What Do Consumers Want in This New Time?

However the likelihood is that this is not our last biological shock nor is this one going completely away any time soon Even with perfect longlasting vaccines viruses will continue to mutate Unless we stop deforestation everywhere and meat market practices everywhere and the way we relate to animals everywhere the mutated viruses will come and get us again requiring new vaccines ad infinitum until medical science itself mutates to a higher levelThe social distancing itself is cutting off one of the most humanizing ways we use timeOther shocking things are having deep psychological effects including pandemic propaganda warfare rising anger and fear they always go together divisiveness ambitions of other countries and of some of our own leaders the list goes onamp8230So we cannot assume that our old verities about consumers and our previous marketing practices toooften based on flimsy evidence are still the ways to go nowThe first thing we must do despite belttightening is the highest quality research we have ever done into what consumers want from us today create new creative and test it in random control trials to make sure that we know which way we are goingLooked at through the lens of the 15 RMT Motivations the two that have increased the most since March are at the top and bottom of the scale amp8211 Security at the base and Altruism at the top Any threat to health or income is a threat to Security so it39s easy to understand why that one is increasingAltruism is one of the names we give to the top most evolved least deployed Motivation We officially call it SelfTranscendence meaning that one sincerely cares for people in general not just for oneself and one39s loved ones Love is another MotivationAs the Federal government underreacted people hoped that corporations would step in and help fend off COVID19 People expecting corporations to exhibit good citizenship goes back a long way I started to talk about it in the 70s calling it quotQOLquot for Quality Of Life something to strive for in business and advertising Jim Stengel wrote a great book about it Today the Association of National Advertisers ANA has an entire division devoted to Purpose the current name for the idea that business exists for improving the quality of the lives of its customers employees stockholders trading partners agencies et alSince March there have been two waves of Purpose driven advertising one about COVID19 and one about Black Lives Matter Ads reflecting reality increased their use of the Motivation AltruismYou need to understand what motivates your current customers today And you probably have a CRM list customers with whom you have a relationship and a way to communicate with them directly by email and other means You could survey your CRM list But the problem there is that in a questionnaire what you get back when you ask attitudinal questions is pretty weak It rarely predicts behavior Simmons found that across 3830 brands with at least 1000 users each within its 25000 annual survey the hundreds of attitude questions in the Simmons survey predicted only 6 of brand adoption When RMT science was added this increased to 11Dr Gerald Zaltman said it in his book 95 of decisionmaking is subconscious The best way to find out people39s Motivations is to measure their behavior such as the content they consume With partner Semasio RMT is now daily updating the Motivations of 276 million Americans based on the content they consumed in recent weeksYou can match your CRM list to this database and learn the Motivational segments within your customer list which will ground your creative in fact This is how you can deterministically understand what your customers want based on the content they read and view All the information is calculated passively without asking people anything and without invading privacy by knowing identity All we know is that they have IDs that can be matched and reached by addressable media You can obtain the data inexpensively from your usual sources of audiences DSPs DMPs Liveramp et alWhatever way you go about it learn what your customers and prospects care about today it isn39t the same as last year Subconscious motivations are what drive behavior The best way to learn about a person39s subconscious is to observe their behavior Content consumed is an excellent indicator of MotivationThis is a whole new way to derive value from audience data It is most valuable at the big data level of CRM return path data RPD frequent shopper card FSC RMTSemasio and other such multimillion homeperson lists which can also be matched onto small data piles which you still consider important eg your own surveys panels etcUnderstanding changing Motivations at scale will help surmount the challenges we all face nowIn life understanding ultimately leads to forgiveness which awakens hopeClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet

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What Do Consumers Want in This New Time?

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Bill Harvey

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What Do Consumers Want in This New Time?

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