HOW MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE IS INTERACTIVE COMMUNICATION?

　

Professor E.L. Roberto, PhD, Coca-Cola Foundation Professor of International Marketing reviewed the £5 million of independent research conducted on behalf of Interactive "Events" and provided this summary as to the techniques cost efficiency:


"The "Event" participating advertisements generated recall scores that are more than 50% productive than normal advertising.

The effect on purchase intention is just as impressive if not much more.

All these productivity increments are attainable at a reasonably inexpensive budget. One Shopper’s Voice Client revealed that for its participating brand, its quarter television expenditure was $5.7 million as compared to its Interactive budget of $0.5 million.

This 1:10 ratio has been obtained in Shopper’s Voice experience in other countries."

Source: AGB: Gallup: Martyn Research: Bourke: NOP. City Insights & more.

　




　

You Have Huge Amounts of Data…so Why are you Starved of Knowledge?

　



Despite spending hours on the 'phone or online your customers are just not

connecting with you, resulting in angry customers hanging up and going elsewhere.

We are becoming more and more divided

by technology. Your customers' dread interactive voice-response, the on-hold

music that doubles the annoyance of queuing, the codes are all barriers to

effective communication.

The rage among your customers has reached an intensity, which is now

causing great damage to your relationship with your customers. We are now

dehumanising our customer relationships even more than conventional

advertising ever did, the very objective of which

was to do the exact opposite! Your customers appear to be invisible to

you except as computer generated stereotypes, while your organisation is

viewed as remote and unreachable causing stress and suspicion rather than

customer satisfaction.

According to a recent study by database software specialist Data Vantage.

Fully eighty nine percent of service providers are failing to deliver the

seamless service your customers want. Causing damage to your brands,

customers to defect, thus putting more pressure on sales. It would

appear that most customer information in to days service organisations,

expensively acquired, is wasted, and what does get through to Management is

contaminated, diluted or otherwise unusable. All this results in huge

amounts of waste. Companies are drowning in data however, they are, oddly

enough, starved of knowledge! All resulting from a

misunderstanding of that little word "Communication"! It would appear,

understandably I hasten to add, that one of the main reasons this frustration

and anger occurs, is when one of your customers calls your 'phone centre to

complain about a bill. and then they receive a threatening reminder through the

post a week later! In reality you and your customers are being divided

by technology, your relationship, conducted through computers has become so

depersonalised as to be dangerous to the very well being of your brands and

business. And sad to say any new channel of communication simply

increases management's' opportunity to repeat mistakes. For example if you

send an email, your call centre will not have seen it!

　

　

As we said earlier, all resulting from a complete misunderstanding of

that word "communication". So let us examine that word ˜communication'

a little more closely. The dictionary definition of communications is as follows:

Communication. n. 1. transmitting 2. A giving or exchange of information, etc.

by talk, writing b) the information so given 3. A means of communicating

4. The science of transmitting information. The interesting fact is the

expression 'the exchange of information' . Communication is not a one-way

flow of information. Talking at or to someone does not imply successful

communication. This only occurs when the receiver actually receives the

message, which the sender intended to send. Message rejection,

misinterpretation and misunderstanding are the opposite of effective

communication. However most marketing communication today depends on a

single-step communications model. A message sender, the message receiver.

This basic model assumes that the sender is active, whilst the receiver is

inactive or passive and the message is comprehended properly. In this case if

the message is creatively prepared and sent through the right medium and, if it

cuts through all the other noise, and then if it is decoded correctly the message

has done its job! In closing please allow me to stress that we are, despite

appearances, creating more problems than we realise, all this new technology

is doing is alienating your customers more than ever before. With all the other

problems, clutter, meaningless noise, mistrust, it is now vital that we rethink

our position on all commercial communication. The fact is that you, the Clients,

can literally halve your colossal marketing budgets and, armed with a true

interpretation and understanding of the word "communication" and be far more

cost effectiveâ¦on all counts!

　

Finally Marketing & Advertising have mastered the Moonwalk
...slipping backward, but maintaining the illusion of progress. The other

day I was talking to two advertising people and asked them "Do you think that

advertising and marketing have to change?" Both professions had their

absolute heyday in the 1950s/1960s and both have spent the past 20 years or so

trying to recapture that glory. Both businesses have spent Clients money like

quadrillionaires and have led Clients together with TV, Newspapers and

Magazines down a road of financial lunacy by thoroughly misleading us all,

after all isn't "Advertising Works" a totally misleading statement?

Ultimately the two advertising people agreed, advertising & marketing has to

change, however, and, rather surprisingly, this change has nothing to do with

new media but to do with the desperate need for accountability and ROI,

together with the desperate need to understand the word communication!

The 60s!Ah that was a glittering time, advertising people ruled the business

world...nobody was being at all difficult about their profession, nobody was

questioning the fact that advertising works, or does not as the case may be.

There was a sense that Advertising men were men of action together with the

fact the men were brilliant. The problem was that these men of action wanted

to act, but certainly they did not want to tell the Client that the advertising

job could not be done. Men of action want to act. They are paid very

generously to act, they have entered advertising to act. But they couldn't tell

anyone how difficult things were, that advertising was not as simple as it

appeared. So doubts were, and still are, excluded, and the facts were altered to

suit the theory. Advertising men don't just become prisoners of their

Clients. They also become prisoners of their errors. Advertising and Marketing

people never questioned the fact that advertising and marketing never worked

they just chased the illusion that creativity was the answer to all their problems

and just followed one expensive creative person with another as logic took

over from common sense. Make the buying of media more important.

Enhancing the theory that advertising works requires staggering amounts of

research with staggering amounts of money, the life of the current advertising

world suggests that that is easier wished for than achieved.

Because of the failure of advertising to understand the process of

communication they have damaged a totally good "old media" whilst, at the

same time, rushing onto the Internet not understanding

at all that the Internet is most certainly not an advertising medium at all!