It’s slowly draining the attention of every human on the planet.

It plays into almost all human needs — as they are defined by the Maslow Hierarchy.

It’s the rectangular status-seeking device in your hands. That’s right. It’s your smartphone.

Maslow’s needs start with the basics. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, we all need food and water. Then safety. Next up is belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization.

The hierarchy was first introduced in a research paper by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943. He had no idea that 64 years later, the invention of the smartphone would supercharge the famous pyramid.

Here’s why: We now check our phones the equivalent of one day a week, and 20 percent of adults spend 40 hours a week on it. The stats suggest we check our phones 80 to 150 times per day, on average.

That’s not new news after a decade of the smartphone’s existence, but one of today’s biggest marketing mistakes is underestimating what people are doing with those phone checks.

With Maslow’s guidance, it’s clear we are reinforcing our need to belong, checking our status, and ultimately building our esteem toward self-actualization.

So, what can brand marketers do about it?

Marketers Marketing To Marketers

This amplified need to belong and check status has turned into hundreds of millions of personal advertising campaigns, all competing against brands for attention.

It is much more likely for people to adopt a brand based on friends and family sharing content than TV, Facebook and YouTube advertising combined.

They’re not just looking at friends and family content all day. They’re making it. Millennials might spend two hours a day creating and posting. Plus, there’s important time spent checking the metrics and seeing who liked their posts.

The sheer weight of personal messages from friends and family minimizes the “cut through” ability of advertiser-paid messaging. Literally, everyone is building status in real time, 24/7, with instant gratification of shared photos and videos traveling at lightning-fast smartphone processing speed.

If you multiply personal posts by the total number of friends on everyone’s contact list, you have a lot of ground to cover to join the conversation. The world of organic reach is a nonfactor for brands, leaving engagement as the affordable metric of choice.

Going forward, your job as a marketer is not just to engage one audience group. You also need to engage friends of friends.

That means, stop focusing on just your target market. It’s your target’s target you need to reach.

So, what to do differently in 2019?

Create A Brand Community

Fans sometimes love the identity of a brand so much, they brand themselves with it. Why is this important? Because whatever they’re doing ultimately will be the formula for building organic participation. When there’s enough participation, a community forms around the brand. Once that happens, creating friends of friends is no longer insurmountable.

Logically, if people are talking positively about your brand to reinforce their status, the marketer-to-buyer barrier is broken. You are one of them. In the friend set.

“Superfans” are those who feel a true sense of identity in their chosen brand relationships and are able to say that their friends would agree. Superfans are more likely to share content and brand themselves with the identity of their favorite brands than other fans. They “mentally smile” when they see others using their preferred brands.

Brands have achieved success in cultivating this type of following by following a formula:

1. Ignite the Fire
2. Fuel the Flame
3. Pass the Torch

This is the path for competitive brands going forward. The cost of finding that moment in the world of “friend posts and shares” as an outsider is a price tag that few can afford.

Ignite The Fire

Brands that have a unique story easily can get past “advertiser” and move to “friend” status. What’s true about your story? What’s likeable about it? Can you tell it in an inviting way?

Fat Face is a European clothing chain that got its name when its founders didn’t want to get off the French mountain they were skiing on. They were from the UK, and the name of their favorite slope translated to “Fat Face” in English. They started selling “Fat Face” t-shirts out of their VW van. Those original t-shirts amplified into a line of clothing and stores, and a style all their own. It’s a real story. And people want to brand themselves with it.

Organic Valley calls itself the “un-corporation.” It started as a group of independent farmers — and though the farmers themselves haven’t changed, they now they bring more than US$1 billion worth of dairy goods to stores throughout the U.S. They have videos with their CEO barefoot, and they show an organization chart with him at the bottom. Packages with cows kissing farmers just makes it a great brand and a believable story.

Fuel The Flame

Driving involvement in your brand can take many forms — from unique lingo and secret menus to co-creation concepts and gaming. The point is to give the consumer a connection point. Xbox allows users to custom design its own game controllers. It’s personal. It’s virtual. And it’s tactile. All in one idea.

