“A man came to the door, I said, ‘For whom are you looking?’ – ‘Your wife,’ he said, I said, ‘She’s busy in the kitchen cooking…’ Po’ boy, where have you been? – ‘I already told you once, won’t tell you again.’” From “Love and Theft”, Bob Dylan, 1996
Say what you like about healthcare advertising, at least it’s got a theory. The advertising may largely be dull, dour, didactic or just plain dumb, and the theory may be completely and utterly misguided, but it’s a theory nevertheless.
That’s a lot more than you can say about consumer advertising, which is still struggling to find a robust justification for its effectiveness even after all these years and all those billions of dollars, though you can’t say it’s for lack of trying.
Ever heard of the fabulously named E. St. Elmo Lewis? Posthumously inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1951, he was responsible for inventing – as far back as 1898 – the notorious AIDA theory of selling, the very first of what later became known in consumer behaviour research as the ‘hierarchy of effect’ models of persuasion.
For what it’s worth, this is what it looks like:
1898 Ad Hopper
And the theory is just about as sophisticated as the diagram. Load awareness, interest and desire into the hopper, in that specific order, and the targeted action, i.e. the sale, will come out the other end. To be fair to E. St. Elmo, he wasn’t proposing advertising’s theory-of-everything when he invented AIDA. All he wanted was a practical sales tool, based on “the latest Scientific Method”, to help life-insurance salesmen close the deal on unsuspecting punters as they toured Hicksville, USA, at the end of the 19th Century. His “latest Scientific Method” turned out to be a synthesis of some admittedly incisive observations of how the most successful salesmen would lead the mark seamlessly from a foot-in-the-door introduction to a signature on the dotted line. He believed that if it worked for naturally gifted salesmen it would work, with enough coaching, for anyone with five fully functioning senses and a measurable IQ. And it did.
Indeed, AIDA was so successful that it spawned (and continues to spawn) a clamouring host of acronyms for proprietary and non-proprietary sales techniques, including ADAPT (Assessment, Discovery, Activation, Projection, Transition), LAIR (Listen, Acknowledge, Identify objection, Reverse it), LOCATE (Listen, Observe, Combine, Ask, Talk, Empathize), SELL (Show, Explain, Lead to benefits, Let them talk) and SPIN (Questions about Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff). Each of these comes with a suitably specious pack of expensive sophistry, usually couched in the language of “cognitive layers”, “psychological frameworks” or NLP quackery. My personal favourite is the “hurt and rescue” principle that underpins the ADAPT model, carefully annotated with a reminder that “hurt” should not be confused with “physical pain”.
If each of these techniques has been shown to work just as well as the next one it’s because personal selling, as most of us have discovered to our eternal regret, is an extraordinarily powerful medium, especially in the hands of a master blagger. But it’s AIDA that everyone remembers, and it’s the one that most healthcare marketers appear to have been reared on when they were young reps fighting their way up the pharma food chain. Because only AIDA, or a viral variant thereof, can explain why 99 out of a hundred healthcare ads end up looking like the result of an unfortunate experiment involving Microsoft ClipArt circa 1993, a detail aid and an amateur chemistry set .
Among the several deeply erroneous assumptions made by sequential communications models such as AIDA the two most seriously flawed are, firstly, the conception of the advertising consumer as a passive recipient of information without thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and prejudices of his or her own, and, secondly, the notion of the human mind as a rational processor of discrete bytes of information, known in the trade as “messages”. It’s these twin assumptions that underpin the “hopper” model of healthcare advertising, and that explain why healthcare marketers regard all other forms of communication as secondary derivatives of the detailing.
But messages don’t make brands – ideas do. Remove the linearity, time and humanity of the face-to-face call and the logic of product messaging disintegrates into plaintive nonsense.
Advertising, at its best, is splendidly non-linear, viscerally immediate, engagingly simple. Because that’s the way good ideas come at you – all at once, and all or nothing. And that’s why the “hierarchy of effect” models of advertising were discredited as long ago as the early 1960s, and why the best minds in the business continue to search for new metrics of advertising effectiveness deep beneath the surface of received opinions – in behavioural economics, in the irrationality of human impulse, in notions of low-level processing, and in the new field of neuro-marketing.
While we wait for the jury to come back in with a definitive verdict, good agencies simply get on with doing what they’ve always done best, shaping motivating insights and product benefits into the kind of ideas celebrated in industry showcases like the IPA’s Best of Health – ideas compelling enough to plant and sustain the brand raison d’être in the minds of audiences long after individual product messages have been forgotten.
It’s 112 years since AIDA – time for pharma advertising to move on.
*Wednesday, 21st December, 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie discover radium.
Thanks to Klosek in Warsaw for this. Back-translated from Polish, apparently by BabbleFish.
