New research from the ANA reveals how marketers are dealing with industry disruptions using technology.

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson curated and hosted a night of talks about moving toward greater certainty and stable ground. (Photo: Dian Lofton / TED)

How do we make sense of the tumult around us? How can we grapple with the confusion and alarm so many of us are feeling? In a special session of talks curated and hosted by Jon Ronson at TED HQ on Wednesday night, six speakers looked not at the ruin that follows hardship but the recovery. That’s why we called the session “Rebirth” — because it was a night to talk about redemption.

Whether it’s the crushing grief of losing a child, the manipulation of an electorate or the fear of public humiliation, each speaker has encountered trauma in one form or another. And as they shared their narratives, they offered useful mechanisms for getting a new purchase on reality.

First up was Mona Chalabi, data editor for Guardian US.

“We’re living in a world of alternative facts, where people don’t find statistics to be a common ground or a starting point for debate,” says data editor Mona Chalabi. “This is a problem.” (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

How to paint with numbers. In the current age of distrust and alternative facts, people have begun to question the reliability of data from even the most trusted institutions, like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Once a source of common ground between individuals, government numbers now provide a starting point for contentious debate. There’s even a bill in Congress that argues against the collection of data related to racial inequality. Without this data, “how can we observe discrimination, let alone fix it?” asks Mona Chalabi. This isn’t just about discrimination: think about how much harder it would be to have a public debate about health care if we don’t have numbers on health and poverty. Or how hard it would be to legislate on immigration if we can’t agree on how many people are entering and leaving the country. In an illustrated talk full of her signature hand-drawn data visualizations, Chalabi offers advice on how to distinguish good numbers from bad ones. As she explains, if we give up on government numbers altogether, “we’ll be making public policy decisions in the dark, using nothing but private interests to guide us.”

A story of hope in the shadow of death. When writer/comedian Amy Green’s 12-month-old son was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, she began to tell her children bedtime stories in order to teach them about cancer. What resulted was a video game called “That Dragon, Cancer,” in which a brave knight named Joel fights an evil dragon. In the game, the autobiographical story of Joel’s terminal illness, players discover that although they desperately want to win and want Joel to beat cancer, they never can. What do you value when you can’t win? In a beautiful talk about coping with loss, Green brings joy and play into tragedy. “We made a game that’s hard to play,” Green says. “People have to prepare themselves to invest emotionally in a story that they know will break their hearts, but when our hearts break they heal a little differently. My broken heart has healed with a new and deeper compassion.”

With speech and song, Emmy the Great shares her story about standing out, fitting in and finding her identity through music. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

Where East meets West. Emmy the Great grew up wrestling the East and West within herself — the East of her Chinese mother, the city of Hong Kong where she was born, and the West of her English father, her British peers, and the UK, where she grew up. But her 30th birthday blessed her with a unique coming-of-age moment, and she finally decided to claim her intersectional identity. She plays two lulling songs on a quiet electric guitar, “Swimming Pool” and “Soho,” with lyrics that swing gently between English and Cantonese.

Finding certainty in an uncertain world. At a time when the world feels like it’s been turned upside down and the only constant is chaos, it’s easy to slip out of reality and question your sanity. This phenomenon has a name: gaslighting. It’s a tool of manipulation familiar to author Ariel Leve. Leve grew up in a Manhattan penthouse, the daughter of a glamorous poet and artist, surrounded by interesting and artistic people. Her mother’s raucous weeknight dinner parties were a mainstay of her childhood, as was a tendency for her mother to tell her that what she thought had happened hadn’t actually happened. Facts were routinely batted away, and Leve was sprayed with words of contempt, which her mother would invariably deny. “One of the most insidious things about gaslighting is the denial of reality, being denied what you have seen with your own eyes,” Leve says. “It can make you crazy. But you are not crazy.” Leve shares a few strategies, including remaining defiant, letting go of a wish for things to be different and writing things down, that helped her survive and validate her reality.

