Categories
Content Marketing

Content Promotion and Ingredient Branding

Brands wrestle with how to make their content not seem like advertising.  As much as people dislike ads, at least a couple of things are generally clear: who the advertiser is, and what they want from us.  To overcome audience resistance to ads, brands create content that hides either who they are, and/or what they want from us.  It is doubtful such subterfuge delivers long term benefits.  Audiences are too skeptical to be fooled for long.

Brands need to ask:

  • When is it appropriate to talk about yourself?
  • When should you let others talk about you?
  • When should you highlight who you are in your content?

Many brands lack reliable answers to these questions.  To avoid awkward questions about their purposes, they skirt transparency. Brand journalism is a prime example.

The Reputation Problems of Brand Journalism

Brand journalism goes by several names, including native ads or sponsored content. The essence of brand journalism is to talk about yourself — without appearing to talk about yourself.  You don’t call attention to the fact you’ve paid someone else to present content about you. It’s similar to the stealthy product placement in films, where brands spend money to make sure their beverage or other product appears on the screen.

Brand journalism is justified in the name of content quality. Brands argue their story is good enough to be featured with leading stories from a well-regarded publication. They buy access to an audience of a publication, much as they do with advertising.  But they dress up the content to appear as if it’s content from the publication itself.  They disguise their primary role in the content. They make it seem as if it is a collaboration between them and the publication, and that they have a broader public interest motivating the creation of the content.

The Guardian offers sponsored content in a non-transparent way.  To many people, the content will not appear to have paid for as an advertisement.
The Guardian offers sponsored content in a non-transparent way. To many people, the content will not appear to be paid for as an advertisement.  A small link takes the viewer to a long page of generic fine print.  Even with this explanation, the viewer  doesn’t know who exactly paid for the content: one firm is listed as the party that brought the content, but the author is listed as being from another firm, and there is no indication of the commercial relationship between the two.

For the moment, the tactic works.  Audiences still don’t have a clear understanding of the source of content, and generally assume the publishing platform produced the content.  While Google bars sponsored content in its news feed, its search results don’t distinguish  native advertising published in the Guardian from content produced by Guardian staff that is not paid for.  And the area is still lightly regulated.   The US Federal Trade Commission has started looking into the boundaries between advertising and sponsored content, but hasn’t produced any rules that are slowing down the practice.  None of these factors will necessarily continue, however.   Native ads are already getting a grilling by comedians such as John Oliver, so public scrutiny is bound to increase.

Because brand journalism is really public relations, it tends to attract firms with public relations problems.  These are the new advertorials: trying to persuade people who wouldn’t normally be interested in the topic, or the point of view offered.  It’s an uphill battle, and firms that do brand journalism run the risk of being seen as firms with reputation problems.

Reputation Building: Making Your Brand Explicit

There is a difference between letting people know you who are, and talking about yourself.  The basic problem of advertising is not that brands reveal who they are.  It is that advertisers talk excessively about themselves.  A basic tenet of trust is being able to evaluate the credibility of a speaker.  Unless the speaker’s identity is revealed clearly, people can’t be sure they are getting unbiased information.

Content marketing promises to remove the hustle from the content.  Ideally, it offers advice that is not a one-sided advertorial.  The content takes into consideration the range of needs of the audience, and addresses various concerns.  Brands that offer audience-centered content boost their reputations.  They become known for offering objective advice that is not focused on their products. The goal of content marketing should be to become known as helpful, not pushy.  And any brand that hides behind another will be viewed as pushy — trying to buy influence instead of earning it.  Transparency is non-negotiable.

Endorsements remain powerful.  Audiences judge content credible when endorsed by a source they consider credible. Brands need to earn credibility from others, not try to buy it by pretending to have news organizations write about them.

Transparency and endorsement are not conflicting goals.  They are mutually supportive.  Brands promote their interests when they endorse other brands with whom they share interests.

Lessons from Ingredient Branding

Ingredient branding is about making the invisible, visible.  It does exactly what content marketing should be doing: bringing greater transparency and information to consumers.

Ingredient branding is a tactic used for marketing consumer products, but generally isn’t associated with content marketing.  With ingredient branding, a brand explains the features of its product that rely on the technology or know-how of another.

We encounter ingredient branding in many products, including our computers.  “Intel inside” is a label on many computers that indicates who made the microprocessor.  The information reduces uncertainty for buyers about the provenance of the product.  Intel offers computer buyers additional information about its components.  The computer manufacturer is endorsing Intel, who has an opportunity to explain the capabilities and benefits of its product.

