Creating an earned mindset
By: Gail Heimann, CEO of The Weber Shandwick Collective
Someone once said, “you can’t buy love.” But, still, marketers try to buy love every day. With every increasingly data-driven fiber of their beings.
Here’s my message to the marketing world: You can attempt to buy love, and loyalty, reputation, and respect. In some cases, you’ll fail and in others your success will be fleeting.
Because the most efficient and effective way to capture these holy grails of the business world isn’t to buy them; it is to earn them. And no, this isn’t another dreary dialectic on “earned media.” But it is, I hope, the first of many revelatory arguments for something much bigger and more potent — an earned “mindset.” Because to earn value you have to contribute value.
Here’s why:
The world has changed and – in the face of the most human-seeming technologies we have ever experienced – real human-ness has become our behavioral north star. A good thing, in my opinion. But getting here has been rough.
We’ve got the permacrisis – the never-ending collision of health, social, climate, economic and geopolitical issues that forms the unrelenting, “everything is always on fire” backdrop of life as we know it.
We’ve been hung out and wrung out. We are an hourly doom scroll away from the next unimaginably wrenching and threatening scenario and we need the guidance, wisdom, and warm embrace that – even in the age of wunderkind cyborgs – only humanity delivers.
And we’re all over the place media-wise. No more single source of trusted information. The media world is dizzyingly fragmented, algorithm-influenced, often-polarizing, an increasingly-fake content-filled, shifting, morphing nether worldly mash-up of genius and joy and mayhem and depravity. A tough place to navigate. It takes skills. Skills born of an earned mindset. More on that in a few paragraphs.
Here’s what else. The above-mentioned, hyper-fragmented media mash-up is, in fact, infinite yottabytes – that’s 1 septillion bytes plus – of content. In more earthly terms, that’s miles and miles of content no one ever sees.
And – a big downer for those of us earnestly producing a gigabyte or two of content to tell stories of and for brands and businesses – people don’t seem to care. According to Harvard Business Review, 77 percent of consumers claim to have no relationship with brands.
But they do care about not feeling marketed to. Blockthrough’s 2021 PageFair Adblock Report suggests that hundreds of millions of people are paying to block digital advertising. And governments are increasingly weighing in, regulating the use of personal data for commercial purposes and beyond. By the end of 2023, Gartner predicts 65 percent of the world’s population will have their personal data covered under data privacy regulation.
So, let’s add it all up; 8 billion of us are huddled together on the planet of endless crises, seeking information and entertainment from our choice of seminal or potentially lethal sources in a writhing media eco-system, pelted with so much “stuff” we’ve lost interest in lots of it. And the more data brings the commercial world closer to our lives, the more regulations will be imposed to protect us.
So, what do we marketing types do now?
The fast answer.
Something.
Do something.
Back to the New Golden Rule [of marketing].
TO EARN VALUE, YOU HAVE TO CONTRIBUTE VALUE.
As brand stewards, we can earn value by contributing value to the communities and stakeholders that are or will be important to a brand. By making moves, by taking action, by, DOING SOMETHING for the people who matter most to the health and success of a brand, business, or organization.
Making a move can take many forms:
· It can be speaking out on an issue.
· Co-creating culture with a community. Or several communities.
· Evolving a product to better align with a company’s beliefs or address unmet needs.
· Reimagining a business model to embrace emerging communities.
· Shaking up a taboo or disrupting a dusty protocol.
· Shaping a new movement or invigorating an old one.
· Making the invisible (people, processes) visible.
But it doesn’t have to be a move that will be extolled as bold or brave or involve any corporate chest-thumping whatsoever. Your biggest move could be listening harder. And more. And committing to deliver differently for the people who rely on a brand or product – as users or employees.
Important: no matter what move or moves we make; we need to activate them in-culture. Create the kinds of campaigns that earn coverage and conversation. We will not contribute value by piercing culture or by reflecting it for a moment in time; we need to make our moves fluidly within culture to add value that endures.
I know what you’re thinking. “You said this was NOT going to be another dreary dialectic on earned media.” It’s not. Because having an “earned mindset,” recognizing and respecting that we have a responsibility to contribute value to earn it, does not obviate the use of paid media.
In fact, I would argue that the optimal approach to building an effective and efficient campaign melds the more enduring brand-building of “earned” with the high-velocity, short term impact of precision marketing. The scope and power of your “earned mindset” is infinitely bigger than any classic earned media-alone tactical plan.
When it all comes together, when we optimize cultural salience, it creates impact. The Weber Shandwick Collective’s research with the IPA (a leader in advertising standards and effectiveness) –found culturally salient campaigns – those that have meaningful core elements that drive coverage and conversation – are 53 percent more likely to drive large business effects (KPIs like sales gain, market share, customer loyalty) and 2.6 times more likely to achieve very large profit growth.
Good outcome. For sure.
So, everything changed. But, perhaps, the kind-of, sort-of silver lining is that human-ness is the only way forward. Basic, time-honored ideas and philosophies like reciprocity are integral to civil society and should be the foundation of every marketing JD.
Put simply. Again. We have to contribute value to earn it. And that takes an earned mindset.
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Gail Heimann is CEO of The Weber Shandwick Collective, the strategic communications and consulting network.