“Escalating disgust and intractable conflict are not what we want for ourselves, our country or our next generation,” says Megan Phelps-Roper. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)

End of the spiral of rage and blame. When she was was five years old, Megan Phelps-Roper joined her family on the picket line for the first time, her tiny fists clutching a sign she couldn’t yet read: “Gays Are Worthy of Death.” As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, Phelps-Roper grew up trekking across the country with her family, from baseball games to military funerals, with neon protest signs in hand to tell others exactly how “unclean” they were, and why they were headed for damnation. In 2009, her zeal brought her to Twitter where, amid the digital brawl, she found a surprising thing: civil, sometimes even friendly conversation. Soon these conversations bled into the real world, as people she sparred with online came to visit and talk with her at protests. These conversations planted seeds of doubt, and in time she found that she could no longer justify Westboro’s actions — especially their cruel practice of protesting funerals and celebrating human tragedy. Phelps-Roper left Westboro in 2012, and after a period of turmoil she found herself letting go of the harsh judgments that instinctively ran through her mind. Now, she sees that same “us” vs. “them” impulse in our public discourse, where compromise of any kind has become anathema. “That isn’t who we want to be,” she says. “We can resist.” She offers four small, powerful steps to employ in difficult, disagreeable conversations: stop assuming ill motives in others, ask questions, stay calm in disagreement and make the case for your beliefs with generosity and compassion. “The end of the spiral of rage and blame begins with one person who refuses to give in to destructive, seductive impulses,” she says. “We just have to decide that it’s going to start with us.”

It’s a cultural marque in its own right, but in these turbulent times, it’s also a highly relevant piece of advice.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the British Government designed three posters to help keep spirits high. All featured the crown of the monarch, with a red background and an uplifting slogan in white type. Two and a half million copies of the “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster were printed but never circulated. 60 years later, bookseller Stuart Manley discovered a copy of the poster in a book he bought at auction, framed it and put it in his shop. In 2005, the poster was featured in a newspaper supplement as a Christmas gift idea, and demand boomed. Since then, the design has been reproduced, reworked and applied in all sorts of ways.

The marque itself may have run its course as a cultural phenomenon in the eyes of some, but the message is highly relevant for marketers today as they navigate their brands through what many see as strange times. Partly, that’s because it’s so easy to be distracted now by the blizzard of statements, trends, ideas, outrage and rebuttal that cram our screens. Partly, it’s because marketing itself seems locked in a fretful discourse over the extent to which data trumps creativity. Partly, it’s because brands themselves seem so commonplace that many fail to carry anything like the residual loyalty that they expect. And partly, as Geoffrey Colon reminds us, disruption is resetting the rules. “The most disruptive marketers believe in using all possibilities available to them, including nondigital tools, in a world with ever more abundant goods and greater access to ever more information. This sometimes runs in contradiction to older systems rooted in hierarchy, monopoly, and scarcity.”

So, as the pressure goes on marketing teams to make their brands work harder, how should they respond? Here are my six bedrock principles for how marketers can continue to calmly and powerfully carry on building brands that will mean something:

1. Understand your contribution – powerful brands understand what they bring to a market that others don’t. They see their presence as a role: one that appeals to consumers, counter-balances competitors and stabilizes interest and demand. What does your brand do for the sector, and what does the sector do for you? In some ways, your operating environment is a community. The critical judgment is knowing what to align with and where to diverge.

2. Keep Your Eye On The Value, Not On The Trends – the purpose of brands is to pave the way for pricing that exceeds the non-branded default. Is the work you’re doing adding to the perceived value of your brand in the eyes of consumers, or is it just raising awareness?

