Interactive Marketing

Way back in 1996 Harvard Professor, John Deighton, defined interactive marketing as "the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us." Not only is this still true today, but its remarkable that only now are our interactive communications infrastructures behaving as if they have half a clue regarding what Deighton was talking about.

While new capabilities have been slow to emerge, they are in fact beginning to build some momentum. It has therefore never been more important to practice the art of providing the right information to the right people at the right times so that they will take the right actions. In light of Deighton's statement, we can see that this has everything to do with learning about those we're marketing to on an individual level and then providing them with information that is designed to directly address there wants, needs and interests—whether perceived or unperceived by them.

In this section I'll attempt to provide information that will empower human-computer interactions such that they will compel the individuals to whom we market such that they take action on behalf of all stakeholders in the marketing relationship.

Excerpts from TRAIN OF THOUGHTS: Designing the Effective Web Experience

Affecting Outcomes—Converting Motivation into Online Results

In Chapter One, we focused on what motivates people to go online. In this chapter, we’ll explore how to tap into people’s motivations and move them toward a desired outcome.

Our aim is to affect the people who interact with our Web enterprises. What effect are we after? We generally don’t publish an online resource as an act of benevolence. We want something out of it. We don’t want to merely assist and inform people; we want to influence their thinking and their behavior.

By influencing thinking we affect how people structure knowledge and develop attitudes and beliefs. By influencing behavior we affect how people decide to act upon their knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. Whichever the case, what, how, and when we communicate with people online is really, really important if we want to make a genuine and lasting impact on their thinking, on their behavior, and on their lives.

02.00.01 The goal of experience design is to elevate a person’s readiness to absorb and respond to our online messages.

Often the most favorable result of presenting an online message is a person’s positive response. The point at which a person transitions from merely going through the material and chooses to enter into a dialogue with a Web enterprise is truly a defining moment  psychologically. This being the case, the question becomes this:

How do we most effectively influence people to enter into what I call a response interaction with our Web enterprises?

Response interactions can range from disclosing personal information to engaging in e-commerce transactions. These are sensitive areas because they involve formations of relationships between people and Web enterprises. Because of widespread information abuse by unscrupulous entities, this is something most people don’t enter into lightly. To understand how to influence people to respond to our online messages, we must first understand something about human nature.

02.00.02 Before people can be effectively influenced, they must first believe; to believe, they must first understand; to understand, they must first be effectively informed.

What’s your strategy to effectively inform the people who interact with your Web enterprise? I’ll give you a hint. It should have as much, if not more, to do with information design as it does with the trendy topic of the moment—information architecture.

To illustrate the distinction, the ways you cook up and dish out your online messages are even more important than the ways you list them on a menu. Information architecture has traditionally focused on helping people access the right information. Information design, on the other hand, focuses on helping people understand and embrace information once they’ve accessed it. Just as a library has great organizational schemes for its books, the library won’t effectively inform anyone if the books are all lousy. The same can be said for an online resource.

02.00.03 Response interactions can best be achieved as the culmination of an iterative online learning process during which the things people learn continually build their confidence in and enthusiasm for the message.

This confidence and enthusiasm must increase until each person is willing to take action. This process can happen quickly—within mere seconds—or it could take minutes, hours, days, or even longer, depending on the nature of the call to action.

If we’re going to be successful at creating these iterative learning experiences, we must understand the nature of the learning process. We must also understand that if the people interacting with our Web enterprises are in the process of learning, then we as creators of online resources are in the business of teaching. If we don’t know how to teach, then there’s little chance that anyone’s going to learn anything valuable from us, let alone put any confidence in what we’re purveying. Only the most determined people will press on when an online resource is ineffective at aiding comprehension.

Again, if we want to influence what people think, feel, and do, we must first effectively inform them. This involves being successful at relating to them, setting appropriate expectations, and then presenting ideas in ways that are meaningful to them as individuals. In other words, we must adapt our messages to conform to how they most efficiently and effectively learn.

02.00.04 We need to have a basic understanding of learning theory.

 There are various learning theories that are widely accepted; the best known are these¹:

• Social Learning Theory—We learn behaviors by observing and then imitating others.
• Cultivation Theory—Repeated exposure to an influence gradually reshapes our thinking.
• Socialization Theory—Prolonged exposure to those in our daily lives shapes our view of the world and our role in it.
• Cognitive Constructionist Theory—When we’re exposed to a new stimulus, we interpret meaning by filtering that stimulus through knowledge structures that we’ve already formed. This filtration process not only influences how we interpret the new stimulus, but also how we reevaluate our prior knowledge.

The learning theory most relevant to our discussion of aiding online comprehension is the Cognitive Constructionist Theory. It directly relates to how we proactively build our knowledge and it helps us understand how the things that we see, hear, and read take on meaning in our minds. This area is the one that Web enterprises need the most help in. We need to understand how people think about the messages we’re confronting them with and how they understand, assign meaning, and respond to these messages.

02.00.06 It’s important to understand that helping people interpret, comprehend, and make desired conclusions regarding ideas involves more than exposing them to materials related to the subjects.

It involves guiding them into comprehension of our online messages. We must take people from the known into the unknown—making sure that each succeeding thought is comprehensible, rational, and memorable to the individual. We must also make sure that our thoughts are compounding—that they build upon one another so that those learning from us have a sense of continuity and of making progress in their understanding of our ideas.

