Today’s consumer mindset can be summed up in one word: distracted. And it just keeps getting worse as people spend more and more time looking at screens.
Reports by eMarketer and Nielsen show that people spend about ten hours a day on a screen – computer, TV, mobile phones, and other connected devices. About three of those hours are on mobile phones.
The vast majority of adults 18 years and older have smartphones and on average check them 46 times a day, or 8 billion times collectively, or so says a Deloitte report on smartphone usage. If you have 16 waking hours (and get 8 hours of sleep), that means you’re checking your phone about every 3 minutes.
The bottom line for marketers is that pretty much all consumers are highly distracted and not paying attention to much around them.
Now add to that how much people multitask when it comes to media consumption. Accenture put out a report showing that 87 percent of consumers use more than one device at a time – for example, watching TV while chatting, posting, browsing, texting, or playing a game on their phone. That doesn’t leave much attention span for marketers to capture and engage.
In this book, we show you how to develop creative that’s emotionally relevant so you can break through some of that clutter and engage consumers in inspirational common causes, open distribution channels that address their lifestyle, and execute direct marketing programs using email, print, mobile, and more that get noticed, acted upon, and generate sales.
This is not your father’s marketing book, nor is it the same book that was released in 1999 under this title. Times, technologies, channels, and needs have changed and so, too, has the way you connect, engage, and sell to your customers. With all this change, the gap or differences in the various generations is getting wider as people’s attitudes, perspectives, and the way they live, shop, and engage with brands is redefined by technology, media channels, and social trends.
This section provides some insights about some of the different values and attitudes that drive behavior among the generations most businesses target today, in both a B2B and B2C setting.
The primary “shopping” generations are roughly broken down as follows:
❯❯ Millennials: 18 to 34 years old
❯❯ Generation X: 35 to 54 years old
❯❯ Baby boomers: 55 to 70 years old
Although a ton of information about each generation is available – from books to white papers to videos and more – the main thing marketers need to understand is what each generation thinks of brands, what they expect about brands, and what they respond to in terms of values and stimuli.
Tables 1‐1 through 1‐3 list some of the characteristics of the various generations that impact their “marketing ability” and what you can do to address and engage them in meaningful ways. These attributes, mindsets, and potential actions should be front and center when you create your customer profiles and emotional selling propositions (ESPs), as outlined in Chapter 2, and your creative, as discussed in Chapter 6.
TABLE 1-1 Marketing to Millennials
TABLE 1-2 Marketing to Generation Xers
TABLE 1-3 Marketing to Baby Boomers
Worldwide consumers are losing trust in business, media, and government. In just one year, the level of trust dropped three points and reached an all‐time low in 2017, according to Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017, an annual report worth reading to help you get a better understanding of your customers’ mindset and how it may have changed year over year. Visit Edelman.com for consumer studies on trust and other key topics.
The most trusted source for business information today is peers, or “people just like me,” while CEOs and other business executives continue to lose ground. Note that the most trusted industry is technology and the least trusted industries are financial services, chemicals, and banking.
What does all of this mean? If customers don’t trust business, and if you’re in a business that consumers don’t trust in general, you need to build content, customer experiences, and messaging around the things you do to be trustworthy. Your customer experiences need to show that you and your people are honest, care about customers’ needs, not just your own, and that you do what you say you’ll do.
In Chapter 2, you read about the emotional and psychological influences of choice and how to appeal to these emotions in ways that build sustainable trust among your consumers.
Defining a common purpose
Traditionally, consumers demanded fair prices, good quality, and good service from brands in order to go back for more. Today, the demands are so much more. Consumers want to know what you’ve done for employees, communities, the earth, and the underprivileged and needy, not just what you’ve done for investors, stakeholders, and executive compensation. In fact, as we cover in Chapter 2, more than 80 percent of consumers (Cone Communications CSR study) state that their purchasing decisions and brand loyalty are based on what a brand has done and is doing to improve the world. A large majority, close to 90 percent, of global consumers are willing and likely to switch brands to one that’s doing good in the world if price and quality are comparable.
More than 80 percent of consumers say that a brand’s actions and positive impact on the world influence what they buy or where they shop and also which products they choose to recommend to others. As consumers continue to say, the most influential source for their purchasing decisions is actually other consumers, friends, and peers, and a brand’s altruistic behavior becomes exponentially more critical.
So what does this mean to you, the marketer? And for small