The Marketing Fantasy World
If you’re in the marketing business, you hopefully have come across Bob Hoffman, aka the Ad Contrarian. For years, his blog (and now his newsletter) have punctured some of the sillier pretensions of the advertising world. Two unfounded assertions have repeatedly drawn his ire over the years: that customers want to have deep relationships with brands, and that digital channels are an effective means of brand building.
He recently wrote an opus that combined these two themes, and made what might be, to some, a shocking claim: that many marketers are living in a fantasy world that comes from believing that our brands are far more important to customers than they actually are. When we pretend that we can drive our businesses by creating greater engagement, we are profoundly mistaken how our customers think and behave, and consequently waste our marketing budgets on tactics and channels that don’t advance our core objectives of driving awareness, interest and sales.
Says Hoffman:
Most marketers have a hard time recognizing that while their brand is vitally important to them, it is of little consequence to their customers. If you’re a marketer and you believe people love your brand because they happen to buy it, you’re kidding yourself.
As Byron Sharp has demonstrated, much of what we call “brand love” and “brand loyalty” is simply habit, convenience, mild satisfaction or easy availability. Are some consumers strongly attached to a few brands? Sure they are. But remember, we each participate in hundreds of product categories and are strongly attached to maybe a handful of brands.
So what’s the problem if we aspire to convert more customers to being brand loyalists, even though most of them won’t be more than loosely attached to the brand? That’s where the critique of social media comes in. Because we could now create opportunities for customers to interact with our brands, we started building tactics to make this happen, without really asking ourself whether this was what customers wanted. Hoffman again:
If you don’t [share branded content], why do you believe that anyone else does? Because your boss says so? Because all the people around you say so? All this questionable “brand involvement” ideology is the delusional framework on which a great deal of marketing strategy is currently constructed.
Hoffman’s conclusion (which I wholeheartedly endorse) is that most of our relationships with brands are transactional, so rather than trying to control consumer behavior by engineering loyalty, we should accept consumer behavior as it actually is and adjust our marketing plans accordingly.
So, what does this mean for pharma and medical device brands? First is that we should have three objectives we orient our tactical plans around:
Make sure the right people are aware of our brand
Help them understand what problem the brand is best positioned to solve
Solve the practical problems that limit their ability to use the brand to its full potential
Perhaps that sounds less exciting than building customer loyalty or deepening engagement with brand content. But I assure you, if your brand does those three things really well, it will be an enormous success, and failing at any of them will dramatically limit its potential.