When we’re successful at doing this effectively, the quality of a person’s comprehension isn’t left to mere chance. We don’t just start throwing information at people and hope that some of it sticks. This is the approach traditional education and training takes and its results are mediocre at best. The performance results of all participants generally forms a normal (Bell) curve with some people passing and some people failing. If businesses operated this way losses would always water down profits.

Instead, we must leverage technology to take a new approach with people so that no member in the group gets left behind intellectually. Instead of leaving comprehension to mere chance, we must flip our standard practices upside down so that we ensure that a person can build from the understanding that he or she currently has to the understanding that we would like that person to have. Notice that this is not a one size fits all approach. Every person’s pathway to comprehension can be different. See Figure

02.00.10 The Web is a medium that can allow us to help more people than ever before in their pursuit of understanding.

Effective Web experiences can make the accretion and tuning process less ominous so that people can spend more time in reflective thought to answer the challenges that the world presents. Who will be the leaders in the online community that will take up the challenge to innovate the Web so that humanity can reach its highest potential?

The people who develop these solutions will be every bit as responsible for the discoveries that will cure cancer, end pollution, and shape our political and economic future as the people who use these systems to make these discoveries. Effective experience designs can be the very tools that accelerate people’s insight and release their potential faster and more effectively than any other approach the world has ever known.

The reason is that more people can find comprehension of difficult ideas through more avenues and through more meaningful expressions than has ever before been possible. If we cut out the vast amounts of time spent trying to match needs with appropriate resources and then make those resources extremely effective, people will have more time to wrestle with and reflect upon the underlying problems that they’re trying to solve. See Figure

02.00.12 The goal is to lead people through a message in a way that results in a desired outcome.

Although by no means identical, the models from Figure 02.00.11 are approximately parallel and follow the same basic pattern. I find it very interesting that Gagné’s view of educating people is so close to Shimp and Gresham’s view of moving people to action via advertising. It really shouldn’t be so surprising. Both activities involve trying to move people intellectually and emotionally toward some end. Dr. Richard Harris has this to say in his book A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication:

“Advertising is one type of communication designed to persuade. This effect may be behavioral (buy the product), attitudinal (like the product), and/or cognitive (recognize or learn something about the product). […An advertisement] is trying to affect the reality perceived by the consumer.”

The same can be said for trying to inform and influence people in their understanding, interpretation, and response to knowledge that they’re exposed to. Each type of communication is trying to “affect the reality perceived by the [individual].” Many people can be exposed to facts about a matter and draw a variety of conclusions. The real art involves shaping those facts into a meaningful message that engenders (cultivates in them) the specific insights that the communicator is trying to propagate. Yes, this is where we get the term propaganda. This doesn’t, however, mean that there are insidious intentions. A teacher is just as interested in helping his student see things a certain way as a propagandist is his target. The question has more to do with whose best interests are at heart than it does with the ethics of exerting influence itself. See Figure

02.00.13 Aristotle’s philosophy most closely follows the three-stage cognitive framework that we all carry around with us to interpret communications.

This is the framework that reminds us that the most meaningful information we encounter has a beginning, middle, and end. This framework is important because it triggers expectations regarding the work that each of these stages must accomplish in our minds in order for us to feel a sense of moving toward comprehension.

Aristotle’s method is the formula for what is known as rhetoric². Although the term rhetoric has undeservingly negative connotations today, it merely refers to the process through which we influence people. To paraphrase Aristotle’s ideas, once people are exposed to our online messages, in order to guide them into comprehension and into a response interaction, we must

• Attract them
• Inform them
• Invoke them to take action

In examining these three stages in our online communication process, we’ll see how crucial it is to understand and leverage certain fundamentals of human perception, emotion, and cognition. Far from being extravagant and peripheral, we’ll see how structuring our messages to be aesthetically interesting, emotionally engaging, and easily comprehensible is both central and essential to an effective Web experience.

Specifically, we must try to understand how people notice, become interested in, comprehend, access, remember, and respond to the messages that they’re confronted with on the Web. This will be the emphasis of Chapters Three through Six. Not surprisingly, I think you’ll find that the how has more to do with making our messages more vivid and interesting than it does with making them more practical. Furthermore, I also believe that you’ll find that the predictor of the success of an online message is the degree to which it taps into and leverages people’s basic consumptive, social, and emotional motivations discussed in Chapter One.

02.04.00 Summary

As we’ve seen in this chapter, it’s essential that we begin to view our role as experience designers as one of guiding people into comprehension of our online messages. When we effectively inform people regarding our ideas, they’re well positioned to enter into response interactions with our Web enterprises. These response interactions are the natural by product of leading people through the three stages of our communication model. After initially exposing people to our online messages, these three stages involve attracting attention and interest, substantively informing them regarding our ideas, and then invoking them to respond by providing key insights as well as specific courses of action that can be taken. For these messages to be successful online, they must ultimately speak to people on an individual level. In this way the substance of the information we provide will likely be appropriate. The nature of these messages is that they’re interactive, in that they closely parallel the process of real life interactions between people.

In Chapter One, we explored people’s online motivations. We learned that, although we should always be attentive to people’s need to easily interact with interfaces, the human mind and spirit need much more than mere simplicity to be inspired by information. In this chapter, we looked at the communication process that we must lead people through in order to convert these motivations into online results. In Chapters Three and Four, we’ll take a closer look at the mechanics behind this process on a micro and a macro level.