Your visitors have evolved, have you?
Introduction
Not since the emergence of television fifty years ago have we seen such a metamorphosis in consumer behavior. The good-’ol-days when all that was needed to reach your audience was a product, a strong message, and enough money to keep them both in front of as many eyeballs as possible is a thing of the past. For years, people “behaved” the way they were supposed to and everything was going along just fine. Then all of a sudden, people’s behavior began to change overnight. They stopped “wanting” to listen to you, they stopped “wanting” to read what you wrote, and stopped “wanting” to look at your ads, they simply stopped paying attention to you. I mean seriously, how rude! So, what happened?
Well, in the 1980’s came the first transition with the introduction of cable & satellite TV. The unforeseen result was the beginning of the end – the fragmentation of mass media. Then in the mid-90’s the Internet arrived on the scene and in a short time established itself as something more than just a fad. And just like that, almost overnight the traditional advertising & marketing model was shattered beyond repair. The Internet now competed for the same attention that the other media channels were vying for, but unlike any other media channel in history the Internet was the first channel that was “push & pull”, or a two-way medium that allowed consumer’s to interact directly with systems, companies, other consumers, etc. and the system would react back. To add to this, the low cost of content publishing technologies allowed anyone with an Internet connection and a voice to stand up and be heard around the world, effectively changing Mass Media, into Media of the Masses.
Here Boy! Sit. Good Dog
In 1904, the famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in physiology for his work on digestive glands. Prior to winning the Nobel, Pavlov discovered a physiological phenomenon that his legacy is probably more famous for and remembered by most for today, “conditioned reflexes”, a.k.a. Pavlov’s Dog.
The story goes a little something like this… One day a inside of Pavlov’s lab a colleague noticed that a dog would salivate as soon as it saw or heard the assistant that fed him, before ever seeing or smelling his food. At first Pavlov found this very frustrating, as it disrupted the results of his test. But after a while he be began to wonder why this was happening. So, Pavlov conducted an experiment to see if one could learn to associate a natural stimulus, such as a food, with an unrelated stimulus, this eliciting a response by the unrelated stimulus alone.
Fast forward a couple of decades to the early 1920’s when a man whose resume includes experimenting on infants, leaving the academia world under suspicious circumstances, and established the first psychological school of behavioralism unleashed his brilliance and knowledge of behavior upon the world of advertising. His name was John Watson, 1878 – 1958. And still today, nearly ninety years later, the world of marketing, advertising, and branding are still following his techniques of behavioralism –Brand Association.
Effectively what brand association attempts to do is manipulate the response to a stimulus, e.g. brand name or logo, which initially provides a neutral feeling or response with the objective to train people to make a “false” connection between the a positive emotion, e.g. happiness or feeling attractive, and the particular brand being advertised.
If one lesson was learned from the dot.com era, it is that it takes more than a brilliant mind and money to make your brainchild to come to life and survive. So, how did mass media evolve and survive for so many years? Like primordial stew, the right time, right place, and maybe a Ouija board under the pale moon light contributed, but some very specific criteria are essential to breathing the long lasting life cycle and impact of mass media.
- Society: People lived in localized communities. The number of people in a certain area was relatively small this allowed them interact with each other more often since they went to the same church, shopped at the same stores, went to the same schools, and often worked together as well.
- Technology: People had limited access to the same media channels. There were at best only a couple of newspapers, three major TV networks, and not many more radio stations.
- Market: People had limited choices in brand options.
The result: people were “salivating” for the next greatest product. For nearly eighty years this model of mass media and brand association would thrive, but the Internet would change all of this almost overnight.
