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Article Title: Giving Voice To Your Marketing Personality On
The Web
Author: Jerry Bader
Word Count: 1603
Article URL: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=51090&ca=Marketing
Format: 64cpl
Author's Email Address: info[at]mrpwebmedia.com (replace [at]
with @)
Easy Publish Tool: http://www.isnare.com/html.php?aid=51090
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If You Don't Someone Else Will
Every company has a personality whether they know it or not. If
you don't develop and foster an appropriate marketing
personality for your company, your employees and customers will
do it for you, and that could be disastrous. Successful
companies pay serious attention to creating and implementing a
dominant corporate identity; and use it to deliver a
consistent, coherent and cohesive Web-presence in the
methodical and persistent pursuit of the company's core
marketing objectives.
Marketing Personality and the Web
With the right marketing personality in place, companies can
deliver their message in a memorable manner using all the
assets at their disposal. Unfortunately, most businesses have
failed to connect the dots between this not-so-abstract notion
of marketing personality and its implementation in the
ever-expanding Web-based business environment.
Today every business has a website; a company's Web-presence
has become their single most important marketing platform, able
to reach millions of potential customers on a one-to-one basis.
But despite its promise; the Web has failed to live-up its
potential - not because it can't, but rather because business
leaders resist using its inherent multimedia capabilities.
Prospects are People Too
The Web like marketing is not about technology but rather
communication; in order to attract, inform, and persuade our
prospects to become customers, we must communicate how our
companies can benefit those prospects; and in order to do that,
we must relate to those prospects in a very human way.
Experienced marketing executives understand most customers make
purchases based on wants rather than needs, and that
relationships trump hard evidence in the decision making
process. The bottom-line: people buy things they want rather
than things they need; and they buy them from people they like
and trust, rather than from the lowest bidder.
A reliance on technical answers to human questions is a
strategy doomed to fail. No matter how large or small you are
as a company, and no matter how many prospects and customers
you have in your database - they are all people not abstract
business entities; their decisions are human not mechanical;
and their dealings with you are based on relationships not
transactions. Failure to grasp these fundamental issues has
lead to botched business tactics like telemarketing that
irritates, offshore service centers that regurgitate proforma
answers, and websites that run on autopilot ignoring real
enquiries from real people with real concerns.
Anyone who has every tried to decipher the arcane assembly
instructions on a new product should know enough to know that
written Q&As, FAQS, and database driven knowledge bases are not
a substitute for the sound of the human voice. After hours of
racking your brains trying to figure out what the instructions
mean, they all of a sudden become clear when your spouse or
friend reads them to you aloud. We understand, we learn, and we
relate to what we hear. It is a primal imperative.
How We Learn, Comprehend, and Remember
Despite the evidence most people think visual presentation is
our primary intake sense and that has lead to Web-development
decisions and marketing attitudes that just don't add-up. There
have been a number of studies that confirm verbal presentation
as the primary sense with which we learn, understand, and
remember what we experience. In her paper, Implications from
Cognitive Research, Farzad Sharifan, PhD (University Mt.
Lawley, Australia) presents research evidence that auditory
presentation is superior to visual presentation.
There is ample evidence that we as a species grasp meaning, and
comprehend more, when information is presented in the form of
linear anecdotal narratives (storytelling) than in a
straightforward recitation of factual information. In his
research paper, Information Relevance and Recognition Memory:
First, Second, and Third Person, Narrative, Bree Patrick Luck,
Dept of Psychology, Georgia Southern University found
Storytelling results in better factual recall of material than
non-narrative presentation; and oral storytelling is a
cross-cultural instructive method that promotes motivation,
comprehension, and memory. These are important facts that
should not be ignored when we think about delivering our
marketing messages on the Web.
The hyperlinked nature of the Web provides a non-linear method
of pursuing information, that as a communication method for
presenting, persuading, and embedding our message in the minds
of our audience flies-in-the-face of our natural instincts to
relate, comprehend, and retain information presented in a
linear oral narrative.
Giving an audience of distracted, attention-deficit
Web-browsers the opportunity to hyperlink their way out of your
carefully and expensively constructed website, is like leaving
your front door open and wondering why your dog disappeared -
audiences need structure and a linear framework within which
they can absorb your message presented by a distinctive
signature voice. If you find this concept runs contrary to
prevailing visual design thinking - it does, because most
visual design schools teach visual design not communication.