Starbucks has a simple form on its website entitled “My Starbucks Idea.” This began in 2013 — and the company has created 277 products from more than 150,000 suggestions, including free WiFi, splash sticks, cake pops and pumpkin spiced lattes.

Designing shoes, playing games and interacting all lead to real conversations and entertainment, and allow brands to meet consumers where they already live and play. Joining them before they join you is the groundwork that all marketers need to do.

Pass The Torch

Appointing loyalists to tell your story builds reputations organically, as long as the tone is sincere and the rewards are fulfilling.

Southern Tide is a clothing line that targets a college market. It does so by recruiting college reps and benchmarking their status with trendsetters who are selling their credibility every day. For some, getting chosen to rep the brand has as much status as getting into the school of choice.

TheSkimm is a daily newsletter targeting a female audience. Advertisers can participate — not by submitting ads, but by providing rewards for Skimmbassadors. How to become one? Get 10 of your friends to sign up for the service. There are now 12,000 of them and more than 5 million readers.

Taco Bell created a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The package includes memorable (and shareable) moments and a taco 12-pack for guests. It’s joining people where they are and having fun with them. By the way, there’s a four-hour notice required in case you get the marriage fever.

Consider the economics of owning versus renting. Much like any other equity, it’s better to own. Own your data. Own your audience. Don’t be beholden to social networks. Email and e-commerce are far more affordable than paying for reach.

So, the lesson for 2019, is to move past just asking consumers to buy the brand. Instead, ask them to join the brand.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Norty Cohen, CEO and Founder of Moosylvania and author of Join the Brand, 2018, and The Participation Game, published in 2017.

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In our latest research fielded in January of this year, we are seeing more two-way connectivity with brands who work at it all year. When we asked “How have you connected with your favorite brand in the last 30 days?” we saw email at 20%. There’s always an argument for mass awareness – but our research also showed that any recommendations from friends to search were 2.5x more likely to influence adoption that TV, Facebook or You Tube ads combined. It’s getting personal folks.

Then we look at all of the contrived concepts around how to get consumers to connect on February 4^th, it’s amazing the amount of effort that is so concentrated. Seriously, a $1.4 billion dollar day for NBC?

According to CMO.com – it’s innovation, but it looks more like desperation and a stretch to get digital to support the buy.

1. Mars made an ad for a single viewer and let that person do a Facebook live to stream his reaction during the game.
2. Hyundai did real time updates.
3. We now have a tactic called “transmedia storytelling.”

To really make an impact, marketers need to circle back to what and who matters. For six years, we asked consumers to tell us what qualities a brand must have to win their adoption. We started it in qualitative – with an empty white board. We then took their answers and pushed them out to 1,000 consumers each year. The order came back the same each year – but the intent is there:

• High Quality
• Would Recommend
• Fits Their Personality
• Socially Responsible
• Shares Interests
• Says Important Things

All of this is about them – it is not about the marketer. “Say important things – TO ME. Shares MY interests.

That’s the key – it’s about them. And getting there by trying to win an entertainment contest for one day doesn’t necessarily build anything. Clearly, not everyone can win the day.

The Drum recently quoted a statistic that less than 10% of consumers could remember a Super Bowl ad two weeks later.

So it makes sense to build a platform that can be articulated all year long. Why release a game or a contest during the Super Bowl? Why shout in a crowd? That’s exactly what Mercedes did by releasing their “win a car” game on Sunday. Keep your finger on the screen and qualify to win.

And the work it takes to “pre-hype” could be spread out all year as well.

The battleship is slowly turning in the C-suites. Now we have A/B ads featuring “real workers,” and content that is crowd sourced photos of consumers from Kraft.

The irony is that the big budget advertisers are dropping $5mm a spot to say, “Today it’s about you.”

The other 364 days are wide open for the rest of us.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Norty Cohen, CEO of Moosylvania and the author of The Participation Game.

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Every January it starts up again about a week before Super Bowl. Every February the buzz dies quicker. It’s the annual celebration of a tactic that started in 1950, the broadcast TV spot.