3. Don’t Over-React – as the media looks to cash in on the headline power of burgeoning controversy, it’s easy to get pulled into a Q&A vortex. The media has a job to do in investigating what is or isn’t news; but brands also have a responsibility to set limits around how they will engage, what they will engage on, and when their investment in this to-ing and fro-ing has run its course. Hilton Barbour described what’s happening wonderfully the other day as “a rise in online outrage and the attention span of goldfish”. Know what you’ll take a stance on and what you won’t, and what you’ll argue over and what you won’t – but, as per my post last week, do so through the lenses of what your consumers are interested in. Answer to the people who (will) buy from you.

4. Run Your Story – the best marketers I know have a narrative for their brand that will play out over the years ahead. For some, it’s a mental map, for others it’s detailed storylines. Either way, it captures how the brand will engage with customers and invite new prospects in over the foreseeable future. Some CMOs have described it to me as “the story of my time here”. Of course, plots can change, developments can falter, markets can accelerate or stall, but the plan, in its original form and as it evolves, keeps everyone true to the direction and, more importantly, the intention.

5. Don’t Wander – it’s always tempting to believe that throwing a wider net will bring in more fish. But there are plenty of examples of brands that have gone off course because they got interested in something and diversified into a sector that baffled their customers, or that thought they were competitive in a new area when in reality they were seriously out-gunned. That’s not to say brands shouldn’t expand their mandate, particularly if they are operating at critical mass, but do so in ways that align with the principles above: watch the shifts in the market (and identify how you can make a valuable contribution); aim for expanded margin not just expanded presence; consider carefully (but not slowly); and think through how this change in your brand will add to your story, or introduce a fascinating sub-plot.

6. Repetition Is Powerful. (That’s right. Repetition is powerful) – There is nothing to suggest that the challenges facing marketers will abate or that the issues themselves will become simpler. While the business press makes much of the pressures of change, the power of consistency should not be under-estimated. Brands with a clear sense of their own worth and identity will draw on these underlying principles to calmly excel and grow stronger. They will continue to reinforce through repetition a powerful and reliable sense of who they are. While marketers can quickly become impatient with historic brand icons, phrases and visual signatures, these work as convenient short-cuts for time-pressed consumers. Therefore abandon what you are recognized by with caution. Being constant is a discipline. Those that aren’t will resort to propelling themselves like pinballs from one idea to another in the hope that somehow freneticism will see them through.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Today I’m going to share something you will think is negative that is actually positive. It’s positive because it’s a learning lesson for all of us in what Geoffrey Moore eloquently called the “Crossing the Chasm” period of business history. Or what Peter Drucker noted was a movement from the industrial economy into the cognitive post-capitalist world.

Your brand is going to fail.

So why would I in my right mind say this is good news? Think about failure for a moment. We’ve all been there in our personal or professional careers. What did you take away from it? What was the true learning? And most importantly, were you able to pivot quickly from this failure and transform it into a success?

Brands have been living in what we’ve known as the “industrial economy.” Built on size and scale, the more global a company and the ability to monopolize, the larger the relevance and profit margins. In this era bigger brands with the most resources swallowed all of the audience, market share and attention. But in the age of disruption big brands are going to have to learn, unlearn and relearn very quickly. Their size will work against them and they will have a hard time personalizing their brand solutions. The era of scale is coming to an end and if you can fail fast in this transition you will not only survive, but thrive in the “long tail niche” era or what I call the “creative economy.”

Brands will need to pay attention to three things to make the shift.

1. Brand marketers who think they live the brand simply because they work on it need an attitude adjustment and fast. So what? Do you use the products? Are you the target audience? It’s time to realize that the very stewards of the brand do a disservice to their brands because they bring innate bias to their decision-making. Those that can throw out this bias by following the next point will have the ultimate advantage.

2. Customers who live the brand should be on your band management team as advisors, influencers and feedback agents. If you have the resources to pay for millions of dollars in wasted advertising, you have the money to do audits to find your top customers and pay them to be on your advisory board. They live and love your brand. You don’t. You’re simply the aggregator, the change agent to bring their knowledge and feedback into better products, services and solutions. How many times has a Gloria, Doug, Tiffany, Maria or countless other customers who have given you feedback been ignored because their insight would hurt your career management review? Swallow your pride, drop the ego and realize the line between customer and brand marketer has blurred. The faster you can realize this, the less turbulent the transition to this new era will be for you and your brand.