Other prominent examples of ingredient branding are information about the capabilities of Gore-tex treatments on clothing, or Teflon coating on cookware.  Ingredient branding makes something that’s not visible to consumers, more evident to them — for example, Dolby sound.  Good ingredient brands can spark curiosity about a product that might be otherwise seen as unremarkable, such as when the Pink Panther cartoon character represents Owens Corning building materials.

Ingredient Branding and Content Marketing

Historically, ingredient branding has been limited to point-of-sale content: providing a sticker or an informational tag.  But the concept can be extended to all phases of marketing for a range of products.

All kinds of products and services rely on a complex web of partnerships.  The more complex the product or service, the more bewildering it can seem to buyers.  Products appear as a black box that defies understanding.   People may worry that important aspects are outsourced to contractors of uncertain reliability.  The business pages are filled with stories about product recalls due to faulty third party components, systems crashes due to poor contractor performance, and disruptions due to supplier bankruptcy or supply chain bottlenecks.

Many products and services are built on a stack of components provided by different sources.  Perhaps a critical element  of the firm’s operations relies on the abilities of a supplier. Will they continue to modernize and accommodate new requirements yet to emerge?  A service might seem slick right now, but how well can we count on it a year from now?  What’s under the hood?

Content marketing can use ingredient branding to demystify a product or service, and surface stories about the development of the product that answer concerns of buyers.  What challenges are suppliers and customers trying to solve together?  Do they have a common roadmap for the future?  Stories can demonstrate a reliable relationship, in contrast to the more fragile arms length relationships that exist elsewhere.

Suppliers and their customers can reciprocate in sharing stories about each other.  Suppliers can highlight the use of their products by others.  Those using the products can mention their use and the reasons for their choice, and link back to the supplier for buyers wanting more detail. For the supplier, it is a chance to show they work with astute customers.  For firms relying on the supplier, it is an opportunity to affirm their belief they are using the best available resources for the benefit of their end customer.

Greater transparency is gained through illuminating relationships.  Trust is increased when brands don’t talk only about themselves, but about their partners.  They show they are invested in the success of their partners.

Buyers don’t just rely on a supplier: they rely on an ecosystem of suppliers.  They deserve to understand what that package offers.  Brands have an opportunity to endorse others in their ecosystem, both those who they rely on, and those using their product.  By focusing on the wider picture, they expand the conversation, and attract a wider audience.

— Michael Andrews

Categories
Content Marketing

Content Strategy for Product Reviews

By most any measure, product reviews are one of the most important types of content.  Audiences spend serious amounts of time consulting reviews of products, relying on them to make decisions.  Some devote even more time to reviews, expressing their own views about products and services.

Despite their obvious importance, there is little consensus within content marketing precisely how product reviews matter to audiences.  Content marketers tend to focus inwardly on their own interests, rather than the audience’s.  They want to talk about their own products, and ignore the existence of competitors.  Depending on their skills and inclinations, content marketers will emphasize the role of owned media (if favoring branded content), social media (if favoring social media influence and reputation management) or promoted media (if relying on PR or promotional favors such as special access).   Yet such attempts at influencing customer opinion of products are of little value unless one first truly understands audience needs.

Brands need to embrace an audience centric perspective toward product reviews if they want to sell more online and become a trusted source of product information.  Audiences don’t just consult product reviews to evaluate products; they actively evaluate the information in those reviews to determine if relevant to their situation.  The discipline of content strategy can help brands identify the different elements audiences seek from reviews, and what information brands need to deliver.

The significance of reviews

The importance of product reviews continues to grow. For nearly every product category, people are buying more online each year.  For some categories such as travel, more than half of purchases are made online in some countries.  Even with more localized products such as groceries, online purchasing is increasing.  Buying online requires confidence that one is buying the right product or service.  Consumers are also spending more on digital products and services, which also require review information.  Even when people buy a product or service locally, they rely on online reviews to make decisions.  Time is limited, while choices proliferate.

The vast quantities of product review content need to be managed appropriately.  This content can be enhanced to make it more useful to audiences to support their buying needs.  However, brands for the most part have neglected to do this.  Most rely on a simple template of allowing their customers to rate their products with stars, and leave some comments in an open text field.  The benign neglect of product review content results in an unsatisfying customer experience — the information is not as helpful as it could be.  It hurts the brand hosting the review, because they provide information that doesn’t really answer the needs of audiences.

Product review content is a distinct genre with a long established history.  In many respects, online product reviews are less helpful than their pre-digital ancestors.  To understand the potential of the product review genre, I will draw on an extensive study of reviews by Grant Blank: Critics, Ratings, and Society: The Sociology of Reviews.  Blank’s book, which was published in 2007, barely discusses online reviews, but instead provides a very detailed examination of reviews by newspapers, magazines, and various kinds of consumer surveys.  His insights provide rich material for rethinking how online reviews should be managed.

