Why A Quiet Place is a great piece of content ? (A Digital Marketing eye on silence)

Other than dominating the movie theaters by becoming the number 1 movie in USA,
getting recognized by the king of horror himself,
being the second highest domestic opening of the year.

A Quiet Place is a great piece of content and digital marketers can view this movie
not just as a successful cinematic experience but a great piece of content as well.

According to Think With Google there has been 60% Growth in mobile searches
for "__ for me" in the past two years and 80% Growth in mobile searches for "__ should I __" in the past two years.

This leads to more personal and intimate approach of marketing,
where the audience receive tailored marketing message that fits their personal criteria.

Even the B2B world is adapting this personal approach through
ABM (Account Based Marketing);
ABM is when an organization takes an individual prospect or customer account
-- these are companies, not individual people -- and treats it like its very own market,
or a market of one.

In this post I am looking at two factors that made this piece of content uniquely different.

personalized content and the way that the audience consumed the content.

Personal vs. Personalized Content

With the rise of personal search
comes a rise of personal content & personal marketing campaigns.

A Quiet Place has created a personalized not personal experience,
the actors didn't call upon the audience by name,
instead they have invited the audience to share the experience
with the small family since scene one.

The first line that the audience read is day 89
then a cut into more or less of a ghost town then another cut into a wall of missing people.

This is not personal content yet it is deeply personalized,

as you as a part of the audience is invited to write the beginning of this story,
you get to create a personalized story based on personal experience.

If you believe in aliens then that's day 89 after the invasion,
if you lean towards dystopian apocalyptic nuclear war world,
then that's day 89 after the incident happened.

 

This is an open invitation throughout the movie,
you unfold the story with the characters of the movie,
the deep silence lets you decide the danger sources,why does this family the way they do?

Being part of the story plays an even bigger role in the second point;
which how the content was consumed in the film?

Content Consumption

Neurologists identify nine or more human senses, and some list as many as twenty one.
Some of these other senses are the sense of balance,
the proprioception sense which is the ability to tell where your body parts are,
relative to other body parts.

One of the senses that was very active during the movie were the Tension Sensors:
These are found in such places as your muscles
and allow the brain the ability to monitor muscle tension,
by not relying fully on visual triggers;
the film allowed the audience to consume the content differently.

In the age of massive video content production,
the thumb stoppers, the scroll blockers and the extremely polished shiny superheros,
this movie was able to transform the experience
from visually stimulating to cinematically pleasing.

Part of telling a good story is to manage expectations,
one of the ways for digital content creators to manage the audience expectations
is through the way these audience consume their content.

If a brand is choosing to implement a specific digital tactic like live-streaming features,
ephemeral content,UGC, podcasting. How this story will be delivered,
consumed and most importantly felt by the audience is vital.

A Quiet Place created an immersive state.

Every close-up, every subtle gesture,
every facial expression meant something to both the audience and to the storytellers.

If the question brands are asking is what reaction we would like to get from the audience?

What emotion we would like to evoke producing this content?

Then start by watching A Quiet Place.

Written by: Fouad Khafaga
Twitter: @Fouad_Khafaga

Brand Biology Survival by Customer Perception

Think of a bird.

Let me rephrase that when you read the word “Bird” what are the first three bird species that comes to mind?

Most people wouldn't choose (penguin- chicken and an ostrich) in one set. There is a neurological reason for that, it has to do with not just the way we as humans think but with how do we categorize information cognitively.

The human brain - Includes your brand’s audience brains - tend to take mental shortcuts known as cognitive heuristics.

In concept they are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information.

Brands are victims to both the overwhelming amount of data produced and heuristics of customers minds.

Both of these factors are very difficult to control that the only way to for a brand to survive and eventually evolve is to understand both phenomenons and to create an evolution ability characteristics in order to survive such a tough environment

Organizing information and raw data are not an exception  in his book the organized mind Daniel Levitin asks the question How are categories formed in our brains?

There are three ways in which we categories information and by extension perceive such data based on former heuristics those three categories are

• Based on mere appearance
  when we read or hear words like ( Car, trees, fish, books) we have a visual description of what that is with degrees of variance.
  
• Based on functionality
  if we look at a tool box the tools inside doesn't look the same yet all of them serve a common function they fix things .
  
• Based on concept
  the wallet not everything inside a wallet is looking the same or serve the same function by conceptually they are things you need while you are physically outside your home

Remember the types of bird question? As it turns out that penguins, chicken and ostrich doesn't fit our perception of what a bird is according to these three basis.They don't fly, not covered with flying feathers and don't really fit our concept of flying creatures. 

So what does this all means for brands? 

Based on appearance

From the caves of France to the tombs of Egypt visual storytelling was a vital element of human heritage

Nearly 70 % of all the sensory receptors of the whole body is in the eyes. Back in 2004 there was an article from the University of Cambridge titled seeing things part of the team conclusion was that “The visual appearance of products plays a significant role in determining consumer response” & “product appearance influences commercial success and consumer quality-of-life.”

So it’s no wonder to find that visual mediums gaining global traction considering that Pinterest has 150 million active uses, Instagram has 600 million active user and YouTube has 1000 million active users.

Brands doesn’t just need to be present in such mediums they have to tell meaningful stories that will enhance users experience of life through adding visual value to the brand.

Based on functionality

Functionality in branding can fall into 2 categories that functionally of the brand itself as what is the function of the product or the service that the brand offers, how does a brand demonstrate functionality through different tools.

