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This past week at ANA Masters of Marketing in Orlando, Gayle Troberman, CMO of iHeartMedia, presented findings from a study conducted alongside Malcom Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries. The study, which was conducted this past May and published in September, found that marketers are on the whole extremely different from the typical American consumer, and both sides could be suffering because of it. The study found that 44 percent of Americans feel ignored by brands, and 72 percent don’t want to buy from brands who are ignoring them.
Examples from the report include American consumers being more likely to participate in leisure activities such as hunting and fishing whereas marketers are more likely to favor pickleball and tennis. Consumers are more likely to define “luxury” as name brand paper towels and premium cuts of meat; marketers identify luxury with designer labels. Most marketers included in the study live in the Northeast, while the majority of the consumers surveyed, which was adjusted for census balance, reside in the South.
Perhaps the most important finding for those who work in advertising is how different the path to purchase is for a typical American compared to a marketer. Marketers in this study averaged over $200K in annual income, and might decide to make a purchase of over $1,000 in a matter of days or even hours, without consulting anyone else. Consumers are more likely to seek approval for $100 purchases, even though their income averaged around $100K a year, often taking months to research and search for deals. As a consequence, marketers are more likely to underestimate the ease of which they can convince someone to make a purchase.
Despite millions of dollars in research budgets, including focus groups, consumer insights platforms, custom-designed studies and the increased availability of first-party data, almost half of Americans are feeling unseen by brands. This phenomenon seems to mirror the general sentiment of the country at the moment – two distinct groups of people coming from different geography, cultures, and likely political views, both feeling totally misunderstood by the other.
Data can’t necessarily replace a fundamental understanding and sensibility of consumer values and influence, but it can help identify an unexpected insight or a seed of an idea, and round out that idea with detail. Data can also be used to validate an idea that stems from bias or personal experience. “We’ve got more data than we’ve ever had in the history of marketing, and yet there’s a lot of human bias that’s creeping into our marketing decisions,” Troberman said when speaking with AdAge. “Part of it is probably because you can justify things with data more easily.”
Marc Pritchart, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer, gave the ANA Masters of Marketing keynote that hinted at a potential, very simple antidote to this disconnect: connecting with consumers in “everyday moments.” P&G spends time with consumers, in their homes, to understand their pain points as they move through their daily chores and tasks. This allows the brand to find emotional themes that they can acknowledge and help solve in their product messaging. Notably, Pritchart is one marketer who does not reside in the Northeast – he lives in Cincinnati where P&G is based.
Understandably, marketers in the creative field are trained and paid to come up with novel ways to communicate a product's value and convince people to buy it. Yet if the beginnings of an idea stem from their own experiences, lives, and backgrounds, the chance of a messaging mismatch is very high. Instead of using data to validate a hunch, brands can use data, both qualitative and quantitative, as their starting point. We might not be able to change the differences between marketers and consumers, but we can start by accepting that we are fundamentally different and take steps to understand how consumers actually feel and think, creating more value for both sides.
