Driving Ad "Relatability" via Universal Human Truths (UHTs)
Recall a time when a friend applied his/her passion and accomplished something. How well were you able to relate to your friend's experience based on similar experiences you had in the past?
Relatability is vital for establishing a strong foundation in any relationship since it generates rapport and increases message clarity between people. Specifically in advertising, the concept of relatability may be applied to short-term tactical campaigns and long-term customer loyalty sustenance. At present, it is common to see brands focusing their ad budgets on how they are different from or better than their competitors. However, these USP-centric approaches may not be effective in forging durable relationships with consumers.
Beyond USPs - Shifting Focus from Brand to Consumers
While USPs are important to communicate to consumers, these propositions are largely centered around the brand and its priorities. For instance, brands may focus their ad budgets on areas that are perceived to be important to them such as a new product launch that the company has invested lots of resources to build or is an important mechanism for reflecting the company's growth vision. As important as these areas are, consumers are unlikely to be at the forefront of such an approach.
USPs are also great in the sense that they offer brands an angle to grab the attention of their target users with a value proposition that presumably can't be matched by rivals at that specific point of time. But then, how do you establish long-term connections with your customers and prospects?
To truly drive ad relatability, it is vital for brands to shift their primary focus from themselves to their consumers. From conversations revolving around USPs to those with customers and prospects at their forefront. The best way to do that is by building long-term emotional connections with consumers.
Creating Emotional Connections with Consumers - Think Why, How and then What
Simon Sinek, one of the leading leadership coaches, advocates that it is crucial to start with the "Why" followed by the "How" and finally the "What" since once the emotional connection is established between brand and consumer, the latter is more likely to be receptive to the former's product offerings. The question then arises - how do you effectively sell the "Why?" factor to consumers to create emotional connections?
Sharing your Brand's Beliefs and Motivations through a Consumer-Centered Approach
No two people think alike or have the same life experiences, so how do you place a bet that the ad you had created (perhaps based on some research and internal validation), will be relatable to ad viewers? It's true with digital, we can now serve customized ads to audiences bucketed based on demographics, location and context so as to invoke as much relatability as possible. Even then, advertisers have found that hyper-targeting does not have any significant impacts on their businesses. Is it then time for brands to target the masses though a more "humane" approach?
Adopting Universal Human Truths as an Ad Relatability Driver
What exactly is a Universal Human Truth (UHT)? Is it an observation about life that is held true by everyone in the world? Is that even possible or realistic? Practitioners have argued that a Universal Human Truth is an oxymoron since truth is definitely not universal. What is true to one person may not be true to another. When we refer to UHTs, we are talking about things that motivate people regardless of experience or belief. In other words, ideals, qualities or common situations that motivate people or are easily recognizable.
Ads Depicting UHTs in Asia
Identifying and adapting UHTs in an apt manner are crucial steps in creating emotional connections between brands and their target audiences. Here are some ads targeting Asian audiences that have been expertly choreographed and filmed to make them relatable via the identified UHTs.
Trust is priceless - UOB
2. Money can't buy the best things in life - Thai Life Insurance
3. Living life to the fullest - TC Bank
4. Giving is the best form of communication - TrueMove
While ads depicting UHTs tend to focus on irreplaceable elements of life, IKEA has placed an innovate spin to this by focusing their recent campaign on replaceable elements of life as seen in the video below.
Approaches to Adopting UHTs for Social Advertising
Studies have found that ads depicting real-life situations resonate most powerfully with global audiences. It was further revealed that employing familiar themes is extremely useful in driving memorability. All these mean that it is imperative to adopt familiarity and authenticity as guiding principles for any creative asset builds.
When using videos, it is crucial to ensure that the ads are "thumb-stopping" since users may opt not to watch the ads by scrolling away. As such, it is important to invoke curiousity, nostalgia, humour or other emotions as early as possible. Text overlays or subtitles are also a must since most people watch social media ads with sound off.
"Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but the stories you tell" - Seth Godin
Adopt a story-telling approach where you can narrate UHTs in short videos. Incorporate hashtags which is one of the most powerful branding mechanisms of social to facilitate conversations and content discovery. Complement video assets with other ad formats like comic strips cinemagraphs or 360 photos to combat creative fatigue as well as to reach out to audiences who are not video watchers.
Value in Adopting UHTs for Social Advertising
Social media platforms have placed a strong focus on ad relevance scores and the most common ways to maximize this score is to either refine your targeting parameters to match the creative / ad copy or create customized copies of the ad to better align with your targeting parameters. Beyond these, creating ads based on situations, values or ideals that most people can relate to should help drive relevance and ultimately success throughout the marketing funnel. The key lies with selecting appropriate UHTs and executing them in a tasteful manner.
The ability to share content on social platforms may it be through public or dark social channels further increases the ad's reach since users are likely to share the ad with others whom they feel will be able to relate to the ad.
Challenge in Adopting UHTs for Social Advertising
The challenge of finding something universally relatable may it be emotional or motivational is aggravated when we start considering social qualities. Many brands seem to run into the same problem - what seems universal often turns out not to be so. Dove is one such brand that has missed the mark with its recent ads depicting "real beauty" which caused an uproar in the social world.
Dove also ran into problems when the idea of real beauty failed to resonate in China in the same way that it did in the West. As such, it is vital for brands to adapt UHTs after taking into account the cultural context of their target audiences. Validating your ads with a diverse cross-section of your customers and prospects, prior to launch, allows for revisions to be made after assessing the response to your ads.
Brands may also consider focus groups during the ad ideation process which could include a few people of different backgrounds from their target audiences. When there is a likelihood of an adverse response in some markets, brands may look to adopt other UHTs for these specific markets alone. For instance, British Airways ran a campaign targeting Chinese students using the airline to travel to college in England. The airline leveraged on the experience of Chinese students abroad who often get stressed when their parents visit due to language and cultural barriers.
Key Takeaways
- Universal Human Truths are human ideals, qualities or situations that are motivational or easily recognizable.
- While focusing your ad messaging on USPs may be sustainable in the short-run, UHTs are the elements that help to drive long term ad ROI.
- Brands should select UHTs that transcend product features to include those that may be associated with consumers’ goals. Brands should ideally, by association, help users achieve these goals, so as to maximize brand and product recall.
- Executing UHTs is as important as UHT selection whereby it is crucial to consider cultural contexts as well as to validate the ad with a representative sample of your target audience before the actual ad delivery.
- Social advertising is a great platform to amplify ad relatability due to the inherent ease of content sharing and effectiveness of driving engagements on social channels.
Final Thoughts: Customers and prospects may not always be in your target audience. Some consumers grow into your target while there are others you could potentially be talking to, who have been omitted due to hyper-targeting. On the other hand, focusing on UHTs to drive ad relatability means shifting to mass reach using content that possess a strong ability to invoke emotions and when executed in an apt manner, could help drive ad relatability and establish long term emotional connections with consumers.