Three Essential Marketing Campaign Components

How a 50-year-old psychological theory holds the key.

Let’s begin with a historical perspective. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, the writer famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a worldwide satellite communication system. The first satellite, the Sputnik-1, was launched in 1957. Some ideas are way ahead of their time. Similarly, in 1957 Leon Festinger published his book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, in which he proves that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system or by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. In short, it’s about reducing tension. The theory goes: Either you adjust your beliefs to fit reality, or you adjust your perception of reality to fit your beliefs.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology. And now that we have the most fragmented media map ever, we can apply it to our messaging.

My proposal: Every campaign needs three messages: retain, retry, try. And they should coexist.

The Three States of a Consumer

If you think about it, there are only three consumption states for anything:

1. You are either a consumer (a company wants to retain you
2. An ex-consumer (a company wants you to retry its products or services)
3. A never-consumer (a company wants you to try it). But that creates an interesting strategic problem: Just as in the game of Go, you need to attack and defend at the same time, and you need to do it on all fronts.

So your advertising must do four things:

1. Keep your consumers from defecting
2. Increase consumption from current consumers (i.e., make light users heavier ones)
3. Get consumers who abandoned the brand to come back
4. Get consumers who’ve never tried your brand to give it a try

Applying Cognitive Dissonance to Everyday Purchasing Behavior

Let’s say you are a customer of our Mythical Burgers joint. Most of my advertising will be geared to keeping you coming back (reminder) and perhaps buying something extra when you’re here (upsell), such as a dessert.

If you are not already a customer, chances are that you won’t be tempted to try Mythical Burgers. After all, you’ve seen the same message a dozen times and still haven’t made the switch. What would it take for you to make the switch? If you are a guy, perhaps it’s that my burgers are cheaper. Or a better value (extra ounce for the same price)? Or the service is faster? Or we give you a complimentary bib, so you won’t ruin your tie?

Bottom line: There needs to be a message that will be different enough from the regular ones that a non-Mythical Burgers customer would consider changing.

 Cognitive Dissonance

The beautiful part is that for current customers, the try message reinforces the reason(s) that keep you coming back in the first place.

Now let’s say you have never been to Mythical Burgers at all. You’ve seen the try messages after all, most of us are exposed to pretty much the same media and didn’t try. You’ve seen the regular messages and didn’t become one. We need a completely different action.

Perhaps it is a promotion (try now and get a meal for the price of a burger) or a tactical action (this weekend only, bring in the receipt from another burger joint and we’ll give you the equivalent for 50 percent off). Whatever it is, it needs to be different enough that it will (1) get noticed by our noncustomers and (2) move them to action.

The try message also works well with the other two groups:

• It might be just the thing to bring an ex-customer back to the grill.
• It reinforces the decision made by current customers in favor of Mythical Burgers and could provide an added value (i.e., the promotion is open to everyone).

Why Now?

I had proposed this to FCB, Kraft and SCJ in the ’90s. Back then, it wasn’t practical: Filming three TV commercials was prohibitive, and our targets did not have enough exposure to other media to impact sales in any way.

Today, there are several communication channels that we can use to segment messages, including the Web, search, mobile, email marketing and SMS marketing, all of which offer significant audiences and inexpensive production costs.

So Where Does Cognitive Dissonance Come In?

Simple: self-selection. As we move along our day, to minimize the tension that cognitive dissonance points out, we will tend to gloss over any communication that is irrelevant. So, if we are not a Mythical Burgers customer, we tend to ignore its communications. It would take a completely different message for the non-consumer to even notice it. It then becomes safe to even run the different ads in the same medium; we will ignore those that don’t apply to us.

What Does it Take?

Tool 1: gathering intelligence: The existence of online surveys, online consumer panels and online focus groups provides real-time, low-cost solutions that just did not exist 10 years ago.

All these promotions and loyalty clubs can be done inexpensively using digital media, including Web, search and mobile with a variety of tools included in the media (online video, SMS and more).

Benchmark

Geico is probably one of the most prolific examples. They had running at the same time, regular campaigns:

Fifteen minutes could save you 15 percent or more, the cavemen, the eyes, the living under a rock and the hyperbolic guy (Can Geico save you 15 percent in your car insurance? followed by some outlandish example).

Capital One (What’s in your pocket?) also has several campaigns running at the same time: the Vikings, the guy with the baby who doesn’t want money back and Alec Baldwin.

In both cases, not only do the different creatives not cause any noise, you might notice sales points in one campaign but not in the other (cash back, no black-out dates, etc.).

Conclusion

The era of simple solutions died a decade ago. Consumers have always been complex. Today, however, we have much better (and affordable) tools to understand them and a broader media environment with which to reach them with highly segmented messages.

In addition to thinking about consumers along smaller segments (e.g., by lifestyle in addition to age, gender and geography), we should also consider their state of consumption, because it is now feasible to create and deliver multiple campaigns to address these differences.

Related content:

Understanding and Serving Your Customers

Engage Customers with An Aligned Media Strategy

The Art of Marketing: The Client Is King