word of mouth, but by and large, brand reputation rises and falls based on the quality of the product and the service wrapped around it.”

Marketers, he says, tend to “over-romanticize” the power of tactics like “sensational viral campaigns.”

At heart, marketing is about delivering values. Now, everybody defines values differently. It could be money, time, the little things in life, a racing heart – whatever you define as value is valuable to you. Marketing’s job is to deliver what’s missing in the value chain and fill that gap.

If your product is mediocre, has design flaws, offers people not a lot of value and doesn’t fill an immediate need – do you think a mass marketing campaign will convince people to buy it? You have so many gaps to fill, your marketing dollar is better spend exploring the real needs of people, how they define value, redesigning your product/service and offering something that kills the competition. Or starts a new market.

If your product is amazing, offers flawless design, has immediate value and fills a desperate need in people’s lives – Go ahead and mass market your product. The only gap to fill is to make the world aware of your awesome product. That’s the point where marketing/advertising delivers value. Because people will appreciate to find out about your product.

Marketing/Advertising is a gap filler. Just like R&D, Product Planning, etc. Use it wisely. Or, rather save your money.