How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

Tuesday night I presented at the first ever CaseCamp Vancouver. So what is CaseCamp?

Think of Bar Camp and shorten it and make it about marketing that uses technology, not just about technology. That’s Case Camp.

Presentations are 10-minute, rapid-fire case studies that tell a good story, in 10 minutes—tops!

The title of my presentation?

How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

or

The biggest thing I know so far about building marketing in a group

I’ve added my speaking notes below, which may or may make sense to you. If you were there, you have a distinct advantage. (Okay, I added a little explanatory information too for this web post.)

The speaking notes go with my CaseCamp presentation movie (464K, .mov quicktime file). Coordinating the two at once is up to you. Bonne chance!

slide 1
“Introduction to me and my idea: see title.”

slide 2
“I started to work with a company a few years ago and they told me that they were very analytics driven. They had specific key performance indicators (KPIs) they used organization-wide to make decisions. I thought that was a good thing.”

KPIs

• alright!
• analytics!
• the web rocks analytics!
• My brag: Google / Yahoo in 2000 / 2001 my team managed the largest ad spend in Canada

slide 3 and 4
“They used this chart to make their marketing and advertising decisions.”
(slide of cost per response (CPR) and (CPA))

“This was their holy grail, I was told. Their advertising decisions all hinged on these simple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs!).”

“Their brands are listed down the left-most column. The next two column, going left to right, show the web cost per response over the course of the year and at the end of the year, once you’d hired me and we’d optimized the campaigns. The second-from-the-right column shows your cost per response averages across all media - TV, print, outdoors and the web. The right column shows the difference.”

“I also mentioned the other factors the web had going for it as an advertising medium:

• superior scalability - we could be practically all the traffic we could handle until it cost too much to buy
• superior cash-flow - you get your placement, get your click throughs, have a chance to convert that traffic, then, 30 days later, get invoiced for the traffic that’s already been delivered and you’ve already (potentially converted into buyers).
• superior flexibility - you can ramp up and down your ad spend in seconds on an ongoing basis, you can roll your learnings from the campaign into the ongoing campaign as long as you want and as deeply as you want, you can stop the campaign
• superior tracking - every step of the customer acquisition process you can track to see where people are falling off, not converting, and address that issue
• pay for performance - you only pay for the people that click on the ads - those that see that ads but don’t click on them but still get your ‘brand message’ (ugh!) - you don’t pay for

I thought that made for a pretty self-explanatory case for an increased budget for the web marketing team. We could deliver more customers for cheaper.

slide 5

“That’s not how it worked out. The feedback I received can basically be summed up in three tactics of response:”

Dispute

• I showed them this
• They didn’t believe it
• If this could be so much better, why hadn’t they discovered it
• ‘This is theoretical,’ they said. ‘Not real.’

Disparage

• No, these aren’t real numbers.
• We discussed the origin of the numbers
• They concluded the numbers were not accurate, for any channel
• The process they were gathered through was flawed
• All the numbers were flawed. How could they make decisions with flawed nubmers!

Misdirect

• Those people you say came from the web, they discovered our brand through other channels, through our TV ads, through our print ads
• We do way more TV advertising that web
• The web is coasting on the coattails of the TV ads
• When customers are searching how do you think they know what to search for?
• We told them in our TV ads!

slide 6

“I didn’t get it. What was I doing wrong? They must need more information.”

slide 7

“I showed them the Internet was exploding in popularity and global reach.”

slide 8

“I showed them that people loved to get involved in the Internet and contribute content, not just get information.”

slide 9

“E-commerce was experiencing immense year-over-year growth.”

slide 10

“Our industry was experience some of the strongest growth.”

“But nothing worked. Why?

slide 11

“People make emotional decisions and then justify them with reason.”

“Decisions get made way back in the emotional centre of the brain, in the places where fear and anger and hunger reside. They don’t get made in the reasoning, high-order functions areas. Those are just for window dressing and justifying the decisions of the emotions.”

slide 12

“So what did I learn from my spectacular failure to understand how decisions get made? Focus on these things.”

Me Lessons

1 - Trust

• Don’t try to convince people to do something
• show them what they could do
• earn their trust bit by bit
• seed trust through external sources of validation: articles, books, etc.

2 - Religion:
Religions have been around for as long as cultures. Use their tactics.

• spread the word, beat the drum
• give people a simple story to believe
• appeal to people’s fears and dreams
• prosthletize: watch Sunday morning religious TV to see how to do this - seriously

3 - Attraction:

• make your ideas other people’s ideas
• use proxies for your arguments
• depersonalize the decision
• sex up the proposal

4 - Quit:

• move on before you stop believing in yourself
• once you stop believing there’s no way you can make others believe
• you have to be able to eat fear

Questions…discussion.

slide 13

“This is a pretty good book at explaining the diverging forces in the world, how we’re stubbornly subject to the same flawed human belief systems and superstition at the same time as we’re reaching out technologically and technocratically: Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber.

And guess which one will always trump the other?