Action Marketing
Contemporary marketing is about relationships in motion. This observation might seem axiomatic, but it’s worth unpacking: if our goal is to foster relationships between an organization and the people (note: people, not consumers) with whom it interacts, we need to be sure we’re facilitating the dynamic in a fulfilling and authentic manner. It’s like any relationship: you learn about one another by virtue of what you share and what you do. If you like what you learn, you seek a closer connection. As you’re getting to know someone, where is your emotional sense of them derived? The stories they share, the way their eyes light up when they passionately discuss a topic, and so on. If you ask someone “what do you stand for?” They might say: ”flip-flops on Fridays, free coffee refills and the abolition of the Designated Hitter rule.” But there’s another question—an unasked one—that is also being answered: “what moves you?” This question is at least as important but, again, answered more subtly: the way a person gesticulates wildly when talking about their favorite things, the company they keep, the way their stories all seem to circle back to the same particular issues—this is sometimes received subconsciously, but it is certainly stored away, deep in a person’s mind and heart. Again, it’s not just what you stand for, but what you move for. Does this person (or brand) leap into action for things that I care about? As fundamentally social beings we notice these things and store them away as the building blocks of subsequent relationships and social constructs.
Who wants to hang out with boring people?
Let’s take the observation that relationships are cultivated through sharing—the rational and emotional process of exchanging values and actions—and return to my original statement: marketing is about relationships. It would seem, then, that a big part of marketing concerns sharing the same things: values and actions. What are your organizations biggest passions? What inspires your employees to get out and volunteer? What does your brand support, even when the cameras aren’t rolling? People want to know these things, and in a world of increasingly democratic and horizontal communications, they’re going to find out. It is my thesis, then, that good, authentic marketing is about sharing with people not just the things that your brand stands for but also the things that it moves for. “Standing” implies values that are immutable …but also stationary. In our live-tweeting, 24/7 news cycling world, you might need to have a dynamic means of expressing yourself, too: this is action marketing. To be perfectly clear, this certainly doesn’t mean that the things that move you ought to be transitory or orthogonal to your identity. Indeed, the things that you move for need to be the things that are so brand-aligned that your entire organization leaps into action. It is precisely this action-through-alignment that sets you apart from the pack and closer to the people you’re trying to reach.
Obviously, it’s important to make sure that you articulate what your brand stands for (hopefully it’s more than flip-flops and coffee refills). What I’m suggesting here is that smart brands in the 21st century will need to be in tune with the confluence of two additional elements: time and passion. You want people to become passionate about your brand—it’s contagious. To share what moves you is to demonstrate that your organization is capable of being moved: it has personality. Life. We look for these ‘action’ characteristics because we have always looked for them in social relationships. These are the qualities we keep close and, in turn, share.
Businesses need this contagiousness. As brands become increasingly shared socially—horizontally—among people and across networks they need to have an authentic reason for doing so. Happiness spreads easily (witness the VW “Fun” project). So does indignation (just ask Nestle). We share and connect with all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, but they go nowhere if there are no actions with which people can resonate. Because of this, I encourage your brand strategizing (and expression) to reflect some thinking about what your brand moves for, because we know your customer is.
- Caleb
