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 them.

At 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 know-how backing it up. This is evident in consumers disdain for advertising. Eighty percent (a made up number) of the advertising I see isn’t worth the pixels, LEDs or paper it’s 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 isn’t their fault. Mainly due to the fact that opinion leads our defense rather than a known understanding of what would truly motivate an audience segment.

Let’s 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 appear.

I believe that we, humans, are complex individuals that are guided by a value system that doesn’t 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 long-term relationship. If any of that is true, imagine how much different our conversations would be with our clients: “I understand that you want the videos and pictures, but this audience won’t respond to that, because it doesn’t 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 for…” Conversation is over.

It 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, don’t 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 vendorship.

Chris Arens is a Partner and Head of Client Services at Catalyst S+F. He can be reached at chris@catalystsf.com

Read all Chris' MediaBizBloggers commentaries at The Marketing Capital Report.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates @MediaBizBlogger

.

MediaBizBloggers is an open-thought leadership blog platform for media, marketing and advertising professionals, companies and organizations. To contribute, contact Jack@mediadvisorygroup.com. The opinions expressed in MediaBizBloggers.com are not those of Media Advisory Group, its employees or other MediaBizBloggers.com contributors. Media Advisory Group accepts no responsibility for the views of MediaBizBloggers authors.