The concept of commercials evolved from a tradition of sponsored hour-long radio shows in the late ‘40s, which didn’t easily translate into broadcast TV. In the early ‘50s, with the advent of TV, innovation was needed. A network executive, actually Sigourney Weaver’s dad – Pat Weaver, created the idea of selling portions of a sponsorship which eventually became spots.

It took a couple of years – but ultimately commercials in :30 and :60 formats became a marketing art form and a massive source of revenue for everyone associated.

Along the way, the context of leveraging military terminology to prescribe marketing tactics became the vocabulary of our industry. Strategy, execution, planning, the old-fashioned media blitz – dropping points onto a market. It’s the way anyone over 30 was taught to think about consumer marketing. Weapons of mass persuasion.

Even with dynamic two-way connectivity in our pockets, this 1950’s innovation is now a bad habit almost 70 years later. Media salespeople are still pushing spots on advertisers and their agencies. Spray and pray. And consumers are curating their way right out of watching those spots. I don’t care who you are, you fast forward through commercials every chance you get. Our research found that only 33% of TV is watched live. That’s 67% ineffective for those who do math. As long as traditional is funded, there will be agencies vying for the business.

It’s a safe assumption the parade of $5MM TV spots will lose a little sizzle in 2018. Sure, we’ll have a dozen straggler brands making their pitch. Just to justify the PR hype of the expense. They’ll be happy to be in the conversation – and hope that awareness will eventually lead to conversion.  Even though they know better – they’ll justify it with digital extensions.

The bigger issue is that agencies and marketers will still worship “hero” TV spots all year long. Even though most consumers no longer convert to purchasers this way, spots will remain the official language of brand messaging for many marketers. The latest variation – six second spots. Shorter to match the attention span. But still a one-way communication tactic.

The Bottom Line: Until You Get To Two-Way Connectivity, You Can Never Reach Your Full Potential

We recently compiled five years of research on “How and why consumers adopt brands,” and published a book, The Participation Game. Our thesis: They don’t consume advertising, they choose to participate in brands. In it, we document how the top 100 brands use two-way connectivity instead of spray and pray to get attention and maintain loyalty.

Consumers’ favorite brands are letting them speak for themselves. Our research shows that consumers are 2.5x more likely to adopt a brand based on word of mouth from friends and family, search or any online review – than TV, You Tube and Facebook ads combined.

You need dialogue and sharing to win consumer loyalty. You can start by looking at what consumers are already doing and joining the conversation.

We’ve broken down numerous connectivity platforms throughout the book. For instance, integrating with gaming. Not because it’s about your brand. But consumers will happily spend more than five minutes on any single game. Compare that to being fast forwarded or multi-tasked during your mass media buy.

Gaming is a simple and natural way to not only get attention but to create shareable platforms. Verizon integrated their connection platform into Minecraft. Chipotle entertains consumers with simple HTML gaming like Guac Hunter and Cado Crusher. The bonus: gamers share and challenge their friends.

You can get into the game by erasing the military lingo off the board and starting with the following exercise:

1. Challenge: be an active part of your audience’s lifestyle.
2. Participation Game Idea: Create ways to engage your consumers and have fun with them on their level.
3. Thought starters: How can your brand connect to passions, hobbies and even time wasters?

• How are they spending their free time?
• Can your brand enhance it?
• How can your brand show you care about it?
• How can you play with consumers?
• Can you challenge them and incite their competitive spirit?

Empty white boards are a good start. We’ll help fill them up with more concepts, examples and exercises throughout our book and at The Un-Conference. Let’s make this the year we move on.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Norty Cohen, CEO and Founder of Moosylvania and author of The Participation Game, which examines how and why consumers adopt brands.

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Great work takes time. Specialization takes years. But on both the agency and client side, we’re seeing a trend in our industry that’s more than a little disconcerting.

We all know how hard it is to develop a unique brand story – and how insanely competitive it is to break through in any industry. Yet, in the ten short years since the evolution of the smart phone – everyone can do it all. Whereas creative thinking was once a time-honored process – now a couple of Google searches or a re-trace of someone else’s idea is considered a “way of working.”

