How Understanding Context and Environment Will Improve Your Brand Communications
Photo-by-Vitolda-Klein-on-Unsplash
My day is spent broken into fleeting experiences.
I receive an email from a company I like that sounds really interesting but I don’t have time at that exact moment to read it so I mentally flag it and hope I come back to it (I don’t.)
An ad pops up on Instagram for a pair of shoes that would be fantastic for the spring at a price point I’m happy with, but suddenly my son yells out “Mummy, help me with building this farmyard” and the shoes are forgotten.
Another email, another mental flag.
Ahhhh coffee and a quick search online for those shoes, but I can’t remember where they were from. Down a rabbit hole on Google Shopping.
I give up and open my ASOS app – maybe they have those leopard print espadrilles.
But on the home page they have a “new denim” promotion and I end up down that rabbit hole…
Until, “Mummy…!”
Or my phone buzzes with a message.
And that’s all before my work day starts.
5,000. That’s the average number of brand messages we are exposed to every single day.
We’ve become pretty good at ignoring them and tuning them out.
What’s a marketer to do?
Face it: you’ve got huge competition and that’s not going to change. In fact, experts predict that the number of brand exposures will continue increasing.
Communications need to cut through.
Communications need to engage.
Communications need to be relevant.
Communications need to be targeted.
This is not new news.
To achieve these 4 things you need to be doing a number of things:
You need to be in the right place
At the right time
Talking to the right people
About something they care about – in that moment in time
We often forget that last bit, so let’s revisit it: in that moment in time.
Cutting through the communications noise
To achieve cut-through, to engage, to be relevant and targeted, your brand messaging needs to land when someone is open to it.
For example, the Instagram shoe ad first thing this morning when I had my toddler at my feet building a farmyard – I wasn’t actually open to it. I wanted to be, but my context closed the door on the opportunity.
Now that’s not to say an Instagram ad at some other point in time isn’t the right thing; it absolutely can be, but it’s all about the context.
In other words: we really need to understand the environment consumers are in when they engage with our communications to develop communications to the greatest effect.
Developing effective communications
Traditionally we have approached communications research in two ways (and both still have a time and place):
Look at big data to see how many people have viewed ads/content and the profile of these people
Conduct advertising effectiveness research where surveying large samples of people about what advertising/messaging they recall and then showing them advertising/messaging and asking if they remember seeing it
But I believe these approaches lack a key component, which is answering whether you could have done it better because they haven’t given us an insight into the consumer context.
Big data can only tell us behaviours; it can’t tell how people felt. Big data may tell us that someone was exposed to the ad, but it could have been lost among the 4,999 other messages that day. It can’t tell us if someone emotionally responded to it. And it certainly can’t tell us why they did or didn’t.
Communications effectiveness takes us a little further as it’s based on real people and their responses, but if you’re looking to enhance future communications, it’s flawed because it’s relying on their memory. Bigger brands tend to be remembered more than smaller brands. In fact, bigger brands tend to be remembered even when consumers weren’t exposed to any messaging, so you might be collecting flawed data about how successful your ad was.
If you want to develop effective communications strategies, it is not enough to simply test whether communications have cut-through, are engaging, and relevant. These are great measures to test whether communications have been or might be effective, but in order to build effective communications from the start, you need to understand the target consumer context first in order to ensure, communications are in the right place, at the right time talking to the right people about something that matters at that moment.
Understanding context
To understand your target consumer’s context, you need to understand the point of engagement (and disengagement) with brands and communications:
CONTEXT: what are they doing, who are they with, where are they, how much time do they have, what resources/tech/devices are they using?
MOOD: how are they feeling in that moment and what has led them to engage with anything?
INVOLVEMENT/STIMULATION: what are they looking for in that moment, are they seeking a passive engagement or something more stimulating, how involved do they want to be?
Next you want to ladder up these contextual factors with hard data:
TIME OF DAY: an important influencer on their mental state and the type of engagement that is relevant
DAY OF THE WEEK: influences how much permission they give themselves for what they do and what’s productive/appropriate
WHERE: where are they going in each of these moments, are they opening emails or social media, picking up a magazine, turning on the radio or watching the TV?
I bet some of you are thinking:
"But answering these questions relies on their memory and you just told us consumers have a faulty memory.”
Correct.
Overcoming faulty human memory
To adequately answer these questions, there are number of human behaviours we need to bear in mind as they influence how successfully and accurately you can gather this data.
Our solution for gathering this data is in-the-moment diaries (also known as asynchronous research or self-ethnography) where your target consumers share their daily activities, commenting on what they’re doing, what they’re seeing, what’s happening around them and how they feel.
Self-ethnography brings us closer to their context
In this approach we:
Gather all the influences and not just the more narrow definition of traditional advertising or communications
Capture more actual behaviours and not only claimed ones
Expose habits they might not think about mentioning (or might not be asked about in communications effectiveness surveys)
Override faulty memories
Using this technique, we learn which channels they regularly visit/interact with and what their mental state is when they do it. This enables us to help our clients think about the best engagements and best messaging for each channel, to make sure we capitalise on that mindset, rather than push our messaging at them.
We believe that if you want to enhance your communications strategy, you need to look at the context in which your target consumers might be exposed to it. This has a waterfall effect over:
Key message
Channel placement
Type of message
Call to action
Ambassadors
Tone of voice
Visuals
Given the noisy brand landscape, you can’t afford to get any of these wrong.
