Byron Sharp wouldn't be happy

Listening to the consumer, only appearing when they want you to and making things as easy as possible is not only wrong, it's the opposite of how marketing works. As the modern master of marketing, Professor Byron Sharp, puts it, ‘No marketing activity, including innovation, should be seen as a goal in itself, its goal is to hold on to or improve mental and physical availability.'² According to Sharp, mental and physical availability is the key to brand growth.

Following this thinking, a marketer's job is twofold. Firstly, to ensure a brand becomes stuck in consumers' minds and is easy to recall when they need the category that the brand falls within (e.g. when someone thinks, ‘Gosh I'm thirsty', a marketer's job is to ensure that the person thinks of their brand before any other). This is called ‘mental availability'. Secondly, if the brand is easy to remember (that is, there's mental availability), then they must ensure that there is physical availability too: the brand must be easily bought or consumed. So if we build on the previous example, the person thinks, ‘Gosh I'm thirsty', then the marketer ensures there's mental availability (that is, their brand is thought of first) and that there is physical availability (that is, it's easy for the consumer to get that particular brand). All of this can be summed up in Coca-Cola's global strategy from some years ago, which they described as being ‘within arms-reach of desire'. The ‘arms reach' speaks to physical availability; the ‘desire' speaks to mental availability.

With regards to mental availability, Sharp told me over dinner,

Adam, there are two fundamental rules about how to spend your advertising budget. Rule number one is spend as much as you can. And rule number two is to divide your total spend and spend around a twelfth of it every month.

Here Byron is making the point that in order to stay ‘top of mind' you need to constantly remind consumers of your presence, and you never quite know when the need will ignite. If you ask the consumer what they want, they won't say ‘constantly advertise to me'. We all know they say something closer to the opposite.

There is another issue with the hyper-targeted Consumer in Control approach to advertising: your brand will not grow. You see, you'll only reach your existing customers because potential customers don't know you exist, so they'll never want you to advertise. In most consumer product categories, the user spread follows a negative binomial distribution (NBD). This is a statistically predictable distribution curve first discovered by Professor Andrew Ehrenberg. This model suggests that across all categories, a few people buy a significant portion of your brand, but most buy the brand infrequently. The figure 3.1 (overleaf) was created by my friend Wiemer Snijders, whom I introduced in chapter 2. It's from the non-alcoholic beverages category, indicating the typical customer base for a popular brand. The graph shows the number of people that buy a particular brand within the category throughout the year.

As Snijders tells us,

The brand is well known, yet almost three-quarters of its buyers bought it five times or less, together realising nearly 30% of annual sales. This seems surprising, yet marketing science says that it is quite normal. The pattern is closely predicted by a statistical curve, the negative binomial distribution or NBD. Every brand's customer base is like this … This pattern in buying behaviour is so regular that it can be successfully modelled, and the predicted values used to understand and benchmark actual or future brand performance measures.³

Snijders argues the negative binomial distribution is the statistical pattern that underpins much of the evidence presented in Byron Sharp's game-changing 2010 book How Brands Grow. I recommend the book highly.

It's likely your brand acts in this way as well. Wiemer points out, ‘In 60 years of research, no brands — from global market leaders to startup challengers —have been found with anything other than NBD loyalty.'

Without the knowledge that most people buy a brand infrequently, businesses run the risk of listening to the wrong consumer. In fact, they often only listen to those with the loudest voices who are invariably the biggest users in the category. These are the ones who are vocal on social media channels. Many businesses put together their own consumer panels featuring medium to heavy users of the brand. However, it's likely the business already meets the needs of these consumers. Instead, the brand should focus on appealing to light users and those who have never bought the good or service. This is also where their advertising budget should go — to keep on penetrating into new and emerging buyers of the category. Getting data on these people before they've entered the category is really hard — hence again there is a need for broadcast communication that's always on and appears to have lots of ‘wastage'.

GME is an Australian company that designs and manufactures emergency beacons and radio communication devices, such as CB radios, with a reputation for being rugged and tough. Their core customers are off-road 4WD enthusiasts. If the company creates a product that's considered ‘soft' or contrary to the needs of hard-core adventurers, their loyal but small customer base complains. As a consequence, GME's customer base has remained very niche because it resisted innovating or targeting new consumers. Unfortunately for them, other companies have entered the CB radio market with a more contemporary offering and have won significant market share. For example, CB radio manufacturer Uniden has cute two-way radios for adults and kids to play with together. They are just a bit of fun and more like a toy than a serious CB radio. However, when these kids grow up, they'll be more likely to think of Uniden rather than GME if they're in the market for a CB radio. GME is still a strong brand with a very loyal following in part because of the superior quality of its products. However, it will be interesting to see how they evolve and chase a new group of consumers. In many cases, companies should pay less attention to their core consumer because it prevents them from focusing on new customers.

