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Graham Page
I think there’s some really fascinating findings here about what different forms of media do. So for instance we’ve got all this interesting information that’s about the way physical media are processed in a subtly different way, in a more emotional way, in a more self referential way, that’s not to say more virtual media are in any way, kind of, not worth doing and so on because clearly different media have different roles within the mix.
So for instance you’ve got the potential for interaction in a much more active and dynamic way with virtual media than you do with physical media that are usually more static. And equally you’ve got kind of internet type targeting and online targeting that you can do with these sorts of media.
But clearly there is something interesting and different about a tangible physical media such as something that’s on paper, and I think this has some really interesting implications for all sorts of different sorts of marketing activities. It certainly seems that by doing something tangible and giving people something to hold or a more direct experience you may end up with something which is more real, which has a different role, evokes a bit more emotional processing and so therefore complements other parts of the marketing mix.
And in terms of what that means for marketers and marketing campaigns, I think the fact that we’re seeing the tangible marketing materials do something a little bit different is quite an important thing to think about when we’re designing campaigns, when we’re designing multimedia activity. I think if, I really think if we’re serious about a 360° approach to marketing, about having a fully multimedia campaign, I think if I were a marketer engaging in a campaign right now, I’d be definitely looking at what I could do that’s more tangible, physical or paper based to add an extra dimension to the campaign because I think without it we’re potentially missing some potential influence and some potentially, very successful avenues to explore.
I think if we now think about it as potentially having quite a strong brand effect then we need to give it its due in terms of the effort we put into developing the creative that’s being used, the effort that’s being developed into the quality of the material because that’s clearly going to be something that drives a lot of engagement, or potentially a lot of disengagement.
I think for many marketers actually one of the potentially intimidating things about this study is people may be thinking, well, do I have to do this all the time to measure the effects of these sorts of materials and, you know, do these big expensive scanner-based studies really tease apart some of these effects?
From my point of view I think we’re in a slightly different situation in that this study was all about establishing a generalisable finding, something which tells us something about how different media work, but I don’t think for an individual marketing campaign you have to go to these lengths. Now there’s a variety of other methods that can be deployed to do that. There are other forms of neuroscience methodology which are a little quicker to do, are more cost effective, do slightly different things but which can still be deployed here. But also conventional survey-based methods are very good at pulling apart the outcomes of different media exposures and there’s definitely methods that we can use there.
But one of the things that I think is important is that marketers now begin to look for some of the brand effects of some of these more tangible, maybe paper-based, direct mail-based campaigns rather than just thinking of them in terms of a direct response mechanism.