Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal “Notice Me: Cutting Through the Clutter” by S. Balasubramnian and P. Bhardwaj, October 20, 2008
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It’s hard to cut through the clutter.
Even as customers are constantly bombarded with advertising messages, they are getting progressively better at tuning out the endless stream of come-ons. Companies then typically up the ante and try to out-shout their competitors to draw attention. All of which just leads to more shouting, and everybody is drowned out…
Here are five questions marketers should ask themselves as they craft new strategies to capture customers’ attention in an increasingly noisy marketplace.
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Can the marketing stimulus be delivered at a time when the customer has few other distractions?
Marketing messages should target customers at times when they are unoccupied, perhaps even actively seeking some sort of information to process. Consider, for example, an airplane on the landing path into an airport. Sitting upright, with in-flight entertainment and electronic devices switched off, passengers have little to do but to look out of the window and wait for the aircraft to land.
Seeking to capitalize on this opportunity, London-based Ad-Air Group PLC places advertisements flat on the ground over an area as large as five acres alongside flight paths in and out of the world’s busiest airports. Depending on their landing approach, passengers are provided with an unrestricted view of an ad for more than 10 seconds.
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Can the marketing message be designed to pique the customer’s curiosity?
Piquing customers’ curiosity can be more effective than inundating them with information. Stimuli that are carefully placed, so that they are encountered in sequence, can be particularly successful at this task…
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Can the marketing message piggyback on another brand?
With television and newsprint media being increasingly saturated, marketers need to seek out new and interesting formats and media for their messages.
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., for example, has teamed with Addidas AG on a range of motorsport-inspired driving and sports shoes. The soles of these shoes are made of rubber with tread patterns designed by Goodyear. If customers viewed the shoe purely as an Adidas product, Goodyear’s contribution would remain unnoticed. However, the Goodyear brand is prominently displayed on the outsoles of the shoes. The result is that every person wearing the shoes is now a messenger for the Goodyear brand.
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Can the product or service occupy a piece of the physical environment that the customer frequently interfaces with?
Consumers today tend to spend inordinate amounts of time interfacing with just a few objects — for many, it is their computer screen at work. Marketers must consider how they can capture the customer’s attention when they interface with these objects. Customers, however, guard access to these objects zealously…
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Can your company build into its messaging a consistent stimulus that affects one or more of the five physical senses?
Successful marketing messages excite customers not only when they first encounter them — they ingrain themselves into the customers’ permanent memory. Once a message is embedded, customer resistance to processing it drops when it is encountered in the future…
Not each of these five questions will necessarily generate a great idea for every company. But they do provide a common language for comparing, debating and improving managers’ proposals.
Edit by SAC
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Full article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122427109679945225.html
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