Basic types of reviews

Blank categorizes reviews into two basic types: connoisseurial, and procedural.  They are different approaches, and each has unique strengths.

Connoisseurial reviews reflect the skills and knowledge of an individual reviewer.  For a connoisseurial review to have impact, the reviewer must have credibility with the audience.  Readers assume the reviewer knows what she is talking about because she has written other reviews on the same type of product or service, and has built a reputation as someone with deep knowledge who can be relied on.  A connoisseur’s impact is measured by how much they influence their audience, or possibly how much they influence the producer of the product.  Sometimes a reviewer’s impact is so great that they attract a regular audience of readers who may not even be looking to purchase a product, but enjoy hearing what the reviewer has to say, because they share interesting insights that add to the reader’s understanding of a topic.  Connoisseurs don’t try to review everything, only the stuff that’s most notable.

The classic kinds of connoisseurial reviewers are the great restaurant, theater and movie critics.  People like Craig Claiborne reviewing New York restaurants, or Roger Ebert reviewing movies.   Their reviews reached many people, and could have a big impact on the suppliers of the products they reviewed.  Some connoisseurial reviews are done by a corporate entity known for their expertise in an area, such as restaurant reviews by Michelin (France) or Gambero Rosso (Italy). 

In the post-mass-market, digital age, it is tempting to believe that connoisseurial reviews no longer play a big role, but this would be a mistake. Some connoisseurial reviewers started in legacy media but have moved entirely to the digital world.  People like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg reviewed technology gadgets for influential newspapers before starting their own blogs. On a smaller scale, connoisseurial reviewers are evident in many places.  In this age of self-branding, people want to show off their knowledge. Members of LinkedIn and Quora answer questions posted, often in the hope of building their reputations. Numerous platforms cater to the output of bloggers and video bloggers who comment on the offerings of fashion, technology, and products for children. Some of these bloggers and video bloggers have developed enormous followings that rival the reach enjoyed by legacy-media critics.

Procedural reviews reflect the results of tests on a product. They generally compare several similar products, and note the differences between them. The tests are meant to be transparent, and reliable, based on uniform criteria — the same test will yield the same result no matter who conducts the test.  There is an emphasis on developing data on a number of attributes of a product, and converting these data points into a numerical score that audiences will consider objective.  Because they compare many products with complex attributes, sometimes they yield surprising results.  The purpose of compiling all this detail is to support the purchase decisions of readers.

The archetypal examples of procedural reviews are the product evaluations of Consumer Reports (US), or Which? (UK.)  PC magazines did extensive procedural reviews of computer related products, with multicolumn data tables comparing features and performance results.  Among digitally native publishers, procedural reviews are less common, but some specialist sites will review products to test them for their real battery life, or their shock resistance.

While Blank considers connoisseurial and procedural reviews the two main categories of reviews, he acknowledges some hybrids that often involve surveys.  A notable example of a hybrid is a Zagat guide, which combines a procedure for reviewing restaurants with the judgments of different individuals who act as dining critics.  Zagat was the first product review to utilize public opinion surveys of customers.  Another prominent survey of critics is the Academy Awards.

Other types of hybrid review include those that that use a procedural process to evaluate products based on their historical performance.  Morningstar does this for financial products, while Consumer Reports surveys car owners to get warranty and repair data.  The popular but controversial university rankings by US News also combine survey and performance data.  Yet another kind of review-like listing involving surveys are lists that rank products according to their popularity.  Popularity reviews include the Billboard charts, the New York Times bestseller list, and box office charts for films.  The presumption of such lists is that what is most popular is what is best.

What makes a Quality Review?

Reviews that are beneficial to audiences must be credible, useful, and timely, no matter what approach is used to construct the review.

Audiences consider the credibility of reviews as essential.  Brands cannot presume that a review will be read at face value.  Audiences can spend a lot of effort unpacking the meaning of reviews.   They look for two qualities: that the reviewer is disinterested (in the sense that he doesn’t have a financial interest in the outcome of the review), and that the reviewer is knowledgeable.  Both these topics are concerns with user-generated reviews.  Audiences don’t know exactly who is making comments or writing reviews online.  There have been numerous accusations of firms either writing fake favorable reviews of their products, culling bad reviews about them, or sabotaging rivals with bad reviews.  Sometimes firms do this directly (in one widely reported case, the CEO of Whole Foods trashed a competitor anonymously) but other times firms hire surrogates to write reviews beneficial to a particular brand.  Even when audiences are convinced a review is written by a “real” customer, they may still have questions as to how much that customer knows what they are talking about, and how reliable their judgment is.

