Great Marketing Communications Involves Getting The Uninterested to Participate With Your Brand
Opinion
We wrote a paper recently, Behaviour Change: Why Action Advertising Works Harder Than Passive Advertising’. It’s been presented in Las Vegas this weekend at the Society of Consumer Pschology Annual Conference. It was jointly authored by Brook Ward, Deakin University academic Josephine Palermo, and myself. It’s a discussion paper to promote the effectiveness of participatory messages in advertising. In short it puts forwards evidence that getting people to participate in communications is more effective than just passively receiving a message.
I’ve now come across this brilliant blog Behaviour Change and Technology there is one particular meta-study they site by Webb, Joseph, Yardley & Michie (2010). It has looked at a number of behaviour change programs that harness interactive technology (internet, smart phones etc) to establish their effectiveness in behaviour change. In short its effective, but the effectiveness obviously varies widely.
Link this with another interesting blog that was posted on Mumbrella by Simon Lawson, called Canalside View this blog has an article on it looking at ‘The Participation paradox and how it relates to advertising. In short – it says the following (and if I have got this wrong please let me know):
- We should focus on getting those people who don’t buy our brands very often to purchase more, rather the getting the ‘loyal’ to purchase more (this is pretty well established for several categories (especially impulse categories))
- To get these people to purchase ‘awareness’ isn’t enough, we need to get them interested in our brands
- A great way to get people interested in a brand is to get them to participate.
- However, only those who are already interested in the brand are likely to participate.
