November 2023

The Dying Art of Listening

It's long past time for companies to meet people where they actually are, not where brands want them to be.

Let’s start here:

Last year, I posited that 2023 would be the year of practical marketing. The crux of my argument was that frivolous brand activities were over-extending the hands of marketers, thrusting many marketers into “advertising for advertising’s sake” type moments that were distasteful, ineffective, or just straight up forgettable. I referenced the many obvious marketing flops within crypto, the metaverse, and NFTs; pointed to the already-in-late-2022 useless Twitter and full saturation of collab culture; and the rapidly declining quality of brand content on TikTok as trends turned self-referential and community managers had to find ways to break the 4th wall to be relevant. The most shared quote of our 2023 preview was this:

“Quite simply, the novelty of virality is gone. Countless boxes to fling content into means countless communities with their own codes, systems, and definitions of “good.” Consumers are too spread apart to recreate the monocultural fame of early viral brands. But, perhaps more importantly, in times of uncertainty people care more about tangible benefits than relative ones.”

I bring this up as 2024 looms for two reasons: 

The first is accountability. I think it’s important to gut check and evolve thoughts as information changes. For the most part, I still agree with what I said would fail in 2023. Our social media environment and culture at large are considerably more fragmented than they were a year ago, making it additionally impractical to bank on “make it go viral” or other vague “use social media to create fame” planning that brands have fallen back on for lack of better, more thoughtful briefs. 

On what I got wrong: I will admit that collabs continue to dominate and attract attention (and there were some I really liked this year!) so we haven’t found the consumer saturation point yet in that regard. I’ll also say that despite the continued fragmentation of social platforms, TikTok’s ability to dictate major cultural trends has proven to be stronger than I expected. This is thanks to the rampant recycling of TikTok content on other platforms like X, YouTube, and Reels, recycling that is sometimes done by creators trying to “sweat their assets” and other times by poachers in the name of “aggregation”/”curation” (aka stealing content).

The second reason I wanted to revisit our discussion around practical marketing is that I don’t believe my prediction went far enough to express how insular it seems the planning, creation, and evaluation of marketing has become. I’ve spent most of this year grappling with this insularity and where it shows up in the work and culture:

These concerns amplified when Alexa and I spent two weeks in August visiting 18 malls & shopping centers across the country during Back to School season. As we spoke to dozens of shoppers, we heard time and time again that most businesses just weren’t speaking their language. Consumers had thoughtful, constructive feedback about the stores they frequent that should be easy to reconcile with. But instead of expecting brands to listen, shoppers had become resigned to making their own accommodations for the pitfalls of the experience.

We did a lot of driving in those two weeks, Alexa behind the wheel and me playing navigator & DJ, pumping out tracks from the 90s and 00s. As we crossed an expanse of highway about 45 minutes outside Houston on our way to an outlet mall, we fell into a Linkin Park rabbit hole. Their album Meteora on shuffle, we landed on a chorus that crystalized what we were hearing time and time again from shoppers across America: 

“Try to give you warning, but everyone ignores me,

Told you everything loud and clear, But nobody’s listening.

Call to you so clearly but you don’t want to hear me,

Told you everything loud and clear, But nobody’s listening.”

When Brands Only Listen For Themselves

What I learned this year isn’t that marketing has become impractical; it’s actually that brands have lost the plot when it comes to the role they play in the lives of consumers. Think about the world we are in today, one of malaise/crisis/creative indifference. The moments requiring reflection don’t come in waves, but are constant. In response, most brands seem to have decided to do one or more of these 3 things:

  1. Act like a “person” on the internet to build camaraderie. This behavior has been well-documented as a race for engagement, but regularly produces weird moments like this exchange between ToysRUs and Edible Arrangements on Threads about the well-being of a giraffe.

  2. Rely on “nostalgia” as the entire source of connection between brand and consumer. This is another well-documented tactic, but it’s worth noting that using nostalgia as the only way to tell your story can be dangerous, even making some legacy brands feel older. On top of that, research from Quick Study for a client earlier this year found that people don’t feel nostalgia often enough to justify using it as a core marketing strategy if your goal is to increase purchase frequency. We also found that people associate nostalgia with sadness almost as much as they connect it to happiness. So tread lightly here!

  3. Build “communities” with their consumers. We’ll go deeper on this topic today, but before we do, maybe whet your appetite by joining the official M&M’s Discord with its 1,874 members. If you don’t want to join, you’re not missing much, just a poorly engaged space that was launched by the brand in 2021, had a sweepstakes for free products, promoted a mobile app, and then stopped getting moderated sometime in summer or fall of 2022. Community!