Even when the review is credible — devoid of obvious bias or misunderstanding — the review is not necessarily useful.  The utility of a review depends on the goals of the reader consulting the review.  Blank identifies two major goals audiences have for reviews: to make decisions, and for learning and enjoyment.  Some readers need very specific information to make purchase decisions; some want an overall judgment rendered, while others simply want to feel they understand what’s important about a product, and what developments are happening.  The differing goals point to different qualities in reviews: one focused on granular detail, the other highlighting big themes and trends.

Finally, audiences want to feel that reviews are up-to-date, and that the information will not be rendered obsolete soon.  They look for clues that something has changed: perhaps a slight model change, a different source now making the product, or indications that service quality has deteriorated or suddenly improved.   Audiences are sensitive to changes, and believe that reviews should indicate a consistent experience with the quality of a product.  Brands are expected to be consistent, and signs of inconsistency are worrying.  The collective body of opinion reflected through different reviews is meant to help audiences predict how a product will perform for them in the future.  One can see this phenomenon in the reviews of apps in an app store.  A new version of a popular app is released, and suddenly reviews turn negative.  Has the new version betrayed the vision of the prior versions, or is this grumbling a temporary product glitch that will be soon corrected?

While credibility, usefulness and timeliness seem like obvious standards for reviews, they can be challenging to realize under a decentralized, crowd sourced model of relying on review content that is user directed and generated.

What reviews say about products, reviewers, and readers

Reviews reflect objective and subjective qualities of products, reviewer orientation and bias, and audience preferences.  It can be hard to untangle the interplay between these elements.

About the product

The first difficulty is knowing exactly what precise product the review addresses.  Products and services are always changing, and sometimes these changes introduce uncertainties.  Have the tech specs or has the product offer changed?  Is the product now made by a different supplier, or using cheaper materials?  Has a defect been fixed, or is it a random, continuing problem?  Was the delivery experience good or bad because of time of year?  Was a hotel stay bad because of a manager who has now been replaced?  Has the priced changed, and accordingly expectations have changed as a result?

Brands sometimes make changes without changing the product name or model.  Other times, they introduce new product models for minor variations, and consumers become confused if their experience with a product they bought is relevant to the model currently for sale.  Not only do reviewers talk about past and current experiences, they may be inclined to speculate about future models or offers.

When comparing products, a difficulty can arise in deciding what features are considered essential to a product category.  Is having a choice of color an essential quality on which to judge a product?  Products with more features can appear more capable, but are not necessarily “better.”  All watches tell time, and some watches do much more than that. Figuring out which watches are comparable and should be reviewed together may involve some arbitrary decisions.

About the reviewer(s)

Readers typically know little about who the reviewer is, and what motivates them.  Many people have a suspicion of reviewers who seem overly enthusiastic or negative, which can reflect either a personality bias unrelated to the product (e.g., agreeability or snarkiness), or a naivety about what is reasonable to expect.  Positive reviews can reflect post hoc rationalizations justifying a purchase, and negative reviews can reflect buyer’s remorse.    Reviews can be as much about the reputation of the reviewer as about the reputation of the product.   In France recently, in an ultimate face-off of reputations, a reviewer of a restaurant was successfully sued for damaging the reputation of that restaurant.

In addition to whether reviewers have reasonable emotional expectations, readers wonder about the reviewer’s knowledge of the product category, and whether that knowledge is appropriate for their needs.   Reviewers may be expert users of a product or novice users, and may be either brand loyalists or first-time customers of the brand.  Each condition carries its own set of expectations.  Experts may criticize entry-level products as inferior; novice users can be wowed by mundane products, or possibly overwhelmed by them.  In some product categories, people apply different frames of reference to evaluate a product.  For some people the service at a restaurant is most important, for others, the authenticity of the food.  Different audience segments often rate products differently, applying different criteria.  When brands don’t appreciate these differences, the reviews become jumbled.  Yelp reviews tend to average three stars because everyone tends to focus on different characteristics, which all manage to cancel each other out.

About the reader

Like reviewers, readers have different priorities, which can change in different situations.  Sometimes an individual may prioritize convenience; other times he or she may prioritize price or features.  Readers will generally have more enduring preferences about products, which will shape their preferences toward reviews.  Broadly speaking, some people evaluate products (or categories of products) on a rational basis (cost/performance), and others on an emotional one (how it makes them feel).  But such distinctions are less clear than might first appear.  Most people choose clothing for emotional reasons, but will avoid a purchase if it doesn’t fulfill expected cost or performance criteria, perhaps learning that it looks great when new, but doesn’t hold up.  Some product categories, such as hiking and biking gear, appear to be about performance criteria, but these criteria are often a means of self-expression rather than utilitarian need.  When the product is truly experiential, perhaps an online course or digital music, it can be harder for individuals reviewing content to rely on explicit criteria.  Instead, they are more likely to try to compare the content with something else they have experienced previously, or to rely on the judgment of others who they feel resemble them.  In the magazine era, people who read certain magazines could be expected to judge products in similar ways, because they shared a common point of view about products, what was important and how to judge that.