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“Then she told us how times were tough and about how she was thinkin’ of
bummin’ a ride back to from where she started
But ya know, she changed the subject every time money came up”
From Brownsville Girl, Bob Dylan, 1986
When Judie Lannon challenged Paul Feldwick (digital skeptic) to take on Mark Sherrington (digital evangelist) in a Market Leader debate on “Has the internet really changed everything?” those of us who are interested in these things (856 in all, as it turned out) were expecting a fight to the last neuron firing. Instead, after a couple of straight jabs to the frontal lobe by Feldwick, Sherrington was obliged to beat a hasty retreat to his corner, nodding in agreement, by his own admission, like a toy dog in a back car window.
It’s a shame it didn’t get bloodier, especially given the audience of fearsome intellectual heavyweights, including Jason Ball, Robert Heath, John Griffiths, Christopher Graves and Julian Saunders, who were waiting eagerly to jump into the ring. Then we would have ended up with a crushed amygdala or two. But by the time I got to the link it had all fizzled out, not only because Sherrington threw in the towel after the first round, but because the debate failed to attract the attention of the fire-breathing digital revolutionaries it needed to make it a real contest.
If it didn’t give us the fireworks of a Thrilla-in-Manila*, at least it illuminated – however briefly – an aspect of the digital v traditional media discussion that’s been buried all this time under the new media clichés of radical transparency, many-to-many conversations and brand subversion. And that’s about how we receive, interpret and act upon communications.
Unfortunately for the dyed-in-the-wool digerati, the dream that more data from more sources more of the time would make us better all-round decision makers in our choice of foods, friends, lovers and brands has been dashed to smithereens on the growing mountain of evidence from neuroscience, behavioural economics and (arguably) Critical Realism against the fond idea we have of ourselves as rational creatures. Which was (and has been for some time) Feldwick’s devastatingly simple point.
More information may make us more knowledgeable, but it doesn’t necessarily make us any smarter. It could even have the reverse effect, with more complexity obliging us to fall back on the cognitive biases we use to take the psychological stress out of decision making.** And in the raging torrent of choices that confronts us as consumers, brands – mental constructs no more rational than religion, superstition or magic – provide the perfect heuristic stepping stones.
A cursory glance around the field suggests that the only people still clinging on to a belief in the persuasive power of the rational message are Fabio Capello, the programmers of satnavs, healthcare marketers and, oddly, Martin Sorrell.
I’d be happy to put this whole topic to bed and kiss it goodnight if it weren’t for my nagging doubts about marketing via social media, the very pointy end of the issue that Judie’s pundits largely contrived to dodge. Information is one thing: peer recommendation is quite another. And it’s precisely its irrationality that makes it so powerful, operating as instant curator of taste, judgment and authenticity – the ultimate shortcut to choice (assuming the recommender is my friend Basil Mina rather than, say, my school acquaintance Anthony “Slash” Teale, who’s a lovely guy, etc, etc, but not necessarily someone whose advice I’d follow unless I were looking for a cold Castle Lager, and then only maybe).
So while the jury’s still out on how successfully brands – as opposed to videos of polar bears sneezing – will be able to capitalize on the meme-stream of social exchange, here’s a thought, courtesy of Dan Ariely, that we should treat as salutary.
In his excellent “Predictably Irrational” Ariely devotes a chapter to the difference between social norms and market norms, all of it, like most behavioural insights, chiming easily with common sense, but in this case revelatory when applied to the uses and abuses of social media.
There’s a big difference between doing something for someone as a favour and doing the same thing for the same person for money. The first is a social contract, the second is a mercantile one. Ariely and others proved in a series of ingenious experiments that pretty bad things happen to relationships when the two sets of norms gets confused, like when you offer to pay your mother-in-law for her delicious Sunday lunch, or when you point out to your fiancée how much that engagement ring cost you. They found, for example, that participants would work quite happily at a meaningless task when the reward was a Snickers Bar, but refused to put any effort into the same task when the reward was described as a 50-cent Snickers Bar.
“These results show that for market norms to emerge, it is sufficient to mention money (even when no money changes hands).” And, further, “…we live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges…violates the social norms and hurts the relationships. Once this type of mistake has been committed, recovering a social relationship is difficult.”***
Brands, by their very nature, are creatures of the market. When they spill over the threshold into social spaces they to have to do a whole lot better than Habitat did, or than BP has done at the most literal possible level.
The danger of violating social norms is a constant risk for brands once they move out of the supermarket, the showroom or the skyscraper. The emotions that motivate the post-rationalizations underlying our brand choices can tip from affection to anger just as easily as they do in real life relationships gone wrong.
In neither of these respects has the internet changed anything at all.
*For Zara
** cf. Julian Saunders’s reference to Barry Schwarz’s Paradox of Choice.
*** Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
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