• by August 2, 2007

In some ways, people remain remarkably predictable. Even in the midst of a fast-changing technology and marketing environment, we respond the same way we always have to love, passion, fear and greed. As communications professionals, concerned with changing (or reinforcing) purchasing behavior, we need to think about how to engage that love and passion and fear and greed. That job hasn't changed.

What's changed, though, is the speed at which people respond to brands that manage to engage those motivations.

In the old days, before the widespread adoption of the Internet, the basic job of advertising was to plant an idea in the mind of the consumer that was strong enough to stick around until they were about to make a choice between competing brands.

That time lag could range from a matter of days (between seeing a TV commercial for a new toothpaste and buying some at the grocery store) to many months, even years, for more considered purchases like white goods or cars.

Now, with the Web, there's often no lag time between stimulus and response. Rather, in the Internet era, when we see something we like - an ad, a piece of packaging, a new product, a new name - we instantly research it, ask a friend about it, buy it online or send a picture of it to someone we know.

That's an entirely new dynamic with significant implications for the way we create marketing communications and build brands.

Perhaps the most important implication is that now we always need to thinking about closing a sale. I realize that sounds a little trite. Surely we should always be thinking about closing a sale. But the reality is that some of the most successful advertising of the last 20 years was based on creating a cultural bond between the consumer and the brand rather than on actively selling something.

In the old model, brand-building proved to be quite effective. By creating that cultural bond, an idea of the brand was implanted that would linger long enough for it to influence a purchase decision some time later.

A very smart former planner, Robert Heath, wrote a book about this dynamic: The Hidden Power Of Advertising. In it, he argues there are two kinds of memory explicit (short-term) and implicit (long-term), and that advertising works most effectively when it engages our implicit memory. That happens at a subconscious level when we're not really paying attention. In other words, when we're unaware of the advertising effect, concepts, images and ideas embed themselves in our memory surreptitiously. The benefit to advertisers is that implicit memories last a very long time, whereas explicit memory only lasts about 45 minutes.

In the old model, the short span of explicit memory was a problem. Very few purchase decisions were made within 45 minutes of seeing a branded communication. But that's not so any more.

Now the purchase occurs straightaway. And if it doesn't, at the very least the research process will have started.

This accelerated timetable means we need to think much more fluidly about how people respond to our brand stimulus, what they'll think, what they'll do next, how we keep their interest, how we engage them in conversation, and ultimately, how we close the loop and make the sale.

And that too means that those of us who work on the agency side of the business will have to be much more active custodians of the brand. We'll need to be better equipped to create and execute digital ideas as easily as we create and execute packaging ideas, or ideas for TV shows or for direct-mail campaigns.

It's advertising's "butterfly effect." A shift in consumer behavior that's going to result in profound changes for the industry - the way we think about brands, the way we engage with people and the way we structure ourselves to do it.