New Media Buzz

By Seth Godin’s estimate, the average consumer is exposed to one million marketing messages a year-about 3,000 a day.  However, since all of us have gotten so good at tuning out these messages, the vast majority of them don’t ever get our attention and of those that do, most are not memorable.  The question is: how do you make your message touch home?

In this case you might want to think back to “home room.”  You remember, junior high?  Try as you might to suppress those memories, there are some things you can still learn from those horribly over-taxed teachers.   It was early adolescence, a time when your own body was sending you thousands of conflicting messages a day, to say nothing of all the messages from the rest of the world.  Anything the teacher had to say was not a very high priority, which is why middle school instructors had to come at you on multiple fronts.  The idea was to make connections in as many different ways as possible, which not only increased the likelihood that students actually understood the content, it also improved their recall ability.

The approach goes like this.  Educational theorists break the pathways, or modalities, by which people acquire information into three basic categories:  visual,auditory and kinesthetic (motor).  Visual learners gain understanding by watching-looking at pictures/diagrams.  Auditory learners learn by being told-responding to verbal instructions.  Kinesthetics tend to be more active and prefer learning via ‘hands on’ projects.  Yet, because most people are not purely one type or the other, a multi-pronged approach, utilizing all three learning styles, leads to the greatest level of student comprehension.  And, because students learned the content through a variety of different pathways, they have several different ways to  recall what they’ve learned.

It’s also one of the reasons why interactive marketing (particularly games and potentially mobile apps) is so effective.  It adds an extra contact point between your message and your audience, i.e. one more way they can access and retrieve your message.  In the case of games, what you’re adding, literally, is an extra touch point.  Pushing play devices across a screen, be it with a mouse or a touch pad, ties your audience to your message in an active kinesthetic way.

But there’s something more to touch than that, and it doesn’t just apply to middle schoolers.  A recent study by researchers from Ohio State University and Illinois State University showed that people who touched an item before buying were willing to pay substantially more for the item than those who did not.  The item in question, an ordinary drinking mug, was chosen for its insignificance, which makes the findings that much more powerful.  The results showed that holding the mug and touching it for a relatively short period of time (30 seconds) made the study participants feel that it was already theirs.  This feeling of ownership in turn led them to bid higher (often above the listed retail price) to make sure they did not lose the mug.

Many sales venues take advantage of this phenomenon.  It’s why car dealers let you test drive their cars.  It’s why the pet shop owners let you play with the puppies in the store.  In marketing, interactive is the area in which consumers’ physical connection with your brand is the most intrinsic to the medium.  It’s there in the controls of your online game promotions.  It’s there on the touch screens and keypads of your audiences’ smartphones. The physical, engagement of your audience with these marketing campaigns creates a kinesthetic pathway between your message and your audience along with the visual and auditory pathways common to more traditional campaigns.

Consider Down the Pipe, a game we built for NOBLE Chicago (for Kraft/Burger King).  The brand message was that Kraft/Burger King are fun and a little bit irreverent.  The game’s visual pathway reinforces this message with the images of a paper cup zipping around catching the rain of falling oreos and straws.  The auditory pathway speaks to the engrossing pleasure of the game through the swooshing cup sweeping across the game floor and the painful crunch of oreos crashing to the ground, not to mention the driving, high-energy soundtrack.  Kinesthetically, the game engages players’ whole bodies as they mouse the cup around fast enough to save every oreo and straw from destruction. The key word here is immersive. The game draws players completely into the branded environment via the pathways of sight, hearing and touch (we left the senses of taste and smell for the restaurant).

We then added a social aspect to the play (sharing high scores and competing with friends) which added an extra emotional charge to the game.  And as any educator/marketer will tell you, emotion is the most vital connection there is.  Ready to reach out and touch your audience?  Give us a call.

Image Credit:  Adam Fox