Consumers are bombarded with 63,000 words per day from brands.
Customers formulate their opinions in the same way influencers do. A Yankelovich survey found that 54% of respondents avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing. Nearly two-thirds said that they are “constantly bombarded with too much advertising.” Congruently, customers ingestion and digestion of media has radically changed over the last decade.
What started out as a simple three-option decision has now become a multi-tiered exercise in calorie counts, special sauce and regional specialties. The same dilution of information and nutritional content, has occurred in brands’ influence as experts over consumers. Take McDonald’s for example, Mickey D’s customers are bombarded with choice the same way that your consumers are bombarded by media today. The average person is hit with 63,000 words of new information every day. That’s the length of an average novel and it is becoming increasingly difficult for brands to be heard over all that noise.
Because of these reasons, brands are struggling to retain and influence their customers and it’s lead to the crisis that Madison Ave is now facing. As 69% of consumers said they were interested in services that “block or skip marketing,” it’s the reason there are so many Mad Men on Madison Avenue. When viewers sitting on their couches eating their dinner are rejecting what you are selling, it makes it harder for the Mad Men to pay for their city apartment and the house in the Hamptons.
Stop treating consumers as someone that you need to educate and start treating them as influencers. To reach the over-stimulated consumer is to move both media and customers simultaneously.
Tim Heffernan has experience leading and advising Fortune 500s through all phases of market development, business development, research, government relations, public relations, crisis, branding and internal communications. Tim has advised government, corporate affairs, marcoms and market development executives in the areas of healthcare, financial services, retail, entertainment, supply chain, consumer behavior, environment, technology, and enterprise policy.
Prior to Aperio Consulting, Tim was vice president of Government Relations and Emerging Business Opportunities for NCR Corporation. He was responsible for policy-driven growth initiatives that drove innovation, revenue and aided in reducing NCR's cost structure. He sat on NCR’s Innovation Council where his team incubated approved council ideas and holds two patent-pending technologies. In addition, Tim managed corporate and marketing communications for the company, including external media relations, executive communications, events, multimedia, graphics and digital services, community relations and thought leadership activities.
Prior to joining NCR, Tim headed Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility Division’s (formerly Symbol Technologies) Government Relations, Public Policy and Affairs. Prior to working at Motorola, Tim worked for communication firm KCSA, and began his career at Weber/Shandwick (formerly Shandwick.) He also held public relations/marketing research positions at Nexgenix and the NPD Group.
Heffernan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Rhode Island. He has been rewarded with both challenge coins from the Department of Defense and a token of appreciation from The White House. He lives in Brickell, FL.
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