Behavioural Marketing.

I always think I'm stating the obvious in my posts. It really shouldn't be hard to avoid marketing mistakes. But the "data" so often suggests otherwise.

The latest example festoons the walls of the escalators at the City Road tube station.  In the pitch, there was no doubt much talk about leveraging social media. In the cold half-light of civic transportation, this means that every few feet there's a barely legible white on pink mini-poster comprising solely of a tweet from a user.  So far, so meaningless.

It's the latest version of the invasion of movie marketing with ever more obscure five star review snippets. Yes, they may be "authentic" and yes they may all be a truthful assessment of the experience but, as with the movie posters,  the reviewer has to have some credibility before anyone pays attention. Do the marketers really think that we'll sudddenly give credence to the opinions of strangers like those we've spent our journey ignoring?

Presumably so, because they also know that their escalator audience is literally mobile and yet have chosen colours that make it hard to read in the real world. Not that anybody who isn't  a marketer is going to read them anyway because real people are either rushing up the stairs, their eyes focussed on the top,  or they're stationary their eyes buried in their device - ironically leveraging their own social media rather than looking at the one they're being expected to admire.

The first rule of behavioural marketing is to market to the behaviours of those whose attention you seek. So, if you're going to be interruptive, you have at least to make an effort to make it worthwhile.
Fish were the fish are is only part of the equation, you also have to fish when they're feeding and make it enticing.

As Bill Bernbach said "If no-one notices your advertising, everything else is academic." Or part of an overlooked effectiveness award paper.


PS The tweets are for Lumia something - I had to check my notes because I truly couldn't remember.