In an era where consumers, voters and other audiences have much more control over the messages that come into (or are blocked out of) their lives, brands, people and their advisors (including their agencies) must do a better job of understanding the factors that are most likely to add up to relevance.
Companies, governments, organizations, educators, employers, political candidates and every other kind of “content creator” in the world spend literally trillions of dollars every year to reach people who are, by and large, actively screening out what they have to say.
Like the smartest of the three little pigs, we have all built our houses out of increasingly impenetrable bricks, specifically to keep out the Big Bad Wolf of irrelevant, unwanted messages and content that, in turn, are being huffed and puffed louder and harder to blow our houses down by the brands that want to get in.
Yet it’s unusual for communicators and marketers to measure the likelihood of a message, idea or brand getting through an audience’s filter. Typically, brand or political message- or concept-testing jump right to the question of how audiences respond after a brand or idea has broken through. This is a bias embedded in almost all quantitative testing, focus groups, shopper marketing and other forms of market research.
But this is the wrong first question to ask. This is asking the question, “What would happen if the wolf got in?” Everyone knows what happens when the wolf gets in. It often comes honey glazed and spiral-sliced.
Even if the unwanted message isn’t deadly, it is, at best, clogging up our field of vision, making life a tangled mess of clutter that prevents us from living our best lives. That’s why we create ways to avoid and ignore them: spam filters, TiVo, caller ID, web ad blockers. These are our houses made of brick.
So, if you’re a wolf, the best first question isn’t what happens when the you get in, but how do you get in at all? Why do some brands (or candidates) succeed at capturing public attention while others fade into white noise? What specifically makes some brands more relevant than others?
Even today, too many campaigns take a Three Little Pigs approach to the task of trying to get to audiences by trying to bash down their front doors with saturation marketing of various kinds: TV ads are the most well-known example, but don’t forget about the massive amounts of telemarketing, direct mail and email marketing that hit you every day.
That approach has inevitably led to people building more impenetrable doors and brick houses and a more adversarial attitude toward marketing of all kinds. Being relevant, on the other hand, is like having a house key entrusted to you by your stakeholders.
Or, to use the object lesson at hand, how has The Donald been able to huff and puff and blow our collective houses down (no matter what we think of him) while, say, Jeb(!) Bush has not . . . despite that exclamation point? And, when I say “us,” I mean all of us, liberals and moderates as well as the brand of angry conservatives who are telling us they want him in the house, who have given him the key.
About 30 to 40 percent of the Republican electorate have given Trump their house keys, apparently because they believe he “is unfiltered,” because he “tells it like it is” and “speaks his mind” . . . because he “isn’t afraid to say what everyone is thinking” and so on. They want him in the house.
But many of the rest of us (myself included, obviously) have given him our keys, too. He gets into our ordinarily sturdy brick houses because we believe he is something in between a “outrageous carnival freakshow” and a “possibly dangerous demagogue who must be stopped.” We may not want him in the house, but we think it’s important to let him in so we can keep an eye on him.
In either case, whether we think he’s “demolishing the phony facade of political business-as-usual” or just a trainwreck, almost no one seems to be able to look away. And he’s accomplishing this not by forcing his way uninvited into our field of vision (in the way mass advertising does), but by making himself easy to find when we are searching for him.
For Trump lovers, this ubiquity is a shortcut to organizing our complicated and chaotic thoughts about what we’re thinking and feeling about politics-as-usual. They are searching for an emblem to embody that frustration . . . and Trump’s reward for being that emblem is his relevance to this group.
But for those of us who are not Trump lovers, it’s the same basic mechanism. We, too, are looking for an emblem to serve as a shortcut for all the messy, complicated and sometimes contradictory things we’re seeing and feeling. Trump’s relevance to us is simply the other side of the same coin, a shortcut telling us not what to embrace but what to avoid.
But relevance doesn’t care about embracing or avoiding. Relevance only cares about whether you’re paying attention.
NEXT INSTALLMENT: Of dog whistles and dread