Wheat and chaff: precise, emotive marketing is the key to success

Melissa Parrish, writing for Forrester this week, points to her comments from their Consumer Marketing 2018 event that marketers use over a dozen different channels and KPIs. But unfortunately mountains of consumer data and numerous touchpoints aren’t necessarily translating to successful marketing for businesses.

This suggests that waste is a real danger – we could be using channels that aren’t really generating trust in the consumer. Parrish highlights the need to focus on a personal connection: “increasingly [engaging consumers is] through difficult-to-execute two-way dialogues that engender strong emotions and therefore deep loyalty". Indeed, we’ve found in previous research that the biggest concerns for consumers are in the emotive sphere – areas such as not lying, being fair and being genuine.

For Jenny Storms, CMO of NBC Sports Group and who spoke at the event, marketing the Olympics came down to a classic segmentation, but not in the usual way. The broadcaster found that behaviours, values, and attitudes defined audience groups much better than simple demographics. So, for Jenny’s team, this emotive data was given precedent. Using every data point, it seems, is not always the most efficient way to market.

Indeed, Heidi Browning, CMO of the NHL, likewise, spoke about developing a unique data strategy for the National Hockey League: rather than start with a large, noisy data set, they focused on the data that mattered. With this fine-tuned approach, Parrish goes on to explain how the focus lies on “just those pieces that fit with the strategy…rather than starting with every possibility and waiting for something to pop.”

With an increasingly noisy marketing landscape, with myriad channels, KPIs, new technologies – and an increasingly savvy consumer – marketing runs the risk of becoming a muddy world and losing precision. “This idea of deciding on the right things to do rather than just the new things you could do will be an important guiding principle going forward”, Parrish concludes.

Keeping marketing direct and consumer-focused will be key in generating stable relationships with individuals. Building that tricky segmentation, that beautifully targeted message or developing a single-customer view will depend on holding the right data and separating the wheat from the chaff.

To read Forrester’s full write up, visit: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/consumer-marketing-2018-could-dos-vs-must-dos/