"Harmony" is core to all of my integrated communication designs. The work is in harmony when internal communications compliment the customer facing material. Together operations and communications build and support the brand proposition and promise that support other mission critical intangibles like love and trust.

I work to to minimize "Cognitive Dissonance".  To learn how Cognitive Dissonance builds or breaks the brand bond in advertising, keep reading.

Cognitive dissonance (Source: Wikipedia™)

Cognitive dissonance is a term used in modern psychology to describe the feeling of discomfort when simultaneously holding two or more conflicting cognitions: ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions. In a state of dissonance, people may sometimes feel "disequilibrium": frustration, hunger, dread, guilt, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, etc. The phrase was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.

The theory of cognitive dissonance in social psychology proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. It is the distressing mental state that people feel when they "find themselves doing things that don't fit with what they know, or having opinions that do not fit with other opinions they hold." A key assumption is that people want their expectations to meet reality, creating a sense of equilibrium. Likewise, another assumption is that a person will avoid situations or information sources that give rise to feelings of uneasiness, or dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance theory explains human behavior by positing that people have a bias to seek consonance between their expectations and reality. According to Festinger, people engage in a process he termed "dissonance reduction", which can be achieved in one of three ways: lowering the importance of one of the discordant factors, adding consonant elements, or changing one of the dissonant factors. This bias sheds light on otherwise puzzling, irrational, and even destructive behavior.

Interesting - non?

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of brilliant plans as well as some very odd ones with business terrain descriptions, growth options and sales projections that didn’t make much sense. I’d look at the plans and wonder where the authors found the data that they used to model their bold plans. 

Then I tripped over this piece and I understood how they’d arrived at their illuminating insights + crazy rationalizations.   

A police officer sees a man looking for something under the light of a nearby street-lamp. “What are you looking” for the officer asks the man. “My keys” the man responds. After a few minutes of helping the man find his keys the police officer asks the man “are you sure you dropped them around here?” the man says: “no I didn’t, I lost them in the park.”

“So – why are you looking for them under this streetlamp?”

“Because this is where the light is!”

Many, many years ago a wise older woman gave me a wonderful piece of advice:

Don’t look at tomorrow with yesterday’s eyes. 

This applies to personal plans and business plans – especially as we move forward through the current Covid pandemic.  

Big brands with big budgets + their DM agencies know that customized, personalized direct mail (delivered by Canada Post) provides a far better return on investment than does unaddressed mail that’s dropped into a postal walk en mass.    

Most smaller clients are too cash strapped to hire an ad agency, to rent a decent mailing list or pay Canada Post a premium to deliver their sales message. 

Well, provided you’ve got a little imagination, all is not lost. 

The brochure cover on the left is from our local Garden Club. To keep costs down the club designed it in PPT and printed it on plain paper with a small colour printer.  

Had they stopped there, this flyer would have been lost among all the other stuff that gets tossed into my mail box. 

But the club added a standard post-it note with a very inviting message: “We think you should enter!” The two personal pronouns combined with the flattering inference distance this homemade brochure from all other unaddressed mail and moves it into the personalized DM response category.

Simple, affordable, brilliant.

I posted opinion piece last March as we moved into our 1st lock-down and the first financial crisis. I'm reposting it to remind you to look for opportunity amidst all of the turmoil. By now you know that not all was lost. Some categories have done VERY well as a result of the pandemic - and will continue to do well afterwards. 

This is a once in a long-time opportunity to see the difference between the impact made by a small, local, online media buy (the kind Google encourages you to set-up and run exclusively on its network) and a real global multi-media campaign. It's also a once in a long-time opportunity to see the difference you can make buy ignoring all the hype, doing your own market research and forging a new path.

Most advertising that you see online, on-air and on the street is tactical, designed to build traffic and clear out excess inventory. The number of tactical ads you see each day is estimated to be in the thousands, depending on where you work, how you commute and how you spend your day. These ads were the bread + butter of daily, weekly and ethnic newspapers as well as community access TV and Radio. Today the low cost of online advertising is challenging the viability of most tactical (off-line) media and has already led to the demise of many great media. I predict the rout will continue for any medium that cannot demonstrate that it offers retail advertisers a decent short term return on investment (ROI). Why? Because too many of today’s inexperienced retail media planners believe that ROI is a great way to sort media options – since they’re only interested in short term ad response rates. 

I’m suspicious because ROI is not directly correlated to the medium’s reach + frequency potential, or the inherent credibility of the medium. Think CBC News vs. Graffiti.    

Tonnage is another piece of the equation. You can see the impact of massive media weight levels in the U.S. Primaries right now. The candidate with the most media support has the best chance of winning the race. 

Here in Canada, we have a lot of micro agencies and a few large ones. Each serves a handful of clients who believe that the thousands they spend every month, or the millions they spend every year are wasted.

Maybe so. Maybe not. Thoughtfully designed research and campaign tracking can address some of their dilemma. A broader perspective would help these clients as well. They need to understand that in the bigger scheme of things, their tactical campaigns really are just a few drops in the daily adverting bucket. So GREAT media planning is mission critcal. 

Last weekend’s ROB featured the above chart with this headline: “Markets see worst week since financial crisis”. 

Last week’s economic down-turn story has been tied to the coronavirus story - the top news story for the past six weeks. Think of it, from an advertising perspective, like a compelling two-part story that has now been told and retold on every TV station, radio station and newspaper in the world. Byond these traditional media, a Google search for “Corona Virus Update" on March 1, 2020, returned 59,200,000 results.

That's the power of advertising! Enough of it can significantly alter global behaviour in a few weeks.

This post is not a rehash of what we actually know about the virus today or about the direct economic impact. 

This post is an appeal to you to assemble your own case study for your own agency + your own clients to help them understand what can + will happen when a highly relevant story is told + retold by a lot of on + offline media many, many, many, many times from sea to sea to sea in every language and dialect. 

This is a once in a long-time opportunity to see the difference between the impact made by a small, local, online media buy (the kind Google encourages you to set-up and run exclusively on its network) and a real global multi-media campaign. 

The markets saw the worst week since the financial crisis not because there was a financial crisis last week, but because all of the global advertising said there is one. Big difference. 

And remember . . . 

“Even a stupid lie travels faster than a brilliant truth.”