HELSINQI CREATIVE

Second-order decision-making

Monday, 26 July 2010

Whose idea was it in the first place to consider consumers — or, really, anyone, come to that — as rational agents making decisions based on fact and logic? It's encouraging to see people discussing behavioral economics and the distinction between (what people claim as their) preferences and real behavior. But hey, is this really anything new? The great advertisers have always understood this, if only intuitively. (Spoken like a creative, right?)

The distinction is between self-image and actual behavior, and what a distinction that is. This is where hands-on experience in Zen or any real mindfulness practice provides an edge in insight. The takeaway there is that it is exceedingly difficult to know oneself with any clarity and that preferences are fickle and contextual, so that asking people what they like is flawed at best. Unless you really know how to deconstruct the results of that inquiry. The corollary is that preferences are accoutrements not unlike Rolexes or Air Jordans, which wrap us in a comfort zone of reifying self-image but which ultimately evaporate like phantoms in the cold light of day and cede to the hard habits of actual behavior.

What does all this have to do with marketing? Only everything, and it's what these bloggers — Bulik, Rubinson, Rubinson — are chewing on with respect to behavioral economics.

If market research is about discovering preferences — in artificial circumstances at that (where "We tend to study preferences at times that are divorced from a respondent being in a need state." 1) — then it is barking up only one of the right trees, and misidentifying it at that. The crucial tree is the behavioral one, the decision tree.

And vis-à-vis that tree, Joel Rubinson has a most thought-provoking post on second-order decision strategies. The nutshell is that people make preliminary decisions about how they will make a substantive decision, in order to simplify byzantine decision-making processes. These preliminary, or second-order, decisions are made, say, while bicycling to the store, when the consumer decides she's going to buy whatever's cheapest, or stick to her favorite brand, or what have you. It's a self-defense heuristic against the hassle of complicated first-order decision-making in the aisle, faced with an embarrassment of choices.

This suggests very different meta-strategies for high-profile national brands vs. price-positioned store brands, and so forth. But hey, just read Rubinson's post on Marketing insights into how we decide.

And then, let's just be done with this preferences of the rational consumer silliness.

Addendum: Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce. At about 10:00, it's all about the "we don't know what we want," we hold on to a self-image. And, a strong caution against universalism, in favor of diversity.

Where have I seen Old Spice Guy before?

Monday, 19 July 2010

What's so universally appealing about the (allegedly already retired) Old Spice Guy and his ads is the lack of snark. The ads' irony is completely inclusive. They poke fun but not at anyone, certainly not anyone's expense. It should remind an increasingly cutting culture that, hey, schadenfreude is not a necessary ingredient of comedy.

And the Guy, portrayed by Isaiah Mustafa, is just so damn likeable. So where have I seen him before?

That feeling of familiarity stretches back a full century — indulge me — to the early aughts and teens when J.C. Leyendecker illustrated the Arrow Collar Man. In his book Adland (Kogan Page, 2007), Mark Tungate writes of Leyendecker's creation:

“The men he painted actually generated fan mail. They were tall, rakish, impeccably dressed and yet forever nonchalant, their cheekbones gleaming above pristine shirt collars. To use a phrase that had not yet become hackneyed, men wanted to be them and women wanted to be with them.”

Love that “actually generated fan mail.” If they'd had Twitter and YouTube back in the day, Arrow Collar Man would have been on the same shtick Old Spice Guy's been on, no doubt. But then, the adjective viral wasn't even in use until 1948.

Return on Integrity is the New Bottom Line

Thursday, 15 July 2010

At base, Integrity Marketing & Branding is perfectly intuitive, once businesses ditch the battlefield mentality for a vision of marketing as friendship, and the consumer as friend. Writing for Advertising Age in “Return on Integrity Is the New Bottom Line for Marketers,” Paul Klein observes:

Increasingly we decide what to buy in the same way that we choose our friends. The most important question is, “Can I really trust them?” According to Jeff Johnson from Kashi, “It’s no marketing secret that integrity plays a big role in how you go about forming relationships with consumers — and that translates indirectly to financial performance.”

Of course, old habits die hard and the pressure to stray into increasingly gray areas is great. The philosophy is intuitive. The challenge is implementation. (That’s why we built HELSINQI.) It helps to realize that Integrity isn’t just a feel-good choice; it has become a necessity. Notes Klein:

As we recover from a global financial crisis that was caused by decades of irresponsible business practices driven by a singular focus on the bottom line, businesses need to recognize that there is a return on integrity.

» Read the complete article

Thanks to Rich Bruer for tweeting the article.

The Inopportuneness of Being Earnest

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

One of the pitfalls of marketing by principled companies and organizations is Deadly Earnest Syndrome, a tragic condition that afflicts the well-meaning. It drives them to decide they have to distinguish themselves from unscrupulous advertisers by means of “pure” messaging untainted by humor, cool, style, attitude, smoke machines, or anything else that smells of dog and pony. In other words: marketing without any of the art of marketing.

DES is caused by deep ambivalence about marketing and advertising, which the afflicted associate with roguishness and duplicity: they see it as a force for evil. Which, hey, it often is. But that’s tough to reconcile with the bald fact that marketing is necessary. If marketing weren’t necessary, no one would do it. End of thought experiment.

Faced with that ambivalence, they try to promote themselves without resorting to the “tricks of the trade.” They try to market without marketing. And they wind up creating strange, conflicted monsters — messaging that’s typically either sanctimonious or tedious, or both.

I was intrigued to come across the “Tom’s of Maine Goodness Philosophy” long-format ad, on Hulu. The message is essentially a mainstream paean to the triple bottom line (of people, planet, and profit, except not so much the profit part) — which is certainly an interesting development, culturally speaking. Unfortunately it’s delivered as an artificially sweetened lecture on virtuous capitalism, whose relentless brow-knitting goodyness made me want to gnaw my own foot off.

» Read the rest of this post

YWCA PDX chooses HELSINQI

Tuesday, 01 December 2009

The YWCA of Greater Portland has engaged HELSINQI for a major messaging refocus. We’re very glad to be working for such a great cause — with such great people!

This is a great opportunity for us as a values-driven, triple-bottom-line business to connect meaningfully with the community. It also brings Anna full circle, back to her days of social work in Portland in the 90s, when she ran a program for latina survivors of domestic violence. At the time, she surely had no idea how the insights she brought out of that experience would come to serve her — and our clients — as co-director of an integrity marketing agency!