“Utility is the only emotion that counts”
After doing a BDW workshop in Toronto, BOARDS magazine, a co-sponsor of the event, invited me to do a piece about a slide in one of my presentations. The slide said “Utility is the only emotion”, an overstatement for sure, but not by so much. BOARDS is sadly closing down, but the piece is still up here. For archival purposes and my own traffic, however, here it is (without the picture of me):
Utility is the only useful emotion in a post-microsite world
Rapp Collins planner says consumers make decisions without encountering any big idea messaging
May 6, 2010
For years, emotion has been the most important, even solitary goal, of advertising. Over and over, planners look for the single most important thing we want customers to feel, briefs call for key emotional takeaways, and ECDs and EVPs look for the emotional climax in every piece of work. Emotion seems to be one of those enduring truths of the industry, immune to digital reality. But, as we move into the post-microsite phase of digital, where the voices of customers, trade press, and reviewers determine the fate of brands in real time – this exclusively emotional approach is reductive and ultimately counterproductive.
What we need to recognize, and adjust our work to, is that utility – how well a brand performs valuable functions for its customer – outweighs any emotion advertising can generate. The sense of satisfaction a customer feels with a product – its utility – is not only the most important emotion; it’s the only emotion that counts. Utility is what takes customers beyond fleeting, reflexive response and into meaning – direct evidence of how a brand fits into/enhances one’s life. And any brand that fails to be, or present itself as, consistently useful will #fail in the digital space.
Today, it’s possible, and increasingly likely, for a customer to go through an entire consideration and decision process without encountering any emotional, brand-generated messaging at all. Example: last year, I was going to Make magazine’s DIY event Maker Faire and needed a video camera to record it. I wanted something small, HD, durable, and that cost less than $400. I Twittered a call for advice from friends (and, via Twitter, Facebook statused as well). A user named @gadgetboy told me he was loving his new Kodak Zi6. I had thought Kodak was a dead brand, and was skeptical, but @gadgetboy is savvy so I heard him out. Another friend on Twitter pointed me to Zi6 videos he posted on Flickr. I also got some recos in response to retweets about the Flip and few other models. Within 24 hours, I had a solid consideration set – all from friends (and friends of friends) and including a brand (Kodak) I had previously dismissed out of hand.
Over the course of the next week, I went to blogs Engadget and Gizmodo and read the reviews. Then, at Amazon, I looked at the accessories and explored potential hidden costs. I was already leaning toward the Zi6, so I checked out Amazon’s customer comments on it and saw lots of !!!s and very few WTFs. I bought that camera, loved it, and now recommend it to others.
Was there emotion? Hell yeah! People said, “I love it!”, “Look at the picture!”, “I cracked the viewfinder and they replaced it overnight!”, “Didn’t read the manual cuz I didn’t need it!”, “Battery lasts forever!” But all the emotion arose from utility, rather than aspirations, segment beliefs, or cultural insights.
As a person who came up in digital in the mid-90s and is trying to break into the trads tribe, I feel compelled to talk about some ads to help make my point. Start with the obligatory Super Bowl reference and you can point to Google’s ad. What was it about? Accurate searches. The searches led to lovely emotional things like romance, love, and life fulfillment. But in the end, it was about the effectiveness of the algorithm, its utility.
Then you have last year’s iPhone commercials. They were all about task completion – finding a restaurant for dinner before going to the movie you just bought tickets for after checking the weather to see if you needed an umbrella. If you take the iPhone spot, drop the catchy tune, stick in my grubby fingers instead of a hand model’s, and make the lighting less pristine, you have what interaction designers call use case scenarios – demonstrations of the product’s utility.
These ads also highlight another dimension of digital – the increasing importance of ideas that aren’t so big. While I don’t doubt that a big idea can be found in both ads, the real energy behind each comes from the little ideas behind the brand’s utility. Watch the Google ad closely and you’ll see not only affirmation of the search algorithm’s accuracy, but the spell correction suggestion, Google Translate, and the presentation of search results as content. The iPhone ad is a presentation of one great app idea after another, with the promise of more apps. The creative here wasn’t a pay-off on the big idea so much as a narrative of little and medium-sized ideas that speaks to more people on a more personal level.
Brand story, message, and emotion can trigger conversation and consideration. But utility triggers decision, action, trust, and passion for a brand. It is the only emotion consumers ultimately respond to. And it’s the one that lasts.
August 31st, 2010 at 9:13 am
[...] This is Steve Jobs in 1997, at an internal meeting setting up “Think Different”. I’ve always felt that Apple is a brand that thrives on much, much more than advertising despite its consistently famous spots. So I was surprised to see Jobs eschew “speed and feeds, MIPS and megahertz”, talk about core values so removed from the boxes, and even praise “Got Milk” because the spot’s primary virtue is that it doesn’t even contain the product (except for the milk moustache, and the word itself, of course, but hey). Did I need to think differently than I have in the past about the need for brands to move beyond the abstract emotional idea connected to an abstraction of the benefit the product endows on its owner? ( in other words, #crisisoffaith?) [...]
May 18th, 2011 at 8:11 am
[...] The point: The real reason for the post, though, is the power of a short screencast. Google has the mantra that Advertising is Information. Screencasts introducing features and helping users use them, like the one for pivot tables below, demonstrates that the reverse is true: information is advertising. I’ve hit this note before, but it bears repeating. Watch the video and notice all the things it does for traditional advertising goals: shows a brand personality (friendly, useful engineering), provides value (here’s how to do it and in very clear visual and verbal language), creates awareness of the product, the suite, and the new feature. Also, interesting to note is that it warrants re-watching – not because it’s so damn funny or cool, but because the use case scenario structure that drives it (”let’s break down our revenues by region”) provides a framework in which you can show other features. The drag and drop, the clear nomenclature, the rich, but manageable number of options available are all visible. Because it’s brief (I haven’t seen a Google piece go over two minutes), you can re-watch specific sections or the whole thing to catch other features or just learn it right. [...]