Brutal facts

The brutal facts and uncomfortable truths series.

I love being in research. It is something I never thought I’d say.?

I used to look at research from the outside, on the other side of the table, being presented to in such a manner as to induce severe boredom and frustration that my creative budget was being used to tell me things I thought I already knew.

But I was wrong. Doing research as it turns out doesn’t mean just testing creative (making it safe and bland). It means accepting that our lived experiences of the world are as rich and varied as you can possibly imagine, it means accepting that you don’t know and can’t speak for all people. ?Human behaviour is fascinating, even if the research that I used to encounter wasn’t.

That’s why I started a research business. To get involved in the fascinating business of being human and to make it better you have to start by acknowledging the problems.

So in this series I’m going to share some of the problems that keep The Mix up at night.

?#1 Most marketing is crap

Look I’m not here to proclaim the death of anything but if we are all being candid, most marketing is a bit rubbish isn’t it??The majority of what you will encounter on a daily basis won’t even register in your neural pathways it is so ineffectual.?If you are really fortunate you will see something so heinous that it will be notable if only for LOLs but for the most part none of us are that lucky.

Marketing is merely a sea of trash for us to wade through whilst becoming increasingly frustrated at being constantly re-targeted for buying a sofa, despite the fact that you only just bought a bloody sofa and in a cost of living crisis it is unlikely that you are in the market for multiple sofa’s because you are not the Sultan of Brunei.

So I return to my original point.?Most marketing is crap. Not actively detrimental to one’s existence, mostly just depressingly banal and pointless.?A waste of money.

At a low level an awful lot of it is just copycat me too versions of one another.

I refer you to our friends at EatBigFish who talk of the Mephisto Waltz of brands getting closer and closer to one another[1].

One of of my favourite examples of this is watch advertising.

Note the ads structure.

Man

In a suit

Stands or sits to the right

Watch to the left

Notice that the watches are all set to the same time.

I repeat the same time.

Some convention of watch advertising exists meaning all watch time must be set to 10.10.

I know.

Or the other brilliant example comes from Dave Trott.?He famously recalls a stat he once heard about 89% of advertising going unnoticed.?No-one can track down the source of the stat but if anyone is quibbling just think about this:

The average American sees between 4000 and 10,000 adverts every single day.[2] Do a quick test on yourself.?How many ads from today can you remember?

I can remember seeing:

An ad for Rescue Remedy

Ryan Reynolds Aviation Gin

McDonalds bill board

BT internet something or other

Some random ad for rugs on Insta

Shoes I definitely want on Insta

That’s 6. Beyond that I cannot say anymore and I work in market research.

If you can recall even just 10, you’re at either 0.25% or 0.1% depending on how many ads you saw.

It’s vanishingly small. In this context 89% feels like it might be low balling it.

I think all of this tells us that if we were marking our own home work, as an industry ‘must try harder’ would most likely be the awkward parent teacher conversation.

It’s these kinds of conversations that undermine the value of marketing and in tumultuous economic times, when you have to justify your budgets to c-suite board members make it hard to argue anything other than marketing is a cost that clearly isn’t driving business growth.

Thomas Barta has a lot of great things to say about this, in his book ‘The 12 Powers of a marketing leader’:

“Despite endlessly saying they want to be more customer focused, many firms don’t have a marketer in the top team. Too few CMOs make it to CEO, and marketers’ reputation with CEOs is mixed.”[3]

His point is that marketers might be great at marketing, but bad at leading marketing within an organisation.?Demonstrating it’s value and constantly helping the business orientate itself around the needs of the consumers by demonstrating it’s benefit to the bottom line.

The question then turns to how we can try harder.

I am not a marketer, nor am I a creative and I’m sure these folks would have plenty of thoughts on how marketing needs to up its game.

I am in insight, we practice strategy based on evidence and from my perspective there are a couple of obvious plays that can improve marketing effectiveness.

The first is the role of insight in the whole equation. At the TMRE conference in Texas recently I heard from Stan Sthanunathan and he talked about moving research from being the risk mitigation department to the growth accelerators within an organisation.

This captures a massive missing link in the quest for better marketing.?Insight people know what is going on in the world.?Marketing is often crap because quite frankly we haven’t paid a blind bit of attention to what people actually want and need.?Businesses now produce a crazy amount of pointless products that serve no real purpose in this world.

I refer you to Christmas scented toilet roll.

In this light insight teams should be leading up front in any business. Scouting for opportunities and helping guide terrific ideas and opportunities by being the voice-piece for consumers, shouting from the bloody rooftops about all the potential places a brand should be playing and the culture they should be involved in.?

In this world, insight people are the energisers, the exciters, the provocateurs.?The people with vision who know how to share the useful and important parts with the organisation they are part of.

The reality we can see is that all too often insight teams are the cleaning up department.

The ones scurrying along at the back, apologetically making sure no risks are taken and that nothing will rock the boat.?When things aren’t working well, insight teams are the invisible service providers of the marketing department, meekly doing what they are told and reacting to every request that comes their way.?The inhibitors of creativity and punching bag when things go wrong.

The truth of insight I think is captured in this idea of the 'fascinating business of being human'. Insight is the place where behaviour and business meet - the junction at which we can design new useful and ultimately profitable products, services and ideas.

But we have to first see the magic in it and find a way of bottling a bit of that so others can see the magic too. If research plays it safe we lose that, and if business can't see it then we lose out on the potential to do marketing that actually works.

?

[1] https://www.eatbigfish.com/thinking/the-mephisto-waltz

[2] https://www.zippia.com/advice/advertising-statistics/

[3] Thomas Barta, The 12 Powers of a marketing leader, 2017, McGraw-Hill Education