XBlog

Rules of Engagement

An important lesson gained from Ad:Tech is the necessity of engagement in all marketing efforts. Engagement is the quality that allows a person to interact, interpret and implement some aspect of your marketing message in their daily experience. It’s the quality that helps a piece of marketing go “viral”.

The major rule of engagement in business is the same as it is in war: never underestimate the other person and never overestimate yourself. Keeping your message focused on yourself leads to a very boring message and as the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put it, “the only thing worse than being bored is being boring.”

An engaging message is about the other person, but it is about the other person recognizing themselves in the reality that your messaging provides. When you underestimate the other person you can end up offending them, putting yourself in a position where future messages will require their active permission to be heard.

A good message, an engaging message, doesn’t require permission, it’s immediately accepted with active participation.

Exposure

We open up to participating in personal engagement when someone opens up to us. The same is true in marketing; the more open (perhaps even vulnerable) a message seems the more likely it is to engage another person. Again this is not about focusing on you or your company, it’s about relating to the other person through commonalities.

Think about the media messaging you’ve seen become prolific in the past, what is one of the most common themes that comes up?

Vulnerability.

Images of children, families, people in situations that expose their human frailty or the overcoming of that frailty; images that focus on commonalities amongst a larger group. These are themes that catch the attention and cause a message to be repeated, to become engaging. People repeat the message because they recognize themselves, their own victories, overcomings and failures in the message.

I’ll Be Your Mirror

As mentioned in a prior post, the movie American Beauty provides a great example of how carefully crafted (it might even be said - scientifically crafted)  imagery can invoke a sympathetic response and engage an audience.

This kind of messaging focuses on the following:

• It engages the audience in relating themselves, via pre-existent cultural cues, to the characters and setting the message presents. American Beauty presents the stereotypes of husband, office worker, house wife, disturbed army vet, insular teenage girl, etc. How can your marketing utilize character types/common settings to capture the viewer?
• It  takes the viewer’s previously held believes, values, and cultural position and realigns them to bring them into the reality presented by the messaging. In a car commercial it is assumed that the viewer drives a car and understands/relates to the driving experience. What is unique is that the commercial represents a specific company’s attempt to place their brand of car into the viewer’s assumed common experience.
• It becomes a mirror for the viewer to recognize themselves and to potentiate an ideal existence in the future. This means that the message  becomes a reflection of not only how the viewer currently sees themselves, but also provides suggestions for how the viewer should expect to see themselves in the future, ie. a customer seeing an ad might think “I recognize that person is similar to me, but with X product they look like a better version of what I am/want to be.”
• Finally, it assumes a reality to the message beyond the message itself. Good messaging doesn’t sneak around pretending no one sees it, it walks down the street like it owns the city and assumes people will follow. A successful message with a baseball player in it will assume to be, and achieve the illusion of being, the definitive message with a baseball player in it.

Are your messages asking for permission or are they engaging the audience in participation?

A Friendly Mistake

Recently an offhand joke on a UK message board provided a vibrant example on how social media can boost your marketing efforts.

A play on the name XNet lead to a message board user posting a link to XNet’s website. The link was posted as a joke, a sarcastic answer to a question, but it lead to the XNet website getting 200+ hits a day from curious readers.

Imagine the potential if you could intentionally harness that level of response for your business.

Marketing’s Easy Once You Do the Math

Connecting with your audience isn’t complicated. The movie American Beauty, which won an academy award, earned a decent amount for its investors and gained the adulation of movie goers, was a calculated attempt at capturing the audiences’ and critics’ imagination. The writers, producers and creatives behind the production used a set scheme of symbols to invoke the reaction the movie received.

By playing on themes of vulnerability, overcoming vulnerability and the frailty of human existence American Beauty captured the imaginations of movie goers, satisfied its investors and convinced the Academy of its effectiveness in motivating culture.

Your Self Perception

So if it’s that mathematical why all the confusion?

The problem isn’t what you’re putting out, the problem is what you see when you look in. We like to see ourselves as independent, rational creatures; unfortunately this is simply not true. Divesting yourself of this illusion is one of the first steps towards becoming effective in business.

1 + 1 = x

If you trust that you are unmoved by the mathematics of marketing then you’ll flounder about trying to find some magic key, but admit you’re deeply affected and you’ll find ample market analysis in your own reactions.

If you solidly apply yourself to learning the very basic ideas behind projecting motivation through common cultural cues you’ll find success isn’t so hard to achieve after all. Production cost was an excuse prior to the availability of digital tools. Now the only thing holding you back is your vision of what is possible and your honesty about where you stand.

Do Clouds Always Mean Rain?

A recent article by Scott Locklin provides a nice reality check for professionals panicking over IT. Whether it’s social media or information security, everything seems in a state of radical flux.

So what was the technological state of affairs 50 years ago? Is there really reason to worry, or are we just becoming victims of ‘The Myth of Technological Progress’?

*special thanks to Professor G.V. Wilkes IV for keying us in on this great article.

How Many Employees Does It Take To Stitch a Blanket?

From 2003 – 2005 Google only had one electrical engineer designing its servers . If you’ve heard of the massive data center operation Google runs this might come as a surprise. It also might be surprising that this single engineer helped design one of the most energy efficient and stable data center operations in existence.

Small and medium size businesses often find themselves in situations where it seems there’s just too much to do and too few hands, heads and hammers to do it. There always seems to be something getting in the way or slowing down crucial projects.

If this sounds like where you’re at there might be something in those last two sentences you read over too quickly… the word “seems”.

Tear Out the “Seems”

It doesn’t take an army to run a business even if it “seems” that way. As we’re fond of pointing out, with today’s technologies all it takes is a clear head and a solid plan to operate an internationally relevant SMB.

The illustrator/consultant Hugh McCleod is developing the idea of “global micro-brands”  to provide a model for this way of thinking and he’s just one of many discovering what Google discovered in 2003…even if it “seems” impossible, sometimes all it takes is one person.

Don’t mozy through the “seemingly” impossible day to day tasks of running a business, tear the “seems” out of your thinking and put your effort into the real task of stitching up a successful business.

Ask yourself, what’s makes the task seem impossible?

1. Are you focusing on something other than completing your current task? Prioritize what you are doing. It’s ok to be distracted, but be honest about being distracted and organize yourself accordingly.
2. Are you really working towards another goal? Don’t waste effort moving in one direction when you really want to be going somewhere else. Be honest about what you want and what you are willing to do to get it. Don’t try to eat the whole cow when you only want a burger.
3. Are you confident in your plans? Things move forward quickly when they’re motivated by confidence. Even if doubts linger it’s better to move forward confident in your actions than to stumble half hearted into failure.
4. Are you a dreamer or a doer? Some people like to read books about foreign countries, others like to travel them. The French poet Gerard de Nerval, upon visiting Egypt, remarked to an artist he knew “It is better that you stayed in Paris, there is nothing here of the Egypt we know, only the modern world…” Point being, it may be that you’d rather talk about success than work towards achieving it.
5. Have you applied what you’ve learned? We read up on best practices, go to seminars, networking events, webinars, the whole gamut of preparatory actions, but rarely do we put into practice the core lessons. Make sure you’re getting some ROI out of all that training and not just overlaying new words on old habits.