Marketers and advertisers need to break down their messages and audiences, not to segments anymore, but to individual consumers, says Riad Afyouni
THE INNOVATIONS OF TODAY
If you are a parent, brother, cousin, uncle, aunt or friend of a four or five-year-old, you probably belong to the list of people who three years ago said something like ‘Hey! This kid can operate an iPad and he’s only two…So smart!’
Well, obviously, today all children can do this and it is a pretty common habit. It doesn’t take a lot of research to understand the behaviour of these kids and their response to the content offered by this platform, or any other similar one. It takes a second to either captivate the interest or totally lose it. No time to read, observe, wait or listen for tips or instructions, that little finger needs to find that ‘play’ button and needs to find it pretty quickly. This innovative device – the technological breakthrough – is a habit today, and very soon a less than basic expectation.
THE HABITS OF TOMORROW
Expectations vary, they always do. Typically they become more demanding and drive more innovations, but what are the children today expecting tomorrow? They are seasoned user experience experts, they can retrieve information such as game hacks, patches and walk through within a couple of taps, locate their favourite toy store on the map and check latest arrivals, download latest, trendiest mobile games and be the first to experience them, they even participate in advanced online transactions such as biddings and auctions using their favourite game console. Most of this, using, at most, two thumbs and a very short attention span. Keep those factors in mind and the current child – your future consumer – is bound to react less to generic catchy sentences and generic calls to action. Clichéd taglines such as ‘Free’, ‘Exclusive’, ‘Premium’, ‘Gourmet’, ‘100 per cent satisfaction’, ‘Join the biggest…’; and impulsive calls to action such as ‘Shop Now’, ‘Save Now’, ‘Start Now’, ‘Join Now’ will no longer trigger their interests. They expect everything to be exclusive, accessible and shaped to their needs. The rich experiences accessible today to them are going to be basic habits and standard expectations in the near future.
MORE EXPECTATIONS, MORE HABITS, LESS TIME
A generation shaped to get what it wants, when it wants and how it wants is on the verge of becoming the main recipient of brands’ communication messages. The challenge is no longer in being digitally ubiquitous, active, and using the latest technological trends, these became basic expectations. Marketers and advertisers should energetically find solutions to talk to these people. Calling out their names? Giving them a tap on the shoulder maybe? Yes.
TARGET AUDIENCE, TARGETED INDIVIDUAL
Establishing the fact that calling out someone’s name, tapping them on the shoulder or showing them what they need at that particular moment is the only way to get a thin grip of the short attention span they own. Marketers and advertisers need to break down their messages and audiences, not to segments anymore, but to individual consumers. Yes, customised communication packages from your brand to each and every existing or new consumer individually. In a nutshell, messages that might work for Tala shopping at Zara, will not work for Lynn shopping at the same place at the same time, and might not even work for the same Tala having coffee at the nearest Starbucks. Different places will trigger different reactions and different responses. Remember, you have one second to either lose or captivate, so can you work with a 1 to 2 per cent click-through-ratio on your ads? This sounds largely unacceptable and is bound to put you off the radar.
ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES
How is your brand preparing today for those future consumers? Viewing behavioural data and insights are definitely not the only way forward. Brands need to build their own reliable information and expand their networks in order to gather behavioural trends of not segments alone, but of individuals, and accordingly build their campaigns and communication messages to match expectations. Two people sitting at the same place, browsing the same website should not see the same thing, nor be addressed to in the same way. Similarly, the same people visiting the same website from a different location at a different time of day should not see the same thing. The same applies to other digital assets owned, earned or paid for by a brand.
ARE YOU SWEATING YET?
Sounds like a lot of work. A lot of data mining and a lot of brainstorming sessions. Yet what is more prominent is the time needed to react before it is too late. Gathering up data and behavioural trends is not a one-day job, nor is something that can be purchased from a third party. Such data requires years to be built, and it has to be built correctly, otherwise it is useless. This comes on top of specialised resources to read, analyse and report. Will you wait until you see no reaction at all on your advertising campaigns, or a five-second-or-less average time spent on your website in order to react? That would be way too late.
Riad Afyouni is the managing director of Born Interactive’s Saudi Arabia office
