REVOLUTION
It’s circa 2012. The world has changed, again. Along with
the Recession, the Arab Spring and the iPad, there is another revolution under
way.
An entire generation of empowered audiences is muscling its way
into the hallowed chambers of marketing. They are a generation born into smart
phones and tablets, a generation that instinctively believes in the two-way
social conversation, and most importantly, an increasingly digitally distracted
and time poor audience.
The reaction to this revolution from the marketing and
communications community has been on two diametrically opposing lines. One
continues to insist on the primacy of the mass-media led creative idea. The
second abdicates all responsibility and talks about ‘crowd-sourced’ creativity.
Needless to say, there is an increasing realization that both these extreme perspectives
are flawed.
CONTAGION
We, at Ogilvy, know that infectious content needs a
contagion of a brilliant idea. We understand that these are not opposing forces
but, in fact, they complement each other. Indeed, to us, the most effective
communication strategies now embrace the chaos between function and form. It
strikes us that the best ideas now have an unstructured shape that enjoys the
freedom to evolve and change as they connect and collaborate with consumers.
We are curious about deciphering which ideas have the capability to be
adopted and broadcast by consumers. This is
why we are investing our creative energies behind the understanding and
designing of the idea contagion.
DISCOVERY
We have had a couple of
big and ‘retrospectively self-evident’ discoveries on this journey.
Firstly, as well
articulated by Katja Bressette in ‘Deeply understanding the mind to unmask the
inner human’, we are not dealing with the homo economicus - the rational human
being who makes decisions purely based on reason, but with the “homo emoticus”
– the emotional human being.
Secondly, the brain
expends only 2 percent of its energy on conscious activity, with the rest
devoted largely to unconscious processing. Thus, traditional market research methods
— like consumer surveys and focus groups — are inherently found lacking in
sifting the brilliant creative ideas from the average ones, because the
participants can never articulate the unconscious impressions that whet their
appetites for certain products.
These two discoveries imply
that we have to fundamentally re-think our creative process. For really
contagious ideas, we need to engage with the emotional subconscious in our
consumers. And we need to find new ways of collaborating with consumers to
understand what they really want.
BREAKTHROUGH
Introducing Neuroscience.
It is more than just a new-fangled research methodology. It gives us the
ability to directly talk to the brain, the seat of all our emotional impulses,
to decipher how consumers feel. Crucially, neuroscience allows us to unearth
powerful insights into people's thoughts and feelings, insights that marketers
can then use to develop accurate communication strategies that resonate within
our consumers' minds.
Neuroscience* has
the capability to define the future of marketing - it is unlocking the power of
emotions and changing the way we listen, converse, persuade, engage and sell.
For starters, instead of
searching for the next product feature or selling point, we seek to understand the
emotional spaces evoked by the product in consumers’ subconscious. By using
neuroscience techniques like fMRI* or Implicit Associations*,
we can unearth the fundamental motivations addressed by the category, product or
brand.
An illustration of this –
diet foods are not really about slimming down, but about insecurity. Such
insights help create ideas that target these primal motivations rather than
superficial features. Needless to say, such ideas also have a head start on
consumer broadcast.
Secondly, we use
neuroscience techniques to sift out our best creative ideas. Neuroscience
techniques like EEG* help us get a quick and direct evaluation of
the subconscious impact of our most audacious ideas.
This is a radically
improved method over conventional focus groups. When asked outright in surveys
and groups, consumers will provide answers, of course, but those answers may be
incomplete at best and quite misleading at worst.
As David Ogilvy said “The
trouble with market research is that consumers don’t think how they feel, they
don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say” Much to our relief
today, neuroscience helps us directly understand how consumers feel rather than
go through the say-think-feel enigma.
Last, but not the least,
we can use Neuroscience methods to refine and fine-tune our final creative
product. Eye tracking* methods help understand the specific frames, within
the creative product, that are driving or detracting consumer attention. Armed
with such knowledge, creative directors can optimize their creative product for
maximum impact.
FUTURE, UNLOCKED
The revolution will force
a new dawn upon all of us. We see neuroscience as an integral part of this promising
future.
In the not-too-distant
future, the creative director will co-create a contagion of an idea. This will
be an idea created in collaboration with the subconscious of the consumer,
something that naturally has the potency to be virally shared between
consumers.
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