Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

CROWDS AND COMMON SENSE.

It's true that you can't fool all of the people all of the time -- and it turns out, you can't please them all either.

Clients often make the mistake of believing they can make everyone happy or interested in their product or service -- from stakeholders to customers at large -- when what they really ought to be focused on is pleasing a realistic and definable target audience.

A good example of this obsession to please everyone all the time is focus groups. Originally devised to help marketers focus messaging, these impromptu star chambers are now called upon to make sure everyone understands the creative and isn't offended by it.

Of course it's an impossible task and, if a client or suit is wobbly enough, the result of focus groups is often a creative or strategic approach so watered down that the only thing it succeeds at is going unnoticed.

A big reason for over-relying on ass-covering focus groups is a belief in the wisdom of crowds -- that if you average out what everyone wants, you end in some sweet spot that covers everyone.

Democracy and the stock market, for instance, rely heavily on crowd psychology because it's thought the mistakes of the many cancel each other out and center around the right answer. Of course the election of presidents with middle initials like W (just sayin'...) and market bubbles and crashes suggest crowds aren't always that wise or reliable.

Part of the problem is: which crowds should you listen to?

In the scientific world, measuring the effect on the many makes sense when you're trying to draw a general conclusion and confirm a hypothesis.

But marketing and advertising are only ever partly scientific and therefore only ever partly predictable. There are often too many variables to draw sweeping conclusions about your audience, what they believe and how they'll feel about your product. (Just look up New Coke or Crystal Pepsi.)

Jaron Lanier in You Are Not A Gadget makes the point this way:

"The 'wisdom of crowds' effect should be thought of as a tool. The value of a tool is its usefulness in accomplishing a task. The point should never be the glorification of the tool."

Nor, I'd add, should it be the checking out of the brain.

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THE THE IMPOTENCE OF PROOFREADING.

There are two things that embarrass the hell out of me. (Okay, well two I'm willing to share.) One is discovering I have a booger after speaking with someone in public. The other is catching a misspelling after I hit 'send'.

With that, here's this:

HOW MUCH DOES IT $OUND?

Businesses -- especially fast food restaurants -- have known for a long time the effect color can have on mood and purchase decisions. It's why most fast food joints paint their walls orange and red: to appeal to the human impulse that connects bright colors with healthy food. (Think of sweet potatoes and mangoes and raw meat, for instance. And if reading my blog makes you hungry, now you know why.)

Now, new research -- well new to me -- suggests that consumers at least in part make purchasing decisions based on how a price sounds. For example, people associate prices with more number twos, which has a back-of-the-mouth vowel, as big and those with front-of-the-mouth vowels like 'three' as wee.

Interestingly, in Chinese, where the number two and three have the reverse vowel sounds, the perception about which price is higher is also reversed.

More from the New York Times here.

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LOOKING TO FRESHEN UP YOUR FONTS?

Came across a great resource if you're in need of some new handwritten fonts to spice your designs up. And from what I can tell, this font of fonts is free!

Act now!

My two faves are below. How about you?

IT'S THE STORY, STUPID.

As a copywriter, I'm often torn between two competing points of view of how communication ought to work.

One says that copy should be short and succinct -- get to the point simply and quickly because "people are busy" and "people don't read."

The other point of view is that we as writers, communicators and marketers have a role to play in educating people about whatever we're selling -- whether it's a product, a service or an idea.

The trend over the last 50 years -- in advertising specifically and communications generally -- has clearly been in the direction of less is more. Think of the whining over 2,000-page healthcare legislation in the US (wow, a law that's longer than the Ten Commandments?!) And when was the last time you saw an ad like this? (The car ought to give you a big hint.)

But it's comments by New York University president John Sexton to Bill Moyers about the breakdown of public discourse -- which he calls an "allergy to thought" -- that really made me wonder if, like a vicious circle, our assumption that we need to dumb down communications is actually what's making us all dumber.

He writes:

"...an allergy to thought, to complexity [and] nuance -- a kind of collapse into an intellectual relativism where opinions become fact... It's a dangerous thing... I think there's a growing hostility to knowledge in this country... Our national progress is being retarded because we have fallen into this discourse by slogan... We don't listen well as a society. When we listen, we listen in feedback loops to people who are likely to say what it is we think is right. We're in the process, it seems to me because of this allergy to complexity and nuance, of devaluing the importance of education..."

And, I would add, devaluing the importance of thoughtful communication.

I'm reminded of something my colleague Scott McKay recently wrote on his blog, addressing the claim that "no one reads anymore":

"... an essential part of [communicating successfully] is a story, a way of connecting emotionally with the product and/or service. A way of making your communication personal. A way of helping people understand your product's value and getting them to understand that they need it."

Don't get me wrong. There are times where brevity is called for -- I don't need to read a story on a traffic sign and if you're a telemarketer, you sure as hell better get to the point. But there are plenty of times when people want to be told a story. You just have to figure out what your product's most compelling story really is.

What do you think? Have people stopped thinking and reading? And is there still a place for telling stories in advertising?

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WHEN MARKETERS NEED TO GO ON A DIET.

Losing weight isn't brain surgery. There are thousands of books that trumpet the secret to weight loss but essentially it comes down to eating less and exercising more. The rest, to paraphrase Hillel, is commentary.