According to London based Institute of Practitioners of Advertising – automation and the “always on mentality” have created a rapid fire approach to the agency business – where thoughtfulness and intuitive understanding of a consumer need is now a gif. We’re also seeing client organizations accelerate their capabilities to jump from manufacturing and sales to creating infrastructures for ad execution, social content and media buying.

Content is what was PR – now sourced from everyone under their roof or worse – from tactical crowd sourced vendors. The do-it-all ship has sailed. Instant gratification now includes executing services that used to be the domain of specialists.

It was just two years ago when Pepsi executive Brian Jakeman challenged the agency world and said that ad agencies have not kept pace with change. Shortly afterwards, Pepsi created their own in-house studio to create content and hired a staff. Then they made one of the biggest mistakes in marketing history. In Portland, Oregon a few weeks after the ad was pulled, rioters were throwing Pepsi cans at Police. Google that.

Should Clients Create Their Own Content?

The way I heard it best described was by Russ Klein – former CMO and now head of the 4As. He said that agencies are subjected to a “creative tension” that pushes them to work that stands out. Certainly, someone on the agency side would have said, “That idea is basically, I’d love to teach the world to sing.” On the agency side, we are masters of shooting down ideas – because we can’t afford not to.

Without tension, it’s too easy to skip over the part about developing a unique platform idea that makes it “sticky” through the line. And it’s as simple to execute me-too advertising tactics as it is to buy stocks on line. We all want this habit to stop – but it’s pretty much like saying to a baseball player who just struck out – “don’t do that.” Easier said than done. We see a tactic, and want one, too.

Hint: if it worked yesterday, it probably won’t work tomorrow.

We’ve arrived in the modern world of tactic vendors and crowd-sourced creative, where marketing is paint by numbers. Media and ad agencies are partially to blame. We’ve encouraged marketers to organize their budgeting process around tactics – and it sure felt right at the time.

What can we do differently? The IPA report quoted one agency executive saying, “We just need to figure out what question the client should be asking.” Most of the time the agency/tactical buying sprees are moving so fast – that we are all caught up in the game.

I saw Fernando Machado, the senior vice president for global brand management of Burger King speak not too long ago. He said that he issues an open-ended one sentence brief and shares it with his teams and his agencies once a year. He spends the year open to any ideas that answer it. By that definition, briefs should not prescribe tactics.

Russ Klein says there are more good agencies than good clients. It’s hard to be a great client. Lots of pressure to inform and manage upwards – particularly with digital innovation changing perspectives daily. But if you can do it – you will have iconic status in our industry.

We will love you because you know the value of an agency partnership and how to make great work together. And that’s the thing about tension. Before we make the pitch for a new idea – we have to ask ourselves…

1) Do we believe that the work absolutely stands out? 2) Will they call someone else if they don’t like it?”

The true agency infrastructure is set up to gestate strategic concepts. Whatever the mix of thinking, research, insights, creative tools – it’s the mission of the agency to differentiate and compete. Ours is to create and help brands incite believers.

But in the end, it takes a bit of risk and originality from everyone to make it happen. We will absolutely go to the wall for clients who set those limits.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Norty Cohen, CEO of Moosylvania and the author of The Participation Game.

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Isn’t this what we need to do to become masters of digital communications?

Personally, I never want to be the only one in the room who doesn’t know what’s new and different in our industry. And admittedly, I’m working at it all the time.

At this point, I can call myself a veteran of the industry – but I’m willing to re-invent every day.

Our industry doesn’t really like seniors. We’re great with freshmen. Even juniors. But once you get to senior status – there’s an obvious bias. But with new innovation occurring daily – no matter where you are at this moment, acquired knowledge is definitely the long game. And you have to start somewhere.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell makes the point that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything. So this won’t happen overnight.

With the birth of I-phone X, now just 10 years since the smart phone revolution, we all have a lot to learn every day.

Not just the latest ad tech – but conceptual trends that are influencing delivery and brand adoption.

So the race is on – and it’s invigorating.

