A Case of Consumer Ennui

Every marketer bemoans the fact that engaging consumers is a more and more difficult task. They’ll try the traditional route (TV, magazines), the alphabet innovative conduit (IM, ISP, PDA, MP3), and every pathway in between.

But reaching the consumer is not the problem. The problem is that brands lost their way long ago, and all the old, new, and soon-to-be-beamed-directly-to-you media in the world isn’t going to help that situation.

A fusion of quality control, “table stakes” satisfaction, more and better process reengineering, and the birth of the “bionic consumer”—born hotwired into the 21st-century media ecology and Internet ready—have conspired to make most products and services exactly the same. And sameness breeds boredom, and with boredom comes lethargy.

Legendary strategist Jack Trout has said, “Differentiate or die,” but I’d like to amend that to a less elegant phrase, but no less accurate observation, “Differentiate or run the risk of having consumers die of boredom. Oh, and by the way, this whole movement is contagious, and new media aren’t the remedy if you don’t mean anything to the consumer.”

I won’t go into the gory details of where brands went wrong. That’s a number of columns or even a book in itself, and different brands have gone wrong in different ways. What marketers need to know is that consumers just don’t care any more.

Doubt me? Here are some incontrovertible facts:

1) In this year’s Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Index, consumer expectations for all 35 categories we track are up again. Yet brands continue to significantly lag behind consumer expectations. Significantly. Gaps between expectations and what your category has to offer may provide opportunities for those brands nimble enough and fraught with enough meaning to actually mean something to the consumer, but there aren’t many of those about.

2) In the 2006 Brand Keys Fashion Index, 67% of 7,500 men and women from all over the United States felt that brands were much less or less important to them. In balance (and for those of you in denial) 7% felt brands were much more or more important.

3) Let’s put the products and service aside for a moment. Maybe really, really creative creative will win the crusade for consumer engagement. For the moment we’ll assume that all the ads and messages and communications were actually attended to by consumers and that TiVo and a raft of other elements doesn’t really factor in. In examining the engagement effects of nearly 300 campaigns (for everything from airlines to wireless service providers), we found that fewer than 35% of the products and services had what consumers felt was engaging advertising.

4) “OK,” I hear you cry, “that’s probably just the older consumer. We don’t care about them. It’s the younger generation that will shape our futures.” (INSERT SOUND OF AIR HORN HERE). I’m sorry, that’s NOT correct. A recent worldwide study among teenagers has indicated that decreasing allegiance to brands is actually full-fledged indifference. In the U.K. just three in 10 are actually committed to certain brands. In another global survey among 11- to 25-year-olds, “brand” ranked fifth out of eight factors involved in youth purchase decisions. Only 24% of the respondents thought brands were important at all. Pretty consistent numbers.

We have suggested in the past that consumers are just better informed and have access to more and better (and more) information that is not controlled by the marketer. That this consumer control creates levels of increased consumer intelligence and insight that shields (or armors) the consumer from undifferentiated, relatively unengaging advertising and marketing. An assistant professor from the University of Calgary has suggested that consumer acumen is being misinterpreted as indifference, but the numbers belie that statement.

Until products and services discover some way of imbuing themselves with something that is meaningful to consumers and that helps their products believably appear to be meeting (or even exceeding) customer expectations, the levels of ennui will only increase. You need to mean something to matter, and the word “meaningful” when used by marketers today is nearly always meaningless to consumers.

What to do? Make use of media as best you can. Connecting with consumers is still part of the process. But consider jettisoning some of the old research processes you’ve been relying upon. Update your marketing toolbox to include metrics that measure real engagement and consumer meaning.

Because today meaning is more important than knowledge.

Robert Passikoff, Ph.D., is founder and president of New York-based marketing firm Brand Keys and writes a monthly column for CHIEF MARKETER.