• by Jim Meskauskas , September 1, 2004

When I first started in advertising, I had two responsibilities: one was to post all of Burger King's spot TV buys in every market in the United States; the other was to learn as much as I could about using demographic research tools and understanding the information they provided.

I learned a lot from the first exercise, but I was excited by the second one. Looking for patterns in the mass of product usage, demographics, and - when available - behaviors sated my youthful lust for a treasure-hunt thrill.

The purpose of this pattern-seeking, as many of you know, is to most precisely identify a target market and then communicate with them as persuasively, specifically, and efficiently as you can.

The desire to speak to the right person at the right time is what lies at, or perhaps behind, the heart of most advertising. But there is a dark side to the kind of targeting which marketers are being asked more and more often to make possible, not only in outcome but in motive.

The promise of one-to-one marketing of the Peppers and Rogers variety or the laser-like targeting suggested by most direct marketing methods are attractive to any company that takes its investments seriously. Advertising is, after all, an investment. If your company looks at advertising as an expense, then the company should either quit advertising or quit the business.

Advertising is an outlay of capital in the hope that more than what was expended is returned, hence "return on investment." But too much focus on the most rarified, identifiable audiences means that a company is not seeing a bigger picture and lacks a vision. The desire for the most "certain" methods of reaching customers is borne of an aversion to risk, and an aversion to risk typically does little to promote growth. Too often advertisers and their agencies regurgitate sermons and preach to the same choir.

At a small panel discussion at the Harvard Club this week Mike Murphy, the Republican strategist who was in no small part responsible for getting Arnold Schwarzenegger elected as governor of California said, "Look, McDonald's never sends you a letter."

Think about it. If the only customer an advertiser insists on focusing on is an existing customer, than you may never reach new consumers. I always like to tell clients beginning a new advertising effort, "fish where the fish are biting." But if you always fish only where the fish are biting, you will eventually run out of fish.

Customer retention is critical for any business, and it is always cheaper to retain than to acquire, but maintenance marketing is just that. You are preserving the businesses status quo. You are not growing it. Growing requires risk. What businesses need is a way to plan for innovation, to account for and manage risk necessary for innovation.

This was the primary thesis of Clayton M. Christensen's book, "The Innovator's Solution." With careful study and a longer view - one that goes beyond the next quarterly earnings report - companies can find a way to incorporate constituents of innovation into the methodologies employed to develop new businesses and new markets. Companies do not typically incentivize their own people or those they partner with (e.g. agencies) to take risks or innovate, but rather mimic either themselves or others in a marketplace. Seldom do they follow a vision that hasn't already been fully vetted.

Political marketing, if we can call it that, is perhaps the most egregious offender of preaching to the choir. Political organizations spend more money talking to the already converted than any other marketing machine. Does anyone really think that a lawn sign in Hollywood or a letter to a donor in New York is going to do anything to increase the number of people who vote for a democratic presidential candidate?

Part of what drives the want for atomic-level targeting is the fear of taking the kinds of chances that some of the most vibrant successes have come from. Certainly it makes sense to try and reach consumers as efficiently as possible, and much of that is done through reaching them where you know they live.

But expansion efforts are always going to entail some degree of uncertainty. Behavioral targeting strategies and tactics work best to mitigate some of the unknown by using behaviors and actions as correlative determinants for future consumption. But even these techniques rely on a certain element of statistical faith.

You can't really call it spreading the word if no out outside the church hears it.