Industry sage and psychologist Adam Ferrier has delivered what could best be described as an “advertising 101” lesson to conference delegates in Sydney.
The keynote at oOh!media’s “World Of Unmissable” on Friday, the Thinkerbell boss was quick to remind the room full of marketers “that 99.9 per cent of the time people do not give a shit about your brand” and that, he added, meant “you’ve got 0.01 per cent of their time to try and make them consider you against everyone else in that category.”
Advertising’s primary role was to change people’s behaviour, Ferrier said, and you can do that one of two ways – by increasing people’s motivation and desire for the brand or making it easier to buy or more available.
But here was the curveball, agencies and the ads they made weren’t that great at creating motivation to buy, Ferrier believed.
“What (most marketers) do in their jobs is to get people to consume or buy brands and most people think it’s to increase a customer’s motivation, but it’s not,” Ferrier revealed.
“The better way is to make things easier for the consumer, to enable them to interact, to buy, to read, play with our brand and that should be the primary job of a marketer,” he said.
And that leads us back to the 0.01 per cent. It’s there, taht “gotcha” moment, Ferrier believed people choose to buy. But it’s not a brand, it’s a category.
“The trigger is ‘I need a drink’, ‘I want a car’, ‘I need nappies’, ‘I need a home loan’, whatever that may be and then the job of the brand is to get into that consideration set and then you’ve got 0.01 per cent of their time to try and make them consider you against everyone else in that category.
“And how we do that is to make our brand easier to buy versus our competitor. And how we do that – according to Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute – is spend as much money as you possibly can on advertising, and how do you spend it? Well, you get your budget, divide it by 12 and spend that much every month.
“And you can make things easier with short, sharp reminders that gets stuck in consumers’ minds and, as a very un-PC way to say it, get up and in their face.
“It works on two psychological principals. It’s the exposure effect – the more exposed to a product we are the more familiar we become with it and then the more we like it, and the more we like it the more we are to consume it.
“The second way is by conditioning. You pair one stimuli with another to create this nice warm feeling and that’s how very simple advertising works and that makes it easier for a customer to consume your brand over someone else’s,” he concluded.
