The future of planning Admap prize: 3 interactivity

In the third of these posts based on my article on planning in the first 40 years its time to look at interaction. Great topic and just to make it clear that this relates to digital marketing, event marking and some promotions.  It doesn’t relate to advertising. Sorry ad boys but engagement has its limits.  Buying  isn’t interactive either. And I would deal with response separately. To me interaction is sustained behavioural response for the person involved to learn or be entertained.  Interaction is valuable to us because behaviour impacts on memory, and behaviour leads to the laying down of patterns which marketers like because it makes it more likely that a given behaviour will be repeated.  It is probably the most important aspect of digital because although online is great for educating people, the internet isn’t a big book – it’s a series of small screens which you have to engage with by clicking touching or pinching. And a lot of behaviour is habit forming. We enjoy doing it.  And doing it again.

Behaviour is also important because it precedes and drives emotion.  Long long ago when I cut my teeth on tracking studies I had to prove that Guinness advertising was working. And I couldn’t help noticing that awareness went up before behavioural change did (or at least claimed behavioural change). And after that emotional statements shifted. So I learned an early and valuable lesson. That when you do something it makes you feel different.  These days I would also suggest that the advertising didn’t lead to a change in emotion, not directly anyway. But when people drank Guinness THEN there was emotional change. Funnily enough not all marketing effects can be attributed to advertising but as a junior planner I was trained to attribute everything I could get away with to advertising effects! Happy times..

The internet is the perfect place for measuring interactivity. Even if we aren’t always sure that people are who they say they are.  The internet is better described as a very accurate record of human behaviour than a reliable way of finding out who people are and what they think. Personas have taken over from customer pen portraits for anyone developing customer segmentations online.  Who you are and what you think are less reliable than what you do online and what goals are motivating you – that usually becomes very clear from how you browse.  Personas  are going to seep across all marketing because of the significance of the internet. Even if only a modest proportion of the budget is going online – internet thinking is spreading into offline marketing. And categorising your customers by goals and behaviours is a lot easier to measure than the conventional ways of classifying offline populations by attitudes and propensities.

Moving on from personas the idea that people use a series of different scripts depending on the context in which they find themselves. Needstates have been a powerful way to explain how the same persona can buy very different products depending on the situation they find themselves in.  But scripts are about ways of behaving and responding depending on what context you think you are in.  We are now within easy distance of the latest fad – that of behavioural economics – if people aren’t nearly as rational as they think they are and if their perceptions and choices can be influenced with small nudges then setting up choice architectures is a specialism that planners working in the interactive space need to develop. Completely different from messaging.

Gaming has incorporate promotional messaging for some time but game design and in particular apps have become a fertile area for giving people alternative scripts to experiment with. We are not doing things TO people but with them.  And the modification of behaviour using gaming elements can only grow in importance.

Right now at Spring Research we are working on developing a specialist research product for researching context.  Research has usually behaved as if context is irrelevant – you can administer surveys online, in the street by telephone.You can run focus groups in a hotel or a private home as if the context was irrelevant to the questions you were asking.  But we need to understand how context influences human behaviour.  And research can help us to do this.  Our product is based on smartphones  but sets out to triangulate context with a handful of simple questions avoiding administering surveys about products or brands – most smartphone based research does just that: the delivery of questions without regard to context.  Supplemented with online diaries and telephone interviews. Its hard work because we are having to challenge so many preconceptions about how research should be conducted.

And moving from context takes us into experiential marketing – designing deep experiences for a minority of customers instead of spreading the budget to provide minimal messaging for a mass audience.   Interactive stretches right through this territory –and it is exciting to find communications planners specialising in this area.