Implications for digital content strategy

Audiences today face a multitude of sometimes-conflicting problems.  They may face an avalanche of product reviews about certain products such as the latest smartphone offerings.  They may have trouble comparing the usefulness and quality of different reviews of a product.  They often have trouble comparing two or more different products from different vendors, since reviews tend to focus on individual products.  They may be overwhelmed by the choice of products available, but find only some of these products are reviewed at all, and those that are reviewed have a paucity of information.  They may feel overwhelmed by apparent the irrelevance of many reviews.  They may feel many reviews seem to be more about the reviewer than the product itself.  They may feel scared to buy something when finding dramatic negative reviews, or angry when they didn’t pay attention to a negative review and later had a bad experience.  They may read many reviews but feel little wiser because the opinions seem confusing or inconclusive.

The current free-for-all in user reviews doesn’t serve brands well either.  They have little insight into how reviews are used.  They often don’t have a sound operational perspective on how to act on review information.  Some brands treat reviews as a social media channel and try to respond to comments as if they were on Facebook.  Other brands discourage reviews by asking customers to fill out private surveys.  Many Amazon vendors aggressively solicit reviews and even suggest what rating should be offered.  Those customers who do submit online reviews may not be representative of all customers.

Brands need to ask themselves some core questions.

How do we know which reviews are influential?  When ratings are aggregated, all reviews are considered equal.  But not all are equally useful to audiences.  Which specific reviews are useful and how do they influence others?  Some sites allow readers to rate reviews that are useful.   But often “useful” reviews are ones that are long, with lots of description of the product, offering information that should be in the product information, instead of offering true evaluations.

How do we improve the review experience?  It can be hard for readers to find the kind of information they seek or that reflect aspects they consider important.  They also rarely are able to discover other products they don’t already know about through reviews.

How do we encourage high quality reviews and feedback?  Too many reviews are of poor quality, or lacking essential information.  Many products aren’t reviewed at all.

Managing reviews as strategic content

Reviews are too important to be left to a junior forms designer on the UX team.  Reviews can be a strategic asset, if the right structure is in place to ensure that the content offers value.  When viewed through the lens of content strategy, there are many things that can be done to make reviews more effective.  I’ll share various ideas on how to improve the product review experience.  Not all of these ideas are appropriate for all products, and will depend on the breadth, depth and diversity of products being reviewed.  The ideas share a common theme: enrich the information by providing more explicit connections between information items.

Better product review information

Customers often comment on specific product features.  They deserve a better structure to enable them to do this.  Today reviewers are generally invited to leave comments in one big unstructured text box.  This needs to change.  One possibility would be to adopt the annotation functionality appearing on some blogging platforms.  Reviewers could provide their own comments about their experiences next to the product information describing a feature or product attribute.

Some sites elicit ratings about key product attributes, which allows these more specific ratings to be aggregated.  Potentially such attribute ratings could be compared across different products, although in practice this is rarely done.  Readers want to know how the experience of customers of one product compares with the experience of customers of another similar product, but online product reviews rarely provide this ability.  Part of the problem is that many product-oriented sites lack robust metadata to enable product comparisons; instead, they rely on highlighting what other products people looked at, which may not in fact be comparable.  Sites should combine a detailed taxonomy with database queries of product attributes and performance, to suggest what other products are most similar.  Ideally, this comparative product set could identify what attributes of are most valued, and which are the biggest concerns to buyers (durability, portability, ease of learning, etc.) Even if these attributes are not explicitly captured, they could be inferred through text analytics.

Finally, retailers and other providers of product review content need to be more proactive in managing the product architecture information. There are so many similar products: variations for different markets or buyer segments, minor product changes, white label products sold under multiple brand names.  Using the product taxonomy and product attributes and performance database, the review provider should identify similar product models that have a common basis, where possible.  Since consumer review information may be scant for a specific model, it is beneficial to highlight review information about related product models, including information about the brand’s overall reputation.

