Awareness: Tactical or Strategic?
October 8th, 2012 • Marketing Insights
You will hear the topic of awareness being thrown around like cigarette buds in the Indonesian advertising industry.
Whether the word materializes in the strategy of clients or planning of agencies, in my opinion, awareness as a goal is either used in excess or its purpose is misinterpreted and thus misused. In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, I just want to talk about what I think its values are and how it can serve as a tool to achieve certain goals.
James Thompson, CMO of Diageo APAC, stated in an earlier issue of Campaign Magazine this year that “[he] expects a campaign to drive top-of-mind awareness, but if it’s not driving other specific attributes then it’s not going to lead to consumption”. Thompson raises a good point about the insufficiency of awareness on its own. No one pays good money simply to be known. There is always a catch.
Thompson mentions top-of-mind awareness. In marketing, this is a highly sought after characteristic which basically allows a brand to be recalled off the top of someone’s mind upon mention of a certain industry. This I believe, is where the attractiveness of “awareness” stems from; because with TOMA, brand managers believe that their brands will continue to benefit through word of mouth. Essentially, it is thought that when you are able to achieve TOMA for opinion leaders, you have a greater chance of increasing the number of nodes in your customer network. What some forget is that even with all the awareness in the world, your brand could remain without advocacy. Advocacy is a pre-requisite to fuel the type of word of mouth that generates a desired change in behavior, whether that be participation, education or purchase.
To many companies, the goal in hiring advertising agencies is to drive up sales. As Thompson mentions, to do this, a positive change in consumption is needed. Now obviously, not all goals are related to sales. For those that have a different goal such as participation, the approach to awareness may be different however, the end goal is still a change in behavior. Some campaigns are very successful in achieving awareness but fail to convince their audience to take action. Viral campaigns often have this conundrum, such as the KONY 2012 campaign. The video has almost 90 million views on YouTube, however the action that it calls for in the video received a less than impressive result in real life.
I could argue that this was the difference between a tactical and strategic campaign. KONY 2012, an extremely successful campaign in terms of reach, was a strictly tactical campaign. It came out with one viral video and had “Cover the Night” merchandise, but could not achieve the result it called for because the campaign failed to achieve advocacy. To my understanding, advocacy can only be achieved through strategic, continuous and integrated campaigns. Once awareness is achieved, incentives and social pressures have to be mobilized to convert thoughts into opinions and eventually into action.
All I’m trying to say is that measures of success need to be focused on end goals rather than the means to that end. Often times, awareness can be weighed too highly in KPIs and therefore distort perceptions of success. That’s my 2 cents at least.