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Published: August 10, 2007
What your marketing is REALLY saying
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The NextStage CRO describes how your unintentional marketing message can subvert your marketing objective.

iMedia's Editor-in-Chief Brad Berens invited me to take part in the upcoming Brand Summit, asking that I do a workshop on how the mind really responds to marketing messages, both the intentional and definitely the unintentional kind. That workshop will expand on my Websites: You've Only Got 3 Seconds column, and I'll preview some of that presentation here.

Most people recognize the obvious marketing messages: advertisers want you to buy their product or service. There are some standard, albeit unobvious, methodologies used in getting that obvious message across -- use of specific colors, sounds, images, et cetera -- that are intended to get you, the consumer, to respond in certain ways.

The challenge to these methodologies is that people receive and respond to non-conscious, sometimes unintentional messages long before the obvious messages register in their psyches. Companies have spent millions of dollars to craft a winning message only to discover that some small, single element was undermining an entire campaign.

This column will look at two different websites and share the messages that should and shouldn't be there (we'll be doing more of this at the Brand Summit).

What is intentional and what is unintentional messaging?
Communication, whether it's two people facing each other talking or a team putting together a website and releasing it to the world, is a time- and energy-consuming process.

Take the example of two people facing each other talking. Person A thinks something, wraps language around his thought then verbalizes that language. Person B hears that verbalization, decodes the language then interprets the resulting thought.

Talk about six degrees of separation! It's amazing we understand each other at all. We haven't even dealt with all those factors that pollute the information stream: environmental factors that modify the sound, linguistic factors that alter speech patterns, cultural factors that alter meanings…

And of course there is a lot more going on when two people are facing each other talking than simple words going back and forth. Have you ever given someone a gift and seen the "Oh, God, not another one" look on his face? Before he can say, "Thank you," or, "How sweet," or even, "Oh, dear… I've already got five of these" you're making apologies and offering to return it for something else he'd like.

The look on the face is the unintentional message, the non-conscious message. The conscious, intentional message is "Oh, what a lovely gift. Thank you so much" but the non-conscious, unintentional message is "Oh, lordy, where can I bury this?"

These unintentional, non-conscious messages also go the other way. Many of us have been in situations in which we had to be courteous to someone we didn't like, trust or respect, or had to publicly agree to something we privately thought little of. Our smile is a little forced, our handshake a little restrained. Often the object of our non-affection and those in attendance pick up our unintentional messages and ask us if something's wrong. These unintentional messages of uncertainty, discomfort, non-belief and so on also get embedded in marketing material (I gave some simple examples in Usability Studies 101: Design Questions).

Now consider the following: Your marketing efforts aren't working and there's no obvious reason why. Maybe it's because your marketing material's intentional, conscious message is "We can help you" while the unintentional, non-conscious message is "Why would anybody want this?"

The non-conscious message will get through every time. Marketing material, like people, can send conflicting messages. Your target audience will ask for clarification by responding to your marketing efforts poorly if at all.

Examples from the NextStage archives
One of NextStage's early adopters, a management consulting firm, had just completed a website redesign and gone live.

Its website traffic dropped. Few people went beyond the home page. A quick analysis revealed that the non-conscious, unintentional message embedded in the site was "I don't have time for you".

Ouch! How did that message get in there? We talked with the design team and learned that this project was one of 15 they had dropped on them in one week. All they kept on saying to each other was how little time they had to complete their assignments. That message came through in the final design, although there was nothing obvious to reveal that.

One of my favorite anecdotes, also from an early adopter, deals with doing a competitive analysis for an online insurance provider. We analyzed its site and four competitive sites' messaging. The four competitive sites had pretty much consistent and expected messaging. The client's site had "Go away. We're not ready."

Again, ouch! This didn't go over well. Then the client remembered that when the site was designed (in house) the company was six months away from releasing its product. A great concern was that someone would actually come looking for the product and the company would have to tell them "Go away. We're not ready."

The last example I'll share comes from NextStage's work with a major PDA manufacturer. The company had spent a great deal of time and money on a marketing campaign for a soon to be released product; a PDA designed specifically for soccer moms. The only problem was that the in-store brochure, when opened, had a 20- or 30-something male with a sideways grin in the upper right looking down and to the left. The lower left of the opened brochure showed a target audience female using the PDA and looking up towards the right.

There were so many negative non-conscious messages to the target audience that we didn't know where to begin.

Website examples
First things first: Creative needs to be matched to some audience. The larger an audience you wish to hit the more general your creative -- hence your messaging -- needs to be. That being said, let's take a look at something that works and something that doesn't.

Consider figure 1:

 

This is the Diesel Jeans website, a play on print dating pages with the purpose of selling jeans. This is also an example of matching creative to your audience. In this case, the audience is shown in the creative: the pictures are all 20-somethings. The images come to life (go from black and white to full color) when moused over. The mouse moves the "page" as if the eye were reading print. Returning from a clicked link leaves a red scribed circle around whatever was clicked on. All in all, this is very nicely done for its audience.

Would this work for my demographic? I doubt it. Visitors largely out of the target demographic might find this site confusing and irritating. But that (to me) is a demonstration of creative done well for a given demographic.

The non-conscious message matches well with the intentional message. Both are "Come play with me," and both will only be non-consciously picked up by the target demographic. Again and with gusto, nicely done! My hat's off to them.

Sometimes an unintentional negative message is easy to catch.

Consider figure 2:

This is for a B2C airline site. There are two challenges to this site. One is the border color. This might be the logo color of the airline, I don't know. What I do know is that it's not an appealing color on a computer screen.

The use of the color as a border may drive your eye towards the center of the page (where the action items are); however, it will probably stop you first. Your mind and brain will need a few moments to correlate that -- despite the color -- this is a travel site.

This is an interesting example of conflicting messages. That color may be unique in the industry and therefore a good choice for a brand and logo (if that's how it was used), and there's nothing in the western psyche indicating that that color equates to travel or flight. If it's supposed to be a setting sun (something suggested by one of our researchers), the sun has set.

The second challenge is the image of the plane flying off the site rather than towards the action items (located on the right of the page). That plane is part of an animated loop that cycles through their routes, some people at a beach, service agents, amenities and so on back to that same plane flying off the page and away from the action items.

The unintentional, non-conscious message is one that -- at first blush -- might be good for an airline site: "Go Away. Now!" instead of "Book a trip with us now," although it comes across as "Leave this site right now!"

Summary
The goal of all creative is to communicate a marketing message to a target audience.

Most people would agree with that and I'll modify it for clarity:

The goal of all creative is to communicate a positive, consciously and non-consciously synchronized marketing message to a target audience.

Most creative agencies understand how to craft a positive conscious message. It requires either luck or skill to craft a positive non-conscious marketing message. It requires lots of skill and training to synchronize non-conscious to conscious messages and have them bulls eye your intended audience.

Additional resources:

Upcoming Conferences:

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.

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