Providing context about reviewers

The use of real names is not always necessary and may not always be desirable.  But providing more context about a reviewer can help readers, and if done properly, benefits reviewers as well.  Many sites provide little incentive to reviewers to post their comments, and those that do often reward activity over quality.  Sites may acknowledge someone as a “top reviewer” because of the number of reviews posted, regardless of how relevant or useful they are.  Review providers need to move away from a social media popularity mindset, and instead think about review posting more in terms of community discussions.

The reputation of a reviewer rests on what they know (post on) and how useful their comments are to others.  The concept of reputation points used in community forums can be applied to product review forums.  If a reader deems a review useful or not useful, that reputation carries to the reviewer.  Reviewers who earn a threshold number of reputation points may receive a benefit that is unrelated to what they are reviewing: perhaps a small sum that can be donated to a cause they support.  The recognition of reputation is important for encouraging quality reviews, and helps readers evaluate reviews as well.

Readers also want to know what reviewers know about.  By correlating a person’s reviews with product categories, it is possible to provide a high level summary of what the reviewer has written about previously.  Readers could see the products a reviewer most actively reviews by brand or category.  This scent may offer the reader an indication of other content written by the reviewer they may be interested in seeing.  If the reviews are published in a community of interest focused on a product category for fans or enthusiasts, it may even make sense to allow readers to follow a reviewer who has deep expertise in a given area.

In summary, providing more context about reviewers can improve the reader’s evaluation and discovery of relevant products.

Supporting reader needs and actions

Product review content shouldn’t be considered in isolation from the product information: both influence buying decisions.  Ideally, review platforms should provide the ability for buyers to choose what criteria is important to them, and see both product information and related user comments about these attributes.  With such an approach, it may be possible to use analytics to correlate what review content a reader accessed, with the outcome of their purchase decision.  While there are many variables to track (potentially over multiple sessions), if the datasets are sufficiently large it might be possible to infer patterns.  It may then be possible to infer the impact of specific review content.  What kinds of comments, about what aspects of a product, had the biggest impact on purchases?

Conclusions

Product review content is a strategic asset, and needs to be managed as such.  Brands need to move beyond thinking about reviews as a simple popularity contest involving the awarding of stars.   Customer reviews are not just another passive KPI metric like customer satisfaction surveys: they are active content that drive customer behavior and business outcomes.  To leverage the power of this content, the content must be structured and enriched to support customer goals.

— Michael Andrews

 

Categories
Content Marketing

How persuasive content can change customer behavior

Brands need realistic expectations of what content can and can’t do.  They need to know how to use content in different customer situations to support changes their customers may want to make.  There are four categories of persuasive content that brands need to use.

The variable effectiveness of content

Often we hear someone talk about creating content to “change the behavior” of customers — and  we immediately take notice.  We wonder: what can content do for me that I’m not now doing?  Can I use content to get customers to behave the way I want them to?  Perhaps there is note of skepticism: is content meant to support manipulation?  Hard-nosed observers might ask: if content isn’t changing the behavior of customers, what’s the point?

screenshots of articles on topic
examples of discussions about behavioral change and content

Bold claims are sometimes made for the talismanic power of content, but equally impressive are the notable failures of content to produce change.  People spend billions of dollars each year on self help media ($10 billion in the U.S. alone), but surveys show levels of happiness unchanged.  This example may not seem pertinent, but chances are your content is promising some level of happiness as a reward for a customer making a change.  The critical question is: what kind of change is realistic to expect from content?   When can content support change, and when can it not?

Whose goals does the content support?

The topic of change is tied to goals.  Brands want customers to buy their products and services, to recommend the brand to others, and to use self service when customers have issues.  They create content to support these business goals.  For content to be successful for the brand, it needs to deliver a predefined outcome.

The goals of customers may be different from the outcomes the brand seeks, especially when change is involved.  When looking at doing something new, the customer will often be cautious.  She may have limited goals, be unsure of her goals, or have no intention to take immediate action.   If the brand is seeking an outcome that exceeds the intention of the customer, the brand is trying to change the customer’s behavior, rather than simply helping the customer change her behavior on her own terms.

It is useful to separate customer behavioral change into three categories, depending on which party is most active in the process.  In ascending order of effort to realize, these are:

  • customer-initiated behavioral change
  • customer-ambivalent, brand-assisted behavioral change
  • brand-initiated behavioral change

What counts as change?

Changing behavior is not a casual thing; it is a big deal.  Sweeping claims that content changes behavior deserve scrutiny.  Marketing professionals sometimes suggest that people have changed their behavior when in fact these people are doing the same things they always do — but with their own brand instead of someone else’s.  Real change involves an enduring transition from one state to another and will generally entail something that’s ongoing.  Behavior is not simply any action or decision, but a habitual action, and/or an action that can be predicted given certain conditions.