David Pisoni, professor of psychology and cognitive science and
director of Indiana University's Speech Research Laboratory, is
one of the nation's foremost authorities on spoken language
processing. "We are interested in how people perceive and
comprehend spoken language, This involves everything from the
perception of phonemes [sounds] and syllables to word
recognition, to what we call lexical access, or how people
locate and retrieve the sound and meanings of words in memory,
to sentence comprehension and spoken language understanding."
Some of Pisoni's findings need to be understood by marketing
professionals wishing to use the Web as a communication
vehicle:
1. Familiarity with a voice helps the cognitive processing of
the content;
2. Audiences store vast amounts of voice-related
characteristics (pitch, speaking rate, dialect, gender,
emotional state, and eccentricities) all of which provide a
rich oral-rendering of personality and character that in turn
enhances understanding and memory;
3. Voice is not an abstract ephemeral sense; it is concrete,
substantive and richer than its visual alternative.
The Practicalities of Signature Voice Representing Marketing
Personality
Using audio to deliver your marketing message and brand
personality on the Web is not technically challenging, but
understanding the implications and impact of such a
presentation requires someone with an understanding of the
psychology, medium, environment and process.
Some small business early adapters have instinctively
understood the value of oral presentation and have used it to
present themselves on their websites. I won't say that this
will never work, but unless they are a trained voice-over
talent, it is unlikely that they are achieving what they want,
compared to what could be achieved if done professionally.
Another group of earlier Web-audio adapters are professional
speakers, authors, and expert presenters. It seems like a
natural for this group to present themselves on the Web, but
the ability to speak in front of an audience armed with copious
Power Point slides, is not the same as delivering a Web-based
presentation. Whereas a live conference audience will ignore
stumbles, stammers and slip-ups, a Web-audience will interpret
each mistake as a blunder. Like a photograph that displays
every wrinkle and line in your face, so a flawed audio
presentation will project a sloppy and amateurish persona.
The Familiar But Not Quite Recognizable Choice
We have all sat in front of our televisions listening to
commercials with the sounds of familiar voices. Big-budget
advertisers hire big-name actors to portray their products in
fifteen- and thirty-second spots. Unlike straightforward
testimonials these unnamed famous voice-overs make subtle use
of voice recognition: Keffer Sutherland speaks for Ford, Sam
Elliot for IBM, Gene Hackman for Lowes, and on and on, but none
of these famous actors are actually identified.
According to Mark Forehand of the University of Washington
Business School and Andrew Perkins of Rice University, in their
article presented in the Journal of Consumer Research, "the
presence of a celebrity voice can influence brand evaluation
even when the consumer has no idea that the voice-over was
provided by a celebrity � When consumers did not recognize the
celebrity, their brand evaluations shifted in the direction of
their attitude toward that celebrity� This effect is called
assimilation� Ultimately this is one of many examples of
implicit cognition in advertising response � advertising
features that influence people independent of their conscious
awareness."
What does this mean for the average business wanting to add a
signature voice to their website: you do not need to hire a
major movie or television star to present your material, just a
voice-over artist who can emulate the style, cadence, and
deliver of a well-liked personality that represents the
marketing persona you want to project.
With enough variation of voice characteristics, the savvy
marketing manager who has properly defined his company's
personality and selected a representative voice can take full
advantage of 'implicit cognition' while projecting an
independent, cost-effective signature personality that takes
full advantage of the psychological advantages of Web-based
voice-over presentation.
The Rational Approach is Highly Over-rated
In Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'The Tipping Point,' he points out
that patients tend to sue doctors who don't spend enough time
with them, rather than doctors who are incompetent. For the
most part, consumers of medical services don't sue doctors they
like, even if they screw-up.
Customers are people and they react with their senses and
instincts like people. Until we as marketing professionals
learn to deal with customers as human beings, and relate to
them on a human level, we will never achieve what is
achievable, and our websites will continue to disappoint.
About The Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,
a Thornhill, Ontario based website design firm that specializes
in delivering their North American clients' marketing messages
using the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash
presentation techniques to create compelling, informative and
memorable Web-experiences that enhance brand personality and
increase sales and profits. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com,
http://www.136words.com http://www.sonicpersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
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