Same goes for direct marketing (and I include online marketing here too, since it's essentially direct via the digital medium). We sometimes spend weeks and months perfecting creative -- change the font, the color, the format, the second sentence in the fourth paragraph -- but good marketers know that great creative is, at best, a third of what achieves success. The best creative in the world is guaranteed to fall flat on its face without two other must-haves:

• A list: if you're not sending your advertising to the right people, the campaign fails. Period.
• An offer: if you don't give me some incentive to agree to listen to you spout off about your product, the campaign fails.

Now, of course, if you're targeting really well (i.e., you have a super list), your offer may not matter as much -- think of Apple marketing to its customers who already love their products.

And if your offer is out of this world, you can probably afford not to worry as much about the list -- although your giveaway will probably end up being really expensive.

In short, it's a combination of these three things -- creative, list and offer -- that make for a successful campaign. It's amazing to me how many marketers still get this wrong. Like people who want to lose weight, they ignore the obvious and expect miracles.

There are no miracles. Only problems with solutions usually right under your nose.

Speaking of lists and offers, here's some more smart stuff from copyblogger.

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DOG RELIGION.

As humans, we have a pretty good knack for assuming we're the pinnacle of everything, that the world revolves around us. Of course, the rest of the world is only too happy to remind us otherwise on a regular basis.

This Scientific American article fascinated me because it challenges the notion that morality and ethics are a purely human invention. Dogs have their own set of commandments, it turns out, not that different from our own.

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MORE ON CHANGE.

Love this quote from Seth Godin today:

"Revolutions are like that. They invent and destroy and they only go one way. It's like watching a confused person in a revolving door for the first time. They push backwards, try to slow it down, fight the rotation... and then they embrace the process and just walk and it works."

Spot on.

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BEST VS BEST PRACTICE (OR, THE LOCK-IN DILEMMA).

Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The only reason your keyboard follows this convention today is that one of the first typewriter manufacturers fatefully chose this peculiar order (apparently to minimize typebar clashes) back in 1874 and it became the dominant keyboard format. It got locked in, so to speak.

I'm only about 30 pages into You Are Not A Gadget, but already Jaron Lanier has gone over my head with many of his musings about the culture of technology. One area I'm finding fascinating, however, is his thoughts on lock-in.

He describes it this way:

"The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into permanent reality."

Okay. That's a bit dramatic. But what he's saying, I think, is that lock-in -- from the QWERTY keyboard to the MIDI standard in music software to thousands of other standards and conventions we use every day -- narrows our options at the same time it helps spread a technology to more people.

Lanier again:

"Lock-in ... removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance."

Two more examples come to mind as I read that.

One, how advertising agencies and marketing professionals often shut down potentially innovative ideas by resorting to locked-in best practices -- better to follow a templated look or "proven" strategy than take a chance on something different.

And second, the healthcare debate in the US. (If you know me well enough, I can always bring it back to the healthcare debate in the US, LOL.)

Read that last quote by Lanier again and try not to think how perfectly it describes the challenges faced by those who want to change the current system. It's inefficient and unfair to millions of people, there are clearly better ways to offer everyone healthcare, yet attempts at change are painful to watch precisely because the system is so locked in.

I haven't read yet how Lanier proposes countering lock-in but I'll let you know when I do.

How about you? Is lock-in a good thing on balance? If not, how do you unlock?

CHANGE.

My parents sold their home.

It's the house they've lived in for 38 years, the one I grew up in. One of my earliest memories -- of my mom taking my brother and me to see our new place one night in 1972 -- and all my childhood and teens are wrapped up in that house.

And yesterday I said goodbye to it for the last time. I walked around all weekend teasing memories from my subconscious, taking in the way everything looked as if I were inhaling a last breath.

To say I had mixed feelings is an understatement. I thought I'd cry as my brother and I and his kids drove away but I didn't. (I do that now, alone, as I type.) Instead I watched my mom arranging things in the garage and was relieved that life would be easier for her and my dad in the new condo. No more dealing with snow piling up on the roof or washing a million windows or running up and down flights of stairs.

Change happens. We can't escape it. Sometimes it's painful. Sometimes it's exhilarating. Often it's both. How we react to change defines our success. If we fight change, we waste away, we become bitter, cynical, paralyzed, we watch others move ahead, cloaked in our selective memories of the good old days. If we embrace change, however difficult, we're carried with the wave. We can still fondly call on our memories but we don't become entombed by them. 

Too often, people and businesses make the mistake of assigning factors to success that, in reality, have little to do with it. Companies hit the jackpot with a product or the way they marketed it and assume every product or marketing campaign from that moment forward must resemble the first. We rigidly follow best practices instead of learning lessons and considering common sense. We do this in politics and religion too. A 2,000-year-old book, a 250 year-old document, even a 30-year-old political philosophy, become immutable, untouchable, dogma. Instead of learning the lessons the original work was meant to address, we worship the person, the paper, the stone, the bricks and mortar.

The irony is the bricks and mortar are not real. The memories -- and the lessons we learn from those memories -- are real. I will never again walk into the house at 370 Sloane Avenue. But lying on that gold shag carpet in the den watching Sonny and Cher or Walter Cronkite, or laughing with my brothers and my mom on her bed during a dozen blackouts, or doing math homework with my dad at the kitchen table, or spending summers reading in the backyard: I can take those memories wherever I go. They'll all be with me long after the bricks and mortar are gone.