Let me back up. For a majority of my years in a marketing role in 3M I was engaged in branding strategy for the corporation, and in the last few years specifically responsible for some or all brand management in the industrial business. During the course of those last years, it became apparent that the traditional ways of communicating about our brand and our products, through printed literature, advertising, and public relations, was not going to cut it. The internet and social media changed all that. The consequence was that it was going to be increasingly difficult to differentiate our brand from others and, more importantly, from private labeled (wholesaler brands) options to 3M products. To continue to support our uniqueness, we were going to have to find new ways to connect with our customers beyond product, sales, and service, and in ways that would increase the significance of that connection.
Storytelling became, and still is, a buzzword in selling and marketing circles. The theory was that in order to connect with customers, you had to do so through a story that made an emotional connection. The old days of being just an exclusive or preferred purveyor of information, of product or application advice, was not going to cut it. That information was now all ubiquitously available on the internet. Product selection on the part of the customer was going to rely more on the emotional perception of the brand (ethical, sustainable, value oriented, etc.) than the word of a salesperson or a brochure.
 |
| From the upper left to the upper right |
Imagine telling that to an engineer. But in many of our consumer markets, it was becoming real, especially with the emergence of reviews on social media and buying sites. Just before I retired, we created a whole department whose sole objective was to create or document stories that would spark the emotions of potential customers are the result of something that could be loosely or tightly associated with the 3M brand.
Of course, it didn't relate well to industrial markets. Imagine trying to make a purchasing agent or a welder or an engineer fall "in love" with your brand. The sneers and guffaws are not hard to imagine. Those decisions were always based on ration, logic, and analytical assessment, right? Not necessarily. The 3M brand in industrial markets always depended on a certain amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD). If you wanted to reduce the risk of making a mistake, or getting stuck with a faulty or wrong product, stay with the 3M brand. That respect of the brand allows 3M to charge more for their products. So emotion already factored into a buying decision. But don't tell the the purchasing agents and engineers that.
Could we make customers irrationally loyal to the brand in consumer markets, let alone industrial markets? And would that be necessary to maintain that kind of brand preference with younger generations who might not be as experienced with 3M products, or don't suffer from the same FUD factor? Within some of the business we started posting some stories that did not necessarily point at large markets or opportunities, but rather stressed the social benefit of how some 3M products were used in hope that the appeal would transfer to related products. One I remember was a project for filtering water in poorer regions of Africa. One of our marketers, who was from the region, initiated a program to distribute filter systems in very poor and remote communities. It was a touching story, not to mention that it was not economically sustainable for 3M in the long run. Not sure if it had any impact on the brand or on sales (again, not sure how to measure Love), but it was heart warming.
Today you can see quite the manifestation of this storytelling strategy in 3M's website directly, in a page called, "Particles by 3M." In it, 3M "Storyteller's" and videographers capture stories about technologies, trends, and in a few cases, specific products that help people, businesses, and society. If you want to see how much brand communication has changed, take a look here: 3M Brand Story
So back to Factfulness. One of the most interesting "instincts" that lead to gross misperceptions about global progress and the status quo that he describes is The Fear Instinct.
“The media cannot resist tapping into our fear instinct. It is such an easy way to grab our attention. In fact the biggest stories are often those that trigger more than one type of fear. Kidnappings and plane crashes, for example, each combine the fear of harm and the fear of captivity. Earthquake victims trapped under collapsed buildings are both hurt and trapped, and get more attention than regular earthquake victims. The drama is so much stronger when multiple fears are triggered.
Yet here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”
Excerpt From: Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund & Ola Rosling. “Factfulness.” Apple Books. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/factfulness/id1320917749?mt=11
It's the part about the need to capture attention that made me think. The media increasingly drives me nuts as it focuses and amplifies the statistical outlier, creating what is often a wildly false impression of what is normal, and what should be paid attention to and how. It often creates all kinds of crazy feedback in public policy and regulation that has nothing to do with putting the problem (if there is one) in perspective, let alone solving a problem. It destroys the critical thinking filter, and creates a bias for feeling and acting (out), rather than methodically defining and solving. It obfuscates cause and effect, and has the potential to create all kinds of unintended consequences.
But that made me think about the longer term consequences of that trend in marketing and social media. Are we in marketing promoting the "feeling" part of decisions over the "thinking" part? Are we dulling critical thinking senses, giving fuel to the reliance on opinion and irrational bias, establishing the priority of that kind of personal assessment and evaluation of options? In moving our marketing communications strategies to storytelling, did I and the rest of us in that initiative actually contribute to more of the phenomenon underlying Roslings articulation of the vast separation of reality from perception. It might be a stretch, and I don't think we had much choice in appealing to the emotional in our market communications. But from a personal perspective, it's certainly worth learning how to develop mindful ways of maintaining our skepticism and defending ourselves against the natural tendency to let the convenience of emotion overpower more time consuming critical and factual thinking.
Footnote: If any of my children are reading this, and they have an interest in reading this book, simply let me know and I'll gift it to you in Apple Books. I think it's that important.
|
Comments
Post a Comment