Today we’re going to hone in on that word, because this ambition to “build community” has become a main selling point and yardstick for marketers both internally and externally. It was a neat trick that excused companies from going out and learning about its audiences because it expected people to choose to “join” the brand’s world instead. It was a selfish decision that placed too much emphasis on social media and not enough on places where consumers may actually be open to hearing a brand’s message. Worst of all, it was mostly lip-service and fog machines covering up a lack of effort to truly understand the people these “communities” were supposed to be full of.

It’s obvious to anyone spending time in corporate America today that the idea of “community building” for most brands was never a serious undertaking, and hasn’t been for over a decade (check out this list of failed brand communities from 2013!). For one, the commitment to building true community from a staffing or budget perspective was rarely present. Real communities are hard to run! They take time & people to moderate & populate. Every decision made is supposed to represent the voice or ethos of the brand in some way, but companies have become too complex, self-aware, controlling of their image, and process obsessed to shift as fast or frequently as the zeitgeist does. 

The outward commitment to creating “space” for consumers despite the clear internal barriers to successfully achieving that goal is an original sin of today’s impractical marketing morass, and a prime example of brands trying to place themselves at the center of the story. Brands essentially taught consumers to expect something they hadn’t asked for, then didn’t deliver on it, and now don’t understand why people say community from brands is important to them. A study this year found that 37% of people have been let down by an online brand community and that 78% of people believe the term “community” is being overused by brands that aren’t providing a community experience. The truth is that most brands were never actually listening, and consumers were tricked into thinking they were part of something bigger than their need state.

I want to be clear that there is data that supports branded communities deepening consumer allegiances with the product and its other consumers. This study from back in 2007, for example, found that people “who identify more strongly with their own brand community” would tend to rate users of their brand as more competent and more warm than users of rival brands.* What the study assumes, however, is that the branded community is active, well-run, and often engaged with. Based on my 12 years of experience in the social & engagement space, I don’t believe there are many brands standing on the foundation necessary to actually create and sustain a community worthy of a consumer’s time. Community was never something natural to brands, or a prerequisite for their success, but instead wormed its way into the conversation as a catch-all tool to soften the edges of capitalism and make purchasing products feel like part of a deeper mission. And who are they really for? In reality, only 7.5% of Americans say they want most brands to run customer communities/forums (GlobalWebIndex Q3 2023). The truth is that the role of brands has been miscast for quite some time, leading to misused resources and a misunderstanding of what consumers are actually looking for.

Proposing A More Realistic Role For Brands

In an interview this summer with Courier, popular writer & consultant Venkatesh Rao spoke about how he has in the past referred to his publications as “more like an airport than a community.” “People pass through and maybe take some souvenirs with them,” he said. “I like it that way. A place where people influenced and were influenced for a while. It feels good to see all the interesting things people have done after passing through this airport.” The distinction Rao draws here between community and airport is fascinating to me, and I believe instructive for brands that have bought into their own story of community instead of listening to what consumers are actually asking for.

Let’s look at some core differences between a community and a transit hub. Communities tend to have shared values that unite them. They are always-on & collaborative. Communities encourage peer-to-peer interaction. A good community is hard to move on from because of what it provides. How many brands out there do all of these things or act in all of these ways? It’s rare, which is what makes it special. The majority of brands half-heartedly deliver on maybe half of these and call it a day, which is exactly why most brands are transit hubs.

Values don’t tend to be as important when choosing a transit hub. Transit hubs are not a constant in life but available when needed. They are unilateral versus collaborative, providing their service at their discretion. There is little peer-to-peer interaction as everyone passes through aside from the odd meet-cute in the terminal in a Meg Ryan rom-com. And if a certain service offered by a transit hub doesn’t provide what you need, there are generally others to readily replace it (other airlines, train times, etc.)

A community tries to center the brand, but a transit hub gives it a role in the consumer’s broader life. It still involves interaction, but in a less demanding way. Being a transit hub doesn’t make a brand passive, but instead provides a clear framework for what actions they should take based on the needs of the consumer. Remember a minute ago when I said only 7.5% of Americans want brands to run communities? In the same study, 37.5% of Americans said they want brands to listen to their feedback. Collecting feedback one-way from consumer-to-brand is much easier than trying to establish a full-on peer-to-peer community, and 30% more people want that level of depth anyway! 

It should be noted that I am not conflating brand communities with the ability of a brand to create emotionally compelling connections with its consumer. There is, and always will be, an inherent power in strong brand narratives, but those narratives get you nowhere if the on-ramp to product isn’t there once people have bought in. This is where the transit hub stands out for its ability to project a message to the consumer (perhaps even an emotional one) within a framework that ensures a good experience and doesn’t overpromise. It forces brands to balance the emotional and functional in a way that better serves consumer behavior. 