Personal communication isn't all it's cracked up to be

In our quest to personalise brands and give consumers attention, marketers spend time, effort and money building a ‘personalised relationship' with the people they ‘meet'. By ‘meeting', I mean have you ever clicked on a pop-up ad or visited a website only to be stalked on the internet by annoying ads? Those ads are delivered programmatically. The advertising algorithm knows a bit about you and why you visited, and the creative messaging is tailored to you and will continue to pop up wherever you are on the internet. You might go online looking for shoes. Days, weeks and months later, you are bombarded with ads for shoes. The impact of personalised communications is still pretty ropey. I doubt many consumers would request personalised ads. In fact, most people think they are kind of creepy.

Personalising consumer messaging has several issues:

• The consumer doesn't care about your brand, and advertising is a poor tool to convince people of anything. Advertising is a long-term game. It works by creating little impressions of the brand, and those impressions come along with associations. We are not as susceptible to advertising as some snake oil salesmen would like us to think. The last thing most people want to deal with is a targeted ad or conversation.
• Advertising is most effective when it ‘seeps' into the minds of consumers. It's the reason why occasionally it makes you laugh. When we make people laugh and feel good, their defences come down and we can create a positive impression. The personalised information is more aggressive. Robert Heath examines how successful advertising drips into the consumer's mind and doesn't become caught in an argument.⁴
• Aggressive selling causes ‘reactance'. How do you react when someone strongly argues a point with you? You probably respond defensively and mount a counter-argument, even if it's just in your head. You are building what psychologists call ‘reactance to messaging'. Reactance happens when someone feels they have limited choices or alternatives. Look at figure 3.2. This is what happens when advertising tries too hard.

Monkey see, monkey do: advertising also works by creating a social norm and showing consumers what's trending in popular culture. This creates an ‘assumptive social norm'. People believe something is popular because it's widely advertised, which suggests everyone else must be buying it. This informed the messaging for Foxtel with its tagline, ‘We're a Foxsporting Nation': it gave the impression that everyone was subscribing to Foxtel. Social norming is impossible to achieve through personalisation because of its application — changes in societal attitudes can't happen through messaging crafted to the individual.

Personalisation focuses on the wrong people. Personalisation only occurs within an audience that is already purchasing (or thinking about purchasing) that brand, which leaves the rest of the market untouched. It's the opportunity cost of personalising your brand with people who have a relationship with you anyway, versus the mass market, which is where the opportunity lies for most businesses. This was the case with GME.

How to create a Teflon brand

Imagine you're the CEO of Twitter and it's 2017. You're worried about the drop-off rates of tweets and you want to make the experience a little easier for consumers. You want less friction and you want to not make people think too hard. You conduct a HCD study to inform the product development of your platform. Here's my fly-on-the-wall imagining of this process:

1. Empathise. Twitter's data indicates usage drops off when people find they can't express themselves in 140 characters. It happens when people are in a time-pressured situation — such as using Twitter while watching TV. Twitter decides the pain point is the restriction to 140 characters.
2. Define. Allow Twitter users to use more than 140 characters.
3. Ideate. Suggestions include removing the word limit entirely or slightly increasing the character limit.
4. Prototype. Options are prototyped and tested with consumers.
5. Test. A decision is made to double the number of Twitter characters to 280.

And that's exactly what Twitter did in a bid to stop people getting annoyed because they couldn't say everything they wanted to in a short tweet. Before they made the change, research companies measured the proposed impact and found most people felt positive about the increase.⁵

Now, imagine that during these discussions someone said, ‘Oh you can't do that. Twitter's brand is tightly aligned to 140 characters', with another person chiming in with, ‘The 140-character limit comes from the days of SMS limits of 160 characters. People don't remember this, but the logic is pretty cool.' Reflections such as these don't come up in a usability lab or a focus group.

Twitter research showed that increasing the character count from 140 to 280 didn't change the length of most Twitter posts. For those who like stats: ‘Only 5% of Tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2% were over 190 characters.'⁶ But one thing certainly changed. Twitter compromised its unique selling proposition (USP), or central organising thought. A platform celebrating brevity suddenly doubled the length of tweets. Author JK Rowling wrote of the decision: ‘Twitter's destroyed its USP. The whole point for me was how inventive people could be within that concise framework.' It was a view supported by many, including horror author Stephen King who added: ‘What she said.'

Twitter's brand was modified because of consumer insight. But user behaviour didn't change that much, and the brand's proposition has been permanently compromised because it used to stand for ‘really short messages' and now it stands for ‘quite short messages'.

