Context is critical

It’s not hard to criticise the recent pronouncements from Downing Street on the cost of living, and many duly have.

When chancellor John Healey stepped forward in early August to warn supermarkets against price gouging he was rounded on by business commentators for what they saw as an uninformed attack on a highly competitive sector where margins are typically south of 3%.

Later down the summer, Andy Burnham’s announcement of his ‘everyday fixes’ initiative to combat bogus discount offers and subscription lock-in deals played to mixed reviews. Some, like Citizens Advice, felt it a good start that didn’t go far enough. Others, in the right-of-centre press, wondered how a prime minister facing formidable macroeconomic and geopolitical pressures could find the bandwidth to focus on whether that £12.99 half-price bargain was based on a genuine full price or not.

One memorable Burnham phrase caught the headlines but ended up laying itself open to ridicule. “Every single unexpected payment, rip-off or hidden catch chips away at hope.” The audacity of the loss of hope being laid at the door of a sneaky two-for-one bumper deal that wasn’t quite as it seemed was manna to cartoonists and online commentators. Burnham must have known he was at the margins of credibility with this one, so added the rider, “That might sound dramatic, but it’s true”.

Whatever you think personally of all that, as a marketer it must grate that the most senior politicians in the land are shining a searchlight on two of marketing’s four Ps – price and promotion – and finding us wanting.

Your reaction might be to run a quick audit on your brand portfolio to reassure yourself that no brand is playing fast and loose with pricing and that any subscription-based offers are as easy to close as they are to open – especially since what is a political initiative today might be legislation tomorrow.

From there you might cast your gaze outwards to the category, to see how its reputation for fair play might come across – concluding, perhaps, that there are always cowboys on the fringes given to dubious practices, but that your own brands are well clear of those.

And isn’t that what marketers normally do – even without negative external pressure? Focus on their own brands, and then those of category competitors, and the relationships consumers have within that narrow frame? It’s akin to the Healey approach – life viewed through a tight lens focused on a single strand of a far wider consumption matrix.

Burnham’s approach was both more nuanced and more empathetic than that, and in revealing it he exposed a gap in modern marketing’s ideas of best practice. The concept he understood and articulated was that of accumulation. Consumers do not live in any single category or find themselves fazed by any single underhand commercial trick. It’s the accumulation that wears people down – the quotidian niggles and setbacks that build and grow with a kind of negative compound interest. Burnham’s gaze was not just wider than Healey’s but wider than that of the typical marketer. What it amounts to is a more intuitive feel for context.

Real people, real lives
It is an established tenet of our discipline that marketers should work backwards from consumer needs and desires. We should in fact go one step further than that and seek to understand people as people, living rich – or boring, or challenging, or polarised, or frankly chaotic – lives, of which consumption is just a part.

What we need to get a feel for is the earthy human context into which our product and service offers, our communications and – so help us – our lofty laddering up to life’s great themes will intrude. Where we should arrive is at a junction that takes us beyond mere understanding towards empathy, and from there, a strong desire to serve people better.

The preferred research methodology suggests itself without too much deliberation: ethnography. In its classic form, it is an observational technique that asks a disarmingly simple question: ‘What’s going on?’ The reality of quotidian life is then captured without judgement in a format known as ‘rich description’. There is nothing quite like ethnography for opening eyes and ears to the routines and rhythms of life’s fascinating ordinariness.

That classical form is slow and expensive, but the good news is that technology has found ways to deliver ethnographic illumination without breaking budgets or busting deadlines. Freeform video diaries, life photo galleries and guided self-reflections are all techniques worth exploring. As with all ethnography, you end up with a lot of data, but AI can speedily turn around voice-to-text transcripts and do a first pass at tagging and clustering themes.

Marketers are fond of talking about encouraging consumers to feel deeper emotional connection with the brand. Well-conducted ethnography is about encouraging brand teams to feel deeper emotional connection with people – who sometimes happen to be consumers.

From context to creation
But what comes next? An awareness of the contextual weave of everyday life is invaluable, but context doesn’t tell you what to do. It is a backdrop against which many different marketing routines can be played out. For marketers, it’s not always easy to make the leap from that holistic panorama back to the specifics of everyday brand management.

Well, moving in this direction, from the wider human context back to the brand, it’s fine to use the category as a staging post. Gather the team together in a workshop session and confront them with a single, soul-searching question: ‘How is our category currently letting people down’?

This isn’t just about unmet needs – though that is part of it – but about the ways in which the category quietly, perhaps unthinkingly, sometimes even cynically, mis-serves people in ways of which they are unaware.

Healey’s bête noire – supermarkets – provides an example. The milk everyone pops in for frequently is placed at the very back of the store. It’s a daily inconvenience designed to prompt impulse purchases as shoppers traipse up and down the aisles. But it’s such a norm that nobody really notices it anymore.

Every category has its own version of milk-at-the-back: little self-serving norms and sleights of hand that are so much an accepted part of the way the sector operates that they never really come up for discussion.

The aim of these sessions is to identify them, hold them up to scrutiny, and resolve to address them. The outpourings are almost always cathartic. I’ve seen teams determined to be the first in the sector to change practices to make things fairer for consumers even if it implies financial sacrifice.

Individually, any single initiative might be small, but taken together, across multiple sectors, they could do much to help with the cost of living and smooth out the frictions of everyday life. Accumulation works both ways.

But perhaps we can go further than that. There is something about the fusion of an empathetic feel for the context of contemporary lives and a critical assessment of the current limitations of the category that can spur brand teams forwards to genuine breakthrough innovation. And here, all four marketing Ps are necessarily involved – with ‘place’ and especially ‘product’ to the fore.

And where might that lead? Perhaps brand teams will play their part in a marketing-led wave of new products, services, ideas and technologies that not only serve people better but help deliver the ultimate ‘fix’ that Burnham, Healey, the entire political class and pretty much everyone else is crying out for: economic growth.

It is an outcome that is by no means inevitable. But there is hope.