We’ve discussed this before in relation to fashion & sustainability, as well as the in-store experience, but the functional sense of ease & convenience far outweigh other factors when it comes to how consumers view their shopping experience on and offline. The seamless experiences consumers want are much easier to come by when brands aren’t centering themselves in the story emotionally, but instead are balancing their story with the literal act of shopping customers are doing in their world. Or said otherwise, transit hub thinking gets at the core of what most consumers prioritize in their shopping experience.

Accepting the fact that not every brand needs a community also frees up the brand to start looking for consumer interests & behaviors that might actually be useful from a storytelling POV. Study upon study can show us how the early 2020s changed consumer behavior and expectations at large, but the collective experience of 2020 is only getting further from the present, and people clearly don’t feel that the advertising of the past few years has kept up with them and their individual needs. I’ve referenced a version of this stat before, but according to GlobalWebIndex’s 2023 Q3 data, only 10% of Americans feel represented in the advertising they see. If it’s true that over $300 billion will have been spent on advertising in the United States this year, it’s possible that $270 billion of it was ineffective because it didn’t feel relatable or relevant.**

How Brands Can Make The Shift

The rate of change in the world is only going to increase, so the rate at which brands observe, react to, and embrace that change needs to speed up. True research is vital to understanding consumer behavior, needs, and aspirations. Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi, touched on this in a piece for WARC last month after its Future of Strategy report found that in-person qualitative research is now the research method least used by strategists. He described the world brands have built for themselves as a “a digital twin of the real world from which we build our strategies, create our work and plan our campaigns” that “is an aspirational place, not for consumers but for organizations – a fake world conjured into existence by marketers’ distaste for the real one with all its ugliness, mess and complexity.

Here’s how we fix it:

  1. Make decisions like your brand is a transit hub, not a community. This will center the storytelling on the consumer and not the brand.

  2. Reassess how you learn about the people you want to talk to, how they see the world around them, and how they talk about the brands they love. Create a new learning agenda, one that asks real questions about relevant consumer interests and behaviors, not just how much time they spend on Instagram.

  3. Bring back budgets for spending time in physical spaces with the people you’re trying to reach. Quant studies online are nice, but they lack the color of being in the real world. Go to the worlds of your audience, learn how they talk about their needs, see how those needs manifest in their shopping behavior firsthand, and then verify those learnings with quant and vice versa.

  4. Develop systems for doing this work rapidly & regularly. If it takes too long to compile, it will almost immediately be outdated. The path to relevance comes from authentically showing up for your consumer in a clear and consistent way.

This is all especially important as we wrap up 2023 because the gap between the need states of consumers and the storytelling of brands that are supposedly serving them will only widen in 2024. We’re headed into a contentious election, continued economic uncertainty, likely some controversial Supreme Court rulings, and the general unease that comes from a world that feels increasingly on the edge. This is no time for wasting time with the same outdated planning cycles and months-long research pieces that provide insight but not action. What’s needed today is a fresh plan that gets you the clarity you need to effectively speak to the right audience, at the right time, in the right places, with the right voices.

One of the traits of a transit hub I mentioned earlier is that you can generally move on from one if it isn’t delivering what you need. You can switch your airline loyalty, choose to take a different rental car, etc. That decision comes down to trust and loyalty. The surest sign that brands aren’t listening enough is that consumers are less loyal than they’ve been in years. According to GlobalWebIndex, Americans are already 5% less loyal to the retailers & brands they like than they were in Q2 2020 (a drop from 38% to 33%). And why should they be when they don’t feel heard? The warning signs are there, but nobody’s listening.

*We’ll ignore for now the finding from the same study that “brand community members who report a higher degree of bias in favor of their brand’s image over their rival brand’s image will report a greater tendency to trash talk the rival brand within their own brand community.” The implication that branded communities become naturally weaponized against rival brands is a problem for another day.

**Put it this way: if marketers in the US played baseball, they’d be Phillies designated hitter Kyle Schwarber. Sure, he hits a lot of home runs (virality!), but his overall batting average is historically bad for a leadoff hitter (lack of consistent relevance). I love a good Schwarbomb, but brands aren’t baseball players! They can’t live or die on one-off moments; they need a plan for consistent & authentic storytelling that their audience will actually come back to in the long run. (Can you tell I’m not over the Phillies collapse in the NLCS yet?)

Global CEOs are saying Quick Study “moves at light speed without compromising on research and quality” and that we are “the real deal—the kind of team you want in your corner for all the big, gnarly, complex ‘how are we ever going to solve this?’ problems.” If your brand needs some smart problem solving, commission Quick Study to make a Study Guide for you.

Send us an email & we’ll custom design a plan that gets you the answers you need: hello@quick.study