Conditioning your Consumers: Slicing Through The Digital Noise To Find Your Bell

We drown in the sound of digital noise. In fact, 4,000 to 10,000 ads bombard the average American every day without them being actively aware of it. Our senses are wired to pick up everything. Literally. In order for our brains to functionally survive, our minds file away most of all this constant stimuli back to our subconscious.  

But subliminal messaging aims to nudge our subconscious awake, keeping these files alive. It’s a decades-old form of advertising that banks on the fact our subconscious will continue to record the messages and then translate them into conscious thought and action when needed. It’s a marketing tactic that pushes impressions of a brand, product or person with the aim of causing us to trust, buy, share and, ultimately, become customers for life.

But it’s getting harder for companies to rely on this type of messaging because the digital noise has increased in volume and variety. Brands are now battling a more desensitized audience, especially among millennials, who don't react to ads the same way baby boomers did. You then find yourself failing at fine-tuning your message. Soon your audience has drowned out or tuned out what you have to offer. While brands are chasing how to deploy the next elusive message and build the next over-the-top cool experience, I want to talk about a methodology that simplifies the thinking and slices through the digital noise.

Introducing "Find Your Bell".

I've recently started asking brands "If you were to define the key phrase that you want to be known for, ie. if someone talks to someone else about a problem they have, how does your name become top of mind in conscious thought as the solution?"

The question I pose is part of a methodology modeled after Pavlov's dog experiment where Pavlov conditioned dogs to salivate upon his ringing a bell. He taught the dogs to associate the reward of food to the bell’s ringing, thus connecting an unconditioned response to a conditioned action.  

Applying this to a marketing strategy, “the dog” represents your customer’s or prospect’s problem, “the bell” represents your content and messaging, and “the reward” is the solution or answer to that problem. Calibrating a campaign to your bell, even as bite-sized as a key phrase or word cloud, can effectively condition your audience to connect their underlying goals or issues to what you bring to the table. Eventually, they’ll “salivate” at the thought of you as the “go-to guy”, the standard bearer, the industry’s inspiration, the teacher, the cure, or the thought leader.  These unconscious connections can trigger conscious actions in the form of customer interactions while you build your brand.

Social media places this subliminal-based, trigger-targeted strategy on steroids. Why? Because conditioning depends on consistency, persistence and shortness of time to cement connections. Pavlov found that the quicker the time between ringing the bell and feeding the dog, the stronger the association. By its nature, social media meets this criteria through its ubiquitous and constant use - hourly, daily and weekly. For example, 62% of U.S. adults get their news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center.

Additionally, it’s mind-bogglingly just how much we depend on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn to not only immediately relate to our world, but define our purchasing power within it. For example, 37% of all consumers said they use social media to find out about products and services, while 41 percent of consumers who spent 2 hours or less on social media spent at least $500 on online purchases over the past 12 months, while 38 percent of consumers who spent at least 3 hours per day on social media spent $500 or more.  Moreover, nearly 30 percent of people who use social media at least three hours per day said showing support of and engaging with their favorite companies or brands was very or somewhat important.

Essentially, social media by far is the loudest piece of the digital noise.  And with its addictive construct and immediate engagement, social media is ripe for applying the “find your bell” concept as a component of a campaign.

In my world, I'm conditioning my audience to connect Taylor Gaines when they think Social Media. So I ask you this - what's your bell? Taking the time to answer this question can mean the key to bringing your audience in tune with your company amidst the cacophony.  It can make you stand out from the digital noise and make your content music to the ears of those who need it.

If you need help brainstorming what your bell might be, let's talk! Send me a LI message :)