How to Reach a Target Audience

In case you were not aware, March is National Women’s Month. So in honor of Women’s Month and, well, women, I have decided to dedicate this blog post to the influence of women in today’s consumer market and emphasize the fact that if you are not already directing part of your marketing efforts and promotional products toward this demographic, you should. For instance, American women spend about $6 trillion annually – that’s a huge market.

Read on for some more statistics regarding women’s impact on today’s economy care of she-conomy.com.

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Everyone is talking about the 2010 Edelman Trust Trends study. According to the findings, consumers trust the advice of their peers 20% less than they did in 2008.

The conclusions?

1. Social media is rendered pointless. AdAge posits that the information gleaned from the study “[flies] in the face of social-media wisdom” because businesses’ use of social media is based on the assumption that consumers turn to personal relationships to help them make buying decisions.

2. The digital age has destroyed friendships. Jay Baer of Convince and Convert, while maintaining social media is not to blame for the trust decline, nevertheless concedes, “The pervasive time crunch that blankets us all has forced us to curtail face-to-face relationships in exchange for digital interaction.”

I can’t believe that, in 2010, a blogger would say that digital interaction is the enemy of face-to-face relationships.

–Today I am texting my friend A. to make plans to grab dinner after work.

–I recently connected with a woman on Twitter whom I would never have the chance to meet in “real” life. She invited me to the SXSW Interactive Atlanta meetup, which I attended Monday night in the flesh.

–At the meetup I met a man from One World Connects, a start-up that is integrating social media and face-to-face exchanges to build a worldwide modern-day chain letter that you can track online.

Show me someone who is using social media to avoid talking to other humans, and I’ll show you a hundred more who are doing the opposite.

But back to study, Baer deduces:

3. Institutions have made us paranoid. He writes:

In the last year, I’ve been lied to at various times by the President, Congress, my family, clients, Tiger Woods, Toyota, the Catholic Church, the local school board, and at least one Olson twin (but I can’t remember which). What this Edelman research demonstrates is that we’ve become a bunch of cynics, and who could blame us?

Baer’s conclusion, that companies should embrace veracity and come clean with their customers, is both right and necessary. However, I think truth-telling is an argument for a different day and doesn’t have much to do with the study at hand.

My interpretation of the study?

As other bloggers have pointed out, trust has not only dropped in the peer category, but in every category — television news, radio news, and print news — by the same amount, 20%. When I look at this data I see the inevitable results of a broadening world with ever-increasing access to information. I don’t believe paid online subscriptions to the New York Times or Atlanta Journal-Constitution will ever work — not because people aren’t willing to pay for information, but because people aren’t willing to limit their information to a single source.

I’ve been mocked for using Twitter as my main source for news, but actually I think it is one of the best ways to be informed. I have 200 friends working all day long to filter relevant information to me. Throughout the day in real time I ingest an assemblage of personal anecdotes, news articles, opinion pieces, photojournalism and videos — all of which contribute in various ways to my being an informed and critically thinking person.

When I read about the Edelman study, for example, I didn’t limit my knowledge of it to Convince and Convert. I also checked out AdAge and Going Social Now, to see what other bloggers’ takes on it were.

I’m all for hard journalism, but I do not believe that NPR or CNN can ever be completely objective and comprehensive. I would rather receive information from a thousand subjective, specialized sources.

Likewise, it’s not that I trust my coworker Sarah less than I did in 2008. It’s just that when she tells me I should take advantage of Dance 101’s half-off sale, I’m also listening to my friend Vanessa, who is texting me an invitation to tonight’s class at Dance 411. From there it only takes one search in Twitter to see what people around the city are saying about both studios.

With ever-increasing access to information, it only makes sense that you or I would consult several sources before making a purchasing decision.

The takeaway?

Instead of using this study to justify dropping off the face of the digital planet, use it as a jumping-off point for a discussion about integrated marketing. As Malcolm Gladwell told us ten years ago, consumers need to come into contact with a brand at multiple touchpoints before the brand sticks with them. (Remember Lester Wunderman’s Columbia Record Club?)

How does the knowledge that people trust every information source less than they did two years ago affect your strategies for social media, direct marketing, promotional products, and other brand touchpoints?

I’d love to hear your comments.

Acree
Marketing Coordinator

I’m not fooling myself. I know it’s still January and this week of sunshine and 60-degree weather is just another cruel joke. But I still long for spring, and it feels so close.

