Is shifting media spend away from mass advertising really all that smart?
Is it my imagination, or am I receiving less unsolicited direct mail in my mailbox?
I suspect I am, and I suspect many others are too. And this begs the question: "Why?"
The reasons may be obvious: direct mail has become “CRM” which is almost infinitely more more targeted (and I, having passed into the post marketing age cohort -- 55plus -- am not a target); and/or marketers are supplanting the role of direct mail with on-line and so-called experiential alternatives. While I can deal with ageist rejection, it seems a pity that post modern communication strategy is designed, essentially, to ensure that the untargeted (such as I) never will find out about products and sevices.
Is there any evidence that the tighter you can target customers, the more efficiently you can build brands? In other words, is efficient targeting the nirvana of marketing? Or is this concept just another case of "conventional wisdom", which, as Robert Samuelson points out in his book “Untruth”, is almost always wrong?
Over the past fifteen years brand marketers have radically cut back on mass advertising in favour of CRM and on-line activities and social networking. This is based on the idea that if you know enough about everybody in the marketplace you can target only those who will be your customers.
At one level this may seem to make sense. It has always been the strategy of choice for high ticket items and luxury goods, while mass products used mass communication tactics. Now, with the increasing availability of low cost, highly targeted new media opportunities, even the massest of mass brands has migrated to this approach. This migration was, and is still, fueled by the magic pixie dust known as: measurability. New media vehicles offer limitless statistics that, when packaged in a binder, look like measurements of the effectiveness of the advertising; and this is what CFOs apparently are looking for (media-measurability trumps sales results every time).
The problem, as I see it, is the unknown. Targets are defined according to the characteristics of the people who we already know use and like our products. No matter how you dress it, targeted marketing can only build relationships with people who in one way or another have told us, directly or indirectly, they want to be targeted.
But, what about all the other people out there who have not told us they want a relationship, probably because they don’t know we exist (because we’ve stopped advertising to the masses.) They don't enter into the targeting calculus and, as long as we tighten out target, they never will.
That's what mass media is for, and why brands were so successful even before these new media alternatives came on line.
Social anthropologists tell us that society is changing in many ways. Generations are different and have different tastes and priorities and beliefs. That is why, we all seem to agree, people are drinking fewer fizzy drinks (colas in particular), drinking fewer beers, and buying more active wear (shoes in particular) and energy drinks.
Is it a cause or effect. In “the day” m fizzy drink advertising (of the mass variety) was ubiquitous, as was beer advertising; and we hardly ever saw a running shoe ad or energy drinks. Could the fact that this is no longer the case, have something to do with the decline in sales in these categories? Is it a fundamental shift in values that has caused the rate of smoking to nose-dive, or could it be the absolute absence of advertising?
This is a trick question – if advertising caused the smoking boom and lack of advertising caused the smoking bust, then does the same process not apply in other categories? And if it does, then why do we think withdrawing mass advertising from the marketplace is a good idea?
As you think about this, I would like to bring one more piece of information to the fore:
A third of consumers (US) say they never want to see ads (only one third!), BUT of those who do want to see advertising 25% want to see it on TV, radio or internet AND (remarkably) fully 25% want to see it in print! (Mediamark Research, Responsiveness to Ads Across Media, n=24,000, as excerpted in Advertising Age, August 11, 2008, page 22)
