Aaron Shields

Most commercial messages contain too many elements, all competing with one another for our understanding, and the elements themselves may be uninteresting, unclear, or off-message.
Marty Neumeier, Zag

Companies try to make their brands stand out and be different: they try to constantly be new to gain a competitive advantage. In short, they use newness as a path to relevance. But, this quest to be relevant has affected their ability to be meaningful.
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Now what do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?

Rosser Reeves in Dennis Higgins’ The Art of Writing Advertising

Marketers are quick to blame agencies for their ineffectiveness. And it’s true: I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen agencies produce off-brand advertising that didn’t resonate with their customers; but hell, it looks pretty and gets likes. I’ve even seen a major agency try to get a company to fund research for an ad slogan that was not only off-brand but was impossible to understand—on the bright side, it was the first time they actually tried to gather data to inform an ad.

But, the fault isn’t solely with the agencies, it’s also with the companies hiring them. Many companies don’t know what they want to get out of a marketing initiative, so they don’t articulate it to the agency, and then the agency produces whatever the agency wants instead of what the company needs.

Every initiative, whether it’s a television ad campaign or the way you handle your Facebook page, should have a goal. And, the goal doesn’t have to be monetary. What is has to be is something that ties into your vision—what you want your brand to become.

Using the vision as a guide, you can create strategies—the overarching plans to get you to your vision—that result in a series of tactics—the steps it’ll take to get you there.

Marketing initiatives fall under the tactics bubble and must be measured in that context. Think: What do I want this initiative to do in a way that fits a strategy that pushes the company towards its ultimate vision.?

Thinking in this way makes it easy to then develop a simple metric to test the effectiveness of the initiative and be able to hold an agency accountable for the results.

Acting this way will ensure your marketing initiatives are on brand; make agencies produce better, more meaningful work; and, it will stop you from being so frustrated with your lack of return on your marketing spend.

The media industry is bifurcated into two distinct worlds: the struggling traditional segment that longs for a simple, more profitable past that will never return; and the vibrant entrepreneurial segment that is reinventing commerce before our eyes.
Justin Smith, CEO Bloomberg Media Group, 2013 memo

It‘s true: we’re in a period of rapid invention that is changing business and leaving antiquated models in the dust. But, the businesses succeeding aren’t reinventing commerce; they’re returning to an old form of commerce where individual customers matter more than demographic groups.

Technology allowed businesses to become bullies: it enabled them to tell consumers what to think and at scale.

But, technology has a way of always returning to human nature: people want to feel like they’re part of a community and be heard–not to be told what to want.

Instead of adapting to the empowered customer and using the human characteristics that new technology has enabled, most businesses have become like Stuart Larkin–the MAD TV character obsessed with attention–shouting, “me, me, me,” and hoping that if they’re loud enough and crazy enough, people will pay attention.

And, many think they’re on the right track with the attention they received. But, attention is easy; mattering is hard.

Businesses are still using old metrics by counting attention in the form of likes and views. But, likes and views don’t correlate to sales. The reason is simple: attention ≠ meaning.

People don’t care about most of their followers or friends on social media. They’re less likely to care about a faceless business. What they do care about is recognition from their followers and brands. They want to be heard, they want to be recognized, and they want to be understood.

These should be your goals because people care about their me more than your me.

It’s the expectation in the new MEdia.

Mattering to customers can no longer be ignored. In the future, businesses will no longer be able to ignore mattering to their employees.

The successful companies in the future will create brands that customers and employees love. They will create meaning.

In short, they’ll be human.