“Too much information, running through my brain. Too much information, driving me insane.”
- The Police, from their album Ghost in the Machine.
In his book The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier offers some sobering statistics about information clutter. Consider this:
• In 1965 an average supermarket carried twenty thousand items, today it’s forty thousand.
• In 2006, 40 billion product-jammed catalogs were published in the U.S. (equals about 135 catalogs per person).
• Compare the features of a 1986 telephone with today’s smart phones.
• On average there are 3,000 marketing messages per day, per person. Up from 1,500 in 1965. Our ability to take in these messages stands at about 100 per day.
• Most commercial messages contain too many elements, all competing with each other for our understanding.
• 1960 there were 44 radio stations, today there are nearly 14,000. Add to that services like Pandora and other online music feeds and the options are virtually endless.
• Also in 1960 there were 6 television stations, today there are hundreds. As well as 25,000 internet broadcast channels.
Added to this information bombardment, we have social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter to contend with, daily emails, and Google searches that return millions of results. Barry Schwartz, professor of social theory at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice states “too much choice is paralyzing us and making us miserable”.
The booming science of decision making has shown that more information can lead to objectively poorer choices, and to choices that people come to regret. It has shown that an unconscious system guides many of our decisions, and that it can be sidelined by too much information.
So what does this mean to you? Well it means now, more than ever, it’s critical to present your offer in a clear, compelling manner. Toward that end there are specific metrics you can use to track your advertising and marketing effectiveness.
The 4 brand assets you need to evaluate and direct are:
Differentiation is the positioning of a brand or product to a specific audience (e.g., A Hooters burger might be promoted alongside a scantly clad young woman garnering a primarily male audience, whereas a Gourmet Burger might highlight its European cheeses, which appeal to a foodie-focused audience.)
Relevance is how applicable a brand or product is to consumers’ lives. Products of higher quality and value than other comparable products in the same marketplace are more relevant.
Esteem is how the brand or product is positioned in the minds of consumers. Consumers’ trust and admiration of a brand can be low or high, depending on the nature of the product (e.g., Toyota is a brand that may be held in much lower esteem than Volvo due to Toyota’s recent recalls).
Awareness is the way a brand or product communicates how it is differentiated from other brands or products (e.g., Starbucks communicates its implementation of free WiFi in its cafés using a variety of media channels, including social media, whereas a small bistro that uses fair-trade coffee beans may advertise its offerings in a locally published magazine).
Great marketing will consider these pillars and permeate them into your brand communications. Get it right and you’ll reap the rewards. Ignore them and your communication will meld into the mass of marketing noise. And as we all know, a confused mind always says “no”.
