Relevance and Crows Speaking to Caw Posted on May 22, 2008 Post a comment

The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw. - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

Wouldn’t it be nice if every marketing message had the spot-on relevance of the crows speaking to Caw? Our advertising campaigns would be 100 percent efficient. We cackle, and Caw knows our message was meant just for him. Of course, the crows’ message wasn’t tailored at all, they simply had one message and kept repeating it everywhere, over and over and over, until finally the right person came across it.

In the real world it’s a little more complicated. Aside from not being named Caw, most people don’t like cackling. So, by cackling everywhere, all the time, we’ll reach Caw with a relevant message, but we’ll waste a great deal of our marketing effort delivering our message to those for whom it has no relevance. What’s worse, like the crow that’s been cackling in my backyard for the last three hours, we’ll alienate most of the rest of the consuming population with our incessant cackling!

Successful communication involves both developing the right message and delivering it to the right person. Most early attempts at targeting were based on neighborhood or zip code level demographics. The logic (and phrase, which eventually became a tagline for one segmentation company) was “birds of a feather flock together.” If your zip code has a few people named Caw in it, then it’s likely to have even more people named Caw in it. Why? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than this, but it has to do with the basic assumption that the distribution of Caws across the land is not random.

Suffice it to say; had the crows used this kind of targeting they would probably never have landed in my backyard in the first place. What a sweet thought! But, what if a couple of people named Caw just happened to actually live in my zip code? Well that would be all it would take for my trees to become saturated with crows thinking my name could be Caw and that I’d probably want to hear them cackle. And it wouldn’t just be my trees. It would be everyone’s trees in my neighborhood, because research tells them we all might be Caws! Hmm…maybe this is what happened in my neighborhood?

To help the crows communicate more effectively, we need to help them vary their message and to target their communication channels more effectively. With good market research, the crow in my backyard would understand that no one named Caw lives within five miles (as the crow flies) of my backyard. With further research into my neighborhood, we might be able to help the crows develop a more targeted message, perhaps one involving the cooing of a mourning dove that would be received much more favorably when delivered from a tree in my backyard.

Thankfully, most marketers have gone beyond zip code level, saturation marketing campaigns. Through database marketing we can now deliver our marketing campaigns specifically to targeted audience segments, at the individual level. The rapid growth in search engine marketing enables consumers to effectively self-select themselves for particularly relevant marketing messages. Mobile technology has allowed companies a flurry of on-the-go target optimization opportunities. And better research and more effective targeting have probably contributed to the fact that I have recently noticed an increase in the sweet cooing of the mourning doves out back. What the crows don’t know is that every time I hear them cackle, they drive me one step closer to buying a BB gun. The wrong message to the wrong household isn’t just a waste of a marketing message; it can cause collateral damage.