All Blacks are a brain strain

Melbourne Herald Sun 12 June, 2010

A few months ago I helped out at an agency that needed some web-page copy written urgently. The client was a manufacturer of breakfast cereals, the market was New Zealand and the promotion was all about rugby and All Blacks.

So for the few days I had to think like a teenage Kiwi rugby-tragic All Blacks fanatic. It was a strain on the brain cells I can tell you. I never understood rugby even in my own teens.

But in business you often find yourself having to think through the mind of a customer who is not the least bit like you. And you have to be convincing.

This calls for that much overused word “empathy”. It’s different from sympathy. It means feeling what they are feeling, from the inside, taking aboard their likes and dislikes and even prejudices.

A US research firm has been doing a lot of work on this, and has put people into 16 different categories. For example, people like me, in advertising or journalism, they put in a class called “word” people. Probably you would fit in that too.

But these people make up just 18.5 per cent of the population, who do much of the talking to everyone else.

The trouble is that the ads we create tend to appeal to other word people - like the clients and their marketing managers - and maybe don’t strike the right note with the rest of the population.

The company, Xyte Inc, did tests on TV commercials. And found that these ads tend to do disproportionately well with word people.

The company’s CEO, Larry Burns, was not surprised. “This is happening more often than we would like to admit," he said. While agencies are briefed on their target markets, they also want the clients and their own peers to like the ads. “We like to talk. We like word problems. We like to express ourselves. "

But often this is not what appeals to the customers. They don’t want to know how clever you are, they want to know if the product will give them what they want - in tangible, understandable terms.

Another category Xyte calls the "hands". These are people who prefer working with their hands. Their focus is much more immediate and practical. And they make up 30% of the population, a bigger portion than word group. "They like touching things, tangible things, and they often don't like ads that appeal to word people," says Burns.

Anyone who’s raised a child knows that they emerge from the womb hard-wired with certain personality traits, likes and dislikes, that no amount of training or enforcement will change. So it is that a person will be dismal in one environment yet exceptional in another.

A product or advertisement will appeal to one set of people but turn off another. It’s important to know the market for each product - and when you identify those who react against it, you can vary your message accordingly.

This you can only do by studying your audience - your customers. Talking to them and understanding their view of the world. The researchers say they are “segmented via patterns of predictability in media, messaging and purchase”. In plain English, if you know your customers and their core attitudes, this will tell you what to say and where to reach them.

Because the fact is that conventional classifications don’t necessarily work. A middle aged woman and a teenage boy might respond to the same stimulus (“Carn the All Blacks!”) while two adult men might totally disagree with each other on a product or issue (“Magpies!”, “Blues!”).