Consumer says yes*

Marketers asking questions of consumers in research would be wise to imagine that at the end of every answer there is an asterisk. The skill is then to discern the meaning behind the asterisk in each case – since consumers unhelpfully do not tend to provide the small print – and to determine what kind of discount to now apply to the raw response, no matter how unequivocally it appears to have been stated.

A very common asterisk is the one that signifies *all things being equal. The more noble the statement the consumer is deemed to have agreed with, the more likely that this is the unexpressed caveat wrapped around it. It’s the one that trips marketers up when they’re probing the willingness of their customers to be swayed by brave brand positionings rooted in ecological rectitude.

“It is important to me that the brands I buy are environmentally sustainable” has a fine certainty to it until you add the asterisked ATBE rider. Because things are hardly ever equal, are they? That slightly less sustainable competitor brand might be better priced, look cooler, last longer, smell nicer, have a grabbier presence on shelf, or any combination of the above. Or it might simply be the one the respondent’s best friend raves about. How ‘important’ is sustainability now?

The trap that marketers fall into when they are blind to that tincy-wincy asterisk is to conflate ubiquity with intensity. When so many potential customers cite environmental responsibility as important – all of them, virtually – doesn’t that mean it is a real and potent determiner of choice? For a few, perhaps. For the majority, you can file it under ‘nice to have’, and you’d better make sure your product or service ticks all the boxes that consumers actually come to the category for.

Is this what brought down the soaraway US shoe brand Allbirds? The shoes were launched on a low-emissions, high-naturals platform and a hardcore of sustainability stalwarts bought into that, powering the business to a $4bn valuation. Then the brand expanded and discovered that the pool of people motivated by environmental considerations alone was smaller than it reckoned. And the much larger, more mainstream, crowd were not to be persuaded by a wool and eucalyptus vibe at uncompetitive prices. In March the brand was sold at a 99% discount from its high.

The issue of indifference

Here’s another asterisk for you: *as if I cared. This is the asterisk of indifference, the flag that should remind us that the natural resting state of most people, confronted with some kind of brand statement on which to adjudicate, is blankness, until the moment you ask.

But ask you have, so now they have to consciously register what was not even subliminal before – an absence, a non-perceptual vacuum with regard to the commercial question. Even where you provide a mid-range value in your metric grid for them to tick – ‘neither this nor that’ – you have artificially induced a moment of introspection that, on this micro-topic, would never have occurred to them in the wild.

And what is your interpretation? That they are neither top box nor bottom box but kind of neutral on this? Something to work with, perhaps? Perhaps. Or more likely something far more humbling: this thing that is meaningful to you was never in their field of vision and won’t readily become so now. Brands just aren’t that important.

The chief creative officer of VaynerMedia, Steve Babcock, gave a brilliant answer that touched on this reality when asked in a YouTube interview to define “commercial creativity”. He said it was “the art of getting people to care about something they don’t care about”. That’s the battle-hardened response of one who has ingested the hopeful consumer verbatims in umpteen marketer briefs and intuitively applied the disclaimer.

Not all consumers are cynical

An insidious consumer asterisk, and one for startups to be especially aware of, is *I’m just trying to be nice here. We’re apt to forget that most people aren’t especially cynical and even when navigating commercial interruptions would prefer to please. So, they lean towards saying what they guess their interlocutor would most wish to hear.

The founders of smoothies brand Innocent have much to be culpable for here. Back in the late 1990s, when working on the idea for their startup, they set up informal stalls in parks and festivals to directly get a feel for the public’s response to their all-fruit formulas. As a way of discovering that one flavour was preferred over another, it was probably helpful. As a publicity stunt it was classic Innocent insouciance.

But now I see entrepreneurs copying this direct approach to seriously gauge general interest in their new innovation, with ‘would-you-buy-this?’ questioning. And people say, yeah, sure, they’ll look for the product when it’s out. Now apply the asterisk, and where are you really? Maybe for every 100 who say they’ll buy, who knows, one just might.

More than a gap

There is an established marketing term for this troublesome consumer perfidy: the ‘say-do gap’. I have two problems with it. First, the word ‘gap’ suggests something that can reasonably easily be bridged. ‘Say-do chasm’ is often closer to the truth.

And second, unreliable consumer responsiveness can apply when there is nothing for them to actually go on and do. It can show up as variance between a measure of how they feel about something today – a new ad, say – and how they’ll feel about the same stimulus later.

Even if you’re simply pretesting a TV spot, where the only consumer ‘doing’ amounts to clicking on a value to reflect how the concept grabbed them, asterisks apply. And the principal one reads like this: *right here, right now, watching in relative peace, in a welcome break from the normal chaos, with a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. In that mood, that artificial setting, maybe your spot hits home and gets a 9. But when it airs, in the real world, caught half-glimpsed amid a dozen competing quotidian stimuli, well, maybe it doesn’t.

One of the most successful marketers I know surprised my MBA students in his guest-lecture last month by telling them he automatically discounts any pretest score by 30%. If an ad just scrapes above the testing methodology’s success benchmark, it fails his, and he ruthlessly insists on improvement.

Life is full of asterisks and, if we’re honest, we marketers are responsible for dispensing our fair share of them. Free!*, we’re fond of announcing, all the while knowing it’s not quite as simple as that, and *terms and conditions apply.

And consumers know what we’re doing and kind of play the game along with us, even if with a wearying sigh. But perversely, where they are unforgiving is precisely on those higher-order claims about which they, in practice, are so flaky: the ethical ones, the environmental ones, the purpose-driven so-called ‘noble’ ones.

If we fail to live up to them in every particular, they will punish us – quite rightly, since we are the professionals here – for not doing as we say.