The Art of Conversation

By Leo Rayman, EMEA Insight & Planning Director

Twenty-first century brand marketing and communications require us to be versed in the art of conversation not the art of war.

In the 1950’s the return of Total War was marked by the birth of the mass consumer era. It is hardly surprising that the models of thinking applied by the business world of the 1950’s and 60’s were drawn from victorious WWII military strategies. The rise of the new broadcast medium, Television, allowed for the implementation of mass-market campaigns in order to promote new products to meet peoples’ basic needs. Designed to change a whole population’s perspective, these campaigns were built in recognition of the power of propaganda that had been employed by both sides during the war. The broadcast approach had more in common with carpet-bombing missions than targeted sniper fire.

Some brands still act this way today. Hardware manufacturers regularly mail-drop most of Europe with largely untargeted communications and they are not alone. During the last two decades many companies, despite excellent customer modelling, would save costs by foregoing targeting, rather than investing in more intelligent, less intrusive contact strategies. No surprise then that they end up appearing unresponsive and unconcerned with their customers’ lives.

Monologue to Dialogue
The language of marketing and communications still relies heavily on military terminology. Campaigns are planned, advertisements shot and media plans laid down like an artillery bombardment. Many businesses still think this way. Their assumption is that the audience is sitting quietly, consuming, at the other end of the battlefield. The problem is that the language (and the thinking that lies behind it) hasn’t changed in over 40 years. Even today clients and agencies are arguing over the finer points of their Brand Onion. But there is little value in debating whether your brand personality is friendly or professional when the most important interaction your brand has with a customer is a conversation between two friends, one of whom just suffered a poor service experience. Weber Shandwick’s European research showed that personal recommendation prompts purchase in at least 33% of cases. Anecdotally research used to show that a negative experience resulted in us telling 6 other people. Today that number might be 6,000. Or 6 million. It means that the way brands interact with all their audiences must change because the power to drive and control conversations has shifted away from brands to people.

Starting conversations
We are advocating a new kind of marketing and communications strategy, designed specifically to enhance, ignite and shape positive brand conversations between peers. The art of conversation should be natural and intuitive. Picture the scene: You arrive at a party, full of people in animated conversation. You don’t know anyone but you’re keen to get to know them. How do you join the conversation?
The first thing you do is to listen. What are people talking about? Next you prepare to enter the conversation. What interesting stories have you got to tell? Then you signal your intent to join in; a polite cough, a smile, joining in the laughter. Finally, once in conversation, you maintain the dialogue (listen, respond, listen etc). Next time you are in a social situation, observe the interactions between people in a conversation. What can your brand learn?

Conversational marketing
For brands it is the same thing: more art of conversation than art of war. What can brands do to enter and shape conversations already occurring in the market?

1. Listen
Brands need to listen. Media analysis will tell you what the media are reporting, but you can discover the real ‘buzz in the bazaar’ using web monitoring technology. Set up your Google alerts, track trends with Google Trends, buy one of a range of proprietary monitoring software tools available. We’re partnering with Radian6, as a listening post to uncover real world conversations. The goal is to find out what people are saying about your brand outside the focus group studio. This is listening in to hear what your brand’s issues are. But be warned, as Oscar Wilde might have said, ‘there is only one thing worse than being talked about negatively and that is not being talked about at all’.

2. Tell an interesting story
The art of storytelling is as old as Human society itself. So what is the story your brand is telling? What is the universally comprehensible myth that you can use in order to facilitate a deeper, more engaging conversation? We’ve been running client story-telling workshops in order to help them figure out what their best story is. When you tie this into a mythic structure, you increase the power of the story. Deep down each one of us is hardwired to understand and appreciate the meaning conveyed by stories and tales – we were taught this way by our parents. Great brands have naturally aligned themselves with mythical characters and stories. For example, Virgin is the Outlaw, Disney is the Magician and Nike is the Hero. But there is no point in appropriating a story unless it is based on values at the heart of your business – otherwise you will fail to deliver on it in practice.

3. Signal your intent to join in
Once you have developed your story, signal your desire to start a conversation. You do this by representing your point of view wherever conversations are happening. Think digital forums as much as mass media, think blog comment as much as Press Releases. Apple is very adept at gently leaking aspects of new products during the development phase in order to build hype. Inviting fans to beta test your products makes them part owners in the development process and people are more likely to want to pass on something they’ve had a hand in shaping. Another alternative is to facilitate conversations on an issue, by building a community space, replete with original and engaging content.

4. Maintain dialogue
Finally, conversations are dynamic and so brands communications need to be too. Brands need to embed feedback into the way they do business. This means monitoring buzz sentiment along with a commitment to respond. A powerful methodology for this is Bain and Satmetric’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), a measure of how well recommended your brand is. A positive NPS is predictive of business growth. Weber Shandwick’s own research shows that Advocacy leaders grow at 2.5 times the rate of average companies in their category. One of the additional positives of commissioning a Net Promoter survey is that detractors can be asked why they are not positive about your brand. The answers deliver a set of issues that once ranked they create an open-sourced agenda for change that will necessitate operational fixes. This moves Communications from a peripheral activity at the end of the process to a central driver in developing business strategy.

From conquest to conversation
Over the last sixty years, we have seen a big societal shift from brands telling people what they need, to a world where people now tell brands how they want them to behave. As basic motivations were fulfilled in the consumer era, people moved onto higher order needs, a search for fulfilment that goes beyond more choice of things to buy. In the 21st Century, people want brands to fit into the stories they tell about themselves. Brands must respond by moving away from conquest and towards conversation.