audience engagement
10
The new audience
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Marketers need to reconsider ‘the audience’, which is no longer passive,
ready to absorb brand messages, and is no longer theirs
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By mark earls, Herd Consulting minds are supremely adapted for a world of suade consumers to run through advertising),
others, rather than for independent thought. while the uK government’s department of
Since its earliest days, marketing has prided Our ability to learn from each other (via Health created the integrated change for Life
itself on putting the people who buy the ‘social learning’ and the disembodied accumu­ programme, built on a thorough review of
products being marketed (or the ‘consumers’, lation of others’ knowledge and skills we call behaviour­change literature and an array of
as we’ve got used to calling them) at the heart ‘culture’) is now widely seen to be the key different tactics.
of its thinking and processes. You could argue mechanism behind the spread of all kinds of But this is just the beginning. the next
that the fundamental point of marketing (as phenomena, from the clothes we wear, the cluster of really exciting insights for marketers
well as its primary contribution to contemp­ music we listen to, and whether we vote or to engage with are not about humans
orary culture) is the idea of organising busi­ not, to the names we give our children. many and human behaviour at all; they’re about our
ness around the needs, wants and desires of now believe this must therefore also be the ideas of the audience itself and our assump­
the people who buy its goods and services. key to changing such behaviour. tions about marketing’s relationship with it.
along the way, we’ve come to rely on So far, so good. marketers of all sorts are arguably, these have the power to bring about
certain ideas about these people – how they starting to benefit from these insights. nike more fundamental change in the practice of
do what they do, how they make the decis­ chose to make a product/service with marketing and advertising.
ions we seek to influence, the nature of the built­in sociability (rather than try to per­ a school concert encapsulates much of
relationship between us and them, and the
importance of the role we play in their lives.
Perhaps marketing’s relationship with
the people ‘formerly known as the audi­
ence’ now deserves a second look. this
article provides a critical look at some of our
assumptions in this area and outlines some
new rules of thumb for marketers to use in
their thinking about ‘the audience’.
in recent years, science has encouraged us
to rethink much of what we took for granted
about the people who make up our audiences.
We have learned that thinking is much less
important than we imagine in shaping our be­
haviour. much of our decision­making is essen­
tially automatic and based on shorthands and
heuristics; we often do stuff and make sense
of it later. cognitive behavioural scientists,
such as Kahnemann and tversky, and Nudge
authors thaler and Sunstein, have catalogued
the cognitiv e biases that have come from our
“lazy brain’s” use of shorthands and heuristics
for decision­making.
equally, we’ve come to understand that
we are a fundamentally social species. Our
Carnivals are a remnant of earlier rituals that have been suppressed, says historian Barbara Ehrenreich
ADMAP FebruAry 2010
DE 0210_10-11 earls.indd 1 1/22/2010 14:23:07
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