How do they find your brand when they’re not looking?

I came across an inter­est­ing blog post today about the dif­fer­ences between active ver­sus pas­sive dis­cov­ery on the part of buy­ers and prospects, and what that implies for mes­sag­ing archi­tec­tures — and by impli­ca­tion, for out­bound mar­ket­ing plans.

Most of the tac­tics based on SEM and SEO aim at cap­tur­ing the atten­tion of shop­pers engaged in active dis­cov­ery. Which is cool, if peo­ple already know your brand, are aware of your cur­rent offers, and gen­er­ally under­stand your brand promise or core value propo­si­tion. (In this con­text we’re talk­ing about the buyer’s activ­i­ties dur­ing the ear­lier phases of the mar­ket­ing funnel.)

But what do mar­keters do if peo­ple are unaware of or unfa­mil­iar with your brand? Or if you’re con­fronting dam­ag­ing mis­per­cep­tions about your product’s posi­tion­ing, core ben­e­fits, price-to-value equa­tion, etc.? Search alone is not enough.

Quick Expla­na­tion of Terms: Online Context

Active dis­cov­ery

A buyer engages in active dis­cov­ery when using Google or Bing to search for some­thing in par­tic­u­lar, such as which stores are offer­ing a spe­cific brand of fash­ion jeans at the best price. From the marketer’s stand­point this is the realm of search mar­ket­ing. ‘Nuff said: there are a bazil­lion web resources on this subject.

Pas­sive Discovery

Pas­sive dis­cov­ery occurs when the buyer didn’t know she was look­ing but found out about your brand (or offer) while vis­it­ing a web site and notic­ing your ad, see­ing your mes­sage pre­sented in the con­text of other search results, stum­bling upon it while research­ing the cat­e­gory as a whole, etc.

The chal­lenge for mar­keters is how best to lever­age pas­sive dis­cov­ery in order to influ­ence the buyer’s per­cep­tions or emo­tional state as he moves through the pur­chas­ing process.

For B2B mar­keters Steve Woods (the author of the post I’m ref­er­enc­ing) writes,

“Pas­sive mes­sages are mes­sages that would not be actively sought by poten­tial buy­ers, such as mes­sages that alter pre­con­ceived notions of reli­a­bil­ity, applic­a­bil­ity of a solu­tion to a cer­tain indus­try, and per­cep­tions of prod­uct usabil­ity, ser­vice qual­ity, or price point.

Woods says that mar­keters plan­ning their mes­sag­ing archi­tec­ture need to think about how/when buy­ers are likely to encounter your mes­sages, so you can antic­i­pate and then cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties to ben­e­fit from pas­sive as well as active dis­cov­ery. He highly rec­om­mends the sto­ry­telling for­mat as the mode most likely to be noticed and recalled.

So What’s the Answer?

Adver­tis­ing?

Tra­di­tion­ally con­sumer mar­keters have resorted to var­i­ous forms of adver­tis­ing as “the way” to get in front of peo­ple when they’re not look­ing, but to do so in a way that would be mem­o­rable (and hope­fully moti­va­tional). Once upon a time that kind of mass mar­ket­ing worked … at least, bet­ter than its alter­na­tives. These days, old-fashioned, out-of-context, interruption-based adver­tis­ing is not an effec­tive solu­tion for cap­tur­ing people’s atten­tion when they’re not actively looking.

That is, it’s not the solu­tion if you’re being held account­able to mea­sured returns on mar­ket­ing invest­ment. Instead you’ve got to fig­ure out how to make those mes­sages avail­able to the right peo­ple, at the right time, and in the right con­text. And despite all the advances in online dis­play adver­tis­ing over the past decade, we’re still in the early days of what’s pos­si­ble when it comes to mar­ket­ing effec­tive­ness and ROI. [Dis­clo­sure: one of my clients is work­ing on ways to meet the needs of under-served mar­keters who want to include more intel­li­gent forms of online adver­tis­ing in their mar­ket­ing mix, espe­cially when chal­lenged by bud­gets that are too small to appeal to dig­i­tal agencies.]

Word of Mouth?

Word-of-mouth is prob­a­bly most effec­tive in the con­text of active dis­cov­ery, when you (as shop­per) ask your friend what she thinks about her new Prius, or the nail salon that’s just opened up down the road.

All the wiz­ards prac­tic­ing social media mar­ket­ing have lots to say on the sub­ject of how to influ­ence the peo­ple most likely to be influ­en­tial when it comes to online word-of-mouth, so I won’t add to their wis­dom here.

I do think the jury is still out when it comes to mak­ing social influ­encer mar­ket­ing scal­able and sus­tain­able in the face of hard-to-prove con­crete ROI. If the down­turn con­tin­ues,  hard-nosed bean coun­ters are going to make it dif­fi­cult for com­pa­nies to staff up so they can oper­a­tional­ize social market-engagement mod­els.  I think social has lots of promise, but it’s in its infancy when it comes to prac­tic­ing this as a dis­ci­pline that can be man­aged appro­pri­ately so it has a last­ing effect on cus­tomer engage­ment and retention.

Other Sources

At the con­cep­tual level there are some intrigu­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties in Mar­tin Lindstrom’s book Buy­ol­ogy: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy. He spent sev­eral years and mil­lions of dol­lars research­ing how the brain responds to adver­tis­ing, prod­uct place­ments, and var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­niques (such as sym­bols, sto­ries, etc.). His find­ings are sum­ma­rized in Buy­ol­ogy.

His appli­ca­tion of neu­ro­science to com­mu­ni­ca­tion effec­tive­ness sug­gests some very inter­est­ing ideas, but taken too far, could also be scary…

Based on Lindstrom’s research Steve Woods’ rec­om­men­da­tion that pas­sive mes­sages should be designed for trans­mis­sion within sto­ries is a good one.

Lessons from Apple & Evangelism

Lind­strom notes that com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­niques prac­ticed by most estab­lished reli­gions and cults are also highly effec­tive when it comes to stim­u­lat­ing the brain to pay atten­tion to or remem­ber mes­sages about brands and prod­ucts. (And yes, those of us who have for­merly worked for Apple’s mar­ket­ing depart­ment are well aware of this…)

Here are the cross-denominational pil­lars of “mar­ket­ing” as prac­ticed by the world’s lead­ing reli­gions, accord­ing to Lind­strom in Buy­ol­ogy:

• A sense of belonging
• A clear vision
• Power over enemies
• Sen­sory appeal
• Sto­ry­telling
• Grandeur
• Evan­ge­lism
• Sym­bols
• Mys­tery
• Rit­u­als

Just think about the launch of the iPad, as a case in point… It’s clear to me that these tech­niques are being deployed by Apple’s hype machine…

Tagged as: buying process, discovery, messaging architectures, search marketing, storytelling

Revised on March 28, 2011