3. Data, analytics and everything else written about in quantified modern marketing is simply a tool to understanding customers based on mathematical equations. But people aren’t a calculus formula. Furthermore, their quantified actions are equations based on past behaviors. The past is not prologue in this new creative era. If customers see you doing things your competitors will do they will simply say, “Why don’t I go use that other brand?” This is the issue we see in a variety of industries from tech to healthcare to consumer packaged goods to telecommunications. Stop trying to be your competition. The more you differentiate, the more human and approachable you can be, the more your customers will continue to advocate in your name. People advocate for people who have a soul, who are authentic who keep it real. Remember this the next time you are calculating an ROI spreadsheet.

Now ask yourself. Are you doing any of what is stated in 1, 2 or 3? If the answer is no to my question well I have something to tell you that you’re not going to like.

You’re failing. It’s time to pivot and make that a positive.

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

There’s an easier way to get what you want when you need it. That’s exactly what Setapp, the recently launched “Netflix for apps”, wants to prove. SuperHeroes New York and Macpaw surprised unsuspecting fisherman on a lake in Orlando with a fresh shortcut. Will they go for the easy way and take the bait?

Setapp is a subscription service with unlimited access to the best Mac apps for a monthly fee. With Setapp in the dock of your Mac, you’ll get around the hassle of having to go through tons of apps in the official app store, a shortcut that we so often would love to have in life.

Whether it’s speed fishing or finding the easier way to build a birdhouse, the multi-channel introduction campaign celebrates the convenience of taking a shortcut. Rob Zuurbier, managing director of SuperHeroes New York: “Setapp reached out to us in an early stage when they were still developing the service, so we immediately got a first hand experience of the benefits of this new subscription-based model for apps. As a digital first communications agency, this type of product is really close to our hearts.”

The campaign is built on the success of the agency’s SuperClose model. By applying sequential storytelling to the long idea of “taking the shortcut”, SuperHeroes New York targets different people in an engaging way.

The campaign shows different types of struggling, brought in short-form content like promotional videos, a product demo and display ads. We see the hassle of starting a fire, building a birdhouse or picking the right apps for Mac, and how all these moments are minimized by offering people a shortcut.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Agency: SuperHeroes New York
Managing Director: Rob Zuurbier
Executive Creative Director: Rogier Vijverberg
Creative Director: Niek Eijsbouts, Hunter Fine
Creatives: Ola Syse, Elliot Stewart-Franzen
Graphic Designer: Long Wu
Account Lead: Beth Irvin
Agency Producers: Severien Jansen, Yumi Yamsuan
Production Company: Good Engine Media
Executive Producer: Andrew Garland
Line Producer: Myriam Schroeter
Directed by: Pete Marquis & Jamie McCelland
D.O.P.: Eric Ulbrich
Editors: Christ Teibert, Huy Nguyen
VFX: Huy Nguyen
Sound design: Silver Sound
Client: MacPaw
Responsible at MacPaw: Yaroslav Stepanenko, Julia Petryk, Olga Ku

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Understanding the human side of customers through digital anthropology studies is the important first step of human-centric marketing. Equally important is to unveil the human side of brands that can attract customers.

According to Stephen Sampson in his book Leaders without Titles, horizontal leaders have six human attributes that attract others to them, even though they have no authority over others: physicality, intellectuality, sociability, emotionality, personability, and morality. These six attributes constitute a complete human being, one who typically becomes a role model. When brands want to influence customers as friends without overpowering them, they must possess these six human attributes.

1. Physicality

A person who is seen as physically attractive usually has strong influence over others. Thus, brands that aim to have influence over their customers should have physical attractions that make them unique, albeit not perfect.

