Hemingway’s Brewery was packed for its first-ever day of content at Cannes in Cairns, Presented by Pinterest, as Dan Krigstein, director of The Growth Distillery and Toby Harrison, chief strategy officer, growth and innovation lead at Ogilvy ANZ, revealed new groundbreaking research into how marketing has changed.
The pair explained that despite reams of scholarship being published in the past on consumer mindsets, barely anyone had touched the subject in a decade — despite the marketing landscape undergoing its most significant transformation to date.
“Influence is one of the most over-used but least understood terms like gravity and anaesthetic. We know that it works but we don’t know why,” said Dan Krigstein, director of The Growth Distillery and News Corp Australia’s Growth Intelligence Centre.
“We didn’t just come up with this stuff. There’s an ocean of academia that’s been put together around this since the ‘50s. But no one has consolidated into something useful and digestible,” added Toby Harrison, CSO and consulting lead, Ogilvy AUNZ.
Campaign effectiveness has fallen and even previous metrics for quality, including the litany of awards programs around the world, are no longer indicative of success in either the short or the long term.
“There’s a big problem. We’re getting worse as marketers. In fact, over the last decade, effectiveness in marketing has fallen substantially. The Oxford Business School found has looked into this and, compared to the last 30 years, we are half as effective as we used to be,” added Harrison.
“For you guys spending a lot of money, that’s a big worry.”
The Growth Distillery’s research has revealed that consumer affinity with brands now exerts an outsized impact on the success of campaigns and a brand’s marketing as a whole.
“What are the people that I like, or I want to be like or I want my life to be like, doing? And how does that have an influence upon me?” said Harrison.
It is in this context that consumers are being asked to make more decisions on more tenuous – or at least more obfuscated information. Instead of relying on traditional marketing tactics to cut through, Krigstein and Harrison said that, according to their research, brands need to build a greater affinity with their target consumers to make an impact. To be clear, this is not the same as creating a fandom. Instead, it is about creating a brand that people are proud to be part of without prompting.
They pointed to the Unreal Engine, created by Epic Games. Unlike most game engines – the essential model that computer games are built around – the Unreal Engine was created not by a crack team of coders, it was crowd-built with millions of developers constantly testing and experimenting with the software. They derived no individual benefit from doing this. Instead, they felt such affinity with the brand that they wanted to help. That engine has now gone on to be used by the likes of NASA to test all manner of things because its crowd-sourced physics model is so impressive.
But that’s not all. In an age characterised by information overload, decoded cultures and institutional distrust — all gifted by social media to greater or lesser degrees — consumers are now more discerning in where they choose to get their information, the communities they are part of and the brands they choose to interact with.
In fact, brands now need to be more flexible in their communication and interactions with consumers. It isn’t simply a case of personalising messages, it’s a case of forming deeper, more respectful relationships with consumers. When choice is abundant, consumers need to feel the value exchange more than ever.
