Lick them with the rod of correction
James Whitmore,managing director at Postar, says these are “heady times for any seeker of consumer truth”…
I was feeling unusually happy about life. BBC2’s new documentary series about the 1970s appears to suggest that it was the transformative decade of the modern era, a period during which the foundations for the modern world were put down. Having been a teenager at the time I could not help but wallow in the glow of reflected glory.
It was all going so well until I read an article about “the customer journey”, the Outdoor Media Centre’s new research into the purchase cycle. “In the old days, you could start with a piece of creative and work your way back. Now you need to start with the consumer, look where they are on their journey and how you want to influence [them]”, quote a somewhat disingenuous Marketing Week. Harrumph.
Some twenty-five years ago, the first agency I joined used psychographics, focus groups, econometrics and all sorts of fancy pants targeting stuff. It was most definitely considered to be the place to start. How else could you possibly brief the creative team? How would you know what media to use and when? Presumably, even older people who had being doing the same in their youth, albeit by candlelight, taught my generation that this was how things were to be done. And so on back to the time when dear old William the Conqueror conducted the first prototype of the TGI study, so that he could properly target his legislation.
Notwithstanding my general irritation at such belittling of the work styles of the gilded generations of yore, we should value the reminder that an understanding of consumer behaviour is at the heart of what we do. The knowledge is of most worth if it can be used to interpret the likely choices that people might make in the future.
Like a lot of good research, the OMC’s study does a very useful job in providing statistical support for what ought to be blindingly obvious but perhaps isn’t.
People spend money. The impulse does not come from thin air. It is not done in isolation. There will be bedrock of learning that will have lodged all sorts of thoughts, feelings and desires in the mind. At some level, there will be a form of planning that will lead to the choice of the appropriate thingummy to meet one’s needs. The purchase is made, the product is used and an experience is had and shared. And so on. Round and round we go.
By dint of its very ubiquity, outdoor advertising is present at every stage of the process. Sometimes it is to the fore; sometimes it is in the background. The study gives a measure of this. It also suggests what might be most effective as advertising and marketing support at each phase of the journey.
What is perhaps even more helpful is that it offers an insight into the value of combinations of media at various stages in the purchase cycle. When is a marriage of posters and TV at its most potent? At what stage is it best to activate your online presence with outdoor ads? How does out-of-home work with mobile search and social media?
It is wonderful to see investment in a study that seeks to understand the mental process of making choices when it is so easy to lazily fall back on anonymous collected clicks and call it “data”.
With TouchPoints 4 also arriving in the last week, these are heady times for any seeker of consumer truth.
And that’s it really. All great creative work, like the media themselves, starts with the consumer, follows the consumer and ends with the consumer. It was ever thus and hopefully, with the continued investment of groups like the IPA and OMC, it will continue to be so.