How to connect with people during a recession

Image by eecue.com

We’ve lived through a period where people constantly advanced: There was a unique sense of momentum, technology made amazing advances, new opportunities to communicate, be employed and make money seemed to pop up every day. There was no time looking back, just a constant rush to look ahead. We didn’t live in houses, we flipped them. We bought the BlackJack yesterday, just to replace it with the iPhone tomorrow. And the GPhone the day after. While we were living in the present, most of our attention was focused on the future.

Just like 9/11, the September 15 failure of Lehman Brothers came as a shock and each passing day made the world feel colder and the outlook on the world less optimistic: TED Spread, Libor, Layoffs, Bankruptcies, red numbers on CNBC and Bloomberg. People had to change from the advancing modality of the last 7 years to a retreat modality. People are not advancing anymore. Instead, they are focused on the here and now. Since most consumers are in a state of shock, they closed their wallets and started to treasure their current belongings. Their current job. Their current relationships. Their current home. In light of the onslaught of foreclosure news, your home has become the emotional center of your life. Home is where your family lives, home is where you have good times with friends, home is where you feel safe from red numbers and bad news.

For the foreseeable future, most people will be in the retreat mode. They will savor things, cherish relationships and use their home as the base camp for strategic advances into the outside world.

Pillsbury has understood this trend:

But they didn’t understand the real essence of retreat: Your home is not a magical place, it’s not the advertising world of Christmas where everybody smiles, the grandfather nods in agreement while smoking a pipe and the mother is knitting away. Home is a real place. It’s the place where you can be real. Where you can yawn out loud, where embarrassing things happen, where you can be yourself. That’s the essence of Ikea’s Home campaign:



The humanization of the retreat mode is where the real game is. Combine this with a social media/conversational marketing strategy that allows people to feel at home with their friends/family through easy connections and solid brand platforms, and you have a real winner at hand.
The retreat mode is a scary thought for economists because the US economy is based on growth and consumption. But it shouldn’t be scary for marketers because we always have to connect with people in their current state of mind. Authentic. Human. Real.

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.

Praising conformity

The American culture is in love with nonconformity: Cowboys, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) from ‘There will be blood’, Jesse Ventura, Ron Paul, Eliot Spitzer – the list is endless. The Milgram experiment illustrated the distrust towards authority:

“The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

The eroding trust in authorities (Enron, Catholic church, Presidency, etc.) fed the hunger for long wolves. People that do what they need to do because they feel like it. Moral superiority belongs to the loners that create their own rules.

Not so, says David Berreby, author of “Us and Them: Understanding your Tribal Mind”.

In a NY Times piece, he explains that the psychologists Hodges and Geyser took a second look at the Milgram and Asch experiments and came to new conclusions:

“This means that the subjects in the most famous “people are sheep” experiments were not sheep at all – they were human beings who largely stuck to their guns, but now and then went along with the group. Why? Because in getting along with other people, most decent people know, as Hodges and Geyser put it, the “importance of cooperations, tact and social solidarity in situations that are tense or difficult.”

(…) Milgram’s “subjects were not simply obeying a leader, but responding to someone whose credentials and good faith they thought they could trust.” Without that kind of trust society would fall apart tomorrow, because most of what we know about the world comes to us from other people.”

David’s writing reminded me of Mark Earls’ “Herd” book, blog and overall thesis that it is our innate nature as “herd” animals that causes mass movements, not the influence of a handful of individuals.

The traditional church of marketing was built around the belief that humans are lone wolves that want to stand out from the crowd. The problem is that people have a tribal desire to follow the herd and be part of a group. Sure, there are instances when they want to stand out and be considered as lone wolves. But, the rest of the time, the same people want to be part of a group and just fit in.

To leverage the full power of Conversational Marketing, businesses have to change how they think about human/tribal behavior. The advent of Social Networks and Web 2.0 has shown us that humans want to stand out by fitting in. Social Media campaigns have to feed this primal human desire and help people to belong.