For brands, physical attractions can come from their brand identities such as well-designed logos or well-crafted taglines. Consider Google and MTV with their dynamic logo systems, which can be flexible instead of static, depending on the context. Google continuously alters its logo to celebrate special moments or persons with its Google Doodle.

Physical attractions can also come from a compelling product design or a solid customer experience design. Consider Apple as an example. Apple is well known to excel not only in its industrial-product design but also in its user-interface design. Apple’s user interface is often considered very simple and unintimidating even for non-savvy users. The Apple Store design is also considered one of the best in the retail industry.

2. Intellectuality

Intellectuality is the human ability to have knowledge, to think, and to generate ideas. Intellectuality is closely related to the ability to think beyond the obvious and the ability to innovate. Brands with strong intellectuality are innovative and have the ability to launch products and services not previously conceived by other players and by the customers. The brands thus demonstrate their ability to effectively solve customers’ problems.

When the Tesla automotive company adopted the name of a famous innovator, Nikola Tesla, the brand promised to continuously innovate as did its namesake. The brand does not disappoint; it is in the forefront of major innovations such as electric cars, automotive analytics, and autopilot technologies. The intellectuality of Tesla creates a strong brand appeal, even though it does not advertise.

Major disruptive innovators such as Uber and Airbnb also demonstrate their intellectuality by coming up with services that connect customers and service providers. Major proponents of the so-called sharing economy, Uber and Airbnb are viewed by customers as smart brands.

3. Sociability

A person with strong sociability is confident in engaging with others, showing good verbal and nonverbal communication skills. Similarly, brands with strong sociability are not afraid of having conversations with their customers. They listen to their customers as well as the conversations among their customers. They answer inquiries and resolve complaints responsively. The brands also engage their customers regularly through multiple communications media. They share interesting content on social media that attracts their customers.

For example, Denny’s Diner creates a sociable persona on social media that is friendly, fun, and likeable. The brand regularly posts witty comments and jokes on Twitter that people like and retweet, making it more human. Denny’s Diner behaves as a friend to whom people can relate, thereby receiving a lot of word of mouth. Zappos is also known as a very sociable brand. Customers can converse with Zappos’s call-center agents for hours discussing shoes and other matters as friends. In fact, Zappos holds the longest customer-service call record at 10 hours and 43 minutes.

4. Emotionality

People who can connect emotionally with others to drive their actions are very powerful influencers. Brands that evoke emotions can drive favorable customer actions. They connect with customers on an emotional level with inspirational messages. Sometimes, the brands also connect with customers by showing off their humorous side.

Dove is a brand with strong emotionality. A humanized brand, Dove addresses the issue of self-esteem among women by encouraging women to love themselves and appreciate their real beauty. With a massive campaign lasting over a decade, Dove has managed to connect emotionally with women worldwide.

Doritos provides a different example with its SuperBowl 50 “Ultrasound” advertisement, which portrays a pregnant woman who is having an ultrasound while her husband is eating a bag of Doritos. The advertisement ends with the baby shooting out of the womb to get some Doritos. The advertisement turns out to be polarizing; some people consider it hilarious while others see it as disgusting. Nevertheless, a facial tracking technology reveals that the advertisement is the most emotionally engaging, even though the emotions it provokes are mixed.

5. Personability

People with strong personability have self-awareness; they are conscious of what they are good at while admitting what they still have yet to learn. They show self-confidence and self-motivation to improve themselves. Similarly, brands with strong personability know exactly what they stand for—their raison d’etre. But these brands are also not afraid to show their flaws and take full responsibility for their actions.

Patagonia, for instance, stands for social and environmental sustainability. It aims to minimize the adverse social and environmental impact of its business activities. With its Footprint Chronicles, Patagonia allows customers to trace back the origin of any product that they buy and see the social and environmental footprint of the product. Patagonia is honest and confident enough to show that its business processes are not perfect and still in fact harm the environment. But it is also determined to improve over time.