One year after the change, Slate published an article by Will Oremus titled ‘Remember when longer tweets were the thing that was going to ruin Twitter?' He wrote,

At a time when Twitter is under scrutiny for its role in radicalizing right-wingers and fomenting anti-Semitism . . . and when CEO Jack Dorsey says he's rethinking everything: The anniversary of its character-limit change doubles as a reminder of a time when people didn't want Twitter to radically rearrange its core features.⁷

I'll tread carefully. Those working in HCD are close-knit and very vocal. Criticising the industry isn't done lightly, so here's some supporting evidence. Brent Smart is one of Australia's top marketers and former CEO of creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi. His marketing team won the annual Mumbrella Marketing Team of the Year award. Since becoming Chief Marketing Officer at insurance company IAG, he's been part of some incredible and highly effective brand-building work. In 2013, Smart said of customer journey mapping, a central tenet of HDC,

I don't think it delivers competitive advantage. It's hygiene . . . When you focus on efficiency, you're able to show a commercial impact from marketing pretty quickly, but you're missing the bigger aspect of this conversation. Too many marketers focus on the efficiency side as opposed to the effectiveness side of things.⁸

Brands that apply HCD or customer journeys to increase efficiency and help consumers glide through their customer experience are building Teflon brands. They are not sticky, they are less memorable and they, therefore, reduce mental availability. This strips the value from the business.

A Teflon world

In 2018 The New York Times published a revealing article headlined ‘How Amazon steers shoppers to its own products'.⁹ It's worth a read if only to learn the difference between a monopoly and monopsony. In 2009 Amazon embraced the private label business and began offering unglamorous products such as batteries in its Home Basics category. Amazon's brand was available along with well-known battery brands Duracell and Energiser. When consumers run out of batteries, they don't ask Amazon's virtual assistant, Alexa, for more ‘Duracells' or more ‘Energisers'. They ask for more batteries. They care less about the brand and more about getting new batteries. The private-label batteries also happen to be 30 per cent cheaper.

Amazon told The New York Times, ‘We take the same approach to private label as we do with anything here at Amazon: We start with the customer and work backwards.' Starting with the customer or customer experience is killing brands, because people don't need brands. They need the product. A company that puts the customer at the heart of its business can make brands redundant and, if not redundant, then generic.

Now bear with me as I become somewhat hyperbolic to make a point. When you watch a movie set in the future, the themes are similar. Everyone wears silver or red spandex, they have similar haircuts and they walk in unison. The lives of these futuristic people are depicted as seamless, frictionless (bloody HCD) and somewhat detached. There's often one mega-brand or company that controls everything. In The Terminator, it's Skynet. In Pixar's WALL-E (one of my top 100 movies of all time), mega-company Buy n Large controls everything from government to space travel to yoghurt. Science fiction takes an element of truth from today and imagines ‘what if' in the future. In this world, brands disappear because the consumer doesn't need them. They need a product or service.

Following the imagination of science fiction writers, corporations are heading towards two outcomes. They will either be swept up to become a Buy n Large of their time — that is, fall into line with the business that controls everything. Or they will create something that's both different and distinctive — a brand with an idea. For the latter scenario to become a reality, a brand has to know what it stands for.

If you're in the whacky creative fringe, you might be nodding along saying, ‘Darn right, the answers to life's questions are always in the movies'. But maybe you want to know what the science says.

We're already partly in a Teflon world

Consider the design of London's double-decker buses or Melbourne's trams. Both used to be ornate, with flourishes. Now both are streamlined and aerodynamically efficient human transport capsules lacking personality. Look at modern buildings: efficiency rules. We are already on the way to creating a WALL-E-like world: a super comfortable Teflon experience. Some of us want to challenge this and add some grit, cognitive disfluency and effort into the world we are designing.

Verda Alexander is responsible for designing many cool and fun workspaces. After designing many typical ‘startup'-style workspaces with skateboard ramps, music rooms and in-house beer taps and baristas, she has since changed her focus and wants to design a workspace that is

. . . a little less comfortable and a little more challenging . . . Life is enriched by challenges. To face adversity, to labor is to be human . . . Friction gives us the ability to slow down, to focus, and to steer our attention where we want it to go..¹⁰

I love this approach. It reminds me of Building 20, which I read about in Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From. Building 20 was a makeshift wooden structure built during World War II on the central campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The building was always considered temporary. When someone moved in, things were reconfigured, walls were bashed down or altered to fit their needs. The building was somewhat dilapidated and never ‘perfectly' designed. It wasn't given a formal name or a dedicated purpose. But many unlikely meetings and unexpected conversations happened in Building 20 that led to the development of many new ideas. Several Nobel Prize winners worked there — especially in radar and nuclear physics. I discuss the importance of effort in chapter 5 when outlining the hope for stronger brands and businesses.

Many marketers are inadvertently creating Teflon brands. By listening to the consumer and giving them what they think they want, brands can slip in and out of consciousness. Being consumer-centric leads to brands and businesses that are only relevant when the consumer wants them to be. This isn't ideal. If you make things easier for them, be aware you may strip value from your business. The less they need to think about you, the worse it is.