One of the brands that demonstrate usefulness in itself is Google, other than being a

Verb, according to the useful brand report the brand is viewed as “useful because it  connects users to what they need to know, the way they want that information. Google scores particularly high relative to its peers for being quick, easy to use”.

Other demonstration of functionality is the functionality through tools and platforms,  @Hiltonsuggests Is a twitter handle with a bio that says:

“Exploring a new city & looking for insider tips? We're here to help! We're @HiltonNewsroom tweeps sharing our favorite travel suggestions.” 

The idea is that this twitter handle offers expertise on travel and travel tips to travelers whether they are Hilton residence or not. The brand is not converting or making sales or selling offers and discounts on this account, this handle serves one function only providing travel advice to travels.

Another F&B brand is using Snapchat as a customer service feedback medium, if customers have a complain about your plate, food is not hot enough, and other restaurant related complains. That goes directly to snapchat.

Snapchat depends on ephemeral content and because of this dynamic the tool serves the function of the ultimate customer service tool.

Complaints answered within one day and at the same time doesn't live on the restaurant reputation forever like a shipwreck survivor who has only one story to tell.

Based on conceptual perception 

At the core of it. the idea of branding is a conceptual idea.

There is a core concept that the brand stands for, this concept is crystallized, revived and asserted every step of the brands journey by all means available and necessary.  

The revolution of the digital world made it possible for brands to leverage that sense of belonging to the core idea of the brand, creating communities and thought leaders that embrace, enhance and amplify this core idea. In other words creating digital tribes.

Sports brands for example are not just about the sports. It’s about the concepts that the sport represent (competition, victory, hometown, nostalgic attachments).

Some brands evoke that conceptually on specific campaigns not the whole branding strategy Like the dodge campaign (God Made A Farmer). 

Red Bull is not about the energy drink, yes we can argue that this is the ultimate goal is to increase brand equity and sales yet what the brand promotes is the sense of adventure the challenge of human limits.

Final Thoughts  

According to the T3 report 87% of the brands were not seen as being “very useful”,

62% of the brands fell in the middle of the bell curve and were seen as undifferentiated, 88% of consumers do not rely heavily on advertising to inform their decisions.

Keeping in mind that companies introduce 30,000 products every year, but 70% to 90% of them don’t stay on store shelves for more than 12 months.

One of the things that these facts suggest is that brands needs to get out of the egocentricity of how great, innovative or revolutionary the brand is.

And get into their customer's mind through their behavioral and cognitive patterns not just to influence but to enhance the human experience.

References:

http://bit.ly/1NcoGP6

http://bit.ly/2rDqpKK

http://bit.ly/2sFjXTq

http://bit.ly/2sdCsNv

http://bit.ly/1Uk1C5h

http://bit.ly/2mquoYF

http://bit.ly/2snQElC

http://bit.ly/2rCQpGh

http://bit.ly/2sKI5no

Brand Biology (Define your species).

Brand Biology

“Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier

Brand biology is a metaphorical term that I will be using during this series of articles, to refer to different types of elements, factors, cognitive phenomena, and components, that gives a brand life and help the brand survive in the different environment of the market.

Your brand biology is your customer’s categorization, your brand’s DNA is your audience perception, and your clients market is your future environment.  The target market defines your species and their thoughts shape your organisms.

There is more than one element to the idea of brand biology and customer categorization, in this article I will review two elements, the first is related to customer perception and the second is cognitive behavior.

Customer’s perception is manipulated and persuaded by factors like brand color, name, personal experience and campaigns.

In a paper that was published by California State Polytechnic University, titled the Effect of theForeign Brand on Consumer Perception.  The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception.

The results support the hypothesis that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brands. In this study, consumer perception is operationalized by four constructs: attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement.

This is important in terms of brand biology; just the awareness of your species as mentioned in this study affects your survival. In future articles we will look at your brand survival tactics, brand environment, brand biotic and abiotic.

The second element that affects the categorization of the brand is cognitive behavior, as humans we tend to create mental short cuts, especially in the age of the digital worlds the choices of any product or service could be overwhelming.

Within social psychology, cognitive miser is an umbrella theory of social cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attribution biases.

 The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world. The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984.

 We tend to crate mental short cuts to ease the process of digesting, transforming and exploring data of any kind. The brain activity of categorizing data lies at the heart of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so we don’t waste neural processing cycles in details that are irrelevant to the core o the process itself.

When we go to the beach we don’t remember every grain of sand, when we look at the forest we don’t name every tree that we see.

And there is a very good evolutionary reason or this, it’s to prevent our brains from getting overwhelmed with data, making sure we don’t have too many brain tabs open at the same time or too many labeled products on the same shelf because too many choices are paralyzing in most cases.

The process of categorizing data in three main ways

the first one is the Gross or partial appearance which means if they look the same they are the same.
The second form of categorizing is functionality; appearance in this case is not the major concern if it can be used for writing it belongs to the writing tools section and sometimes we might call it a pen.
 Finally the third way of categorizing is conceptual and a perfect example of that is the tool box “If it fixes things it’s in the box”

In order for your brand biology to be compatible in such a harsh environment, in order or your kind to survive, the brand must master the skills necessary to stand out among your species.

First Study the industry before entering the market, understand the audience reactions to the existing, past and future products and services in your industry.  That will provide some needed input and insight into the customer’s perception.

Second define your species if your brand is serving an appearance, a function or a specific concept. Make sure you highlight those features build your campaigns based on how unique and authentic your brand is.

The elements of brand biology are many. Customer’s perception and audience cognitive behavior are two essential components of determining the DNA of your brand biology.