The marketing business is not a chore – there are so many fascinating aspects to it – don’t let any of it slip by you. Find the niche you love and dig in.

Personally, we’ve done a lot of work to understand the mindset of the millennial generation. We assumed they were the early adopters – starting with high school students. Their intuitiveness remains the benchmark for functionality.

Starting in 2013, we began surveying a baseline of 1,000 millennial consumers every year – and have recently published our five year Top 100 favorite brands report.

Along with way we asked lots of questions to better understand “how and why consumers adopt brands.” It was the basis of our research and the set up for the book, “The Participation Game”.

The recalibration of mindset that came along with this journey taught us a lot about how as marketers, we have to be ready for a generation of consumers who market themselves.

The challenge for many marketers – and this includes a broad segment, now anywhere from mid-30’s and older – is that they may not have rushed to embrace the advancements in intuitive connectivity.

Most now realize their mistake of letting the “youngest” member of their team be in charge of enlisting Facebook starting around 2005. As agencies, we saw the people “who get it” become younger and younger.

Personal interactivity has flat out redefined delivery. The pragmatic logic that allows even the smallest brands to win by micro targeting and harnessing the power of their target’s target, is now the new way of working.

Harvard Business School professor and consultant, Thales Teixeira, called for the immediate cessation of “spray and pray” media dissemination in a recent Google think blog. He says the industry is broken – and earning attention is the true mastery of our craft.

Publicis Chief Strategist Rishad Tobacowola says “Learn something new every day.” Whether it be a book or a new subject – he reads an hour every morning.

A few years ago, I saw Howard Tullman, who runs 1871 – Chicago’s massive start up collaboration – more than 300 businesses percolating at the Merchandise Mart. He coined the phrase, “Attention is the new currency.” Yes, we’ve truly lost four seconds since 2,000, falling behind goldfish, who have a nine second attention span. Humans have eight seconds.

So everything we believe about messaging and delivery needs care and feeding every day.

Thoughtful care. We need to be wary of Google-induced knowledge. Difference making concepts are probably not in Siri’s repertoire.

This takes a commitment to stop. Think. Sort it all out and apply the learning to consumer behavior and brand building opportunities. Give it more than eight seconds.

There’s so much user experience logic to absorb that many senior marketers want to revert and communicate the way they always have. Talk about TV and one way communication and the board is happy. Everyone gets it.

Well not for long. We asked 5,000 consumers how often they watch live TV and it was 33% of the time. So – the waste is there – because everyone can hit skip. Messaging cannot be a bitter pill to take before getting to the content you came for.

How much work is needed? What’s the baseline?

I would start with a must read set of books that bring you up to speed. By must read, I am equating it to your toughest college course. Don’t do it and you will fail.

Ultimately, your career choices are somewhere between understanding the complexities of media delivery or getting fitted for an orange vest and checking receipts at a big box retailer.

Keep in mind that new stuff is published every day. One way I keep up is by letting Flipboard curate articles for me on all kinds of subjects from UX to PR to Digital Design.

It’s a challenge to do it regularly – but so is going to the gym. I believe we can all learn new tricks –whether you’re a card carrying senior or a newbie.

Will the digestion of all of this material make marketers more valuable? If you apply it to what you know about business and making things happen – yes. We can still have Professor Emeritus and it can be you someday.

Here are a few the books I recommend starting on:

• The Content Trap, Arnand Bharat
• Different: Escaping The Competitive Herd, Youngme Moon
• The Originals, Adam Grant
• Start With Why, Simon Sinek
• Friction: Passion Brands In The Age Of Disruption, Jeff Rosenblum
  
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk
• The Membership Economy, Robbie Kellman
• Competing Against Luck, Clayton Christensen
• Impossible To Ignore, Carmen Simon
• The Connected Company, Dave Gray
• Disruptive Marketing, Geoffrey Colon
• The Four, Scott Galloway
• Jobs To Be Done, Steve Wunker

If you have other recommendations, please add them in the comment section below.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Norty Cohen, CEO of Moosylvania and the author of The Participation Game.

The Blake Project Can Help: Content Strategy Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers