You can't get targeting wrong. You can mess up the message, get the medium all wrong, and if you target perfectly - it's probably going to be effective still. The same can't be said for the message or the medium. The message and medium/design amplify the benefits of good targeting, or compensate for less good targeting. If you're selling ice, you can't target Eskimos. Doesn't matter what the message or medium is.
Obviously, perfect targeting is a fantasy. I often find taking ideas to their extreme end is helpful when weighing them against each other. It's the lazy reductionist's way of getting to the core of a thing.
In this case, a little thought experiment. Your goal is to sell what you're selling, pick anything. Out of the three components (targeting, message, medium), two have to be shitty and one has to be perfect. Which of those three is most likely to produce success?
Now I'm going to get into the mechanics behind my assertion, a short journey through how humans navigate their environment. By the end, I'll have made a case for attention and emotion as the key levers for successful marketing, which requires good targeting.
As an alternative/supplemental element, this section of the talk I gave on how and why memorable marketing is memorable talks goes through the psychological concepts with examples from the wild:
I posit the purpose of marketing is to cause (not correlate with!) a change in behavior. For that to happen, a few things need to precede the behavior change:
Need to be exposed in some way.
The signal needs to be received and processed.
The received signal needs to be remembered.
The remembered signal needs to catalyze a change.
Much of #marketing focused on the first and last, at the expense of the middle two. For a person to make a change, they'll need to remember something first. So how do we get to the third step?
We need attention. We used to think attention works like a searchlight in a dark room. An alluringly visual and self-aggrandizing theory. Turns out that as of July 2024, our brains aren't searchlights, they're filters. Think about it. Our senses are able to process so much more than we could ever attend to at any given time. And as far as filtration systems go, the human brain is a good as they come. The vast majority of stimulus we ingest with our sensory system is ignored. If you're ignored, the master plan fails on the spot.
So what do we pay attention to? Lots of things. Many more than we should worry about here. We want to know about the things we'll pay attention to AND encode, then store as a memory. That's where the next lever comes in.
We need emotion. The vast majority of what we attend to doesn't go any farther than that. Think about it, our memory storage is an incredibly limited resource. Our brain is like an investor, constantly predicting what will be useful for future us to remember, allocating the scarce resource judiciously. Most of what we attend to in a given day isn't remembered.
So what gets remembered? Lots of different things. New things, scary things, bizarre things, things that bring pleasure or pain, things that increase our chances on producing successful offspring (hello status symbols! Post another cool vacation Instagram you high status mate, you!). Emotion is a pervasive and consistent through line for the things we remember.
Think about it this way, take a quick inventory of what you remember from the past few years. I'm willing to bet, most of those things - if not all - coincided with abnormally high emotion. And I'm willing to bet you still feel echoes of those emotions when you remember them now. If that's not enough to convince you, check out this study from BBC 'Science of Memory'. When you do, you'll see BBC found most memory encoding happens when emotional intensity increases.
So we need both attention and memory, there are lots of ways to get each of them, and probably lots of ways to get both of them. Let's recycle my initial assertion: targeting is the most important capability in marketing. So what I'm now saying is targeting is the necessary part for getting or not getting attention and emotion. That's due to one intuitive fact about the human experience.
We care more about ourselves than other things, believe it or not. This is the self-reference effect, one of the older findings of modern Psychology (that has replicated across time and cultures). That's not selfish, it's adaptive. It's what our physical forms are engineered to do.
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” poet and writer Maya Angelou once said.
This is why personalization works. It's why we value the store that knows us by name more than the many stores who have no idea who we are. It's why we constantly over-estimate the impact of emotions on OTHER people's behavior and under-estimate emotion's impact on our own, referred to as the Empathy Gap. It's understandable that our ability to empathize with others, is a fraction of what we ourselves feel. Watching someone win an award or get fired is very different than winning an award or getting fired yourself.
This is the core of the insight. When your marketing has more to do with other people than the recipient, it's more likely to be filtered out. We have lots to attend to that's relevant to us, now. If it's not about me, it's far less likely to cause the emotional intensity needed to be memorable.
So if you're marketing isn't doing what it could/should/would, work on your targeting. And if you don't know how you're marketing is doing, figure out how to know if your targeting is right - then worry about the rest of it.
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