Catalyst S+F: 100 Data Points Does Not a Persona Make – Chris Arens - MediaBizBloggers

I believe that the advertising industry as a whole has been working on luck and that the luck is about to run out There are at best a handful of us that really deeply understand consumers and then there is everyone else who fake it to unsuspecting clients and sometimes get lucky in their assessments Why do I think this because I have been one of themAt best advertising executives are good sales people to a main constituent marketing professionals They aggregate and regurgitate the appropriate lexicon that gives the perception of depth of knowledge with no real knowhow backing it up This is evident in consumers disdain for advertising Eighty percent a made up number of the advertising I see isnamp8217t worth the pixels LEDs or paper itamp8217s displayed on Why A real lack of understanding towards the origins of human behavior and cognition is I believe a silent yet systemic cause for most of the ire between marketing professionals and their agencies Sure we are defensive and want to allow the marketer to take part of the blame but I argue that it isnamp8217t their fault Mainly due to the fact that opinion leads our defense rather than a known understanding of what would truly motivate an audience segmentLetamp8217s harp on that thought If you imagine for a second that you knew that a motivating factor for a desired audience was certainty how would this drive your decisions to communicate to them If your product were a car would you send them to a site with videos and pretty pictures or to a site with specs comparisons and stats on years worth of maintenance data The creativity in us all will fight for the videos and pictures but knowing the audience would actually steer us down the other path as unsexy as it might appearI believe that we humans are complex individuals that are guided by a value system that doesnamp8217t necessarily exist on our surface That we flock based on survival mechanisms that seek to fulfill that veiled value system And that uncovering that value system is the secret to unlocking the communication angles needed to guide consumers into your product suite and ultimately into a longterm relationship If any of that is true imagine how much different our conversations would be with our clients amp8220I understand that you want the videos and pictures but this audience wonamp8217t respond to that because it doesnamp8217t provide them the information they need to make the decision that this is the best car and we KNOW that is what they are looking foramp8230amp8221 Conversation is overIt is my assertion that an agency that has a better more established practice at understanding people and why they do the things they do will have a higher client retention rate better relationship and better partnership Why Because if you know that much about how people think donamp8217t you believe that you would use the same understanding on your clients Unfortunately we tend to wait until the business is about to leave us to pull out our big guns of consumer insights that ultimately give us the agency a renewed lease on vendorshipChris Arens is a Partner and Head of Client Services at Catalyst SF He can be reached at chriscatalystsfcomRead all Chris39 MediaBizBloggers commentaries at The Marketing Capital ReportCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBloggerMediaBizBloggers is an openthought leadership blog platform for media marketing and advertising professionals companies and organizations To contribute contact Jackmediadvisorygroupcom The opinions expressed in MediaBizBloggerscom are not those of Media Advisory Group its employees or other MediaBizBloggerscom contributors Media Advisory Group accepts no responsibility for the views of MediaBizBloggers authors

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Catalyst S+F: 100 Data Points Does Not a Persona Make – Chris Arens - MediaBizBloggers

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