Who Persuades Who?

In brand communication, who persuades who?

The Brand persuades the Customer. Obviously.

At least that's what advertising has been trying to achieve since the advent of commercial messaging, that's how the whole game is designed.

But given its inherent commercial objectives, Brand Communication is more akin to negotiation and emotional 'warfare', the principles of which state that one side should never try to explicitly persuade the other. The influencee should sort of persuade themselves in the process.

Persuade themselves? Yes, and handled well it's an implicit process, as both sides - brand and customer - prefer to believe they are in control or that they cannot be unduly influenced, respectively.

Let's take a look at how the customer side perceives and deduces meaning from communication, and how people then decide to accept or reject a message and proposition to buy the brand.

Most believe they follow a conscious cognitive process when dealing with commercial information:

1. OBSERVATION: I receive information (ad / product intro)
2. ORIENTATION: I weigh info against personal context and needs, which helps me deduce MEANING 
3. DECISION: I decide if that Meaning is RELEVANT
4. ACTION: If "Yes", I buy!

The ORIENTATION step here is of critical importance to the customer: to define personally relevant meaning of the brand message by evaluating against what they really need. 

After all, people know themselves best, right?

The customer uses his or her independent self-awareness to deduce meaning, ORIENTATION guards against being duped by misleading commercial communication: in other words, the Customer is the Meaning-Maker!

And the advantage for the brand? Once customers deduce Personal Relevance entirely by themselves, the door to emotional Brand Loyalty is wide open – humans tend to trust their own interpretation and conclusions most.

Nice.

Only, this whole idea is wishful thinking.

From the Brand's POV, full interpretive rights should NEVER be left to the customer. While the customer may be under the illusion of being an "objective observer and meaning-maker", brand communication often tries to AVOID giving much interpretive space to their audiences. For good reason.

Meaning and Relevance should be supplied by the brand. Because, what if the TA gets it 'wrong'? What if their biases and misperceptions incorrectly see the brand as not relevant to their needs, and the brand then (unfairly) loses the sale?

Better the brand manager defines the 'correct' Meaning on behalf of the TA in the first place, so they deduct 'correct' Meaning and Relevance.

In the cluttered reality of today's world, the brand communication process looks more like this:

1. ORIENTED OBSERVATION means that Brand messaging is supplied with pre-defined and structured meaning. 
2. The TA accepts the proposed meaning, and their subsequent decision is convenient, easy and fast - and so is their action!

Super convenient, super effective, great news for the brand…right? The advantage is obvious: it distracts from the brand's own competitive weaknesses, and what's more, communication is designed to limit the TA’s sometimes annoying own meaning-making efforts (talking about 'correct'...).

With the Brand being the Meaning-Maker, Observation and Orientation (meaning-making) are merged into 'ORIENTED OBSERVATION' that tells the TA how to see, feel and think about the message.

While this makes business sense for the brand, in reality serious issues have emerged with this tenet:

Firstly, the offered "meaning" is often built on weak or faulty foundations: skewed, shallow, or simply not in line with the TA’s real feelings and perceptions, and thus often seriously out of sync with people's real contextual needs. 

That's a serious issue: when people discover the gap between the offered 'Meaning & Relevance' vis-à-vis real personal Context and Needs, they will feel duped – and future sales and brand loyalty are dead. Forever.

Another risk that some brands don’t even recognize is: it does happen that the Brand (or it's brand narrative) is truly relevant to the TA's Needs, but the brand communicator doesn’t know the specific cognitive connection of that Relevance Experience, either by being biased or oblivious to the target audience's real Needs - invariably, this reflect the issue of having no or too shallow insights. 

Resultingly, the brand then offers a Meaning that the TA sees as disconnected from their personal context and needs – and the (originally deserved) sale is lost!

That happens more often than you think.

It‘s a treacherous world, isn't it?

Here's a way that allows Brand and Customer to CO-CREATE Meaning and Relevance. This is an approach adopted by persuasion professionals, government 'non-kinetic/narrative warfare' specialists, hostage negotiators etc., whose livelihood depends on the ability to influence and change minds:

Influence and persuasion is almost irresistible when Brand Communication is designed to evoke the TA‘s personal "Identity Frame" - that is, when the consumer viscerally recognizes a reflection of the SELF and a personally relevant context in Brand Communication.

What this means is that Identity-based communication activates the urge to satisfy specific personal needs you are (or now have become) aware of: communication creates a 'prescriptive' or directive sense of urgency to act (buy) in the consumer.

With unbeatable results:

It speeds up TA's decision & (favorable) action, but not via skewed or faulty Meaning Proposition – instead, the Brand offers carefully pre-constructed Meaning based on the TA‘s critical key Self-Identity Themes, and this naturally leads to customers' emotional identification with the brand message.

Secondly, it prompts the TA's immediate attention to her related personal needs – again, this means that customers themselves deduce Meaning and personal Relevance, feeling a visceral urge to attend to their needs.

It's a Co-Creative Identity-based Process, designed to spur the TA into Self-Persuasion.

However, this requires some serious customer understanding to be done before the development of brand communication, but the rewards are outstanding. 

Here’s what you need to do:

FIRST: decode TA's Self-Identity, to understand 'WHO am I in my current Role?'

• Trace the formation of Emotional Tensions and Needs, within the Role(s) the TA play in their current life stages - this effectively uncovers real emotional and rational needs, as well as brand & product elements relevant to fulfilling those needs
• Decode the emotional and functional role of product/brand in TA's formational path & today

How? By using Narrative Psychology techniques that define Formative Tensions, Identity-specific Needs and the corresponding role of category, product and brand.

?SECOND: Integrate identified Core Themes of the TA's Self-Identity Motivators into a sharp Brand Narrative:

• Create a brand narrative that targets TA’s Self-Identity Perceptions and Experiences – embed relevant Needs and Tensions into Narrative

How? By processing Insights in a one-day Brand Narrative Workshop specifically designed to target TA's Internalization and Prescriptive Action.

THEN: Translate into multi-channel Creative Communication Content 

• Use creative techniques based on from communication psychology to impact rational perception AND emotion
• Maintain Brand-Narrative-based Message Consistency across ALL channels, be creative & versatile in format

How? By translating the Brand Narrative in a Creative Workshop designed to develop multi-channel content (including tactical events such as live-streaming, etc), and by using techniques from creative communication psychology.

Give people a compelling reason to 'persuade themselves': it's the highest form of lasting impact and persuasion, it's by far the most effective way of changing your TA's perceptions and behavior.

Talk to us for more information info on specific techniques, workshops and case studies.