Domino’s is another example. The pizza company made a brave move in 2010 to admit their pizzas were not compelling. In an advertisement, Domino’s publicly shared customer feedback about their pizzas. In response, the company reinvented its pizzas and offered them to the critics. The company confidently took responsibility for its flaws, which made the brand more human.

6. Morality

Morality is about being ethical and having strong integrity. A person with positive moral character has the ability to know the difference between right and wrong. Most important, they have the courage to do the right thing. Similarly, brands with strong morality are values driven. The brands ensure that appropriate ethical considerations become a key part of all business decisions. In fact, some brands put ethical business models as their core differentiation. The brands keep their promises even though customers do not keep track.

Unilever, for instance, announced in 2010 the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which aimed to double the size of the business while halving its environmental footprint by 2020. It also aimed to improve the well-being of more than 1 billion people and to enhance the livelihoods of millions of people in the process. The corporate-wide moral compass was translated into brand-level initiatives in a movement to create more humanized brands within the company. Examples include Knorr’s effort to fight malnutrition in Nigeria, the effort by Wall’s to create micro-entrepreneurs in India, and Omo’s campaign to save water in Brazil.

Summary: When Brands Become Humans

More and more, brands are adopting human qualities to attract customers in the human-centric era. This requires unlocking customers’ latent anxieties and desires through social listening, netnography, and emphatic research. To effectively address these anxieties and desires, marketers should build the human side of their brands. The brands should be physically attractive, intellectually compelling, socially engaging, and emotionally appealing while at the same time demonstrate strong personability and morality.

Reflection Questions


• What are the deepest anxieties and desires of your customers?
• Does your brand possess human qualities?
• What can you do to make it more human?

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: C. Whan Park, Deborah MacInnis and Andreas Eisingerich, excerpted from their book, Brand Admiration with permission from Wiley Publishing.

Don’t face your marketing challenges alone. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

To achieve true digital transformation, organizations need to be open and inclusive to tap knowledge and ideas that reside both internally and externally in other companies and institutions. Partnerships, especially nontraditional ones, and collaboration are the basic elements of successful innovation. In its report Inclusion + Innovation: Leveraging Diversity of Thought to Generate Business Growth, […]

As part of Canada’s ongoing 150 celebrations, the Canada Games Council launched an emotive campaign this week for its 50th anniversary, inspired by and featuring the next generation of national, international and Olympic Champions, hoping to awaken the pride of the nation.

Developed by Vancouver creative agency Will, the multimedia campaign includes video, radio, social and digital ads to drive awareness and pride for the Games across Canada, by celebrating the untold stories of athletes on the road to greatness.

“In the Untold Story video, we had the opportunity to pull back the curtain on these quiet moments of preparation, dedication and hardship. It’s a journey that is both physical and emotional for these hopeful young athletes, and one they often experience alone before we all get to share in the pride of their success in world class competition,” said Creative Director Lisa Lebedovich

“This campaign shines the light on the role the Canada Games play in inspiring the next generation of national, international and Olympic Champions as we approach the 2017 Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg,” said Tom Quinn, Canada Games Council Chairman.

The national campaign is part of a broader program for the Canada Games Council including the 50th Anniversary Activity Challenge which promotes physical literacy in Canada’s classrooms.

Will partnered with media agency 6S Marketing to win the competitive pitch in May 2016. This adds to Will’s recent sports-related wins this past year, including HSBC Canada Sevens and Freestyle Canada.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: Will Creative, Vancouver, Canada

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In the spring of 1902 the Hanoi governor was worried: a bubonic plague outbreak threatened to spiral out of control. The governor wanted to exterminate the city’s rats but he lacked the necessary staff. After puzzling over his conundrum he had a brainwave: a bounty for every rat’s tail handed in.

At first, his idea worked wonderfully – tails poured in. Hundreds each day in March, thousands in May, peaking on 12 June at a staggering 20,114.