I used to love winter and everything about it: the cold and the clothes — all wool coats and stockings. I loved staying indoors and wrapping a blanket around my feet as my dad built a wood fire. I even loved that Counting Crows song about December, God help me.

But now that I live on my own, and I pay my own gas bill and can’t start a fire to save my life, now that I have to take my own wool coat to get dry cleaned and can never seem to find any long sleeved shirts in my closet — now that “dreary” and “sullen” are words that apply to my actual life, rather than a fantasy one that I would dream about as a teenager, winter doesn’t seem so hot. In fact, I can’t wait to get shed of it.

I’ve begun to reminisce frequently about the springs I spent in college under the Atlanta sun. In these daydreams I always forget about the long, dark nights I spent, head in hands, hunched over my Greek lexicon, eyes blurring before the page. I forget what it was like to feel terror in the face of an impending deadline, to trudge miserably through campus to the library, to dine constantly on cold cafeteria food and burnt coffee. Instead, I remember the hours between classes spent lounging on the grass — book bag as pillow and hoodie as picnic blanket — draping my hand over my eyes and drifting to sleep under the warm gaze of the sun. Never mind that there were pages of dry lit criticism and long explanations of neural processing sticking out of my bag and begging to be read. In that moment they were forgotten, and they are forgotten now; as I look back it seems those tedious articles and assignments never existed except as benign accessories decorating my blissful enjoyment of a Georgia spring.

To me, however, college in the spring was more than a paradise; it was a community. In the spring, student clubs would delight to set up tables around the quad or pedestrian circle, passing out hotdogs and t-shirts in exchange for nothing more than your email address. Never mind that the year was nearly over and anyone recruited for a club would lose interest by July, spring seemed to endow student-led organizations with a peculiar generosity. Hardly a day went by that I wasn’t confronted with a free koozie or plastic cup on my stroll to dance class.

Now, in the real world, as a marketer I weep with desire for such a friendly, readily assembled, and accessible audience. A smart, older friend told me when I was in school that “Nobody does community like college campuses.” I didn’t understand what she meant until I graduated, and gone were the hundreds of everyday friends, gone were the hallmates nosing into my apartment, gone was the free pizza and music playing on my daily commute. Gone were the free shuttles, the endless wealth of resources, the free literary mags and science papers vying for my attention at the newsstands. My friend was right: Nobody does community like college campuses.

This virtual world makes marketing with promotional products more complicated; customers are often not within an arm’s reach. So I’m asking you: How do we cultivate community — for the ease of distributing promotional products to a relevant audience, but also for the exchange of ideas and neighborly friendship, for the chance to repeat my afternoon reveries under the sun and to share common experiences — in this so-called real world? The crux of marketing, as I’m beginning to see, is to engage with a community. But what does that community look like in post-college life?

Last Friday, fellow blogger Kim wrote about the struggles she faced in making a purchasing decision between two different pairs of fuchsia high heels and the factors that eventually swayed her toward one pair over the other. She wrote, “With the price being almost the same, my decision came down to the extras provided by these companies. When would I get them? Were there any discounts available? How much was shipping? And what would happen if they didn’t fit? I settled on one of my new favorite shoe and accessory websites. They offered me free, overnight shipping and the option to return the shoes free-of-charge should they not fit properly.”

Upon reading this, it instantly reminded me of an article I had read last week posted by Penn Olson, titled, “7 Psychology Theories That Help You Sell,”  – one of which was called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is, essentially, a negative emotional feeling that arises when one holds two somewhat conflicting ideas concurrently. In relation to purchasing, Penn Olson explains, “We feel cognitive dissonance when we think that our purchase might not be the best there is.” As a result, studies have shown that people try to reduce this dissonance by changing their attitudes or beliefs in order to justify these attitudes or beliefs – or in this reference, purchases. The article continues, “As marketers, our job is to give them a hand to reduce this dissonance. That’s why we have sales people telling us that the dress looks good on us at the fitting rooms. Besides having an awesome product, warranties, exchange and refund policies, and positive testimonies and reviews can help ease the mind of consumers before and after purchase.”

So in effect, Kim was able to make her decision of which fuchsia high heels to purchase because the shoe website was able to reduce her cognitive dissonance and push her attitudes in favor of their site by offering special shipping and guarantees. At Pinnacle, we do the same thing. We offer rush promotional products whose orders can be processed within 24 hours. We have a Pinnacle Platinum Guarantee that ensures that all orders will arrive on time and exactly as approved, or we will re-run the order or refund the purchaser’s money. You can also find tons of case studies and individual customer reviews on product pages throughout the site!