Changing customer behavior requires getting them to take actions they don’t normally take, and would not be expected to take, unless they change the basis for how they act.  A brand hasn’t changed a customer behavior simply because they try your product when they routinely try different products.  But if a customer tries your product when previously loyal to another product, then they have changed their behavior, albeit only in a small way.  It is small because it may not be lasting.  That change could be reversed, or could evolve into a new behavior where the customer is not loyal to any brand.  If the individual becomes a loyal customer of your brand, then a more significant behavioral change has happened.

Why changing behavior is hard

“People hate change. They love consistency,” notes Chris Nodder in his book Evil by Design.  “The posh name for this is status quo bias: the tendency to like things to stay relatively the same, and to perceive any change from the current situation as a loss. Loss aversion leads people to overestimate potential losses from a change and underestimate the potential gains. They also tend to overvalue their current situation (the endowment effect).”

The importance of customer buy-in

Change can be hard work: people will change only if they are motivated and able to change.  People need to feel they have bought into the idea of making a change.  Because of the personal effort and commitment involved, any less-than-truthful content that urges people to change their routine will be  problematic.  Deception can sometimes appear to work in the short term, but it will backfire in the long term.  People get angry when they feel misled.

Some content professionals have questioned content marketing practices that offer non-promotional content to get email addresses or other personal details, and then later use this information for overt sales.  One copywriter summed up the conflict:  “With permission marketing, you get the audience’s permission to give them content, but not really to market to them. However, your basic agenda is still to sell. So eventually you have to come clean and start pushing benefits.  Hence content marketing is a sort of cognitive bait-and-switch, and ‘a lie’ in the sense that it obscures or omits its own motive. It is based in bad faith or deception in a way that ‘traditional’ advertising isn’t.”  Lesson: be honest about what customers have bought into.  Even if the initiator of a change is the brand and not the customer, the customer needs to feel they are in control of making the change, to be willing to adopt it.

Customers buy into change when they are ready.  The role of content is to support their readiness.  People are ready when “triggered to do something they want to do and are able to do,” according to  BJ Fogg, a leading researcher in the field of persuasive design. Fogg highlights two key aspects content needs to address: motivation, and understanding.  His framework parallels a prominent theory in communications science called the elaboration likelihood model.  According to that model, people process information through two routes: a central route involving active evaluation of information, and a peripheral one, involving impressions and cues from the environment.  When motivation is low, people are less likely to actively evaluate messages, so it is important to appeal to peripheral factors like emotional aspects, to engage with them.

How customers vary in readiness

Customer readiness depends on how familiar the substance of the content seems, and how motivated the individual is. Customers must desire the change (have motivation) and know how much effort is required (feel comfortable with what’s involved)

The notion of familiarity captures whether someone believes they understand and is able to do something.  When changing behavior, the new behavior may be similar enough to other experiences that the individual has little trouble imagining what’s involved.  The parallels customers draw will not necessarily be accurate: they may understate the adaptation required, or overstate it, of course.  But when a task seems unfamiliar, people are inclined to not pay attention, and even fear it.  All content needs to make actions feel familiar to their target audience, incorporating frames of reference each segment uses to understand things.  To the extent that an absence of familiarity creates a gap in attention, the content must also provide emotional cues to help the audience relate to the content.

We can divide readiness into four categories.  Customers may be more or less familiar with the change you are promoting, and be more or less motivated to embrace that change.  By thinking about the interaction of these two factors, we can build a simple matrix of persuasion categories to guide what general kinds of content are most appropriate in different situations.

diagram of content persuasion types
content persuasion matrix, based on customer readiness to adopt change

Four categories of persuasive content

Encourage

A change is customer-initiated when customers have both motivation and familiarity with proposed changes.  Content for such customers should focus on supporting the their intention and understanding.  Even though the individual clearly wants to make a change, there can be confounding factors.  Inertia is a  big concern — it is easiest to stick with what one has been doing all along. Another factor is competition: other brands are probably addressing this customer segment, and their content may be more compelling.  The content should reinforce the benefits, provide an encouraging tone, build anticipation, and betray no ambiguities or confusion that could interfere with the flow toward action.

Change can involve multiple steps or interactions over time, so content must communicate clearly at each step and provide sufficient context and follow up.  After the individual adopts the new behavior,  reinforce messages and spark dialog by seeking feedback from them.  Consider fine-tuning the presentation of choices (making sure their aren’t too many), and make the calls-to-action clear and compelling, answering the question of “why do this now and not later.”  Do not assume people are ready to go through a process involving change when they aren’t fully ready.  Customer motivation or understanding may be qualified, so provide content for them to explore that addresses concerns they may have.