But there was a problem. Despite the growing tail collection, there was no decline in plague victims. Nor was the rat population shrinking. In fact, if anything, there were more rats – but they were tail-less.

The bounty had unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of the populace. They were capturing rats, feeding rats, breeding rats and lopping the tails off rats. The one thing they weren’t doing was killing rats. Rats were too valuable.

The target had encouraged the specific behavior that was rewarded – handing in rats’ tails – but it had a counter-productive effect on the underlying intention – a reduction in rats.

From a safe distance, this tale of unintended consequences seems farcical. But similar examples have been recorded with alarming regularity. It’s so common that the German economist, Horst Siebert, coined the term ‘the cobra effect’, so called as the first recorded example was an attempt to cull snakes in Delhi that backfired.

Siebert discovered that whenever there is a sliver of difference between a metric and the objective then unintended consequences are unleashed.

Marketing Is A Victim Of The Cobra Effect

Advertisers, just like the governor, are trying to resolve complex problems with simple targets. Of course, the details are different – brands are grappling with unsatisfactory returns on investment rather than vermin infestations. But the consequences are equally perverse.

In order to boost campaign performance, digital advertisers set a range of targets. However, these metrics are almost invariably short term – visits, views or sales. That’s not speculation. Peter Field’s recent analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Databank found that the proportion of entries with a short-term goal had risen from 7% in 2006 to 33% in 2014.

Short-term metrics are popular as they’re straightforward to collect and interpret. This ease appeals to marketers as they must manage more data than ever. Since time-pressured marketers crave shortcuts, they put their skepticism on hold and will themselves to believe that messy, complex reality can be captured with a simple metric.

Once measurements are added to a campaign they take on a life of their own. It feels remiss, unprofessional even, to ignore data, so plans are optimized to the metric being captured. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, we shape our metrics, then they shape us.

Once short-term metrics have been collected it’s easy to generate improvements: dropping the worst performers quickly boosts results. In a world of uncertainty, that progress is addictive. In Martin Weigel’s memorable phrase, short-termism is ‘marketing crack’.

But we’re optimizing to a sub-optimal position: what works best in the short term isn’t ideal in the long term. Les Binet and Peter Field showed in The Long and Short of It, their earlier analysis of the IPA Effectiveness entries, that direct approaches outperform brand approaches by 50 per cent over one to two years. But brand approaches are six times more effective when judged on a three year-plus timescale.

The short-term focus creates an illusion of success. But illusions tend to end abruptly. Marketers are like the man in the old story who jumps from a skyscraper. As he’s falling, as he passes each floor, he reassures himself: ‘So far, so good,’ he says, ‘so far, so good.’

Unless marketers change, they’re in for an unpleasant landing.

So What Can We Do?

First, insist on balanced metrics. If metrics are flawed because they give a partial view of the problem, then capturing a single type of data will be misleading. Instead, campaigns need to track a variety of genuinely different types of measurement.

Every digital campaign needs to complement short-term tracking with analysis of how longer-term brand metrics have been affected. The costs for exposed versus control brand tracking have dropped far enough now, that this aim is feasible.

Second, we need to recognize, as the sociologist William Bruce Cameron stated, that not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

No metric, or range of metrics, can fully capture a complex problem. So we should avoid giving undue deference to metrics. They need to be given the importance they deserve – but no more. Even in a world of limitless data there is a crucial role for human intuition and judgement.

Unless we recognize this, we’ll continue to deliver rats’ tails, not rats.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Richard Shotten, Deputy Head of Evidence at Manning Gottlieb OMD.

Don’t face your marketing challenges alone. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

The Blake Project Can Help: Disruptive Brand Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

By Mia Dand In the constantly changing world of digital and social media, Influencer Marketing is the new black. However, due to the nascency of this space, it’s plagued with hype and chaos. In our latest report, we reviewed the current state of influencer technology in 2017 and highlighted critical considerations for CMOs as they […]