The biggest challenge in building a brand's appeal isn't how to attract consumers for whom brandings have no cachet; that answer is obvious. Instead, it's figuring out how to build a brand that can appeal simultaneously to consumers with totally different demands and requirements. This applies to nearly two-thirds of all consumers, split roughly down the middle between those seeking practical vs. emotional relationships with brands.
In our last column (DIRECT, February), we looked at consumers at both extremes of brand involvement. Fervents care about brands in every way while Indifferents don't care at all. Between these extremes, Yankelovich Monitor research finds two other groups of consumers with different approaches to brands: Practicals and Emotionals.
Consumers relate to a brand along four dimensions — as a time saver, an indicator of quality, a source of emotional satisfaction, and as a badge of status. Different consumers can be grouped together according to the relative importance they place on each dimension.
Practicals comprise 29% of all consumers; Emotionals, 34%. Compared with Practicals, Emotionals are younger and about evenly split between men and women. Practicals are better educated than Emotionals and much more likely to be women. The biggest demographic difference between the two groups is ethnicity. Emotionals are about twice as likely as Practicals to be Hispanics (13% to 7%) and about 50% more probable to be African Americans (11% to 7%).
Practicals and Emotionals want very different things from brands. Practicals use brands as indicators of dependability and trustworthiness. Nearly 90% of Practicals believe that an indication of whether a company is good or bad is whether it makes a point of standing behind its products. No surprise, then, that when asked to choose, more than 80% of Practicals relate more to integrity than success. Nearly three-quarters of Practicals look for brands and companies to be open and honest about their affairs and policies.
While Practicals are interested in brands that do the right thing, Emotionals are concerned about the intangibles and the imagery of brands. Three-quarters of Emotionals say that despite current economic uncertainties, they still like to indulge themselves from time to time. Over two-thirds of Emotionals choose brands that allow them to express their unique tastes and individuality, compared with only a third of Practicals. Four times as many Emotionals as Practicals say they like to buy brands that make them feel like they've made it (40% to 9%).
Practical considerations jockey for position with emotional ones as direct marketers try to get on the inside track to consumers. But there's a common theme: quality. Practicals look for cues that signal a commitment to the highest quality standards and practices. Emotionals seek quality as a means of self-expression and self-indulgence. Thus, the stronger the perceptions of quality, the more that Practicals will see a brand as trustworthy and the more that Emotionals will regard a brand as indulgent.
The answer to the challenge of simultaneously satisfying Practicals and Emotionals is for DMers to build a quality image for their brands. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done, for direct marketing itself struggles with its own image. We've all seen the survey results, but it's easy to ignore them because, despite the poor perceptions of DM, consumers continue to buy in ever-increasing amounts through direct channels. But by focusing just on our immediate gains, we lose sight of what we're giving up.
Two-thirds of consumers — the Practicals and Emotionals — see quality as a signal of what they want from a brand. When consumers' poor perceptions about DM detract from this, a brand's quality image is eroded. Over time, as we sell more and more by direct methods, we chip away at the reputation for quality that attracts consumers of all sorts to our brands. This undermines brand loyalty and exposes the brands we offer to greater competitive risks. In turn, this raises costs and lowers the productivity of our marketing. Already we're seeing this in our businesses, and these problems grow worse every year.
Ultimately, successful DM is as much about attitudes and perceptions as it is about transactions and behavior. It's easy to motivate behavior without improving perceptions, but this is self-defeating. As the major airlines enjoyed record business in the late '90s, they failed to shore up customer perceptions. Now they can't win customers back because their value propositions are upside-down. Automobile manufacturers drove record sales through loss-leader zero-percent financing, and now find that their brands lack an image of sufficient quality to generate sales at any other price.
Building strong brands means making attitudinal insights a core part of how we do direct marketing. Attitudes need to sit alongside behavior in our databases. For reasons both practical and emotional, this is how we will realize the greatest return on what we do.
J. WALKER SMITH is president of Yankelovich Inc., Atlanta.
CRAIG WOOD is president of Yankelovich's Monitor MindBase division in Chapel Hill, NC.