Sweeten

When a customer segment believes they understand what’s involved, but still isn’t motivated enough to change what they are currently doing, their outlook falls in the category of customer-ambivalent, brand-assisted change.  The task is to sweeten the appeal of the change.

Customers may be ambivalent because their normal behavior has become part of their identity, and so changing behavior feels emotionally uncomfortable.  They may hold on to stereotypes, such as “I’m not the kind of person who would do this,” even when they have an interest in something new, and understand what they would need to do.

The content should appeal more to peripheral cues, rather than rational ones.   The attention individuals offer is driven by their internal state.   When people don’t feel emotionally or spiritually connected to the content, they don’t pay attention to it.  Getting the emotional dimension right is key to involvement.  Know what content makes them feel good about themselves (aspiration based), and bad about themselves (fear based).   Content will feature the benefits and urgency of a change on a personal level, and nurture a feeling of ownership of an outcome.  Content will play up individual identity, and belongingness to a group. It may spotlight the individual’s status or the judgment of peers, as either motivational carrot or stick. The content will stress the benefits of the journey, and the reward at the end.  Sweetened content promotes “a new you” theme.

Nudge and reframe

Nudging and reframing are common with brand-initiated change, and can be used with customer-initiated changes that are difficult to accomplish.  These approaches work for people who may be ok with the general notion of a change (they aren’t attached emotionally to the current situation), but who are less sure about the practicality of doing so.

There is some debate about whether someone’s attitude needs to change in order for someone’s behavior to change.  In general the answer is yes, but it may be possible to get behavior to change first if it does not seem too taxing.  If individuals try something, and find it doesn’t create hardship, their views may change as a result.  But if there views don’t naturally change, and they need to think as they apply effort to maintain the change, then the change won’t stick.

A nudge strategy is often relevant for brand-initiated change, when there’s an asymmetry in the motivations of the brand and the individual.  A brand may be able to successfully nudge someone to do something the person is indifferent about, if the brand simplifies the message to one key action.  The brand should decide what is the minimal action necessary from the individual that gives the brand value, and then focus content on supporting the accomplishment of that action.  The change required may be largely unnoticed by the individual, but it can be significant for the brand.

The brand reframes what action is needed for the change, making it less daunting.  People have trouble estimating the future effort and consequences of a change, so content that realistically suggests the effort will be minimal, or will only requires small steps, will make the task seem more familiar.  Paradoxically, some content that nudges (such as asking for an organ donation) is intentionally impersonal, designed to seem like no big deal, particularly when the wider implications of the change might seem too emotionally charged.  The strategy in such cases is to get people to change actions, not to persuade them to change their beliefs.  Sometimes a greater good appeal can be effective to encourage someone to go along with an action without undue evalution,.

While minimizing the change involved works in some cases, in other cases the customer needs to be actively involved. Another type of reframing seeks to make the change less intimidating by likening it to something the audience is already familiar with that they like.  The goal is to neutralize the fear of the unknown.

Campaign

Campaigns exist to support brand-initiated change.  The brand assumes responsibility for maintaining the initiative.  For example, brands have campaigned for many decades to change our personal health and grooming habits, often successfully.

The marketing campaign is supposedly dying a slow death.  Widespread evidence suggests that people resist conventional marketing campaigns, and inoculate themselves against their messages.  Campaigns are ineffective in getting people to do things they don’t want to do, but they have a role in cases where people lack sufficient motivation and ability to do things they are tempted to try.  People in this category can be overcome by inertia.  The goal is not to convert people hostile to an idea, but to speak to people who like an idea in the abstract, and make it possible for them to actually act on that idea.

Campaigns provide content to support people throughout a long change process.  The format recognizes that when people have to summon willpower to make changes, it drains their energy, so the content should energize rather than make demands.  One way such content can energize audiences is by offering recognition and a sense of belonging to a shared community.   A campaign might promote behavioral change through the use of advergaming, such as the America’s Army recruiting game.  Public health campaigns sometimes use soap operas to simultaneously entertain (motivate) and educate.    Successful campaigns appeal to an audience in a way that enables them to form a lasting relationship with the brand.  Campaigns address the most difficult type of change, requiring long periods, and will be successful with only a fraction of an audience segment.

Conclusions

By knowing the motivation and knowledge your customers have, brands can tailor content in a way that increases the likelihood that customers can make changes successfully.  The four categories of persuasive content are only a starting point for thinking about change.  There are a range of tactics appropriate to each category, and brands are wise to evaluate these options in detail.  They may need to plan for the likelihood that a customer will graduate from one category of readiness to another.  Continual analysis and testing are crucial to successful outcomes.

— Michael Andrews