Can You Relate to Your Audience?

As modern-day marketers, my colleague Shane Collins and I would be lying if we said we’ve never performed an online search for “what makes a great campaign?” or “what are the most important elements of marketing?” We are all in search for some hidden gem that is going to win that next pitch or win the agency an annual award. 

The search results all come back pretty similar: “5 Key Elements of a Successful Content Marketing Strategy,” “The Most Important Part of Marketing,” “Marketing Plan Elements,” “4 Most Important Elements of Promotion Mix,” etc. If you click through you’ll see that they all are saying the same thing: Define your goal/objective, optimize for maximum conversion, tell a great story, promote aggressively, blah, blah, blah.

Well, if it’s as easy as following those simple steps, then why do we still see ads like the ones Variety called “The Worst Ads of 2016”?

• Valeant’s Xifaxan and AstraZeneca — Super “Bowel”
• Anheuser-Bush renamed itself “America” — All Bottled Up

Or the Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner that hit all our news feeds recently?

These ads all had great creative (open for debate), told a story that speaks to the target audience, went big with promotion, etc. So why did they fail? The answer is simple: They failed to connect with their audiences.

The primary difference, from our vantage point, would be the context – these ads missed the mark contextually. Successful ads create a story that takes the beliefs and attitudes of multiple audiences into account.

Which brings us to Stories in Motion (SIM). When we heard WE was developing a survey to get at the attitudes and behaviors of people in the U.S., U.K. and China, there was genuine excitement in the office. It’s one thing to assume you know what is going on, but it’s a whole other thing to have data to support your assumptions.

A recent standout campaign would be Organic Valley’s “The Real Morning Report.” Not only does Organic Valley speak directly to its target audience, but it tells a story that is relatable to most audiences. The ads shine a light on the reality of women’s daily routines juxtaposed with the idealistic approach other brands take, lending authenticity and emotional appeal to the message.

Inspired by the “Real Morning Report” ad, we thought we would look to see what SIM data we had around the morning routine. What we found was 67 percent of people in the U.S. use their smartphone when they first wake up/are getting ready (72 percent of females, 62 percent of males), which is right in line with Organic Valley’s “Real Morning Report.” 

The data element from SIM that stood out the most was device usage among baby boomer males. More than the smartphone, the television (44 percent) had a higher percentage of usage among this group in the morning, which goes to show that age and gender truly do matter when trying to understand your audiences and are definitely a requirement of contextual understanding needed in marketing today.

We aren’t trying to say we have a foolproof way to generate a great campaign, but we do think having a firm grasp of your audience’s attitudes and beliefs leads to better contextual understanding and maybe a victory in your next pitch or another trophy in your agency’s trophy case. Check out the rest of our Stories in Motion research to see if our data can apply to your next campaign.

Connect with the author, Joshua Eubanks, on Twitter.