by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay Today we have a mystery for you to solve. Get out your pipe and deerstalker hat. But first, the set-up.
Recently Dave Trott had an excellent post about the limits of strategy.
I have always felt that in advertising, strategy is essential but it’s not enough. The problem with most of our agency strategists is that they complicate the shit out of the easy stuff and screw up the hard stuff.
For the most part, peoples’ purchasing behaviour is pretty easy to figure out. First, there’s the utilitarian stuff. They buy these things because they’re cheaper, nicer looking, more convenient, better tasting, or work better. No mystery there.
Next, there’s the emotional stuff. They buy these things because the brand makes them feel better. Also, no mystery.
Planners and other strategists take great pains to make these obvious behaviours seem arcane. After all, if a dumb-ass blogger can figure this shit out, who needs a “cultural anthropologist?”
Then there are the 10% of consumer behaviours that really are mysterious. This is the stuff that is very hard to explain and truly requires the help of a good strategist. Sadly, this is the stuff that many of them get wrong.
Here’s an example.
I get The New York Times delivered to my home in Oakland every morning. Yet when I’m travelling, I don’t buy The Times on Mondays or Tuesdays. I do buy it, however, on Wednesdays through Sundays.
Pretend you’re a marketing strategist, and see if you can come up with a logical explanation for this purchasing behaviour.
Before the answer, an observation.
While most of our purchasing behavior is done for obvious reasons, we each have little quirks that are very difficult for a strategist to intuit or even discover.
For example, there are restaurants I go to not because I like the food, but because I like the bread or the bar. There are also restaurants I avoid whose food I like, but whose bathrooms stink. Likewise, there are a number of categories I participate in in which my behavior is due mainly to personal quirks. I am sure we each have some of these.
The point is, it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that data has all the answers. There are always personal behaviors that are not easily explained by anything other than knowing the person.
Now to The New York Times mystery.
The answer is this. I get most of my news on line, not from the newspaper. I get the newspaper for basically three reasons: the sports section, the business section, and the crossword puzzle.
The Times has a terrible sports section so I don’t read it for that. The business section is very good, but not compelling. The primary reason I get The Times is the crossword puzzle.
The Times crossword puzzle gets tougher as the week goes on. Monday and Tuesday are not challenging for me; Wednesday starts to be a challenge; Thursday is usually pretty difficult and contains a trick to it; Friday and Saturday are killers; Sunday is about as hard as Thursday, but it’s big so it’s fun.
So the explanation is, I don’t buy The Times on Monday or Tuesday because the crossword is too easy. It’s highly unlikely that this behavior is representative of anyone but me. Nonetheless, I think it demonstrates that synthesizing a correct explanation for a purchasing behavior – when not obvious – can be a tricky business.
The Ad Contrarian is Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), the author of The Ad Contrarian and 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising. This column has been republished from his blog The Ad Contrarian.
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